well greetings welcome back to our biblical hermeneutics course we're going to be talking today about segment surveys and when we talk about segment surveys also could be called passage surveys we are going to be talking about how do we take a larger passage of scripture that's more than a paragraph or just a verse or two but it's less than a book and how do we begin the process of surveying or observing now there's other elements to the hermeneutical process that we will be talking about later on but at this point we're going to see how the whole conversation about structural relationships really fit into our process of observing a particular passage and i will say this is particularly helpful when preparing for a sermon series so i know that many of you will be preparing for a series of sermons or bible studies and you want to take a particular passage of scripture the segment survey will help you to make sense of a particular passage and not just take one verse here or a couple of verses there but to see what's really going on there so uh i want to also before we jump into this i want to point our attention to an assignment that you have coming up because there is a segment survey that is coming up here soon that's going to be due this is going to this lecture is going to help us to have an idea of what it is that we're really after you can see that on your syllabus as well so as we get started here let's pray heavenly father we just thank you we thank you for the opportunity to come here and study your word to learn and to grow together lord i know that there's people who are watching this from different parts of the world right now so whatever is going on in their lives whatever's happening lord if they're burdened by things going on with their family or burden by things happening in their ministry lord i just pray that you would give them the grace right now to tune in to lock in and to hear what you want to speak lord we thank you for the skill set that we're developing but we know lord that apart from your spirits lord none of this is going to be worthwhile so help us holy spirit in this time we pray in jesus name amen all right so as we talk about the segment survey i want to talk about some elements now this is going to be very similar to what we do in our book survey when we look at a whole book of the bible but what i found is that in my experience starting by seeing how the structural relationships and some of the observations and questions work in a smaller passage of scripture helps to kind of wrap our minds and our arms around what that looks like to do a survey rather than starting with a book you know i'd be like hey you know what okay guys take deuteronomy and just do a book survey well we'll start with looking at how this is done in a passage and then at the end what we'll do is we'll take the the gospel a passage in mark and we'll have an opportunity to walk through some of these elements together and then it's your turn so the the first thing that we're going to be doing and i'm going to list these things and then we're going to come back and and spend a little bit more time on a few of them but the first thing that you want to do in a passage survey is get an idea of the general material of that passage and what i mean by that is you're you're you're reading through and and again we want to read through the passage uh more than one time a few times especially if you're preparing for a sermon or you're preparing to teach and and if you're preparing for this assignment you want to read through it a couple of times get a sense of what's happening in the passage get a sense of okay what genre are we looking at here are we looking at a are we looking at a letter are we looking at a historical narrative are we looking at law are we looking at apocalyptic literature what type of genre are we looking at here get a sense of that get a sense of who the target audience is and and some of the contextual things that we need to do and as you're also getting a sense of the general materials of this particular passage you you know your target passage but you also want to be very familiar about what's going on around this passage now here's an example of this when when i moved to the place that i live now is ohio it's in uh in a state of ohio here in the united states and it happens to be a colder climate we we get really cold during the winter time now i moved there from florida now in florida we don't have to worry about it getting really really cold but which i i imagine some of you are living in climates like that right now but for those of us who have colder climates you may have come across this before this is a a windshield scraper and the reason why you need this is because during the winter months in ohio it gets not only cold but then you start getting sheets of ice and actually not too long ago i can remember going to my car and just having to get somewhere and just having layers of first we had snow on top of the car once i got rid of the snow then i had to deal with layers not layer layers of ice on my windshield now here's what i've been guilty of before and a lot of people that i know have have done this as well where if you get in a really um time really big time crunch where you are in a rush what you can find yourself doing is just scraping just enough off your front windshield and your back windshield where you can see ahead and and you can go where you need to go but the problem is is that becomes really dangerous because if you can only see right ahead and you've not taken the time to clear off the west the rest of the windshield then what's going to happen is that you're not going to be able to see what's going on all around you the way that you need to see it and so even if it takes you a little bit longer i'd rather be a little bit late and be safe than be in a rush and be in danger then you want to take the time and scrape it all off and i say that as an example for what we have to do when it comes to reading scripture is that we can find ourselves maybe in a time crunch we got to get a sermon together really quickly or we've got to put this bible study lesson together really quickly somebody's expecting me to teach something and so we scrape off just enough where it's like okay i'm going to preach these two verses here and we've we've prepared it but we've not really taken the time to clear off the rest of the windshield to get a sense of what's going on around us and so when you are starting in a book survey you are getting a sense the general materials of that passage so you are looking at what's happening before what's happening after who is being addressed to what's the genre so that's kind of the beginning part of um that's the beginning parts of the survey but after that what you want to do is you want to go and have blocks and titles now when we talk about blocks and titles i'm going to give you some examples but if you're dealing with a a chapter and a half or you're dealing with several verses then you may realize that there's certain there's certain titles within certain sections that you see and you want to title it so that you can come back to it later it'll help you out in your own personal study but it also help you out if you're thinking through how am i going to preach this over a course of four to six weeks or how am i going to design a bible study lesson for the next four to six weeks or however long the passage is and so it gives you the ability to kind of put it in chunks and put our arms around the the whole passage as a whole and we can start to begin to see how they are connecting together now after you look for you know after you write the blocks and the titles then what we're going to do is we're going to start looking for the primary and secondary structures now we talked about that before so you may notice that there's a contrast going on or you may see that there is a um a preparation going on there's something that you see that's happening in the text that helps put the whole structure together now remember from what we said last lecture that the way that you can tell the difference between a primary structure and a secondary structure is that a primary structure covers at least half or over half of the passage that you're working with now it doesn't mean that the other structures you see are not important but um it it's usually coming alongside with a primary or a larger structure and that's going to help us later on down the road we want to try to see how all of this fits together because remember one of the things we said in the principles of inductive bible study to have understanding of a passage we don't need to only understand what it says but how what it says is put together so that's what we find with the structural relationships once you have the structural relationships then what you're going to begin to do is you're going to ask the questions based on the structures now the questions that you're going to ask are questions for definition and questions for implications again i'll give you some examples of this here but you'll see some of that on that worksheet that you should have about the major structural relationships you'll see after the definition of the actual structure there's a set of questions those questions are to point you towards being able to define specifically what it is that you think that you're seeing and the key thing is is that it needs to be specific we don't want to just kind of generally say oh i think somewhere in there there's a contrast or there's a comparison what specifically is being compared and then you put the verses down and then or what's being contrasted or or you may see that there's a recurrence of contrast it'll get real fun we'll start putting two or three of these structural relationships together and you begin to see you know you know there's a recurring contrast that's leading to a particularization of a particular so we'll get there but you just want to start getting yourself familiar with it and and you may say on this first go you may think you see something and you put it down at first and then after you go back and you ask some of the questions for definition you're like oh i thought that was a primary structure but it's not really what i thought it was or maybe i thought that was the main structure but then i my whoa i see i see that i you guys see that particularization going on there or you see that causation going on here and so you begin to to notice that and that's just training your eyes so don't be afraid of making a mistake if you think you see it put it down and then what are you going to do you're going to come back later and begin to ask the questions that are needed and then after you ask the questions of definition then you're going to ask the question of of the so what question what are the implications of this if um you know when we were looking in psalm chapter one and we saw how there was a contrast between the righteous and the wicked you have verses one through three and then you have versus i believe it was four through six and you see that there's a contrast so so what are the implications of this contrast what is this implying those are some of the questions that we should be asking as it comes to that and then next in a survey after you've had the opportunity to get a general sense of the text and what's going on there and after you have had a time to kind of put the blocks and titles of particular passages within the larger passage then we get the relationships and then we get the structural relationships then we get the questions then we want to start identifying strategic areas in a passage what are the strategic areas that we see here going on that that help um that you can go back into to say if i had to preach this whole passage in one sermon you ever had a large passage of scripture and you had one sermon to preach it well how do you keep yourself from missing it you've got to identify what is the strategic point in this passage that if i don't get this point if i don't get this then i've kind of missed it and we can find ourselves doing that sometimes can't we like we can miss the whole thing um and it's not that what you preach was heretical it's just that that's not what this pastor was saying and so you want to get the strategic point of the passage how do you find where the strategic areas are well you find the strategic areas because the structural relationships begin to lead you to where those strategic areas are so you see how they're starting to work together now the the relationships help you find the strategic areas and then after you find the strategic areas then i want you to begin making some overall observations about that passage what are some observations that come up now we'll talk later about what a detailed observation is that's when you kind of lock in a little bit more in detail of something but that's what we're going to do and then and then at the end we want you to make your first attempt of a claim of the text it does not mean that that's all in the interpretive process there's other steps you still got to do evaluation appropriation there's still other things you've got to use your extra biblical sources but but i want to encourage you that in this process of surveying that the role of commentaries and bible dictionaries and maps and those things those things come a little bit later now if you have some background or experience in working with the original languages then you can use that in the process of just the reading through as well but so so so that's what we're we're going to do so let me model this because right now it's all theory right so so let's let's turn to mark let's turn to mark and let's just see what this looks like i'm going to look at two different examples one example we'll look at here together then you're going to kind of take a crack at it yourself you're going to take give it a try and then we're going to come back and then we're going to look at another passage in mark so turn with me i feel like i'm getting ready to preach right now turn with me to mark chapter one now what we're going to have an opportunity to do here is we're going to look in our our passage is going to be mark chapter 1 verses 1 through 15. that's going to be our our passage in and what we're going to do is i'm going to read it through now if i'm doing it myself and i encourage you to same thing i will read it through a couple of times but i'm just going to read it through one time here together and then you'll see what i'm going to start doing with giving some general overall impressions of what's going on what i notice here and then then we're going to go to block blocking and titling different sections within this passage all right so the gospel of mark chapter 1 the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ the son of god as it is written in isaiah the prophet behold i send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way the voice of one crying in the wilderness make ready the way of the lord make his path straight john the baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in all the country of judea was going out to him and all the people of jerusalem and they were being baptized by him in the jordan river confessing their sins john was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and his diet was locust and wild honey and he was preaching and saying after me one is coming who is mightier than i and i am not fit to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals i baptize you with water but he will baptize you with the holy spirit in those days jesus came from nazareth in galilee and was baptized by john in the jordan immediately coming up out of the water he saw the heavens opening and the spirit like a dove descending upon him and a voice came out of the heavens you are my beloved son in you i am well pleased immediately the spirit impelled him to go out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by satan and he was with the wild beasts and the angels were ministering to him verse 14. now after john had been taken into custody jesus came into galilee preaching the gospel of god and saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of god is at hand repent and believe in the gospel all right so when i look here in this passage there are a couple of things that i want to make note of right is that this has given us this is at the beginning of a gospel account of the life of jesus so you you have this narrative that is written and so i'm i'm making some notes of this is that this is not once a point in time in a land far far away this is rooted in a historical event and so um i'm paying attention to that and i noticed that this happens to be at the beginning of the ministry of jesus and so i'm just making some general just what's happening okay this is getting us ready for what jesus is about to do so how would i begin to block entitle this passage because within here you know that there are several sermons that you could preach there's there's several teachings or lessons that you could have just from those 15 verses that we just read but if you want to just kind of feel how it all fits together here's what you would have in mark chapter 1 verse 1 you have the opening the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ the son of god so that's a pretty quick opening what we'll find with mark is that he doesn't take a whole lot of time to just jump right into the things that he wants to jump into but then so my first block and title would be mark 1 1 that's the opening but my second block would be mark 2 mark 1 verses 2 through 8 and i have that as john preparing the way so you see how where it says as it is written in isaiah the prophet behold i send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way the voice of one crying in the wilderness make ready the way of the lord make the past straight and then you can read all the way through to we get to verse 8 where john says i baptize you with water but he will baptize you with the holy spirit now let me just make a note with the titles the titles don't have to be super fancy or super technical just little notes to help you remember what's happening in that part of the passage and so the second block would be john preparing the way mark 1 verses 2 through 8 and you may have a different name but that's basically what's going on and then my third block would be the baptism of jesus so that would be mark 9 through 11. and so we see there the the whole narrative of jesus being baptized spirit descending like a dove and the voice of god speaking and so i had that titled baptism of jesus i know that was real real technical right just real straightforward to the point block four jesus in the wilderness mark 1 12 13. and so you see where you know immediately the spirit impelled him to go out into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness 40 days and being tempted by satan so i'm reading through notice at this point i'm not diving deep yet i'm just kind of given general blocks of what's happening within this particular passage and so i'm titling it i'm giving it little titles i'm giving it little blocks and then i'm beginning to to go and then in verse 15 i mean then in verses 14 and 15 i had that titled jesus ministry commences he has begun his ministry so that's how i would block so as you have your passages i want you to kind of go through the larger passage the segment of scripture and then i want you to begin to give me blocks and titles block it off give me titles to help you to remember what's going on in each block of that passage and that's going to help us later on when we try to figure out how the whole passage fits together so all right now that you have that and it shouldn't take that long for that part of it maybe a little bit longer than what you just saw but i i had a little bit of a head start uh i looked at this last night so the next thing that i want to start doing is looking for the structural relationships what are some of the the primary or structural relationships that i see going on in this passage now don't be afraid to just try it out you might be wrong you might think you see something and then you realize i thought i saw this but later on it was that that's okay at this stage what i want you to do is to begin to train your eyes to begin to recognize what's going on so here's some things that that we see going on here one of the big pieces that that you can find is that there's a sense of climax going on right you can kind of feel the buildup of of what's happening here now if i say that i see climax then what i want to do is i want to begin to actually say where am i seeing this so um so i see you know in in one one that we have jesus the son of god he's introduced as the son of god that's a pretty big deal and then i'm going on and i'm looking to see where in verse three it says the voice of one crying in the wilderness make ready the way of the lord make his path straight okay this is this is building up and hmm verse 5 lets me know that in all the country of judea was going out to him and all the people of jerusalem and they were being baptized by him in the jordan river this is talking about john so now you have all the people all of judea coming out um and so we we see that and and then we see here in in the baptism in verse 8 where um i baptize you with water but he will baptize you with the holy spirit so there's a sense of okay this is building up to something here who is this guy and in verse 10 it tells us that jesus came out of the water and the heavens are splitting apart and the holy spirit descending on him like a dove i mean this is this is pretty big all of this is i would say okay it looks like this is climaxing into something like we're being prepared for something big is about to happen i don't know exactly what it is but man something big is about to happen um then he's out in the wilderness in verse 13 and for 40 days being tempted by satan maybe i want to pay attention to that later on this whole idea of being in the wilderness for 40 days in preparation for something big i don't i just something's happening here then what do you see in verse 15 the time is fulfilled the kingdom of god is at hand repent and believe in the gospel the time is fulfilled man this so so you see how man it looks like there's a climactic structure that's happening in these first 15 verses it's building us up to something uh but you could also say man maybe that's maybe that's preparation maybe there's more preparation going on or maybe it's a combination of the two verse seven what does john say one is coming who is mightier than i well this is so so we are to be looking for somebody coming one is coming who's mightier than john john's preparing the way and what we find interesting is that it's after john had been taken into custody that now it begins to happen so so there's a whole lot here i'm holding back and i'm sure as you're reading this you're probably seeing wow there's so much here that's happening but we are being prepared you guys remember what preparation is right introduction preparation it is preparing you for what's about to take place it's setting us up it's letting us know hey this jesus here you might want to pay attention to him yeah this is you know there's a voice that's been crying out into the wilderness that's been you know telling us and we see john the baptist and all of judea is coming to john the baptist so so think about this if all of judea and all the people are coming to john and then john is telling them no listen there's somebody who's coming who's mightier than i then you probably want to pay attention to that because it is building our expectations so these are just some of the structural relationships there's a little bit of an inclusio which is an auxiliary relationship here in um verses um you know one we see the son of god right the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ the son of god and then what do we see in verse 11 and a voice came out of heaven you are my beloved son that voice from god you are my beloved son in whom i am well pleased and so we we have at the beginning the the title son of god and then you have god himself saying in verse 11 this is my beloved son and so there's a bit of an inclusion there there's a there's a bit of bracketing going on that's helping to frame who this jesus really is and so there are some things that that you begin um that you begin to to see as this uh momentum begins to build up now you could also say that there's a contrast here now i'm just giving you some examples i mean of some things that i'm seeing here in this passage right because what if you took uh or maybe you could even say uh yeah what if you see you see john john's at the height and then what happens he ends this passage in custody jesus is in anticipation but now his ministry is fully realized right as john's ministry is what seeming to stop contrast so i'm going to put those verses down so so this is an example of some of the things that you would begin to point out in your structural relationships and um then another structural relationship here that i had was particularization you remember particularization is when you start with a general idea and then it's specified for the rest of the passage and so you could say that chapter 1 verse 1 the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ is really the overall general idea of this is what's going to happen and then what do we see throughout we see how it begins right this gives us the beginning all the way up to now the kingdom of god is at hand and so there there are different relationships um that are starting to come forth i want you to try your hand and see how you're able to recognize it but for every strategy for every relationship that you see i want you to begin to ask the right type of questions questions for definition and questions for implication so if i think i saw a particularization there here's what i'm going to ask how specifically is the general statement particularized in the following material i'm going to come back later and answer those questions but right now i'm just asking why the use of particularization here what are the implications of this passage and so these are the questions that that you're going to have in in i can also make sure that's included in our path just an example of what a survey looks like so you can see how i wrote this and structured the whole um the whole sheet so you can see oh here's how blocking the text here's the structural relationships now that i've kind of gone back and given myself more time to think about it i would actually probably say that the major one is preparation and then you have some secondary structures that are going on here as well maybe particularization is as well and and then i would kind of put as an auxiliary relationship or secondary one inclusio or some of the other things that i think i'm seeing here um even contrast as well but i'm not quite sure it's contrast there i think so but go ahead and put it down give yourself an opportunity to see what you're doing is you're training your your your your eyes to see how does this all fit together instead of just seeing it tree to tree the tree hopefully you can begin to see the forest within that particular passage this is leading up to something here and and and we have somebody preparing the way and here's what we see so i'm looking at what are some of the strategic areas that um that you notice notice here well an obvious strategic area is verse 15. actually i would say verses 14 and 15. after john had been taken into custody jesus came into galilee preaching the gospel of god huh okay something seems to be stopping something seems to be beginning and then in verse 15 we actually see jesus making the announcement by the way i'm making the note of this is the first time we actually hear jesus himself speaking up to this point we're just being prepared for the coming of jesus but now in verse 15 we actually hear the first words in gospel of mark about from jesus which is the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of god is at hand repent and believe in the gospel now again i've not gotten into the deep dive of what does he mean when he say the word repent that's going to come later when i start doing more of a detailed observation but at this stage i'm just making notes just okay here's some things that i see here that that seems to be strategic here in in this whole passage i would also look and say you know what um let me see here verse 7 seems to be pretty strategic as well because you have john saying after me one is coming who is mightier than i what does that do if he's telling you if someone is coming who's mightier than either you start looking it's like i i thought you were pretty special john because everybody in judea says and all the people are coming to you but you're telling me somebody mightier than you is coming boy this must be somebody pretty special so that would be a strategic area that i would make note of that if i want to understand what's going on in this passage i want to make note of the fact that there's somebody coming who's mightier than john this this is a pretty big deal and then i see that other strategic area where john is taken into custody and jesus ministry is beginning and then we see the first words from jesus in verse 15. so all of these are things that are helping me to wrap my mind around what is happening in this passage of scripture so now after i've gotten some strategic areas and you don't want more than two or three especially for just 15 verses because else you could say everything in there is strategic so you got to be a little bit selective but this is helping us to understand the strategic areas how did i choose that strategic area well if i think that preparation is one of the primary structures then i've got to ask what are they preparing me for and i think verse 15 14 and 15 leads us into what's happening the kingdom of god is at hand this is what we're being prepared for we're going to see what the kingdom of god looks like in the person of jesus and so that helped me to identify where i feel the strategic areas are so if i had to preach a sermon on verses 1 through 15 and i only had one shot to preach it guess what i'm going to probably spend the majority of my time on i'm going to spend a lot of time on verses 14 and 15 because that helps me i'm going to reference everything else but that's kind of where it all leads to the kingdom of god is at hand get ready um you know so anyway now from here what i'm going to do is i'm going to start making just some observations of what i notice happening here so i've blocked off certain parts of the text and i know that these are some of the things that are happening um you know i know john is preparing the way we have the baptism of jesus we have jesus in the wilderness and then jesus ministry is commencing so you know i i see that there's some structural relationships that are going on here that's helping me to connect and so now what i want to do is i want to make sure that i'm making some some general observations now those observations are going to become more specific as i begin to hone in later on and then later on i'm going to start bringing in some commentary work as well and and i like to use commentary as making sure i don't fall into a ditch in terms of interpretive ditch but i don't use it at the front end of surveying or observing a text sometimes i think we cut ourselves short from allowing the spirit of god to speak to us through a text by jumping to what the experts have to say rather than allowing ourselves to be patient in the text and seeing what's happening what's developing what are some of the strategic relationships how do i see it fitting together what in the world does john preparing the way jesus being baptized jesus be in the wilderness have to do with the ministry of jesus commencing oh perhaps all these things are building up to it that make hopefully that's helping you um as you begin to think about it and and so um after you do that if you want to use a commentary or two you can but we're going to have a whole lesson talking about how to use extra biblical sources so you don't have to do that yet but for the sake of the assignment at that point what i would want you to do is to to give some observations and give your first go at what you feel like the claim of this passage really is what do you feel like this passage is is is is communicating within its own context and and and start there and and i think that'll be that's just an example of a shorter passage on what we can do now your turn um i know you have an assignment coming up and so i'm going to give you something to look at and this is not going to be for your assignment because i'm going to come back and i'm going to model this passage survey when we come back but i want you to read mark chapter 2 through verse 1 through mark chapter 3 verse 6. i know we skipped a little section there in mark but um i think there's some things that are really that'll really stand out to us as we do that and then we're going to come back together and then we're going to begin to do a survey with that part so you can kind of see how it's done with another passage as well this is going to be a little bit longer than the first passage it's going to be a little bit more than a chapter long but we're going to see how this seems to be fitting together and then but i want you to kind of take a stab at seeing if you can identify some structural relationships within it and when we come back we'll look at some of this together and that'll help prepare you for your assignment that you have coming up all right happy reading you