A Verse Out of Context: How the New Testament Quotes the Old

On our How We Read the Bible page, I keep pressing one rule above the others: context. A verse means what it meant to the one who wrote it, in the place where he wrote it, before it can mean anything to us. I still believe that, and I am not taking it back.

But an honest reader of the Bible runs into something that seems to cut the other way. The apostles themselves, writing under the inspiration of the Spirit, sometimes take a verse from the Old Testament and use it in a way its first author could not have had in mind. If one of us did that in a Sunday class, someone might gently say we had taken it out of context. So what do we make of it when the New Testament does the same thing?

Out of Egypt

Take the clearest example. Matthew tells us that when Joseph carried the child Jesus down to Egypt and back, it was "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son" (Matthew 2:15). He is quoting Hosea. But turn back to Hosea, and that line is not a prediction at all. "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt" (Hosea 11:1). Hosea was looking backward, at the exodus, at the nation God brought up out of slavery. He was not forecasting the travels of a baby.

And yet Matthew is not playing loose with the text. He has seen something true. Israel was God's son, called up out of Egypt, and Jesus is the truer Israel, the Son who relives his people's story and redeems it. Matthew is not ignoring Hosea's context. He is reading it inside a larger context, the whole story God has been telling from the beginning.

The apostles read it all as pointing to Christ

This is not a one-time move. Matthew hears Jeremiah's "Rachel weeping for her children" (Jeremiah 31:15), a verse about exile, and hears it again in the grief of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:18). Paul takes "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn" (Deuteronomy 25:4) and applies it to paying those who preach (1 Corinthians 9:9). Peter stands up at Pentecost and reads that strange day through the words of Joel (Acts 2:16). Again and again the apostles open the Old Testament and find Jesus on the page.

They learned it from him. On the road to Emmaus, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). The risen Lord taught his friends to read the whole Bible as one book about him. The apostles are simply doing what he showed them.

What this means for us

So here is the honest tension, and I do not want to soften it too quickly. A verse can be carried beyond its first setting and still be used rightly, because the Spirit who inspired Hosea also inspired Matthew, and he was telling one story the whole time. There is a larger context, and the larger context is Christ.

But notice the careful thing. The apostles never contradict the original meaning. They do not make Hosea say the opposite of Hosea. They honor what the verse meant, and then show how it opens into something greater. They read the part in the light of the whole.

That is the difference I want us to hold on to. We are not inspired apostles. So we still begin where we always begin, with what the writer actually meant. We do our homework. But we also read every passage as part of one unfolding story that finds its center in Jesus, and we stay humble and gracious when a brother or sister draws comfort from a verse in a way that is more devotional than precise. Often they have seen, dimly, the same thing Matthew saw clearly: that the whole book is about the Lord, and his fingerprints are on lines that were written long before he came.

Read in context. Always. And then lift your eyes and read it all as one story, the way he taught his friends to do on the Emmaus road.