Through my internship with Steve Elliott at Church Assistance Ministry (CAM) and teachings from classes here at Fresno Pacific University, I am learning the value of knowing the “context” when studying the Bible.
Steve first introduced this to me when he taught me to study the Bible. Then when we took the Biblical Perspectives 436 class, we were taught even more about the “Historical World” which we need to know and understand before we begin to study the Bible.
The importance of historical and literary context became very apparent when I led a Bible study in Steve’s absence last week. As we started to dig into the book of Galatians to learn about how we should serve one another in love, I did my best to set up the historical context of the church setting, the city of Galatia, and the issues that Paul is addressing in his letter. Then we began to study Galatians 5:13 and how it was important to us as Christians to serve one another in love. As we started our discussion, it became very clear to me that I had not done an adequate job of setting up this context for my participants when one of them tried to apply the verse to salvation.
This caused me to have to apologize, take a step back to re-introduce the verse with the emphasis of the passage on “service” not “salvation.” Once I had the group correctly oriented to looking at the verse as a service verse, not a verse about salvation, they were able to understand what Paul was communicating.
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