5 minute Bible » Context

E100-46: Isaiah 51:1 – 53:12: Reading prophets for pleasure and profit

tim — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:18:38 +0000

I have not focused these 5 Minutes on how Is 53 speaks so clearly about Jesus, it is the Old Testament passage that is most clearly, directly and simply fulfilled in Christ. But that status should not make it paradigmatic for undedrstanding how Jesus fulfills Scripture. For more on that (and there is nothing on that in this podcast :( see What DOES “fulfil” mean? And other podcasts on this topic here.

Bible Jesus Read, The

Philip Yancey. Zondervan 2002, Paperback, 240 pages, $7.29

Instead in this audio talk I want to focus on reading the prophets. The prophets are problematic today, in part because Christians sometimes make them seem more like Nostradamus than Nathan, but even more because these books do fit Yancey’s friend’s description: “weird, confusing and all sound alike”. In these five minutes I’ll mention two key tools background (“context“) and hearing the “voices”.

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E100 Week 10: Prophets: three principles to unlock the code

tim — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:36:21 +0000

William Blake: The Ghost of a Flea

Prophets and prophecy: the most misunderstood part of OT, “mysterious messengers”. A random chunk from a prophetic book will offer a confusing, seemingly muddled, confusion of vivid picture language. Yet, three simple principles can (usually) unlock the mystery and allow the prophets to speak:

conversion not prediction
context not timeless
conversation not monologue

As I’ll explain briefly in this podcast these three principles can cause mere fortune tellers to become evangelists, and their mysterious messages to become a call to convert, to change our behaviour, to redeem our world…

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E100-41: Psalm 23:1 – 23:6: A psalm of the life of faith

tim — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:48:05 +0000

Wadi Qelt, Judean Desert, with St George's monastry by Ester Inbar, available from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ST

Perhaps the best known and popular psalm among both Jews and Christians but not easy to categorise, except that it expresses trust in God. The imagery makes even better sense when some geography and culture is understood:

sheep follow shepherds, they are not left on the hills and then driven
green pastures, means land where there is some green vegetation, not just rocks and dust
wadis: steep sided gorges, semi-desert little vegetation, quick run off from hills = flash floods

For more on this see also my “Psalm 23 in context”

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E100-39: 1 Kings 16:29 – 19:18: The big fight at Mt Carmel

tim — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:12:55 +0000

Banana plantation at the foot of Mt Carmel

Since this is a gripping, but well-known, story what I’ll try to do in this podcast is show you how a bit of context (see here for more on context and understanding the Bible).

I’ll also tell you God’s two nicknames, in some religious traditions knowing all a god’s names is really important, in Hinduism the god Vishnu has 1,000 names, in Islam there is a tradition that God has 99 names. Yahweh the God the Bible talks about has kicknames as well as formal names!

Forrested crest of Carmel from the Eshkol Tower of Haifa University

A couple of photos to illustrate the geography

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E100-24: Joshua 3:1 – 4:24: Crossing the Jordan

tim — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:59:41 +0000

In spring it becomes a torrent, today's river is depleted by water taken by modern pumping stations for cities and irrigation

For today’s reading there are historical (standing stones) and geographic (the Jordan river) information that is important, and perhaps better communicated by pictures and words, rather than words alone. So here are some relevant pictures, with brief captions…

Even today the Jordan valley has (in places) dense bush, making it a strange and dangerous place for people more used to dry pastureland. Photo Wikimedia.

Ancient monoliths (like these from Tel Gezer in the Judean Shephelah) are still impressive. Photo Tim Bulkeley

They were often erected in rows or circles, they still cause us to wonder why they were raised.

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Reading the parable of the Big Feast in context (Luke 14)

tim — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:45:43 +0000

As part of my seminar on Bible abuse at Easter Camp I talked about how a couple of sorts of context (cotext or social setting and culture) help us understand Jesus parable of the Big Feast (Luke 14:16ff.) more sharply. This podcast is a quick version of that focusing on questions of context.

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Being Ideal Readers: 2 putting it all together

tim — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:08:00 +0000

In part two we get drawn to the hymn in Phil 2 and discover not only what Jesus’ disscension is all about, but also get to understand the talk of us being gifts in Eph 4:11-13 better. (If you have not listened to part 1 do listen to that first.)

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A Text without contexts is dumb! 2: Text without cotext is dumb

tim — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:14:00 +0000

For the second part of this “A text without contexts is dumb” series we’ll think about cotext, the text that surrounds a text, providing context. The biblical examples come from Psalms and Ephesians. You might want to listen to Part 1 here first ;)

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Amos 7:14 presuppositions and rhetoric

tim — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:13:00 +0000

Amos 7:14 is a striking problem for interpreters, not least because what Amos is reported as saying to Amaziah seems to contradict what he is reported to be doing in the rest of the book. This makes it fertile ground for us to incorporate either our presuppositions or rhetoric into the text.

(I use the NIV and Grasping God’s Word) as examples in this but do not intend disrespect for the translators or authors, just to suggest they are human too!
Duvall, J. Scott, and J. Daniel Hays. Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible. 2nd ed. Zondervan, 2005 is an excellent book, which we plan to use as a textbook for a course I’ll teach next year :)

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A Text without Contexts is Dumb!

tim — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:42:00 +0000

This latest one is aimed at real beginners in biblical study and addresses why multiple contexts are important for reading/hearing texts, particularly the Bible.

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