The Bible is littered with these sorts of things that we either sort of read over
or, you know, we look at the passage, it's too hard, it must be about Jesus,
so let's just talk about Jesus now.
So how is it okay to have pagan thinking influence the way we read the Bible?
That's a good question and I get that question with some frequency.
I would say, you know, we need to realize that the biblical writers
were influenced by their world, okay?
So we sort of think about the idea, you know, we're having pagan influence,
over us to read the Bible.
And what we really mean by that is people who weren't sort of in the prophetic tradition
or they're Gentiles, or they're from some ancient Near Eastern culture,
something outside the believing community of Israel or the church,
that sort of plays a role in how we read Scripture.
Well, all those things played a role with how Scripture gets written,
because God uses people and people live in the world, they have their own environment,
they have conversations, they grow up in a certain way,
they have certain episodes in their life, they're just part of their world.
It doesn't mean that the ideas that they hear are just automatically going to sort of get thrown
in the Bible, regardless of what they mean, okay, that's something totally different.
But Paul, for instance, quotes secular pagan Greek poets a few times,
it doesn't mean he believes what those guys believe,
but what they said was particularly useful to make a certain point,
you know, bad communications corrupt good manners in 1 Corinthians,
that comes right out of Menander, or whoever the Greek poet is,
I'm not real versed in Greek poets, but you have 4 or 5 of these things.
And so that's an easy example to see, it's the kind of thing that would show up in a study Bible,
it's going to tell you where Paul's getting this. Well, okay, that guy's a pagan.
If it's okay for Paul to hear something and think that that's useful and write it down,
it becomes part of a letter to the Corinthians,
it's probably okay for us to learn the context for that quotation,
why Paul thought it was useful, so on and so forth.
Now, in a bigger way, that's what we're doing
when it comes to the supernatural world or lots of other stuff in the Bible,
there are things going on in the culture, whether it be literature,
or maybe a war or some other event or some cultural practice,
that if we understand what they're thinking, why they're doing a certain thing,
they're doing it because they think a certain thing,
that's just going to make us better readers of what we actually find in the biblical text.
Let me just give you sort of a random example here.
In Numbers 5, I remember when I started writing for a Bible Study Magazine,
10, 12, 15 years ago, whatever that was, one of the early essays I wrote for the magazine,
and this is just for the average person in the pew,
and I sort of gravitated toward this kind of thing, I did a little essay on Numbers 5.
This is the test for adultery.
And it's really weird; you take some dirt in the tabernacle and you mix it with this and that,
and you essentially create this thing that the woman who's accused has to drink.
And if her body reacts in a certain way, she's either guilty or innocent.
Again, that's known in the ancient world as trial by ordeal.
And it's common. I mean, you can find this in lots of other places.
And the idea was that "the gods" will decree guilt or innocence.
So why is Moses doing this? I mean, why are the Israelites doing this?
You don't look at that and say, "well, they wanted to be just like the pagans.
Okay, they're letting paganism influence the way they thought."
Their assumption was that the God of Israel who gave them the Torah,
who told them how to build the tabernacle,
who's now in a covenant relationship with them,
that when you have a situation like this arise where the woman can't defend herself,
that God will make the right decision.
And so they follow the procedure, except their focus is the God of Israel,
that they believe is going to give them the truth of the matter.
So it was actually a defense mechanism to protect the woman from false accusations.
Let's say her husband hated her or something like that,
and he wanted to accuse her because it's the death penalty.
No, we're not just going to do this where we don't have this woman capable of defense.
We're going to go to God with it and here's how we're going to do it.
And God actually gives them the procedure that He'll honor if they do this,
and He'll show them who's correct and who's not.
But you can't really understand why that's "okay" for the Israelites to do,
unless you sort of understand what the whole point of it was to begin with
and how the Israelites are thinking theologically about it as opposed to somebody else.
So the Bible is littered with these sorts of things that we either sort of read over
or we look at the passage, it's too hard, it must be about Jesus.
So let's just talk about Jesus now.
And you miss, again, part of the worldview that they're in
because this passage is going to influence some other passage later on.
It's going to give you a little glimpse into the worldview,
how they think the spiritual world interacts with the physical world.
And that's going to be useful somewhere else.
So it's really important to have sort of our heads into this kind of thing
so that we can not only understand a given passage,
but then that'll become useful to understand something else.