Just What Do You Mean, Context?

Have you checked the context? When someone says context in terms of Bible study, what do you think of? Do you think of what's before and what's after the verse? I'll read the verse before and then I'll read the verse after. There you go, that's context. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. There's a little bit more. A little bit more to context than just the verse before and the verse after in the Bible. In fact, sometimes you'll do that and you'll find that you're still stuck in figuring out what a verse means. So today I'd like to explore a few other kinds of context. Now what I'm gonna say, I don't want to discourage you with it. I don't want to be giving you a bunch of things that you think you then have to do every time you read the Bible. When you sit down to read the Bible, just read. But these are a few things I think that you might find are useful to widen your tool set when you're studying. I know when I'm working on a project at home I can get stuck because I just don't have the right tool that I need. And so I'd like to expand our toolbox a little bit by looking at different kinds of context. The first I'd like to look at is passage context and this is kind of what we said. It's the verse above and the verse below a passage. But there's more to it than that. Of course that verse number in your Bible is is not inspired. It wasn't there before. So you can't put any stock in it. Before there was a verse number whatever it is you're looking at in the Bible was once a sentence that was contributing to a paragraph. It was contributing to a thought that was contributing to a movement that was contributing to where the whole book was going. And those other layers need to be kept in mind when you're when you're working with finding out what you should be getting from a single Bible verse. That is the passage context and with that we're trying to trace the author's overall line of thought. But there are other kinds of context as well as for instance the recipients context. Why was this written? Who was it for? Where was it being sent to? And why? Does the author tell us their purpose for writing? Very often for instance the Apostle Paul in his letters will tell you either at the beginning or the end of his letters why he's writing, what he's trying to address.

But sometimes his letters are long and you can kind of lose sight of that fact along the way. And for example in Philippians 4 the last chapter there's a part where he talks to these two ladies in the Philippian church and he says you too need to get along. You're having this fight. You need to reconcile. And once you know that and you go back and you read Philippians you realize that there are things that Paul was doing to lay the foundation for that conversation earlier on like a couple chapters earlier in Ephesians 2.14. I can just read it to you here. He says, do everything without grumbling and arguing so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world. Then I can boast in the day of Christ that I didn't run or labor for nothing. That's from the CSB translation. So when Paul writes that couple chapters later he knows, you know we may forget, but he remembers what he's going to be asking a little bit later. Whenever he introduces that part it seems kind of just dropped in but it's not. He's laid the groundwork that he's going to ask for this reconciliation between these two ladies later in the letter. Another kind of context is the author's context. The biblical author is inspired by God but he uses his own vocabulary. He writes, you can tell the author's personality often comes through in the writing. So you have to think sometimes about personality, age or experience. When we have the letters of Peter, we read those, we can tell this Peter who's writing to us is not the same Peter that we read about back in the Gospels. Some things have happened. Most notably the Holy Spirit came down on him in Acts 2. But also just the experience he had through those intervening years.

You know, has changed his perspective. He's been on a journey. Vocabulary is something that's unique to an author a lot of the time. Different people speak differently. In fact words can change over time. So when we're doing word studies we have to be aware of that. We have to take into account what words mean when we're comparing them between authors and between eras. And the author's own current circumstances sometimes matter. For example Paul writes this letter to Philemon. And he's trying to bring about this reconciliation between Philemon and his slave Onesimus. And he says this thing. He says if Onesimus has wronged you in any way there's maybe a possibility that Onesimus ran away and he might have stolen something from Philemon possibly. And Paul says if he's wronged you in any way or if he owes you anything charge it to me. And that's happening in a context where this house church is meeting in Philemon's house. He's likely, at least in my experience, that might mean he's probably the richest member of the church there. They're reading the letter right now in his house and Paul is in prison. So you've got this man in prison who's asking this man who's probably very rich to have this reconciliation and saying if he cost you anything charge it to me. That's context. Another kind of context is the literary context. So literary context is like is the passage part of a genre, a particular genre that people are familiar with or does it make motifs or does it use make use of motifs that the original readers would have been expecting. For instance, if I start a story with a pastor, a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar, are you expecting that's going to be a tragedy? There's probably going to be a punchline with a start like that. And that kind of thing happens in the Bible as well, especially in the recounting of true stories, ancient histories. You will find motifs used heavily because they're really powerful. They enable the writer to tell you what happened and what it means at the same time. So, for example, are you reading Genesis and you're told that somebody is going east? They're going east. There's probably trouble on the horizon for them. Or does a man and a woman meet at a well? Well, we can probably expect a wedding not too far off after that, usually in the Bible or an elderly couple with no kids run into that. Probably God's plan of redemption is about to take a step forward when you run into that. Those are motifs which God has arranged through the sequence of events that happened and the writers have picked up on and they've highlighted in order to draw out what it's going to mean in the larger story. Sometimes context can even affect the meanings of words. Like if I'm in a courtroom and I call you a baby, that's probably an insult. But if I write a 1980s power ballad, a love song, and call you baby, it's probably a compliment. And there are Bible words that work that way as well. There are words that just show up in songs, that just show up in the Psalms, or they take on just a certain meaning in the wisdom literature part of the Bible. So those are things that you also would need to take into account when doing a word study. Bible writers make frequent use of allusion. Is the author using a charged word or two, some charged language that's referring to something that happened way back here? Or is he foreshadowing something that's going to happen farther on in a story? That's context as well. How is the author using poetic techniques that the ancient reader would have been looking for, like parallelism and chiasm? I'm not going to talk much about that. I hope to do a message on that in the future.

It's not to say that those kind of things you're going to find any secret knowledge in. It's not that they'll turn up some secret thing that wasn't there before. But they do help you follow the author's line of thought. I think of those things as the soundtrack. It's the difference between watching a movie with the soundtrack and without it. It's still the same movie. You're not going to necessarily learn more things from the soundtrack. But it does help you follow where the author's going.

How is the author using techniques the reader would not expect, like taking a common story trope and flipping it on its head or presenting conflicting details, presenting a paradox before you? The biblical writers do this kind of thing too to give you the element of surprise, to give you a speed bump that slows you down and forces you to think a little bit harder.

The cultural context. The Bible always has a cultural context. This is what we say. We were raised differently a lot of the time, as they say. Do I have the same questions when I'm reading a text that the original readers of it had? That's a useful question to ask sometimes. Would the writer have anticipated my question? Or are there things that seemed so obvious to him that he didn't need to say it that are not so obvious to me?

If so, that might be a point where there's a cultural bridge that needs to be crossed, where we need to understand something a little bit more about the world that the Bible was written in. And for that, you do need to look to external sources sometimes, but you have to find reputable sources, because a lot of people write a lot of things that preach well to try to explain Bible stories that don't go back to primary sources. So that you do have to be careful with.

On the other hand, there are times when there might be things where a biblical author is trying to surprise you with something, is trying to point out something that's weird that we miss, because it's not weird to us. It was weird then, but it's not weird now. For example, at the beginning of the story of Ruth, Ruth opens on the scene of this husband and this wife and these two sons going off to Moab.

And the two sons, Matalan and Kiliyan, were not told which one is the older son. And that's fine to us. That does not bother us when we're reading stories. But if you are an ancient reader, that would be where the story goes in the minor key, where you think, I'm not sure if these guys are going to make it out of this story or not. Because that's going to be important, which one's the older son, if they are. It's kind of like the old TV show Star Trek. I don't know how many of you saw the old TV show Star Trek. But they'd have these landing parties, and they'd have Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, they'd beam down to this planet, and they'd usually take along a guy in a red shirt that you'd never seen before. And that guy's not going to make it out. He's not going to make it back to the ship. And that's what happens in some of these little cues that are given, where they skip past the thing that you're expecting, which son is the older son. So we talked about passage context, recipients and author's context, literary context and cultural context. But that may sound like a lot of things, but they all kind of have something in common together. And maybe you've sensed it intuitively. It all really boils down to just trying to have a meeting of the minds with those who wrote the Bible. It's the same thing that we do with a letter that we receive from anybody that we love. We sit down and we try to think through what led them to write what they did. Why did they write this? We try to think about all of the parameters that were behind them doing that. That's exactly the same thing that we do here. We try to walk a mile in their shoes. We do our best to step into their context before we take it back into our context. And that's an important exercise to do, even in prophetic passages. Before we decide what a passage means to us, we should think about what it meant to them. The passage rarely means what it never meant. Everything has a context.