5 Questions About Scripture

Have you ever thought about how we apply Scripture to our lives?

Well, I have. Sometimes, I feel like we apply Scripture to our lives just because it is Scripture but we do not really understand the Scripture in the first place.

We may take one verse and use it as a tag line on an email or as an inspriational quote but in when taken in full context it may have a different meaning altogether.

Do most Christians know and understand that the Bible is not written in chronological order?

Do most Christians know how the Bible came to be?

Do most Christians know that the early church survived for almost 400 years without a Bible?

Do we teach the timelines involved in the writings?

We spend so much time teaching young believers what is in the word but we do not teach them the historical reliability of the Word.

In any two-way communication there is a deliverer and a receiver.

We have a habit of taking a subset of Scripture and applying it to our situations in our lives when in reality we must be more diligent in the way we interpret Scripture. In my view I think we need to see what Scripture says and how it applied to those who received the message and then how that applies to our lives. We cannot apply Scripture to our lives without first seeing how it applied to those who it was written to.

In my opinion I think we must ask a few questions before we get to what a verse means in our lives:

1. Who wrote it?

2. What did they write?

3. When did they write it?

4. Why did they write it?

5. How did it make its way into the Bible?

Instead of simply reading a verse and saying that it applies directly to our lives I think that we have to examine the scripture fully. In order to that we must first consider who was the writer of the scripture. What was their writing style, what other writings do we have to compare this with to see their full mindset and thought process? Once we see this we are able to start to more fully understand what they were writing.

The next step is to examine who they were writing to. In many cases the letters of the New Testament are letters to an individual or to a specific church with instructions for them to follow. Now I would say the vast majority are great guidelines for any individual or church to follow but we must still take into consideration the receiver of the message. We must be able to look at the history behind who was receiving the message and what their situation was at the time of the writings.

History tells us quite a bit about the early church days but sometimes we just read the Scripture and leave out the history and this may be were some of the disconnect with the world comes in. I mean it is great that Paul wrote these letters to the churches and to Timothy and others but really why did he write them? What was going on in that time that caused him to need to write these letters and why were they included in the Bible when others were not?

We must also look at the cultural time and religious climate when these books were written in order to discern the full context of what was being written. If the letter was to a person then what was that person going through at that time that made that letter important to them. If it is a church, what was the specific reason that the letter was addressed to them?

The last key to this puzzle is teaching our young adults and young believers how the Bible was created and ensuring they understand that the Bible was not always there. In this I agree with Andy Stanley, We must not focus our faith on any book but instead we must base our faith on a historically reliable event that happens to be written about in the book. In some ways it may seem like you are talking out of both sides of your mouth when you say this but think about it this way. If your faith hinges on the Bible and someone offers an argument against your Bible then your entire faith is brought into question. If your faith is hinged on a historical event that is soundly supported then nothing can question that faith. That is not to say that the Bible is not reliable, inerrant, or untrustworthy it is simply stating that our faith is in something greater than the Bible. Our Faith is in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God which happens to be documented in the Bible which we consider to be God’s Holy Word.