Daily Lesson for Wednesday 2nd of April 2025

Seventh-day Adventists owe much to William Miller for their understanding of Bible prophecy. While his understanding of key passages (such as Daniel 8:14) was not perfect, Miller’s methodology was, nonetheless, important, because it paved the way for the birth of our last-day remnant movement.

Image © Kevin Carden at Goodsalt.com

In some ways, studying the Bible is not unlike assembling a large jigsaw puzzle. If you gather just two or three pieces together, it is nearly impossible to discern the entire picture. Perhaps in those two or three pieces, you can see a horse, and so you conclude that you are assembling a picture of horses. But a few more pieces reveal a chicken and a cow, and then once you have assembled hundreds of pieces, you can finally see that you have been working on a picture of a landscape, which includes a city, a farm, and a range of mountains in the distance.

One of the central ways in which some Christians err in their study of the Bible is that they treat the Scriptures as a loose collection of sayings or proverbs that they can use to address a specific situation. Some will turn to the simple study guide at the front of a Gideons Bible, where they can find helpful verses on a number of topics, and assume that it represents the sum total of the Bible’s teachings on a given subject.

Unfortunately, they take the same approach to prophecy, lifting an individual text out of its context and comparing it to current events instead of the rest of the Bible. This, in part, has led to the constant stream of modern books on prophecy that have to be updated every few years because they were wrong on what they said was going to happen—and when.

That’s why it’s so important not merely to select some specific texts on any given topic but instead to study carefully everything the Bible says about that topic and to take into consideration the context in which it says it, as well. It is very easy to pull a passage out of context and make it say whatever we want.

<–Tuesday Thursday–>

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Source: https://ssnet.org/blog/25b-01-studying-the-word/