I know we have some good Bereans among us (Acts 17:10-11), and some may wonder—especially with a message like the one last Sunday—“where is he getting these sermon points?” In one respect, it’s obvious they are coming from the text. However, what may not be obvious is why a particular sentence or phrase is described as “the main point of the passage.”
By way of reminder, regarding Hebrews 1:1-4, I said that the main point was that God has spoken in a Son. Clearly, that idea is in the passage, but why is that the main point? Why couldn’t the main point be that the Son is superior to angels (v4) or that He is the radiance of the Father’s glory (v3)?
Further, I taught that there were three truths that the author wanted to convey about this Son. (1) He is the appointed heir of all things; (2) He is the agent of creation; and (3) He is now enthroned at God’s right hand. These are not the only statements made about the Son in the passage, so how did I know these are the main truths the author wanted to convey?
Still further, I suggested three reasons for the Sons enthronement and one result—all coming from phrases in verses 3-4. How did I know these things?
For three reasons, I’d like to take this article to explain how I arrive at these sermon points. First, I want to set the Bereans at ease. It’s good to want to know how a teacher/preacher is arriving at his teaching points and it's good for him to show his work. Second, I don’t want to take the time to explain this every time I do it in every sermon! Hopefully, having explained it once, I’ll know that you know that I’m not pulling these out of thin air! Third, not everyone enjoys the grammar nerdity involved, so if I can do it once here, I stand a smaller chance of losing people’s attention in each message.
The bottomline is that with New Testament letters the Greek grammar does all the heavy lifting. The Greek text of Hebrews 1:1-4 is all one sentence. (Our English translations, in order to make it more readable, break it up into smaller sentences. The bad news is that this often obscures the grammatical relationships. The good news is that one translation—Young’s Literal Translation—does a fine job of preserving the grammar and syntax of the Greek text.) If one is teaching/preaching a passage that consists of one sentence, diagramming the sentence is one giant step toward a sermon outline. The main idea of the passage is simply the main clause of the sentence. One then needs only to discern how the other phrases and dependent clauses are functioning in the sentence. If one is teaching a passage that has multiple sentences or multiple paragraphs, diagramming is still a great place to start, but discerning the main idea can take a little more work. In that case, one must determine the idea that ties all the sentences/paragraphs together. Often, though, there is a key sentence that states explicitly what that idea is.
Below is a diagram of Hebrews 1:1-4 using Young’s Literal Translation.
I won’t explain the grammatical rationale for how/why I diagram the way I do. Obviously, this is not as detailed a diagram as we learned in school, but it serves my purposes every week.
The main clause—subject and verb, along with accompanying prepositional phrases—is in blue. This is the main idea which is why the main point I sought to drive home in the sermon was that God has spoken in a Son, and we should therefore listen to Him. The preceding words in gray are a participial phrase with its modifying phrases. As a whole, it modifies the main clause. As a temporal clause (indicating what God did formerly), it provides a contrast, which supports the idea that the Son is a superior revelation of God. Again, we should listen to Him.
The clauses in purple are three relative clauses. They each modify “Son,” giving information about Him. This is why I suggested the author had three truths to present about the Son. The third of the three relative clauses (“who sat down…”) has attached to it a total of four participial phrases—three preceding (green) and one following (brown) the verb “sat down.” Typical Greek syntax (syntax refers how words, phrases, and clauses function relative to one another) indicates that the preceding phrases likely indicate reasons for His sitting down, and the following phrase likely indicates a result of His sitting down. That’s why I presented these things the way I did.
This kind of "diagramming" is not something you must do when you study the Bible. Again, it's really only going to be an accurate exercise if you're using the original text or a translation like Young's Literal. The point is...this is how I'll be discerning the points in Hebrews. The grammar of the text dictates the main idea, points, and sub-points of the sermon.
Comments