As we bring our series on how to read your Bible to a close, we started off with a simple game. We separated the students into two groups as a type of competition. The challenge… we would give the students a set of instructions and they had to explain it. The trick… these were very old instructions that don’t mean the same thing any more. What were these old instructions?

• Put a Sock In it
• Turn it down a notch
• Hit the hay
• Take the Limelight
• Wrap it Up
• Bite the Bullet
• Get on a soap box

Many of these have become common phrases, but in context they were very specific instructions that meant things that honestly confused many of our students.

The Lesson

In the past several weeks, we’ve talked about the different genres found in the bible. Narrative or what is essentially storytelling. Then we talked about Poetry and songs found in the Bible. We also talked about how these genres are used together, aside from specific books like Psalms and Proverbs.  The third main genre is what many people think is the majority of the Bible, but in all honesty, it’s only a quarter of it. This is called Discourse. This would be instructions and discussions about various topics.

This would include the laws of the prophets and the epistles of the Apostles in the New Testament.

Ask: What is a Law?

Often we see laws as a hard and fast rule that we can’t break and must obey. But all laws that we have today are created for a reason. We have laws in place that are meant to keep people from hurting each other. We have laws about voting that are meant to identify us specifically as residents of this country. We have certain laws that are meant to help provide for people.

Many of the laws that we find in the Old Testament are the same thing. Some are ancient rituals that mean to identify the people of Israel as distinctly God’s. Some of the laws are in place to keep people safe from disease and death. Some Laws, like the ones about sacrifices, are put in place to make way for people to connect with God. Many of these laws are in place to ensure that God’s people treat each other and others with respect and justice.

When you read these laws in their cultural background (like we discussed back when we talked about Bible study basics), we see that these things are always pushing His people to be better. For example, even though God doesn’t remove slavery altogether, what he commands his people is a revolutionary idea for the ancient and modern world. Remember that slavery in the Old Testament was very different than what we experienced in the United States and even much of the modern world, but according to God’s commands, all debt was to be forgiven every 7 years, and all slaves were meant to be released every 7 years. 

Now some of these laws were, in fact, for all people; they generally pointed out the sins that we must avoid. Some, however, are very squarely locked into cultural situations. Example. Murder is still wrong and sinful. But you don’t need to worry about sacrificing an animal anymore because Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice. To be able to distinguish these laws, we have to be intentional about reading all things in context, again like what we talked about when talked about Bible Reading basics.

Sadly, time after time, the people of Israel violated the laws of God. Which we discover by paying attention to the narrative of the entirety of the Scriptures. But as we read that narrative we discover that all these laws, all the poetry, all the narrative point to Jesus. It is Jesus who simplifies things by summarizing all the laws.

Read Matthew 22:37-39: ³⁷ Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.

Beyond the Old Testament, we see this style on display throughout the New Testament. We see it in the Gospels when Jesus teaches us about the Kingdom of God and lays out very clearly what we should and should not do as people of God. But also, we see it throughout the Epistles of the Apostles.

Ask: What is an Epistle?

The epistles are the letters we find in the New Testament from the Apostles. They are written by one of the apostles to either a group of people or sometimes to a very specific person.  We often call them books such as “the Book of 1 Peter,” but these are actually letters of instructions. In our first lesson on reading the Bible we used the illustration of two boys being given two very different letters. One letter tells a young man to rest and take it easy as soon as he gets home. The second tells a young man to immediately sit down at the table and begin doing homework.  What appears to be two very contradictory ideas suddenly make sense when you take into context that one young man is struggling with stress and anxiety from school while the other is failing school because he’s being lazy.

The idea of examining the context of these Epistles is just as important. We have to look at the historical context of the situation, the cultural context, and the specific situational context of each letter. As we read through these discussions, with the proper context, we can begin to discover how we, as Christians, should respond to various situations we encounter today.