Wednesday, January 5, 2022

A Narrow Focus

The scriptures we've been reading this week have had a pretty narrow focus on the Creation, and have been mostly spent comparing and contrasting three very similar accounts of the same series of events. This is good for a deep dive and detailed analysis of the texts, but we haven't really branched out to find a wider range of insights.

For instance, a Sunday School lesson covering the topic of the Sabbath Day could address the origin of the Sabbath, what the word "Sabbath" means, why the Sabbath changed from Saturday to Sunday, why we should keep the Sabbath Day holy, and how we can do so. However, if the teacher limits themselves to using only the scripture references in this section of the Come, Follow Me manual, then they can really only cover the origin of the Sabbath and not a lot else. This is alright, if we want to consider the Sabbath in the context of the Creation, such as by wondering why God, an immortal and thus tireless being, decided to rest after His labors when He didn't physically need to, but there's little else we can learn about the Sabbath, going only by these scriptural references.

In some cases, it's good to have a narrow focus. In other cases, it may be better to branch out and use the manual as a starting point for our own scriptural exploration. The manual itself may not have very many unique insights, but the scriptures have plenty of insights we can find. We just may have to broaden our focus to find them.

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