We have all seen those black and white Dust Bowl photographs. When we see snapshots of tired farmers looking on in despair as their whole livelihoods rise up and disappear in clouds of dust, we face the problem of context: The vast majority of people today simply do not know what it was like to grow up during the Great Depression. So, we study firsthand accounts, photographs and history books to try and find some context for what it was like.
When we open our Bibles, we read words that are thousands of years old with twenty-first century eyes. We read words literally written in stone tablets on tablets made of plastic and metal. With such a gap in time comes a context problem. Basically, when we open our Bibles, we are faced with a problem: We don’t know what that culture and time in history was like, so we often take things the wrong way.
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