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Lesson 1 covers the importance of context.
Welcome to this short introductory level study into hermeneutics, and we're going to do a week-long class. This will be a short class to get your appetite wet for digging into God's Word at a greater level.
One of the most important things that you could do. And we're going to start this first lesson on one of the most important elements of interpreting God's Word. There's nothing more important when it comes to the study of the Bible than context.
Now, context has a couple of different aspects to it. You have the context that you might think of, meaning the verses before and after whatever passage you're studying. But there's historical context, cultural context, spiritual context, all these different elements.
Now, each of them need to be dug into. But the most important, and I'll give you the little trick that I use, when people challenge me with a verse of scripture and they think they know what it means, typically all I do is back up a few verses and read the context.
One of the classics that I like to give, when you look in Matthew 18, is the case where you end up seeing in Matthew 18, and there's two verses right next to each other that people often take out of context.
One is verse 19 that says, Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth on anything I ask, it will be done for them from my Father in heaven. And many people think that means I just need to get two or three friends that are Christians to pray with me on something I want and God will give it to me.
Another passage, the very next verse, So many people take that, and boy is that used for so many prayer meetings when people just, it's only a couple of us on a Wednesday night prayer meeting and they want to encourage themselves, so they say, Well, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.
It's kind of a funny verse because if you think about it, Matthew 28, verse 20, Jesus says, So the question is, how many Christians do you actually need for Christ to be present? Now, I know some of you said one, and I'm sorry, it was a trick question.
See, God is omnipresent. He's everywhere, and therefore you don't need any Christians for God to be present. He already is present. So you see, we don't need anyone for him to be present. So you say, well, what does those passages that you just read mean?
Well, if you stop, if you back up just a little bit to verse 15, you end up seeing it's dealing with church discipline. And so as you see, it has steps of church discipline. So verse 19 and 20, they're actually encouragement to people who'd go through church discipline and have to put someone through that and bring it before the church because no pastor ever wants to do that.
They need the encouragement to know that God's behind it because they followed the process. You see, context can make all the difference, and you can get radically different understandings if you read just a verse.
So one thing you have to remember is those verses and chapter breaks that you have, they weren't in the original Bible. No, they came hundreds of years later. It's unfortunate. It's easy to reference a verse that way so that you can help people find where you're referring in the Bible.
But unfortunately, it also keeps people from reading the Bible in its context. Now, that's the most important context. But you do need to dig into the culture and the history because a lot of times some of the things we think the Bible's saying is really just you and I not understanding the times.
People don't understand the phrases of speech. For example, Jesus said when asked when the end times was going to happen, he was asked, and he said, No man knows the day or the hour, only the Father knows.
And so what you end up seeing there is people say, Well, Jesus didn't know something. Well, that's not possible. But once you understand that that's a Jewish idiom, that's a phrase of speech that Jewish people would use to say in context of a marriage, to say it's not your business to know.
You don't know that. And then you keep reading the rest of that passage, you end up seeing that's talking about the expectancy in which we should be living, waiting for the end times. Well, that's exactly what that idiom means when it comes to a marriage in a Jewish culture.
And so once you understand some of the culture and the history, it plays into understanding more about the context. So the most important is context. Now, next lesson we want to deal with is dealing with the difference of descriptive and prescriptive.