SBS has been very challenging, but also very possible to complete, and I have learned so much. Understanding the background of each book and the historical setting has given a new level of clarity to them. Did you know that the nation of Syria and Assyria are not the same thing? I didn’t!
A while ago I had a conversation with a woman who was nervous, because she met someone who told her that the Bible was against the celebration of Christmas and Christmas trees. I thought that was interesting, so I looked with her at the verse that was used against her. It was Jeremiah 10:3-4, “For the customs of the peoples are vanity. A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with a hammer and nails so that it cannot move.” She felt that because of this verse, all of her family celebrations of Christmas were actually sinful. I remembered what I learned in SBS, that you have to look at the context of a verse to figure out what it meant.
I looked and showed her the very next verse, Jeremiah 10:5, “Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good.” So upon closer examination, Jeremiah was showing the people that it was pointless to take a tree and fix it into an idol, not a Christmas tree.
On top of this, Christmas was established as a celebration of the Birth of Christ sometime around 0 AD, while Jeremiah spoke during the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, over five hundred years prior to any potential existence of Christmas.
I told her that she can look into the history of the custom of Christmas trees if she wants, and decide whether they are sketchy or not, but this verse is not talking about Christmas. The woman was so relieved to find out that she had not been in sin her whole life.
I was very thankful for the training I had received to not just take a verse a face-value, but to look at what it would have meant to the original readers.
