Broad meadows

Psalm 78 opens this way “O my people, hear my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old-.” So what is he saying the purpose of a parable is? Teaching. Parables may be described as using a physical process or thing as a metaphor for a spiritual/prophetic concept. However, he also says these are hidden things, things from of old.

So what are these things and how can we come to understand them? Many years ago I was in what I thought was a doctrinal dispute with the Lutheran church I was attending at the time. Something had stuck in my spirit and expressed it in a series of dreams, the substance of which I couldn’t remember but I seemed to understand the problem anyway.

Being completely startled by such an event, I wondered how I might test the information. What I decided to do was to look up every reference I could to what I considered the words relevant to the topic in Scripture. I bought an exhaustive concordance using the 1984 NIV Bible. It’s a great tool for any Bible study and has every word in the Bible, what verse they are in and the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic words used and the various ways they are used in Scripture are there.

By the time that I had finished doing this study, which took months, I realized something surprising. I could actually see individuals and groups being described by the words I was following. I wrote a paper on it and made sure that it got to the groups that needed to know. It would be many years before I attempted to replicate these results with other words, but the results were just as surprising.

There are few rules that I had going into this study: One, whatever I find cannot contradict a plain reading of Scripture. Two, don’t try to define a symbol, let Scripture do that. Three, wherever the Bible does define a symbol, that can be plugged into the story being told to derive spiritual/prophetic information. Others developed over time.

So what I’m going to be doing in this series is to use the methodology I developed and reveal some of those hidden things, things that will make you go “wow”. The next few writings I will be giving the symbols I will be following and the interpretive framework that I use and give examples of what I am talking about.