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TranscriptToday we're going to talk about an important approach for understanding the Bible that you might not be taking. By now, you've probably heard me speak about my previous struggles with doubt many years ago. Things like, does God exist? Is the Bible true? How could all of this possibly fit together? Well, one of the main contributing factors to my struggle was the wealth of apparent contradictions in the Bible, and here are some examples:Statements like, you're justified by faith alone, or you're justified by your works. These are both things that were presented to me as a part of Christianity. Then you have, for instance, God elects, and predestines people, or it's man's free choice. Well those are very different it would seem. Things like you can't lose your salvation, but you probably could.God is all powerful, and wills for everyone to be saved, but then many people aren't. Is God incapable? The fact that maybe Jesus died for everyone but only some people go to heaven. Well, how come he died for people that aren't in heaven? That doesn't make sense. Then there's Genesis 1 and 2, with seemly contradictory creation accounts. Perhaps the Canaanites, who the Bible says were utterly destroyed, but then we see Jesus talking with some of them in the New Testament. All of these things are different types of apparent contradictions, many of which we've actually talked about before. To my much less educated mind at the time, in high school and college, I didn't understand how all these things went together, or if they did at all. So, you might be wondering: what's this biblical approach that I mentioned initially that you might not be taking? Here's what it is. We need to systematize our understanding of scripture. That's not a very catchy title. That's why I didn't lead with that. This is actually what the study of systematic theology is. Now, hear me out, if this is a new term or it sounds really boring. I'm going to try to make this practical for your daily life.Here's what systematic theology does. It simply tries to assemble everything the Bible has to say about a certain topic into a cohesive teaching about it. For instance, the Bible says a lot of things about God. It says a lot of things about man. It talks about salvation a whole lot, and it talks about the Trinity. At no point in the Bible does any biblical author sit down and say, "I'm going to write up everything you should know about man and his nature and his state before God." At no point does a biblical author sit down and write out everything we need to know about God, or salvation, or the Trinity. These are 4 areas that are taught in scripture, that are extremely important to Christianity, and yet in order to understand them more fully we have to go to many different places in scripture and try to piece things together. However, this isn't like assembling a jig saw puzzle. We can't go find a sentence over here and a sentence over there and a sentence over there and stick them together and say, "We have arrived at the wealth of everything scripture says about this topic." Because sentences exist in a context of a paragraph. Paragraphs exist in the context of a book, which has an audience and an author, and a genre, and all of these different types of contextual details. We have to understand the context of, well, individual words, that are in sentences, that are in paragraphs, that are in books, etc., in order to understand the meaning of what's being spoken about before we can assemble what's being spoken about into a cohesive teaching.Here's an example where not taking this approach causes some problems. Paul says that we are justified by faith in Romans 3:28. He says, "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law." But,…