Why Consider the Layers of Context Courses?

Over the years, I have had students ask me if I believe that every passage of Scripture has one thing that the Lord is seeking to reveal through it, or many different things, depending upon which teacher is teaching about it. I emphatically believe that every passage of Scripture is given by inspiration of God in order to reveal some clear aspect of God’s eternal redemptive purposes in Jesus Christ. Failure to come to some understanding of how any given passage accomplishes this divine goal means failure to arrive at the true meaning of any passage. The preacher may derive many things from a passage without ever coming to grips with what God placed the passage in His Word to reveal. Some of these things might be “good” things, even “Christian” things, but not what the passage is actually intended by God to reveal.

All true Christians believe the Bible when it tells them that man was created directly by God, and in the image of God. One aspect of being created in the image of God is that man has the capacity to think, to reason. No other created being, created for life on the earth, has this capacity. Man can communicate through written words. Man can also receive communication through written words. He has the rational thought capacity to read and decipher thoughts and concepts communicated through written words.

All true Christians also believe that the Bible is God’s revelation of Truth to man in authoritative written form. And, since God created man with his innate capacity of rational thought, it is appropriate to believe that God’s revelation of Truth in His Word will accommodate itself to man’s capacity to reason and to understand words that are written with the very purpose of conveying an understanding of Truth.

Thus, it is not a “leap in the dark” to believe that God’s written revelation of Truth is going to be written in such a way as to avail itself of man’s created capacity to read and decipher Truth written in words. That is to say, God’s written Word will be decipherable to regenerate men and women simply because they approach it in faith, using the rational thought processes with which they are endowed through creation.

Really, it is not at all hard to support the approach we are taking to the study of the Bible. It simply requires of us that we believe that God has given us the Truth in the way He wants us to have it and that He has given us the capacity to receive it when He created us in His own image. Therefore, to look at everything in the Bible in its full context is to believe that the way God has given it to us matters.

The context in which God gives us any piece of revealed truth is therefore vital. It matters that there is a central theme against which all passages are to be interpreted. It matters that God gives each section of the Bible with certain books following others. It matters that we understand that the biblical revelation of Truth is progressive, with later portions being clearly understandable only in light of earlier portions.

I have said many times that no man can improve upon the exact manner in which God has given us any portion of the Truth. My clever restatement of biblical truth falls far short of God’s original statement of it. True God-honoring Bible study, therefore, begins with the presupposition that God knows exactly how to give truth to His children, and our responsibility is to learn to receive it as He has given it.

From even the little that we have considered it is evident that approaching God’s Word from a thoroughly contextual perspective is really the only God-honoring way to do so. God has given us His truth in exactly the format in which we need it. No man can improve upon it. No restructuring of its contents makes it better or more effective.

Basically the approach to Scripture that I therefore personally advocate and have taught for years is that of learning to see everything in the Bible in context. Most serious Bible scholars recognize the requirement of studying particular passages in the Bible in their immediate context. But, what I am suggesting goes far beyond this general principle. I contend that there are really basically seven “layers of context” that must be seriously considered if we are to rightly understand anything in the Bible. These successive layers of context are arranged in the order in which they must be attended to. They are:

A. The Bible as a whole

B. The testament of the Bible in which the words are found

C. The section in the testament

D. The book of the Bible itself

E. The chapter (or section) of the book

F. The immediate surrounding context

G. The very words themselves

What we are talking about is seeing the revelation of truth in the Bible in its connections within the canon of Scripture as God has given it to us. The kind of question we are asking is: What is the overall thrust of this book in the Bible, and how does the passage I am looking at relate to that message? But, we take that perspective farther by also asking something like: What is the overall message of the Bible as a whole, and how is that message developed in the Historical Books, or the Poetical Books, or the Gospels, etc., as a section? Then, we take that same approach all through the seven layers identified above. The overall result is that when we consider any passage of Scripture in its entire biblical context, layer-by-layer, we have confidence that we are encountering what the Lord is actually seeking to reveal to us in it.