Lesson 8 | Explore the Context
What’s at Stake: Being “Quite Wrong”
Gain:
Seeing the Goodness of Every Detail
Reading a passage in context requires not just that we read verses that occur before and after it, or even chapters, but whole books…and sometimes even whole sections of your Bible! Moses’s instruction regarding “levirate marriage” is a case in point.
Death is a tragedy, even as life is often tragic. A man’s name should be perpetuated, but death militates against that. If a Jewish man died without children, his name would be “blotted out of Israel”—it would cease to exist and would be forgotten. And God, in his goodness, works against the wrongness of a life being lost and of a “name” dying.
But is life in this age, in an age of death and loss, all that God has in view in this passage?
From the context of the whole Torah, we understand the perpetuation of a man’s name was not important in and of itself, but as a shadow of resurrection and the eternal life in which no-one is cut off.
For example, consider Genesis 13:15. How long did God promise Abraham that he and his offspring would live in the land?
That requires resurrection! That requires eternal existence in the land of promise, which certainly isn't happening in this age. There must, therefore, be an age to come.
Loss:
Getting the Bible Wrong
Unlike our contextual reading of Deuteronomy 25:5–6, the Sadducees vision was narrow: it was limited to current, temporal existence. Thus when they read it, they concluded that it made the idea of resurrection inconceivable:
So even though their knowledge of Scripture was vast, they didn't really know the Scripture. If they did, they would have considered the context, including the story of the burning bush in Exodus 3:6. Tragically, their failure to do so led them to being “quite wrong” (v. 27).
God forbid we do the same! Let us, rather, widen our vision to include the context of a passage of Scripture as we wisely and diligently seek to get it right.