The critical need for context in Bible teaching

Some Christian traditions have a very spiritual-sounding Bible reading method: you just open up the Bible, and whatever verse is in front of you is the one you read and apply to your life. Some devotional guides also encourage this bite-sized approach to Scripture, having a verse for the day with a long explanation by a pastor or Bible scholar explaining that verse.

There is real danger in this. If we miss the context of the Bible passage in front of us, we are likely to read it in a very self-centred way, and we will often miss the point altogether.

Understanding the context of a Bible passage is one of the most important ways of ensuring you understand it properly. There are a varieties of context, including the historical setting, but what I mean here is the literary context, how the passage you’re looking at is part of a wider book. What passage comes before it? How does this passage fit with the flow of the wider book? Where in the Bible is this passage: is it before or after Jesus? Asking these kinds of questions gives us the best opportunity to read passages correctly.

I think that all preachers should model this in their preaching. We cannot assume that everyone listening is familiar with the passage being preached on and the context of that book. Even taking a few short sentences to explain who wrote the book and what it’s about will help! And often the passage beforehand will help a lot with reading the one in front of us.

Let me give you an idea of what this looks like from Genesis. (I could use any Bible book, I just happen to be preaching through Genesis at the moment). God makes really important promises to Abram about offspring, land and blessing at the start of chapter 12. Those who blessed Abram would be blessed, and those who cursed him would be cursed. This then helps us understand the following chapters. When Abram goes into Egypt, Pharaoh is cursed when he takes on Sarai as his wife. When Lot is abducted by an invading army, Abram rescues Lot. Time and again, those close to Abram are blessed, and those who mistreat him are cursed. This sets us up for the major Biblical theme of Jesus, Abram’s offspring, who would be the key person in history. Blessing and curses would be centred around whether people trusted in Jesus or not.

The Bible is a book written by people as well as the word of God. This means we can use the tools of comprehension like with other books, looking at the context, and thinking about the vocabulary. This is God revealing himself in a form we can understand and we need to make every effort to do so.

Reading a passage in context saves us from making some major mistakes. If we take only a phrase or a verse as our personal Bible reading or the text for a sermon, we are in greater danger of reading it incorrectly.

How about if you don’t know much about the Bible and are not sure about the issues of context? The biggest tip is to read larger slabs at a time. Read a chapter, not a verse. The larger slab will help you see the context more naturally. And use other resources to help you, maybe a short summary of the book from a study Bible or something like that.

The context makes sense of the text. We need to be thoughtful about our Bible reading lest we make it say something quite different from what God and the writer intended.