You may have heard it said that the Bible was written for a different time and culture so isn’t relevant today, but throughout history the Bible has been interpreted for the times. For example, the Dead Sea scrolls which were written by the Essene community, which lived in Qumran around the time of Jesus, looked at what the prophets had written 800 years earlier about the Babylonians and read into that the occupying force of their day, namely the Romans.
Some people are better at reading a biblical text and applying it to a situation. This is what Clodovis Boff calls ‘correspondence of terms’. Others are better at looking at a situation and making the connections back to Scripture. What Boff calls ‘correspondence of relationships’. When you’re reading the Bible, does it remind you of things happening today and what does it have to say about them? As you look at the world around you, does a particular Biblical text come to mind and what might it be saying? Whichever way round your mind tends to work, it is the connections we are able to make to today that make the Bible God’s living word to us, and not some outdated instruction manual for a bygone era.
Read and look, or look and read, and see what God may be saying. God may be offering a word of hope, a word of comfort, a challenge, a call for you to do something. Be alive to God’s word which is as relevant today as it has ever been.
Turning to God 