Tag Archives: context

November 3, 2022 · 4:56 pm

One step further

You always hear people exclaim when telling scripture to prove a point to someone in discussions, but what if we take it ‘one step further’, to make it really clear, to all of us!

We all seem to know that ‘passage’ in the bible that will prove your point to someone, it’s always handy to have in a discussion. What the significance of the verse is that it alone can put the brakes on something that is being touted by someone in your discussions. It is also true that your counterpart can do the same thing to you also.

So who is right?

I, through various reading material, it has dawned on me that it is because ‘we’ (all of us) are not starting on page one together! What I mean by that, is that we are coming from different stories,examples, people, periods of time, languages, backgrounds, and theologies, and we are starting from ‘our’ base point for telling the story, or scripture.

What time has corroded over the centuries on our theology of God and the Bible has done harm on our understanding God and the Bible. I read all kinds of subject matter pertaining to religion, christianity,and the bible, and for the most part, it all starts from the time of Constantine in the 4th Century in our belief systems or our historical prowess of facts. We have used the Universal Church(Roman Catholic) and its rebellious Lutheran to get us to today. (Which I have always thought that from a religious point, we were starting from the middle of the story) All of our denominations have come from the starting point from the universal church. (Which in my opinion is based on something very misleading and misunderstood to its originality of a ‘church’)

I follow a theologian that says it quite succinctly in the problem that the modern ‘church’ is doing, and that is we are asking the wrong questions. We are asking questions to the middle of the story, when we should looking and thinking what God’s story is telling us from the beginning. God’s story is a narrative. Narrative- a spoken or written account of connected events; a story. There is meaning in a narrative story from the author, it doesn’t change or waver, it stays the same, no matter what.

There is a theme in the first two chapters of the bible. A tragedy happens, then the resumption of the theme starts back up, to the very end of the narrative. Until we get on the same page,the first two pages to be exact, we will never get to the point of why we have to have “Context”!

If we have Context from the first two pages of the Bible, it will not only stay in context thru out the bible, put the focus of the story will come to light to All of Us!!

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October 21, 2021 · 2:25 pm

Coming together……

This is a loaded statement.

It is because of the verse that says to the effect that We all should continue to come together in Hebrews 10.25. The verse is as follows- 25. not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as ye see the day drawing nigh.

This is the foundation statement that is holding up the institution of the ‘church’ of today. This is where we will start to show that this is going down a rabbit hole to nowhere.

One of my favorite words in situations like this is the word ‘context’, Context is where you find the true definition of a storyline. One of the biggest mistakes of christian apologetic’s is ‘cherry pickin’ a verse out of context, let alone out of background of a story. Let’s start with the part of the background of a story. The background of this story in Hebrews 10 is one that in history is in turmoil and uncertainty.

Our stage is in the Roman Empire where everyone and everything is under scrutiny of their rule. People and institutions and religions are being ransacked to have them comply with their rule. This also includes the Jewish world and the new Christianity that was being born. It was a threat. One of the ways of ‘confining’ the issues of a problem is to send it away. This is exactly what the roman law did, they sent as many Jews and Jewish and gentile christians out of the area or even out of the region as possible. It was a way to dispel the thought of problems of the future.

It was in this transition of dispelling of people, that the christians were being exiled to other places, not just one place, but multiple places around the kingdom, and out of the realm of influence of romans to give the problems to someone else. It is in this transaction that the story evolves in its statements.

Chapter ten starts with the telling of the old covenant’s unfulfilling salvation to it’s people and that God has now given it the new covenant thru Jesus Christ in setting them free from such a slavery of a covenant, to a one of freedom in Christ. God written in our hearts and actions are now the way that we live to be Christ like, to be a temple, filled with His Spirit for all the world to be. It is this charge that God gives us, to be a representative of Him. It also leads us to the fact that it is to be done no matter where we are at. Whether we are in this city or that city, we are to be Christlike, meeting with our other Christ like neighbors, lifting them up and being there in their time of need in whatever reason that it is. God is in Us. We are in Him. Stand firm and forthright in being the Eternal Purpose of God in all the World. It will soon be everyone around us to all say to each other, We are ONE in Christ, Christ is one in Us! Hallelujah, and Amen!!

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June 10, 2021 · 2:33 pm

“As the Father has sent me,…”

In John 20.21 when Jesus told his followers “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you”

What if? What if we got this statement all wrong, that we have misunderstood what Jesus was telling us?

Our recognition of what we think it means is that Jesus wants us to be sent also, as was He. But………

What if we first break down the meaning of the first half of the sentence, so we will know what the last part of the sentence means.

The Father sent Jesus to do or be what? God had a specific mission for his son to do on his creation. But what was it? From my perspective I believe that we have missed an important issue in Jesus’s coming to earth, it is that He had to become an identity to the world that they would recognize. Yes, He was a man, but he was so much more! He was God in man!! Jesus’s main goal (I believe) was to be recognized as God as the Son of God. This was going to be harder than you think to get people to believe this.

This is when context really comes into play in a story that we must realizes makes the point to what Jesus was really up against. In this age, or even for ages before the god’s have always been around, but with a slight different slant to what we would be used to. You see the ‘god’s’ were always upstairs somewhere never to show their selves to anyone, their was the imaginative imagination of what each god actually looked like(thus the ‘idol’ of such one made by man, really doesn’t make sense) and to give each one of them a description of what each god could do as a job.

Now if you were used to this scenario over the centuries with your people this would be the norm. But what if one day, a man was walking down the street and looked different,sounding different and being different than any other man walking the trail that day, there was something special about him, but you different know what. This man started to touch people who were sick, disabled, or their life was just rotten to the core, and He healed them in whatever condition the person was in. His wisdom talking to the leaders of His Priest, out surpassed them in their understanding of the Torah. Passerby’s were awe struck with his authority of men and women. The faith that they believed in Him to heal and cure their lives was astonishing.

You see God had to send His Son to earth to show the world that He was God, the Son of God. God of the creation,man, and the earth. This was his goal. It was to bring his authority back into the reality of mankind, and not him. Man’s attempt to achieve a paradise on the earth was and is a failure. God’s faithfulness, which has never left man, or in another way of putting it, God is and did keep his side of new covenant that He proposed to Man, Man had not kept his side of the covenant to God, God will bring it to a full commitment with His Son dying on the cross to kill off the man’s inability to take care of his half. Man would succumb to the liabilities of himself. Jesus becoming the ‘New Man’ of the ‘New Identity of God’ is to reign forever and ever.

Now, to answer the question at the beginning of the blog, The ‘Father has sent me’, is the defining of what God was, who He was,and what He was doing in the ‘Son of God’ on earth,as this ‘New Creation’! This is,and will be “you”,”Man”!

“,I am sending you” is the statement from Jesus that He is sending us to be the same as “Jesus” in this new creation!

We are all to be like Him in the image of God!

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July 3, 2017 · 2:02 pm

How do you,Read?

For those that take reading the bible seriously, I mean in a more serious bible study of your own, in what lens do you read from? ( You won’t see this at church)

For most people that are serious in real bible study will come from usually come from either from their upbringing traditions, which is reading the scriptures from an all ready theology mindset, and when the word is read it will ‘fit’ their story.

This mindset has been in effect for quite awhile in the christian main stream, which will give it its own direction and outcome. I would unpack this scenario now but this is not the road for today.

Where as the road today is pointing to the road less traveled is the one of the critical Historic method of which the storyline is kept in context of history, and using the social, personal, and historical truth describe the origins of ancient texts in order to understand  ‘the world behind the text’.

This method ‘critical historical method’ is one that is being used more aggressively it seems the last thirty to forty years in the educational realm, which has brought about some new and different light to the scriptures. In my opinion it is the more truest form of extracting the ‘message’ of the scriptures. In the way of ‘theological methodology’ the scriptures are skewed because you are being biased in your reading and mindset. It is only because you are set in your ways of ‘seeing’ the bible or that it is thought to be the only way to read it, or it was the way that your church sees it.

It is a safe way to start from scratch with out any preconceived notions on anything and just take the text for what meant to the person,persons or people on a social understanding to stay within the context of the story. Go deeper into God’s people, who they were,why they were chosen, what were they to do? This will get you on a good path of God’s storyline for ‘His Chosen People’!!

 

 

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November 8, 2015 · 11:03 am

Context

My studies  have given me alot of insight into the scriptures over the years, but it occurs to me, this latest insight maybe the most eye-opening one of them all.

Reading a story we are usually set up first with what is called the ‘back story’, this will usually include some or all the things that you need to know  for the story to make sense to the reader. This is true with the bible and with God’s setup of it.

Without going into all the detail of genesis, there is alot of back story there to process, we even have issues now to what it still means, (which does affect a story, one way or another) but the storyline is basic in that God created a place(universe), a people(children of Israel), and himself(their God). Remember, this is really basic, but it gives you the jest of the story, but then he lets the story go in motion to let things play out.

It is this storyline that is used throughout the whole bible I mean whole bible, there is not another story introduced in the middle, or end, or anywhere else. It is all the same story.

Paul, a main character in the last part of the story, has an epiphany that what had happened a few years earlier with the appearing of ‘Jesus’ on the scene was what the scriptures(mainly the prophets, and even in the Old Testament) was in fact talking about in the future. Paul had taken the scriptures from the old, and had matched them up with the history of the day to see that this was what they(prophets) were describing of the ‘Messiah’ to come. It was not of what the Jewish people had in mind, but it was what the God of Israel described for them.

This is, in so many ways tells us that we must stay in context of anything that is being told to us, read to us, or in belief. It was Paul that connected the dots from the old covenant to the new covenant, that what it was and what it would look like.

It is when we as believers are led away from the ‘context’ of the story that it is a in a wild tangent, that makes us need to go back to the first of the story, to get our point of reference back again.

This would be a good thing to do every once in a while to re-read genesis and to really see what God’s storyline is, and to know what the back story is.

God, God’s world, God’s people.

The basic, Context.

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