Context, Context, Context Part 3

The third context error is in reading things outside of the overall context of the entire Bible. This is most clearly seen in the telling of “Bible stories.” Any of us who grew up in Church and Sunday School, and Church Youth Group and such would be very familiar with this phenomenon. We would well remember all of the flannel graphs (and don’t think I’m attacking flannel graphs, I love them, I miss them… but I digress) and story books, and rote telling of stories. Rarely, if ever, were these “stories” actually read to us out of the Bible, and virtually never was it explained to us how these accounts fit into the overall context of the Scripture. This was especially true of lessons from the Old Testament.

A good example of this is the account of Daniel in the lions’ den, as we commonly know it. We are told this story without ever being told really who Daniel was, why he was in a foreign capital city (if we are even brought to understand that much) or what his life had consisted of. The fact of the matter is that it was quite recently that I even came to understand that this even in the life of Daniel happens toward the end of his life, when he was an old man, in his eighties! This might not seem like a really big deal, but over the course of years of instruction it adds up, and you can easily end up seeing all of the things that you’ve been taught as nothing more that disjointed stories, and you might even come to see them as mythical, and not even real, which becomes a really big problem. But even more than that, it causes a failure to understand the absolutely terrific context of the whole of Scripture.