Proclaimer Blog
Speculative application
When you're studying a passage, inevitably you want to ask questions of the text to which there are not always answers. That's fine and good. And it's OK to think what the answers might be and whether they scan when comparing Scripture with Scripture. But it is easy to make too much of this kind of groundwork for application which must always be, at best, somewhat speculative.
Take Ezra 2, for example. It's a long list of names of those who returned to Jerusalem in 538BC. Names are grouped (broadly speaking) by leaders, geography, family and role and there are not a few mysteries. Take Nehemiah (Ezra 2.2). Who he? Could it be that the eponymous hero of the second part of this story made an early visit to Jerusalem? No wonder that he was so moved by the state of the capital in Nehemiah 1.
No.
There's nothing in the immediate text to suggest yay or nay, but do some basic background work and you will discover that Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem in Nehemiah 1 in the year 445BC. Even if he were a very young adult leader in Ezra 2, that would make him at least 115 by the time of Nehemiah. Highly unlikely. That's a clear avenue of application to avoid.
But sometimes there are no answers. Take the small number of Levites who returned (compare Ezra 2.40 with Ezra 8.15-19 and 1 Chronicles 23). Why so few? I don't think there's a clear Scriptural answer. Fensham suggests that it may be because their work was lowly and so they didn't want to return. Possibly. but, do you see, there's no way of cross checking that fact, and so, I would suggest, that is not a legitimate line of application: "even if your work is lowly, you should still be committed to it."
It's not that it's unbiblical (See Col 3.23, for example). But it's not derived from the text and so it's you making a point, rather than God making a point, if you preach it that way.