Just Keep Reading
"Study your Bible" is the exhortation that you hear the most on a Sunday morning if you attend a biblical church. Every believer feels conviction about the amount of time they spend in the Scriptures. As much as we talk about Bible study, how often have you actually heard a sermon or Sunday school lesson on how to study your Bible? If you are like me, the answer is probably very little. Therefore, is it a surprise that we don't spend much time doing it? If someone told you that you need to play baseball, that baseball was paramount to what God made you to be, but they didn't teach you the rules or show you any techniques, how much baseball would you actually play?
Let's look at this from another angle. Imagine you're sitting in Bible study at your church, and your pastor brings up an amazing truth from the passage. You might think, "How did he get THAT from THIS." (Now in our example, we are going to assume that his point was actually there in the passage and not some wild idea of his own.) For many of us, our very next thought is discouragement because we feel like we will never have the level of understanding as the pastor. Maybe others would just brush it off and say, "Well, he has a Bible education. He should know all this stuff, so I don't have to know." These are two wrong mindsets, but they come from the same root issue. Seminary has made the idea of Bible Study a professional pursuit.
This isn't an article to bash seminaries. I think they are valuable assets to the church. However, many pastors learn a semester's worth of "rules" and methods of interpretation in order to dissect scripture like a game of Operation(don't hit the sides, or you're a heretic). These pastors then enter pulpits and Bible studies seeking to teach their congregations all of these "rules and tools" of interpretation. This seems like a good idea at first. I had the same mindset when I got out of school. Here is the main issue with that thinking: almost every layperson in a church does not have the time to study like a Bible scholar. What then? Do laypeople just give up on understanding God's word? Certainly not!
In this blog post, I hope to give you a few tips on Bible study while encouraging you to reject the idea that you can't understand scripture. I have a bachelor's degree in Christian studies, but I'm currently working a plant job that takes 40-60 hours out of my week. When I study my Bible, I don't actively work through the rules and tools of biblical interpretation that I learned in school. I don't have the time to do that, and I don't know that you do either. So maybe my method of studying will help you since I'm in the same boat as most working people with a family.
Some Principles
Every good practice comes with principles to ground your work. I have a few to get us on the right track.
Read Large Portions
The Bible was written to be consumed in large chunks. This is especially evident in the New Testament. Letters from the apostles were written and sent with the intention of being read aloud to the congregation in their entirety. Imagine standing to hear the letter of Romans read to you! In the Old Testament, most of the book of Deuteronomy was a speech from Moses to the congregation of Israel.
You may be asking, "So what? I have my own Bible now; why would I need to read all of that at once?" You would be quite right in that assessment. We do have our own bibles; however, when we read single verses or paragraphs, we miss overarching themes and arguments. These themes and arguments would have been easier to grasp for the original audience who heard the entire work.
So our principle here is that sometimes verses will only make sense if you read the whole book. There are times (such as the book of Romans), that the real meaning of a hard verse can only be discerned by tracking with the whole argument of the letter. This requires us to stop thinking about Scripture as a jumbled collection of isolated verses and more like a story with a plot composed of many subplots that need to be thoroughly examined. So from time to time, read a whole book in one sitting. A helpful tool for this is a good reader's Bible. These bibles have no notes, cross-references, or even verse markers. They force you to read the Bible like a story to keep you from fragmenting ideas with verse markers. (Side note: chapter and verse numbers were not in scripture originally, they were added to help find passages at a later date)
2. Listen to the Word
The principle behind this point has more to do with your heart than anything else. When the books of the Bible were originally written, the average person could not read or write. Scribes and priests were the individuals with the greater education. In Israel, the priests would read segments of the Old Testament to the people. We see this in Jesus' time when he read from the scroll of Isaiah. In the New Testament, the letters were most likely read by the elders of the church to the congregation.
Once again, you may be saying, "So what? Most of us can read now. Why do we need to listen?" Listening to God's word was not merely an act of necessity, it was an act of humility. Whenever you listen to someone speak, you are submitting yourself to them. You are being quiet and allowing them to speak. At that moment, the speaker has the authority. Even if you close your ears, you can't really block out the voice speaking to you. Whenever we listen to God's word, we are actively humbling ourselves before the spoken word. We aren't allowed to interrupt with our own ideas.
I encourage you to find an app on your phone to listen to the Bible being read. Open your Bible and follow along, but be humbled before God's word as it is read to you. Recognize that His Word has the authority and you are submitting yourself to that authority. God desires to give wisdom and understanding to the humble who fear Him.
3. Library with One Author
The last principle is all about context. The Bible is full of individual "books" with their own authors. Peter talks about the process of inspiration in his second letter:
For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:21 ESV
According to Peter, every book of the Bible was written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit. We can see the variety of styles and genres in scripture. God didn't dictate the exact wording of scripture; he allowed each writer to use their own style and way of wording things. Even with this freedom, God still ensured that what was written is exactly what he wanted to communicate. This is just another example of the connection between God's sovereignty and man's freedom. What does this have to do with Bible study?
Our principle is this: Scripture interprets scripture. Whenever we run into an unclear passage, we must look at the context of that passage. If you read a passage in one of Paul's letters, the best places to look for understanding that passage are that letter and Paul's other letters. This is our method because Paul is generally going to talk about an idea in the same way across all his works. John might talk about the same thing, but he is going to word it differently because he is a different person. On the other side of that, John might be able to help you round out the idea precisely because he thinks about it from a different perspective.
On a grander scale, everything you read in scripture has to be understood in light of everything else because the Bible really only has one Author. Scripture is God's Word. While it may be composed of sixty-six books with different authors, they are all held together by their status as divine revelation. We are reading one grand story of God's work to bring about His kingdom rule in heaven and earth. That's the overarching theme by which all scripture is to be understood. Everything else is application at different levels and spheres.
So while we read our bibles, we must ask ourselves "What story is God telling and how does this passage help explain that story?". There may be many authors and books in the Bible, but at the end of the day it is one book with one Author.
Putting it Together
Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Acts 17:11 ESV
These principles are held together with the mindset of a Berean. These Jews were considered noble because they heard Paul's message and then examined the scriptures to see if it was the truth. A mind which seeks to examine God's word with a receptive heart is absolutely necessary. How does this look when we start constructing a Bible study?
Are you ready for it? Are you ready for the best Bible study plan to help you understand scripture? Here it is: Just Keep Reading. That's right, just keep reading. The best way to tie all these principles together is frequent exposure to God's word with a mind ready to examine.
Read large portions of scripture with an examining eye, asking yourself what the author and The Author is trying to teach. Listen to large portions of scripture with the same examining mind and be humbled before God's word. When you come across a verse or paragraph that you don't understand, write it down and keep reading. Wrestle with that verse and take it to the Lord in prayer. We have access to the Author of the book, so ask questions. As you read and re-read that book, you will understand the meaning of that verse over time. Be patient and ask the Lord for understanding.
Finally, I want to address an "echo-chamber" issue. If you are only left to your own ideas while reading scripture, then you usually won't be challenged because you'll find that every passage agrees with you. We have an amazing ability to twist words to say what we want them to mean. This is why asking the Lord for understanding and being engaged in a local body of believers is important. The Holy Spirit will bring conviction as pastors, and other believers challenge your interpretations of scripture. This will prevent God's Word from becoming an "echo-chamber" where your own ideas are merely bounced back at you.
Conclusion
Studying the Bible is really that simple. Most seminary classes in biblical interpretation amount to complications of these basic principles. While biblical scholars can help us understand scripture, the Bible wasn't written specifically for scholars. It was written for God's people. The people who understand the Bible most are those who are in it most humbly for the most time. In other words, understanding comes from frequent exposure with the correct heart posture. The great thing about scripture is that it produces the humility needed to understand it. So like I said before: Just Keep Reading.
