There are the knowns, then the known unknowns, and then there are the unknown unknowns.
For us, it is unknown unknowns that must change. The problem is that our knowns and known unknowns are filters that block us from seeing, receiving, and embracing the unknown unknowns. Our deepest fear is that of being wrong. We've been preached to and conditioned to believe that what we know is both truth and right. We believe this so strongly that what we believe to be true and right is unassailable to us. We are not open to having it challenged and we rise up to fight with strong emotional ties at any hint of disagreement.
Yet, an honest and humble man will readily admit, "I could be wrong" and then follow through by taking in the opposing points and examining them to see if they are true. In other words, he will actually give way to the truth that he might be wrong and have a willingness to change his mind (repent) if the evidence leads him that way.
A dishonest and prideful man will either say "I could be wrong" as dishonest lip-service and feigned modesty or he will cut to the chase and be an honest dishonest man and declare, "I am right no matter what!" Either way, he becomes unteachable, intractable, intransigent, and immovable from his "truth" and "right". And for Christians, he will use his filtering of scriptures to prove it to himself and to you. A weak mind will fall prey and victim to him. Thus, the words of Jesus to the Pharisees:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
Humble first step
I am going to propose something to you and I want you to honestly and humbly read it and think about it. Resist the urge to use what you believe now and take my words as an attack on your beliefs. Be humble. Be open. Detach a little and ask questions that arise from the humble and honest point of "I could be wrong".
PROPOSAL: The bible was not written to you in the 20th or 21st century. It written by people in their time to people in their time.
PROPOSAL: In like manner, the bible was not written with a 20th or 21st century worldview, but that of an ancient near eastern worldview and the worldview of ancient Jews—both Old Testament and New.
THEREFORE: Several proposals follow as reasonable and logical results of the proposals above—if they are in fact true.
PROPOSAL: Reading scripture with a modern worldview and a lack of an ancient worldview will most likely result in misunderstanding the fullness of the meaning and intent of the original writer and his audience.
PROPOSAL: Not only will a modern reader miss the meaning and intent of the ancient writer, but the modern reader will have no mental guards around his mind to prevent him from using his modern worldview to invent and concoct his own meaning, which will be expressed as, "What does this scripture mean to me?" As a result, what he believes will become more and more distorted over time, especially as it passes from person to person.
Many modern American's have been a part of a school days experiment where the teacher whispers a phrase to a student at one end of the class. Each student in turn whispers what they think they heard to the next student until the last student is whispered to. Invariably, what comes out of the last students mouth about what they heard is utterly distorted and perhaps completely different from what the teacher first whispered to the first student.
Now—take this little experiment and magnify it over twenty or more centuries, across any number of cultures, and changing ideas, worldviews, and so on. Even though the words are written down, they are still subject to distortions. Allow me to demonstrate by a thought experiment with you.
Take the same teacher-students exercise above and give it a new twist. Instead of whispering a phrase, have the teacher write the phrase and what the phrase means to them on a piece of paper. Have the teacher pass that note to the first student, who copies the phrase to a new note along with what the phrase means to them. Have the student then copy their version of the phrase and its meaning to them on a second note and pass that to the next student. Repeat the same steps for each student in turn until you reach the last student.
What do you think the outcome will be? Will each student have the precise or even similar written "meaning" of the phrase? What factors will cause the meaning of the same phrase to change and distort as it moves along from student to student? What part will worldview, culture, language skills, and so on play in the distortions as the phrase moves along?
Once more, multiply this across twenty centuries and millions of people from changing societies, beliefs, cultures, worldviews, governments, and so on. Bring all of the factors to bear that will modify the "meaning" even though the words of the phrase are fairly stable. What distortions will arise, prevail, and solidify in the minds of people as "truth" and "right"? Are you still assured that your version of "What the bible means" is both true and right?
Go back to our teacher and the first student. Does the last student know the meaning that the phrase had for the teacher? What if the last student was able to gather up all of the notes from the other students coming before them, but only back about two-thirds, where the first third is unknown? Could the last student read two-thirds of the preceding notes with the same phrase, but variants of meaning and be able to discern the original phrase and meaning of the teacher? The answer seems obvious and rhetorical, right?
NOTE: Try doing this experiment at your church or bible study group. Think about the results once you have them. Here are some suggestions for phrases to use:
1. "Bee's Knees"
2. "Donkey's Years"
3. "Egg on your face"
4. "Fit as a fiddle"
5. "Gild the lily"
6. "Hobson's choice"
7. "In a pickle"
8. "Jump the shark"
9. "Kick the bucket"
10. "Let the cat out of the bag"
If the proposals are true and the experiments help to illustrate the point, then what are we left with?
The bottom line seems to be that even with the written word faithfully transmitted, the meaning of that word based on its first century and older worldview context is lost and that each generations changing worldview has brought distortions to the meaning of the faithfully record text. Therefore, it is not enough that the text is the same now as it was twenty centuries ago because the text does not carry with it its own context. That requires other and more writing to provide such information and this is what has been lost, replaced, and distorted over time.
Humble second step
If we go back to our modified teacher-students experiment above, how can we help our last student? We already understand that our last student has a fairly faithful copy of the phrase that the teacher wrote. What is lost is the meaning—that is—from the teachers point of view, the phrase is to be understood in the meaning. If the meaning is what has been lost (not the phrase), then our best way of helping our final student is to find the writing of the meaning and make him aware of it so he can see both the original phrase and its original meaning to the teacher.
If we are the proverbial final student in a long line of students, stretching from the disciples all the way to us, then both our need and its solution ought to be clear. While we have faithful copies of the scripture (e.g., the "phrase" in our teacher-student exercise), what we do not have is the meaning. Now, having written this, it is not entirely true. Allow me to offer some observations.
We do have some of the meaning. We have the epistles and we have early church father writings. We believe that the epistles help explain the Gospels and the church father writings help explain the epistles. All of this—we are told—helps to explain the Old Testament. The question is: Are we right? Is this true? How do we know? Could there be more?
NOTE: There are many people who are taught and instructed to read only scripture. They are taught that reading books beyond the Old and New Testaments will literally rot, destroy, corrupt, and otherwise harm their understanding of the "pure gospel". What such people are literally walled off from is a truth they don't even know exists: The apostles read books other than the Old Testament. The evidence for this abounds from the scripture itself. Here are a few examples:
1. Acts 17:28: In his speech at the Areopagus, Paul quotes from the works of the Greek poets Epimenides ("In him we live and move and have our being") and Aratus ("For we are indeed his offspring"). This suggests that Paul was familiar with Greek literature.
2. Titus 1:12: Paul again quotes Epimenides ("Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons"). This is another indication of his familiarity with Greek literature.
3. 1 Corinthians 15:33: Paul quotes a popular saying of the time ("Bad company corrupts good character"), which is believed to come from the play 'Thais' by the Greek dramatist Menander.
4. Jude 1:9: Jude refers to a dispute between Michael the archangel and the devil over the body of Moses. This story is not found in the Old Testament, but is found in the apocryphal Jewish work 'The Assumption of Moses'.
5. Jude 1:14-15: Jude quotes a prophecy from Enoch. This prophecy is not found in the Old Testament, but is found in the apocryphal Jewish work '1 Enoch'.
6. 2 Timothy 4:13: Paul asks Timothy to bring his cloak, books, and parchments when he comes to visit him. While we don't know the contents of these books and parchments, it's possible they included literature beyond the Old Testament.
These references suggest that the Apostles were familiar with a wide range of literature, including Greek poetry, popular sayings, and Jewish apocryphal works.
Two huge windows of context
That the Apostles read books other than the Old Testament scriptures is undeniable. The question becomes: What books? Do we have a range and domain? Can we read these books in order to recover and reacquire their understanding and worldview, which (in turn) will help us broaden and deepen our understanding of the scripture they wrote by the providential guiding of the Spirit of God? The answer is a resounding, YES!
The first part of this window has come to us over about two hundred years of biblical archaeology. Not only has this turned up physical artifacts like buildings, pottery, coins, implements, and so on, but it has turned up literally tens of thousands of ancient written texts like cuneiform clay tablets and a whole host of ancient writings, which we have learned to read and understand. From these writings, we can get a deep sense of an ancient near eastern worldview, which forms the context and history into which the Old and New Testaments are written.
The second huge part of the window has opened up to us through the discovering and unraveling of the Qumran community library called the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the desert hills of Judea starting in December of 1947. These documents (more than 1,000 of them) have shed light on the time and beliefs of Jewish people from about 200 BC to about 70 AD. As recently as 2016, the documents are still coming in fresh and new, with previously unknown information that is both revealing and startling.
Perhaps the most startling revelation to come from the DSS has been the beliefs of the Essenes and how the beliefs of these people literally helped to usher in the first coming (advent) of Jesus, our Lord and Savior and King! Based on the DSS, we now know that John the Baptist was literally the tip-of-the-spear at the end of the line of the Essenic story. We know that Jesus hailed John as being the greatest among men born of women until that time.
Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
Therefore, to understand how God incubated the early church, we must understand the incubator and its environment. The Dead Sea Scrolls read like an instruction manual to the incubator. They tell us very precisely what the Essenes believed during the two hundred years leading up to Jesus, and how Jesus capitalized on those worldviews and beliefs to form and birth his church.
What will blow your mind is when you begin to see and realize just how much of the Essenic belief system aligned with the church as Jesus built it, how the disciples framed those beliefs through the lens of the teachings Jesus gave them, and how all of this formed up into the early church from Pentecost and beyond!
The Essenes were marked out by a number of aspects that set them off from other Jewish groups or sects. What is enormously striking is how they eschewed wealth and strongly embraced discipline and the study of God's word. Their entire life was dedicated to preparing the way for the advent of Messiah. To this end, they would sell all of their worldly possessions and give it into the community. Moreover, money they earned from work they did would also be given directly into the community for the needs of all. This is precisely the same model that the early church adopted in the deserts surroundings Jerusalem as the church formed just after Pentecost.
The striking and obvious similarities between the preaching of Jesus, the behaviors of him and his disciples, as well as the choices of the fledgling church after Pentecost leads one directly into knowing that early Christianity shared more similarities than dissimilarities. It is this very congruency that obviously led a number of Levitical priests to become followers of Jesus in the first waves of converts into the church. Literally—former Essenes after Pentecost could point directly to Jesus as the Suffering Messiah (Messiah ben Yosef) and abandon their old beliefs to adopt and follow Jesus.
Not only this, but their apocalyptic eschatological (Last Days) views of the Age of Torah that led them into the arms of Jesus as Messiah formed the basis for their views of the Last Days for the new age they were entering: The Age of Grace or the Age of Messiah. We call it the "Church Age"—that is—the two thousand years that stretched out in front of them from AD 75 until AD 2075 and the final Jubilee Cycle of years (50 years) preceding it—AD 2025 to AD 2075, with the last 7 years being the time of Jacob's Trouble (AD 2068 to AD 2075). This would be preceded by a restoration of Israel, 120 years (Genesis 6:3) before—that is—AD 2068 - 120 years works out to AD 1948, which saw the return of Israel from dispersion and the finding and revealing of the Dead Sea Scrolls to help Christians prepare for the final Jubilee Cycle of this Age of Grace!
It is the very clear evidence of the correctness of the Essenic Jews at the time of Jesus in preparing for the advent of Messiah (Jesus) and how they got that picture right from their writings that leads us into the arms of understanding that we now have their writings, plus our own in the New Testament (e.g. including Revelation) that leads us directly into knowing Jesus, as King, will return very soon (circa 2075) with a time of supernatural evil coming just before it. It is for this that we are being prepared and it is for this reason that we must connect the dots.
Reacquiring and embracing
All of this leads us to begin to question the "gospel" distortions of the last eighteen centuries by reexamination of this new data regarding our brothers and sisters of the first century before Christ and after Jesus as the church was forming. From this information we can reorient ourselves to understand the troubling times that lay ahead of us.
One thing seems starkly clear: The world is getting more and more evil, wickedness is replacing righteousness, and the "gospel" of our fathers is not making a dent in it. It is my proposal to you that the answer lays within the reemergence of the data, worldviews, and understandings of our ancient brothers and sisters from the time of Jesus. Both the biblical archaeology and Dead Sea Scrolls have given us a direct view into their minds and motivations.
To be more precise about it—their ancient near eastern understanding of the supernatural story of the war between God and the gods (and demons) is critical to understanding why Jesus came the first time and what God is up to overall. And as that same supernatural evil rises once more and crescendos in the final seven years of this Age of Grace, we must reacquire this understanding to armor ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren along with others that we preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to in such a way that they will not succumb to the lies and deceptions that will most certainly arise and deceive many in our Last Days before Jesus returns as King!
It is to this end that books like "The Unseen Realms" and "Reversing Hermon" by Dr. Michael S. Heiser, and the work of other scholars and theologians like Dr. Matthew Bates and Dr. Ken Johnson are crucial to read, consume, and understand. Such data and material are helpful in allowing us to quickly understand the ancient near eastern supernatural worldview and how it plays out in our time and for our needs. God has certainly allowed such information to come back into view so that like that final student in a long line of students before us, we can discard the distortions of the last 18 centuries and reclaim and embrace with the undistorted views of our founding brothers and sisters like Peter, Paul, and others.