Finding the Right Answer

The Apostle does not approach this problem of husbands and wives, and wives and husbands directly, immediately per se, as if it were an isolated question. His method is this – you must always approach it indirectly. It is, once more, ‘the strategy of the indirect approach’. When I am confronted by a particular question I must not immediately apply my mind directly to it. I must first ask the question, is there any principle; is there any doctrine in the Scripture that governs this kind of problem? In other words, before you begin to deal with the individual problem, as it were, that is in front of you, you say: Well, what family does he belong to? You might go even wider and say: What nation does he belong to? Get hold of the big classification, and having discovered the truth about the group or the class or the great company, you then proceed from that to apply the principle to that particular instance or example. -- Martin Lloyd Jones