The last time in the blog I wrote about "Observation," the first step in studying a passage of Scripture. It's the stage where we answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How questions of a passage in the Bible. In the Observation stage we're not trying to find any spiritual principles or apply anything to our lives, we're just getting information.
Now the last part of Observation before we get any further is really important. It's called the "What's different?" stage. What we want to do is just observe, either mentally or on a piece of paper, what's different between the Biblical setting, (then), and your life, (now). You're asking yourself, "What's different between the story I'm reading and my life, time period, culture, etc?"
The reason we do this is because there are a lot of differences sometimes between the Biblical culture/setting and our lives. Sometimes people try to make applications or take lessons from stories where things are taken out of context and they get themselves in trouble. If we can recognize the differences in the stories we're reading it will help us see what part of the story is still relevant for our lives today.
For example. If we're reading out of Leviticus 4, we obviously recognize the differences of:
1. We're not Jewish
2. We're not sacrificing goats, bulls, lambs,
3. We're in a totally different time period culturally and contextually than the Biblical audience.
The list could go on, and it seems dumb or overly obvious to list what I did, but I promise that when we notice the differences, it will help us notice the "true all the time stuff" that I'll talk about later.
And Bobby is different because he doesn't like to wear pants in public. Weirdo.
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