One of the things they drilled into us at Bible college is to always ask questions of a Bible passage and the book it belongs to. They wanted us to do this so we could get a better understanding of the text of passage we were reading.

Some of the questions we were to ask were…

• Who wrote the book?
• When was it written?
• Who was it written to?
• Who were the main characters or people group?
• Are they all the same people group?
• What was the city like that they lived in?
• What was the major reason for writing?
• Was there is issues the church faced at the time?
• Was the letter a correction, a rebuke, a teaching, an encouragement?
• Was there a follow up letter to clarify things?

As I began to do this I came to realise that often this gave me a much better understanding of the situation and why the letter was written to the people.

It also gave me a better understanding of the stories contained in the passages. In a sense brought out some of the meat of the stories that I had missed from a first reading.

If you are new to reading the Bible I would encourage you to get a good Bible commentary and a good Bible dictionary. These will help you to really understand some of the background a lot better.

Remember the meat or solid food we seek as Christians is often brought out as we understand the background context of the passages we read.

God Bless,

Dave