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Welcome to Day 1426 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomMastering the Bible \u2013 Figurative Interpretation and Biblical Symbols \u2013 Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.\xa0Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.\xa0Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1426 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.\xa0Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today\u2019s current events.\xa0To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word.\xa0Our focus for the past 39 weeks on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today\u2019s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better.\xa0When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Today we will conclude this book study with the final two insights.


Mastering The Bible \u2013 Figurative Interpretation and Biblical SymbolsInsight Seventy-Nine: Figurative Interpretation Takes the Book of Revelation as Seriously as Literal InterpretationDr. Heiser shares that during his teaching career is that one of the biggest misconceptions he has encountered about Bible interpretation is the idea that interpreting what the Bible says with symbols or metaphors equates to concluding that what you\u2019re reading isn\u2019t real. This is deeply flawed thinking. But it\u2019s nevertheless understandable.


Bible teachers and preachers are fond of saying that the Bible needs to be interpreted literally for it to be taken seriously. Taking something \u201cliterally\u201d means you\u2019re ruling out any type of figurative language. That only makes sense if the biblical authors wanted to be taken that way. Sometimes they didn\u2019t. Since they were human, much of what they wrote could have meaning on more than one level. Insisting only on literalism stifles communication.


We use words every day in ways that would be comical or offensive if taken literally, yet we never expect what we say to be denigrated or considered phony. When you say on a hot day, \u201cI was roasting out there today, were you?\u201d When you say you\u2019re madly in love with your wife, should I presume you\u2019re insane for being attracted to her? If your boss is hard-hearted, have you just diagnosed arteriosclerosis? When you tell your neighbor his new car is a sweet ride, will he ask you not to lick it again? We can laugh at these absurdities, but all of these statements are meant to be taken seriously. They all have meaning that corresponds to reality.


Biblical writers didn\u2019t live in an alternate universe where people never used figurative language, metaphors, or symbolic references. All of those things are stock elements of the way language works. Pitting \u201cliteralism\u201d and \u2018\u2018figurative\u201d against each other in some sort of semantic death match demonstrates poor thinking.


The reason we can understand when to take a statement figuratively or literally is that the world we\u2019ve experienced informs us how to interpret it. In other words, the cumulative effect of our upbringing, our cultural setting, our experiences, and our Worldview wires us in such a way that we intuitively know what is meant. To reject symbolic interpretations of the Bible is to deny the biblical writers their humanity. Instead of letting them be the authority for understanding what they wrote, we assume we know better.


Instead of bending the book of Revelation to our own will in the name