The Latin word for “weave” is texere; we can see that root in words like textile. The word for “with” is com. Put the two together and you get a word that is extremely important in Bible study: context. The imagery for the word context is that of a woven fabric; lifting a thread out of that fabric tears the weave, ruins the fabric, and leaves the thread as weak version of its former self.

I remember selling men’s clothes back when I was in college. I didn’t know much about it when I started. I remember one day I was giving a woman a pair of pants that had been altered. She noticed a thread sticking out of the pants. Being the helpful salesman, I reached for a pair of scissors to cut the thread off. The woman who was working with me screamed from across the room “No!” I didn’t realize that these pants were woven, and the thread that I was about to cut was an integral part of the weave. Had I clipped that thread, it would have continued to unravel, ruining the pant. Luckily the other saleswoman was there to save the situation.

We must remember that the verses of the Bible are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that can be removed and put together as we wish. They are threads woven together by the Holy Spirit; surely we don’t think that we are wiser than He as to how they are to be arranged. One of the worst things that we can do when studying a topic is to use a concordance to find all the verses that speak to that topic and then only study those verses. A concordance is a wonderful tool for identifying passages to be studied, but we must go to each text and study it in its context lest we teach something that is not true.

A verse out of context can lose all meaning. Remember the old saying: “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.”

{photo by Dariusz Rompa, sxc.hu}