Why is the questions that tends to encourage the most speculation of any of the six questions.  When we are trying to determine why the author decided to say what he did or why God encouraged the author to include it, we are trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the author.  It helps me to make my own outline of the text in order to get a good overview of what all is happening.  While Bible outlines are readily available, making your own forces you to reconsider the whole book as a single cohesive work instead of several distinct sections.

Whatfor is by far the most difficult question to ask because it forces us to relate the passages to our own lives.  As we consider how the stories and teachings of the Bible affect us, it may make us happy, sad, or even a little nervous.  But what’s important is that we are allowing the Bible to teach us more and more about God and how we can be more like Him.

When questions are important for rebuilding timelines or while establishing a chain of events, especially when an earlier event has specific relevance to an event occurring later in the narrative.   Understand where the writing falls in the life of the author may help to bring out keywords and phrases that we might otherwise miss.

Where helps us to determine the environment in which the story is unfolding.  Knowing the location of an event will tell us about nearby cities, land features, or lakes – which sometimes are even referenced in the story itself.  Knowing how one location relates to another, can allow us to estimate travel time as well.  Furthermore, locations can also give us hints about the people, what sort of culture they came from, and their background.

While context is not strictly required in order to extract the basic meaning from most passages, it does greatly enhance our ability to understand more deeply what the author is trying to convey to his readers.  In the New Testament, this context is particularly important for the letters written by Paul as some of them are very short and do not give sufficient context to see the whole backstory without additional study.

This little series is based largely on an adult class that Doug Henson is teaching on Sunday mornings.  I have mentioned more than once that it would be good for all of us to go through that class at least once; until then, we’ll pick up the cliff notes in our own class.

Who is the question we ask when we need to know the players in a passage.  Who is speaking?  Who is the recipient of the writing?  Who is listening in the story?  Who is in the story?  At this time, we also look for anything that is special about the actors.  Is he a “man after God’s own heart?”  Is someone mentioned as having a checkered past?  Does anyone remind us of ourselves or someone we know?  What is their background, their motivation, their purpose in the story?

What is where we pull out the greatest volume of information.  Consider the narrative: what is happening?  How are the actions described: quickly, without hesitation, carefully?  With every one of these six questions, take notes; always have pen and paper handy.  Next to your description of each person, take note what they were up to.  This will help you see the who and the what side by side, so you miss nothing.

Of course, at first you will have to think about each question one at a time – just like when you are reading a math word problem or a short story.  It doesn’t take long before you start to identify the important parts and recognize elements that may be important later.  But the key is practice!