Asking Interpretive Questions in Logos: Step 3 in Creative Digital Sermon Prep

While not the first step in preparing a sermon, asking interpretive questions helps you move from wondering to understanding what a passage says to a modern audience.

A preacher begins the sermon prep process in prayer, then chooses a sermon text to preach or teach, and then starts to study that text by reading it multiple times. Next, the preacher records textual observations of the text in a detailed way. That brings us to the next part of our 10 Steps of Creative Sermon Prep. We call it Asking Interpretive Questions of the text, which guides the study process so we can find the answers that will shape our main idea or Big Idea in the text.

Bridging the Gap Between Ancient and Modern Worlds

Have you ever traveled to another country or a region of your own country that you’ve never been to? You likely experienced things that you didn’t understand.

I remember trying to buy gas in New Jersey on my way to Boston from my home in North Carolina. I tried to jump out and pump my own gas, but I learned that you don’t do that in New Jersey. A gas attendant must pump it for you. Why couldn’t I pump my own gas? Does this add to the cost of my gas? Do these pump attendants have to be certified and trained to follow safety methods I can’t follow? Will the attendant pump 15.4 gallons or short me by a few gallons and pocket the difference?

As we look at the Bible, we read it in our language. However, there is a culture surrounding the text of the scripture that we don’t fully understand without some help from students of the biblical cultures in ancient Israel or the Greco-Roman world. John Stott’s seminal book on preaching, Between Two Worlds, illustrates that the preacher stands with one foot in the ancient world and one in the modern world (link to Amazon Affiliate Link).

The third step of our sermon prep process helps us bridge the gap between the ancient world and the modern world of our hearers.

Asking Interpretive Questions During Inductive Bible Study

Everyone who preaches expository sermons should first make careful observations of the text without the influence of other interpreters. This helps us focus on the text and not what some scholars tell us the text means. Asking interpretive questions will take to the next step in inductive Bible study.

Inductive Bible Study is defined by Wayne McDill in 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching as follows:

Carefully examining the text for whatever information it contains on the subject it addresses and seeking to discern the universal principles thus revealed.

Wayne McDill in 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching

The previous step involved examining the text to determine what I already knew. This step involves examining the text to understand what I don’t know.

Asking Interpretive Questions:

We still won’t open commentaries, lexicons, Bible dictionaries, handbooks, or atlases. However, this step leads us to those resources.

In the last step, we looked at how to set up our note-taking system to record the observations. If you haven’t already, go back and check out that post and follow the steps there first. You will use the same note-taking system in this step.

In this step, we will ask the investigation questions, which begin with the words below, also called the 5 Ws.

The investigative questions usually start with:

• Who – who are the people and characters involved in the text?
• What – identify meanings and explanations of details in the text, like meanings of keywords.
• When – temporal details that aren’t explicitly understood from the text, like when was this written or when did something happen that the author referred to in the text.
• Where – location and geographical details.
• Why – purpose and reasons for things in the text.
• How – seek to understand the way things happen like steps or skills.

Recording Your Interpretive Questions

Just like the Making Textual Observations step (the previous step), we will read through the text and write down the questions that come to mind as we read through the text. Record these questions in such a way that you can easily answer them.

How you record the questions in the asking interpretive questions phase of our study will depend on how you set up your note-taking system. I use Logos Bible Software’s (partner link) notes feature. Because I’ve already recorded my observations, I will have a note on each verse or passage. These show up as icons next to the verse. In my case, I use yellow squares to indicate a note exists for that verse, although users can change this.

If you followed our steps in the previous post in this series, you should have created a note (see image below) for each verse or passage.

I will open the note next to the text and go phrase by phrase through each verse (see image below). When I come up with a question, I will record it in the note in Logos. In the next step, I will answer those questions using reference books in Logos.

Let’s take a passage as an example. I recently preached on Matthew 18:1-6 (listen using the player below). I opened the passage in Logos Bible Software with my Christian Standard Bible on the left half of the screen, and then I right-clicked on the first verse and chose Add note from the pop-up menu. Choose Reference on the left side of the pop-up menu that shows up when you right-click on the verse (see image above).

Now, start typing the questions. You may try to organize things by writing the word or phrase as a heading. Then, put your observations and questions first under each word or phrase.

If I do this with Matthew 18:1, here are the kinds of questions I might ask.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “So who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

Matthew 18:1, CSB

• What time is he referring to when he says, “At that time”?
• Who are these disciples?
• How many of them came to Jesus?
• When did this occur?
• What does the kingdom of heaven refer to?
• What does “greatest” mean?

Looking at the list above, you may be unable to answer all of them. However, we can discover the answers to some of these by looking at the context, which we should do in the first part of our process, where we choose the text and read it in context. However, it’s a good idea to look again here. Remember that repetition helps us understand more and learn what this passage teaches before looking at third-party tools like commentaries or lexicons.

Let’s take a look at Zechariah 4:6 to give you an example of how we will record questions.

So he answered and said to me: “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the LORD of hosts.

Zechariah 4:6, NKJV

• Why does he begin the word with “so”? Does it connect the verse to the previous passage?
• What does “this” refer to?
• Is this “word” considered prophetic?
• How often does the “word of the LORD” appear in the book? Is it significant in the book?
• Who is Zerubbabel?
• Are “might” and “power” synonyms, or are they parallel in some other way?
• How does might/power contrast with the Lord’s Spirit?
• How does the title “Lord of Hosts” connect to this passage?

Asking Interpretive Questions: Word Studies

Many people will treat word studies as a separate part of the preaching process. However, it’s really just one subset of the asking interpretive questions step in Inductive Bible Study. We repeatedly ask the question, “What does that word mean?” Notice in our list above, we ask that of the word “greatest.” But we may want to look up the meanings of many words. So, I actually do this as part of the Asking Interpretive Questions step in our 10 Steps. After I create my list, I will then do a word study on each keyword.

What kinds of words will we look up?

• Key verbs – all verbs that are not being verbs or linking verbs like forms of “to be”, although you might want to look up the verb tense, voice and mood of these simple being verbs too if they add to the meaning of the text.
• Adjectives – descriptive words that modify nouns
• Adverbs – descriptive words that modify verbs and adjectives
• Nouns – not pronouns or proper nouns since they don’t usually bring with them meaning, although that might not be true in some situations.

Search for the Word

You can use the Bible Word Study Guide in Logos Bible Study. Enter your word in the search box and it will find the word as a Topic in books like Bible dictionaries, Topical Bibles, and Encyclopedia.

You’ll also see entries for Hebrew and Greek word studies, Biblical Senses, and Textual Searches from your top Bibles. Use that last one first in the next step.

Searching Bibles with the Bible Word Study Guide or Right-click Menu Tools

Before consulting lexicons and dictionaries, I like to find out what the Bible says about a word by searching for it. Use the Bible Word Study Guide to do a Textual Search. It finds your word in top Bibles. Read through the results and see if any questions you asked in this step show answers in other Bible verses or passages. Before other reference tools, we want to use the Bible to inform us about our passage.

You can also search using a right-click on a word. For example, in Zechariah 4:6, we will want to study the word “might” found in the NKJV. So, right-click the word and choose it in the pop-up menu. You have a choice to make.

Notice that in the pop-up above, we see two columns. On the left, you’ll notice some Hebrew words. The first is the word in that manuscript as it appears in this verse. The second is the lemma as it will show up in lexicons. The third is the root which you cause to search multiple reference tools in Hebrew. I usually choose to search for the root or the lemma.

After selecting the word on the left, you can choose tools like…

• Factbook – a large collection of references about that word.
• Bible Word Study Guide – runs a guide on that word.
• Search – search for the word in multiple places like Bibles, All Open books, and All books in the library.
• Look up – look up the word in various dictionaries or lexicons.

In the second column choose to search in the Bible. You can choose “inline,” which is in the copy of the Bible you have open. I prefer to choose the Bible because it opens another window with my search results, which I can quickly glance at to find any instances of that word that will help me interpret the meaning of the term. Record the observations you discover from this search in your notes.

Logos Exegetical Guide

To do word studies in Logos I also use the Exegetical Guide. It quickly and easily finds all the major words and then organizes a list of the lexicon entries for those words below some other word study information.

In Logos, go to the Guides menu and click on Exegetical Guide. Then type your reference in the box at the top left of the window that opens. The guide will run and search the library for the right content.

You can also select the passage you want to study and then right click to pull up the pop-up menu. You will make sure that the Reference is selected in the left hand list then scroll down and click on Exegetical Guide in the bottom of the right hand list to run the guide.

We will focus on the Word by Word section of the Exegetical Guide for our word studies during the Asking Interpretive Questions phase of the Inductive Bible study. You can use the other sections as well, so here’s what the guide includes by default:

• Your Content: any items you’ve created in the past for this passage.
• Textual Variants – textual commentaries, apparatus, and original language texts in your Library.
• Word by Word – the list of words along with other grammatical details. We’ll focus on this part in the section below.
• Grammatical Construction – shows interesting grammatical details of the verse.
• Important Words – this section links to Word Study Guides for some of the passage’s most important words. I don’t use this because Word by Word lets me choose the words I want to study, and this list might leave off some that I consider essential.
• Lemma in Passage – lists all the lemmas in the passage with links to a Word Study. You might want to consider using this instead of Word by Word, but I don’t.
• Important Passages – shows other passages pertinent to this passage’s study.
• Ancient Literature – find this passage in ancient literature.
• Commentaries – find your passage in the commentaries.
• Journals – same as commentaries only for journals.
• Grammars – shows text in grammar books in your library.
• Visualizations – tools that show the verse in a visual diagram in the original language.

Note that if you’ve edited your Exegetical Guide, you may not see the same sections listed above. I edit mine to include only Word by Word, Grammars, and Lemmas.

Now, we’ll look at using the Word by Word section of the Exegetical Guide for word studies in the Interpretive Questions step.

Word by Word Section of the Exegetical Guide

The Word by Word section of the guide will help us do word studies on the significant words. It shows each verse you ask the guide to search for. For example, in the screenshot above, we only searched for Zechariah 4:6 in NKJV. If we had verses one to five, it would include a section for each of the verses. In each verse, you see the following:

1. Below the text of the verse in Hebrew/Greek and English, you see the Lexical Form of the word and the word in the English verse highlighted by bold text.
2. The Greek or Hebrew word below links to a Bible Word Study. Click to run the study.
3. We also see a speaker icon. Click to hear the word pronounced.
4. After the speaker, you see the English transliteration of the word and a simple translation of the word as it’s used in your chosen Bible translation.
5. The following line shows the parsing information with each word as a link to open an explanation of the word’s tense, voice, mood, etc.
6. If the word has an entry in the Bible Sense Lexicon, you’ll see it next. Click to open it.
7. The rest of the section for each word includes links to your Bible lexicons and dictionaries.

I look over this guide to find any information that might help me interpret each word’s meaning in that verse. You can click any of the above items to open them and get more information. I then record any of this information in my notes just like we did in Making Textual Observations, the second step of the sermon prep steps. You can also add notes to each word in the Word by Word section of the Exegetical Guide.

Finishing Up

When you start by making observations of the text and record them in the notes, you then record any questions that might help you understand the meaning of the text. Do your word studies using the Bible Word Study Guide. Now, we have notes attached to our passage with a wealth of information. These two significant steps give us much of the text’s meaning. You could create a meaningful sermon or Bible study if you had to. However, we’re not ready to take that leap forward.

Next we’ll cover the process of discovering answers to our questions by consulting reference tools and commentaries. Make sure you follow that order. Begin with tools like Bible dictionaries, atlases, and the Logos Factbook. Do not check commentaries until you’ve consulted references for word studies, cultural backgrounds, dictionaries, and atlases.