Rightly Divided s01e07 Character Studies

This is a podcast episode about studying Bible characters. The guest, Dr. Steve Posey, suggests starting with minor characters like Barnabas or John Mark instead of major characters like Abraham or Paul. He emphasizes the importance of identifying with characters who are more relatable. He also discusses how to approach studying a character's flaws and the importance of asking questions and letting the text reveal insights about the character's life. This is Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. I'm your host, Tom Terry, and in this podcast we'll be exploring the various ways of doing Bible study so that you can get the most out of your time when studying God's Word. Our guest for this eight-week series on basic Bible study is Dr. Steve Posey, an instructor with International Leadership University. Dr. Posey teaches Bible study methods and conducts other training for crew staff all across Africa. He will be with us for the next two episodes of Rightly Divided to help you get a firm grasp on how to study the Bible according to its various types of genre. For this episode, we'll be talking about how to study the lives of biblical characters. Steve, there are so many characters in the Bible that it can be hard to know where to begin a character study. So what would you suggest as a character study to ease into it to begin with something simple? Oh, great question. You know, Tom, I like what you said in the question, ease into it. One of the important things is that we don't want to pick a character, let's say the character of Abraham. We can study Abraham for weeks and months and quite frankly years because he's such a broad, large character in the Old Testament. Let's go with someone who's not quite so big in terms of all we know about him and all the references to him and all those things. Let's go with someone who's a bit more of a minor person. You see, there are over 3,000 people identified in the two testaments. Really? Yes. And who counted that up? I don't know who, but I bumped into that number. And yet, you really only have about 100 of them who are major characters when it's all said and done. That's a lot of major characters. Yeah, it's still a lot of majors. But let's go with one who's one of the minor majors. For example, let's go with someone like Barnabas. That's much more doable. We can control our work because what we know about Barnabas is basically in the book of Acts. We know a reference here and a reference there in the epistles of Paul. But let's start with someone who's not in every next page. So we want to start small to dig in and, as we say here in our country, get our feet wet. Okay? Okay. So how do you begin that first step? Well, the first thing... Let me ask it this way. How should you determine which character in the Bible you should begin to study first, other than obviously taking one that's easy? Well, there's all sorts of reasons we might want to study someone. Maybe we have an assignment within even a class, even a secular class, to bring forth the character qualities of a human being that we know of, or maybe we have a Sunday school class where we're studying a character, but we want to dig in a little bit more. I think another way to study a character is to try and say, of people I know in the Bible, who is most interesting to me in these minor characters, for example? A good study would be the character by the name of John Mark, because we find John Mark in some very interesting situations. There are only just a few passages of him, but his experience actually speaks quite profoundly. And pretty much everybody agrees that he probably wrote the Book of Mark, and so there's a lot going on there. But whatever your interest is in terms of characters, and when I say characters I mean people, I think that's where you'd want to start. Paul is very interesting, but once again, gigantic in terms of you can study him for years. Yeah, you could do the same thing with David, you could do the same thing with Saul, and on and on. But those little characters, those smaller characters I guess you could say, to me speak somewhat profoundly, because I don't identify with David, I don't identify with Paul and the great things that these men did. But I could identify with a guy who ran away from the danger in the Book of Mark. Well there's that, and can you identify maybe with a guy by the name of Barnabas, who he brings in a guy that nobody trusts, and he says, no, this guy's a good guy. There's a character quality to that character that we want to look at, because Barnabas wasn't a proud man, he's very humble. He could have said to Paul, hey, I'm the boss here, because Paul, in the Book of Acts we see that it starts out with Barnabas in charge, and then Paul's in charge. And Barnabas is still on the team, and you and I know from having lived life and watched life, it's very seldom you have a fellow or a person begin leading a team, and then when it's transferred to another leader, that person stays on the team. Barnabas does. There's all sorts of character qualities in Barnabas, and yet he's not this gigantic guy that you have to look in a hundred different places. I feel like I can identify with characters who are more in the background. Guys like Silas who helped Paul write Scripture, basically taking dictation and then getting the Word out, things like that. Even, boy, suddenly the name escapes me, but Jeremiah, the prophet Jeremiah, his right-hand guy, he was fearful. For the life of me, I can't remember his name now. There's a chapter actually in Jeremiah dedicated to him, I think chapter 45. But he does whatever Jeremiah needs him to do to make Jeremiah's ministry successful and taking care of the details for him. I think I can identify with guys like that more than I can. I love Paul. I love reading Paul, but man, oh, man, he makes your brain hurt sometimes. He sure does. I can't identify the fellow who's helping Jeremiah. It's on the tip of my tongue. Do you want to take a look? But you're right. Well, for example, when we go to Elijah, well, we have Elisha. And now he's a very, very good servant, if I can use that word. He starts small and then becomes a major focus. In fact, bigger than Elijah before it's all said and done. So one of the things that I often do myself is I try to find a person who exhibits, and we'll probably talk more about this, exhibits certain character qualities that I need to learn about. And I look at that person and ask myself, okay, what in my life? And we'll talk about this later. But anyhow, so the whole Bible is there for us to use. But once again, we go back. Let's start small. Let's ease into it. Well, so many Bible characters have major flaws. So how do you determine when an action by a character is revealing his flaw or it's being revealed for another, possibly deeper reason? Yeah. Well, you know, the unfortunate thing about biblical people is those writers didn't gloss them over. Yeah. In other words, they always revealed the nasty stuff along with the good stuff. Nasty stuff along with the good stuff. And so the way we begin to look at that is we have to ask this question, okay, what were his good traits and what were his not so good traits or his negative, if we want to use that word? Yes. Now, which ones tended to rule his or her life? Because we find almost every biblical character, speaking of people, had some negatives, but not every one of them allowed those negatives to take control. Right. Well, let's take the person of Peter. Once again, he's a major character. But Peter comes along pretty well when he goes to the centurion and he crosses the racial barrier. Right. And then he doesn't come along so well when he comes up and he won't eat with the Gentiles and Paul has to give him a tongue lashing. And so what we have is we have Peter's a respecter of race. On the other hand, we have Peter's not a respecter of race. So Peter is like a lot of us, we're good in one situation and then weak in another. And that's very revealing and it's good that we see that because we don't, for lack of a better word, we don't deify Peter, make him a saint that's above all saints. Peter was a fisherman and he had his problems, but he was also filled with the Spirit of God. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So as we prepare to do a character study, should we prepare a list of questions that we want to ask from the text or should we let the character's life progressively reveal what kind of person he or she was? Excellent question. I think we do both at the same time. Okay. So there are some questions we're going to ask no matter what, like, okay, who is this? What is the context in which he's operating? How does he act in these situations? How does he act in other situations? What are his character traits or qualities? We want to ask those no matter who the character is. On the other hand, as we're going through the texts, the references to this person, we begin to see that they tell us some things that maybe we didn't think about in the beginning. So we want to allow the text to tell us, too, some of those things. And if we're reading with a very good eye, we'll see those things that maybe we didn't expect. We'll see those things that surprise us about this person, for example. You know, I've noticed sometimes in my own Bible reading that there will be situations that take place that as you are first reading the text, they seem rather small. Like it's a mention, you maybe learn a little bit of a lesson from it, you move on, but then later on it comes back to bite you or reveal something even larger. And I'm thinking about a class that I took earlier this year, and we were looking at the life of David when he wanted to bless somebody from Saul's house, and of course there was Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth. With the bad feet. That's right, with the bad feet. And the Scripture says that he was lame in his feet. And that wording is used very specifically. And so as I was talking with the teacher about this topic, he says, you know, very rarely will anybody go a few chapters before this event when David is getting ready to attack Jerusalem to take it for himself, for the kingdom. And the Jebusites look down and say, oh, your lame guys will not even be able to come up against, I'm paraphrasing here, will not be able to come up to attack. And David makes the statement about the lame, and he says, the lame of whom my soul hates. And you first read that and you think, well, that's not very cool. But then the whole thing turns around several chapters later when Mephibosheth comes on the scene, who is lame in his feet, and David has to now minister to his needs because of the commitment that he made to his father about not cutting off his line. And he makes this lame man like a royal son. He does. Yeah. And so that little thing, that little comment that he makes, it reveals a little bit about his personality, suddenly becomes a major deal later on in his life. Okay. You know, Tom, there's so much in what you just said. And one of the things is, how did Mephibosheth become lame? He was dropped when he was a baby. And so he wasn't born lame, but because of the circumstances, his nursemaid, she dropped him. And David, if he had anything, one of the character qualities we see of David, first there is exactly what you said. He said he wouldn't cut off Saul's lineage. But then the second thing is we see that David was a man of tremendous compassion, and we're looking for character qualities, and he had compassion. At one level, he says what he said in that context, but in another context, he had compassion on a man who, in that sense, never had an opportunity to be whole physically. So David was a very compassionate man, and we see that. We note that when we're studying David, for example. Some of the character qualities we look for when we're looking at these people is there's positives and negatives. And one of the good things to do is to, as we read the references on the person we're studying, is to list when we see a positive character quality and to list when we see a negative. And then we're going to go back and we're going to look at why is that one negative and what is the situation? Why is this one positive and what is the situation? We look for character qualities, and they're really, just like in Galatians 5, the fruit of the Spirit. That's what we're looking for in terms of the positives. Things like faithfulness, kindness, patience, gentleness, self-control, truthfulness and goodness, and love and peace and integrity. Those are the positive character traits we're looking at. And I just mentioned another one, the compassion that David had for those around him. And we don't think about it, but a fellow by the name of the Apostle Paul was a very compassionate person. And we think, we have a tendency to think, and I've only discovered this in my own studies in the last couple of years, in fact in the last year, of Moses. He was the law-giver. Moses was a man of great compassion. Time after time, he said to the Lord when the people of Israel sinned, he said, Lord, take my life, save them. He had great compassion, but when I hear people talk about him, we don't hear that. So we want to look for those things. Now, of course, there's the negatives, and we want to note those, too. Such negatives as unfaithfulness, people who are deceivers, people who are untruthful, and so forth and so on. I think we're all much better at identifying the negatives than the positives. Should we do a character study on God as portrayed in the Old Testament? And if we do, we're automatically coming to the text with the idea, God has no flaws, no imperfections, he commits no sin, he doesn't do anything that's not deserved. But we can still learn a lot about his character, can't we? We look at Moses and how he reacted to God. We look at David, how he reacted to God. But then how God, if I can even use the word about God, reacts to people, what that tells us and what that can tell us about our relationship with him. I think that would be an excellent study, because probably we're going to come away from that study about God, specifically in the Old Testament. And the tendency that you hear, even sometimes from the Christian pulpit, is that the God of the Old Testament was angry, and righteous, and he is righteous. And he had anger. But the God of the Old Testament also was compassionate and loving. He declared those things as part of his name in the book of Exodus. His name was not just like a single title, it was a description. And it was compassionate, and merciful, and loving-kindness to the generations beyond. And that's why we have... And we miss that. Yeah, we miss it. And that's why, and especially if we don't know our Hebrew, and most of us don't, we miss it because there are different words for God that proclaim who he is, what his character is, in the Old Testament, in the original Hebrew. And sometimes the failing, if I can use that word, of our English translations is it just says God. They translate it God, which he is. But that descriptive term... There's just so much more in there that you can't see in the English. Some characters have their story told in multiple books. Scripture of David, and Solomon, and Moses, and various kings. The authors of those books, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, they profile their characters in such a way as to try to get their point across about those characters' lives. So when we study a character, should we go through all of the references about that character in Scripture, or should we stick to the single profiles from a single book at a time? For instance, if I can give this an example, a very broad example, but you read about David and his kingship, and it's portrayed a certain way in Samuel and Kings, and then you're reading Chronicles and it's something completely different. In one set of books, you read all about his sin with Bathsheba, and then it's not at all mentioned in Chronicles. So knowing that the author of each book was trying to make a point, should we mix that together to come up with a profile of their lives, or should we just go one book or section at a time to get the point about that part of the story? Well, I think it's a both and. What we want to do is we want to look up, there's some steps in doing a study of a biblical character, biblical person. First, we want to list all the references we can find to that person. A good study Bible, which will have all those references, that will give you those references. And so those will be all the situations where that person's mentioned in the scriptures. That's our first step. Then our second step is we want to read through all of them to get our first impressions, and we want to note those impressions. And as you were just saying, we're going to note some different impressions from different books, and that's fine. We want to see the whole thing overall. Then we want to go back, and we want to get a flow of what's going on in all those contexts, because different contexts draw out different parts of who we are as a human being. And so that's why sometimes we find a different David in the book of Chronicles than we do, for example, in 1 Kings. But we don't stop there. Then we want to read through and get a personal profile, putting down each of those character traits, positives and negatives, and try to put beside it what's the positive, what was the situation, like you were saying about Mephibosheth and David's comments. And then we do a character profile study. How do you do that? Well, there are a number of steps. Can I put that back for just a minute? Sure. There are a number of steps, and then we'll go into that. We do that character quality study, and we're going to look at that in a minute. And then you want to ask or write out, that would be a better way, an overview of what is the whole picture of this person. That's why you start with the small people, so to speak. They're not small people, but the less talked about people, so that you can get into the habit of doing this. But we write out an overview of the life of David. And there will be the highs and the lows. And there will be the super positives, where God says, David is a man after my own heart. And there will be the super negatives, where David sees Bathsheba and invites her in. So you do that. And then you ask this question. And so I'm saying, in response to your question, I'm saying you do the whole person, all of them in different readings, or successive readings to do it, and you have to look at each part at an individual time. But you could start at the back and move to the front, or you could start at the front and move to the back, because you're studying a human being. And then you want to ask yourself this question. What is the main lesson I learned about this person's life? David was a man after God's heart, a man of great compassion. And yet, he had failings. And he was a man who allowed his own lust of life, if I can use that word, to create a situation that was negative for his entire kingdom, and negative for his family line. And because of that, his family line lost the kingship, if I can use those words. And yet, at the same time, he gave us the most wonderful worship psalms ever penned to the God of the universe. So we put all those things together. In other words, he's a multicolored character. He's not perfect, but he's this human being. And then we ask this question, and this is the most important question. And this gets over into the character study, which we'll look at now. But we ask this question. What about David's life do I want to see implanted in my life by the Spirit of God? And what about his life do I have some qualities which match that are not positive, that I don't want to continue in my life? And how is God going to change me? Because I can't change myself. I mean, I can, but I can't. It's the Spirit of God living within us who can change us. Now I said we'd do a little bit on the character study. Can I list two or three things that you want to do? Well first, I think we do what we've been doing, what I've been saying. Now we've got this overview. We see the person. We see what we identify as some of the negative character qualities. We see what we identify as some of the positive character qualities. And we want to contrast those. What is really different about them in terms of how much do they tell us about that person? Then we might want to go to a Bible dictionary to make sure that we understand what each one of those character qualities really means. What does it mean to be compassionate? Sometimes we think compassion means that we just sort of blink at something that's totally wrong. No, that's not compassion. So we want to see what the character quality is. And then we've already done a lot of this, the cross-references of where that person displayed that character quality. What were the different situations in which he or she displayed those character qualities? For example, we want to ask this about Esther. Was she brave? And the answer is 1,000%. But she also feared greatly. And she feared greatly at the same time. And if she hadn't had her uncle, what would have happened? Yeah, he pushed her. He pushed her. And she wouldn't have pushed herself. So we ask those questions. And we ask, okay, let's say David was compassionate. What were the benefits to this trait in his life? And we note them. And the person who's telling the story is telling the story and showing us what that compassion did. He's not just sort of throwing that in there. He put that in there. The entire life of David, we don't have everything he did. We don't have every time he sat down to eat. We have specific times he sat down to eat. Why did they put in that David was in the cave when Paul went in to relieve himself? Saul. I mean, Saul. Yes, Saul. Why did they put that in there? We want to see that David was committed, no matter what, not to put his hand on the man of God. Why did he take care of Mephibosheth? Because he was committed not to knock out Saul's line. I want to call him Paul. Let's call him Saul. So we see this consistency in his character. We want to ask those questions. Now does Jesus say anything about these character qualities in this person? And that's pretty important. And a second question, does Paul in his epistles say anything about them and include them? Now whoever wrote the book of Hebrews tells us some interesting things about Abraham and David and people of faith. And that's a character quality. So we want to ask those things. And then we ask this, okay, what does that mean for me? And that was going to be my final question to you today. How do we apply the lives of these characters into our own lives? Because like I alluded to earlier, you know, these were prophets and judges and kings. And I'm just the little guy here behind the microphone talking to you. How do I apply these lives, who are bigger than life, into my own life? Well, you're correct in various areas before I answer the question. These people are bigger than life in one sense. In another sense, as we used to say when I was growing up, they pull on their jeans one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. They were bigger than life because God made them bigger than life. And the writer wants us to see what God can do and what God does. Historically, yes, they played the role. But they played that role because God chose them to play that role. How could a Samuel come out the way he did when he had an Eli whose sons didn't come out the way Samuel did? And the writer is saying, because God was in control of Samuel. Why? Because of Samuel's mother's commitment. Not only that. So we ask those questions and we seek to answer them. And I think one of the basic answers that comes into what you've said is, I asked myself as I'm studying this other human being who's like me, because he's a human being, who's a sinner like me, who's been saved by grace in the Old Testament and saved by grace in the New Testament, if I understand Paul correctly. I ask myself, what about his or her life do I want to ask God to implement into my life? And then I get practical. What can I do to ensure that that gets implemented in my life? What's a project I can do? That's a good thing to do. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. All right. You've been listening to Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. Today we've been discussing how to interpret different types of literature around Bible characters. This is the seventh in an eight-part series on how to study the Bible. On our next episode, we will be exploring how to do book studies. I'm your host, Tom Terry with PreachItTeachIt.org. Be sure to visit our website for tools and resources to help you craft your sermon or Bible study that you lead. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next time on Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org.