I thought I would revisit this topic briefly, since we've been at this reading plan for a week now. I just picked up a book by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart called "How to Read the Bible for all Its Worth". What a great book! I've just barely started into the chapter on the prophets, but it is very useful already and I would recommend reading it.
Fee and Stuart say that the prophetic books are so hard to understand for us now because we tend to want to read them in light of the coming of Christ. However, we must remember to keep these books in context, as I mentioned in an earlier post. These prophets were speaking God's word to his people at a particular point in history, so for us to fully understand the importance of that message, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the audience of the prophet. For them, they had an idea of what the prophet was talking about because the prophet was speaking into their lives about their actions. Here we are trying to make sense of a message that was delivered to a people we have very little information about. That's why it is so important to read a bit about the history of the people in the bible, so that we can understand how these words applied to them.
This approach of researching about the text that we are reading can be a lot of work, but in the end, it will be worth it, so that we can get the most out of God's word, which is just as applicable to us now in the 21st century as it was to the people who first heard it so many years ago.
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