Building on the Foundation

  In Exodus 12:15, as it reads in most Bible versions, we find a puzzling statement. God commanded His people, “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel” (NKJV). “On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses.” This wording makes it sound as if we should deleaven our houses on the First Day of Unleavened Bread, a Holy Day! And yet, a few verses later, we discover, “For seven days no leaven shall be found in your houses, since whoever eats what is leavened, that same person shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a stranger or a native of the land” (Ex. 12:19). If no leaven is to be found in our houses for seven days, then obviously it cannot be found in our houses on the First Day, either! It must already be gone by then. So what’s the meaning of v. 15? It becomes a little...

Before reading this post, I highly recommend you read The Scary Truth and Approved Conclusions . It provides necessary context. Next to the Holy Spirit, context is one of the most important aids to understanding the Bible. A lack of context is one of the primary reasons most of the false teachings in the world have come about, and it's vital if we actually want to know the truth about what God is telling us through His word. For proper context, you generally have to read the verses around the verse and sometimes the chapters around it (In the case of Paul, the entire letter, the words of Jesus, and the Old Testament. I'm only half kidding.). Without getting the context, you can come to some pretty wild conclusions, like sin is good and we should sin more so that the grace of God can abound more in our lives. So the context around a particular verse is important, but also the subject (who or what is being talked about), and who the recipient of the verbal or written instruction...