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Ok, clickbait. Sort of. There are 5 steps. If you already have a mature study discipline these probably aren’t new. If you’re not sure how to study your bible, these straightforward steps will begin to take you from reading your bible to studying your bible.

So maybe we need to define studying and think about that with respect to how we tend to interact with our bible. This could be oversimplifying, but maybe not. We tend to read, rather than study, our bible. We tend to read a chapter or two at a time. We tend to look for passages that we can apply to our life (think hope, grief, morality, encouragement, etc.). We tend to spend more time in the New Testament and less in the Old. We tend, probably unintentionally, to think the bible was written for me. At least that’s how we talk about it: “This passage encouraged me because I know that God understands my struggle.” To sum it up, we tend to read the bible pretty me-centrically. I have 20 minutes for a quiet time today. I need to improve; I need to work on this sin; I need to pray more. What can I get out of my reading, and what can I apply to my life today. I suppose we’ve all heard someone say at one time or another something like, “I’m not done with my quiet time today until I find something I can apply to my life.”

In contrast, let’s define bible study as the practice of trying to understand what the authors say and what the original reader would have understood. This is not straightforward. Not because we can’t read the words, but because we don’t live in the culture. It’s like reading Shakespeare. His plays at the time they were written were entertainment for the masses. From the lower classes to the higher classes, everyone got the innuendos, the sarcasm, the idioms and plays on words. They understood the language. But today the average English speaker has to struggle and pay close attention to sort of get most of what’s happening in a Shakespeare performance. We miss the cultural connections and the word plays. That’s the dynamic we face when interacting with our bible. The goal of bible study is to get into the setting of the author and who that author writes for.

The discipline of bible study will challenge and excite you for the rest of your life if you let it. These five practices will get you started.

1. Read the entire letter or book in one sitting

You’re looking for the big picture here. Why was this thing written? Why is the writer responding and what is he responding to?

This is best practice especially for the letters in the New Testament. What is a letter after all if not a personal communication. Like getting an update from a friend who sends a letter with a holiday card. Or a long email discussing a family reunion as a destination vacation. You don’t start by turning to page two and reading the third paragraph. First you read the whole thing so you can figure out the big picture of what’s going on.

Reading, say, a chapter at a time and one chapter a day of Hebrews, you’ll read the whole book in 13 days. By day 5 or 6 you’ve forgotten the important details of chapters 1 and 2. By chapter 10 you may forget the book is about the superiority of Jesus to Torah and that the works of the law won’t “save” you. You’ll wind up reading verse 25, “not neglecting to meet together,” and come to a conclusion that if you’re not at all the church meetings then you’re in sin. Which is sort of not the point of, well, any of Hebrews.

For most letters of the New Testament you might spend 45 to 90 minutes reading from beginning to end. Some are a 10-minute read. Some Old Testament books might take a couple hours. If you have YouVersion read Hebrews to you, that takes about 50 minutes. You might need to do this on a weekend or a day off if your general bible reading is a half hour or so. Set aside the time and plan for it so you can read from beginning to end uninterrupted. You might need to do this a couple of times for each letter if you’re not used to reading this way. The first time might just be too jarring as you try to take in and understand so much detail.

2. Read your bible like a novel, read a letter like a conversation at Starbucks

The bible is not a math, or science, or legal textbook where you learn formulaic processes to solve problems. It’s not a checklist of do’s and don’ts. Rather it’s the story of God and his people. Again oversimplifying, the Old Testament tells God’s story from creation to Noah, to Abraham, to David, to Jesus and the restoration of God’s creation. The New Testament authors tell about the life of Jesus and work out what their scriptures (the Old Testament) mean in light of Jesus and how our purpose in our Jesus communities is to partner and participate in the restoration work of God as he restores his creation through the resurrected Messiah.

Read the Old Testament books, the gospels, and Revelation like a novel. You don’t open a novel and start on page 87. No, you start on page one and read to the end. Why? Because the detail on page 132 is important and connects back to page 49. The author wrote, edited, and revised the story to make these connections. It’s deliberate and purposeful. The biblical authors and editors wrote with the same intentionality. Read it like a story so you can make the connections. And don’t skip the Old Testament or think that the value is its wisdom. Literally the ENTIRE New Testament is founded on all sorts of detail in the Old Testament. Just look at all the footnotes in your New Testament, especially if you read ^*the NET bible. The New Testament is, dare I say, incoherent without a firm grasp of the Old Testament. This will ground you in God’s story.

Read the letters in the New Testament like you’re having a conversation at Starbucks with a friend. That friend is talking to you about something very meaningful. You listen intently to make sure you understand them because you deeply care for your friend and get the sense that what they are telling you has profound implications on your life. In a conversation with a good friend you don’t generally sit there waiting for commands to be told to you. You actively listen. You ask clarifying questions. You respond. Communication goes both ways.

3. Identify who the “you” and the “we” or “us” are in the New Testament letters

There is this passage in 2 Corinthians from 2:14 – 6:13 where Paul finds himself defending the role of the apostles to the believers, the Jesus community, in Corinth. Right. Maybe slow down and read that again. Paul, a man with extensive education and context, who has been taught by Jesus himself, has to defend himself to other Christians. And he also stands up to the Corinthians in defense of the other apostles.

A segment of this passage in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 reads

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

This is the kind of passage heard in sermons regularly encouraging us to not lose heart in the face of health issues, or financial problems, or marriage and family struggles, because these are “light momentary affliction.” And of course that’s true. But it’s not the point of this passage. The “we” here is the apostles. In the sense of “we,” Paul talks about the struggles of being an apostle and why the apostles are able to persevere – even against their own brothers and sisters in Christ. The sense of “we” is clarified in 4:15 because Paul contrasts “we the apostles” with “you the Corinthians.” Paul says, “For it is all for your sake . . .” Again in 5:12 Paul makes this clear saying, “We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us . . .”

This use of “we” meaning not you the reader, and “you” meaning you the reader (sort of – we’ll get to that in the next point) is prevalent in the New Testament letters. Your understanding of quite a bit of what’s going on will be flipped on its head once you get this. And back to the first point, you’ll probably miss it if you don’t read the entire letter in one sitting.

4. Figure out if “you” and “your” is singular or plural

The word “you” in English is ambiguous. Does it mean “you that person?” Or “all of you in the crowd?” Only through context does the sense of you being singular or plural get clarified. That actually becomes a huge obstacle to understanding our bible. Does an important passage apply to me specifically? Or my Jesus community that meets in my church building? Or a network of house churches addressed in Hebrews and Romans? Or maybe all the churches in my city? How you read and apply “you” changes dramatically how the world around us experiences Jesus and the gospel.

Take for instance Romans 12:1-2

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

In this passage the “you” in most cases is Greek plural, something like “all of you.” To clarify what the author intends to communicate to the original audience in Greek, the passage would read something like this in English:

I appeal to all of you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present all of your bodies together collectively as one living sacrifice [singular sacrifice], holy and acceptable to God, which is your collectively unified act of spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but each one of you be transformed by the renewal of your [singular in this instance, thus each one of you] mind, that by testing you, together as a community, may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The living sacrifice is singular. The plural “you” instructs the collective audience to come together around the idea of a living sacrifice. However good it is that you or I might individually and sacrificially serve, love, and give of ourselves, that’s not where this passage is going. Rather, the passage points to the world-changing, creation-restoring power of God’s mercy as our Jesus communities together worship God as a singular sacrifice. That is an entirely different level of meaning for us as Christians and how we intentionally come together, because, Jesus. And in this case it profoundly affects how the world around us sees Christianity. This meaning is dependent on understanding who is included in the “you.”

You can determine the use of “you” in a tool called an interlinear bible. Here’s a link to Romans 12 in a free online interlinear. Open it up and take a look. You should get the basic idea of what’s going on as each Greek word or phrase is augmented with explanatory detail.

This screen shot contains annotations of an instance of “you” and the living sacrifice in this passage. The “you” is identified as plural, and the living sacrifice as singular. To use the interlinear, open up the verse you’re looking for and hover your mouse over the details.

#5 – Ask yourself questions about what you just read

When we read the bible as a text book, a checklist of commands to obey, or, basically, not as a story, then everything is a fact being spit out *at* you. That might be fine if it’s the very first time you’ve read your bible, but after a year or so of familiarity you want to grow to a point where the details startle you, or make you ask why, or cause you to compare what you just read with a passage you know that maybe contradicts it. You’re trying to get at the author’s point to his audience or why this particular detail is important to the story.

For instance, in Acts 4:36 we get the detail that Joseph, a Levite, sold a field:

Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

Ok, whatever. If you know your Old Testament you might wonder why Joseph had land to sell because the Levites were not given land in the distribution to the tribes. So you can walk through some lines of reasoning to fill in the details. Maybe the Levites weren’t prohibited from buying land for themselves. Or Joseph, being from Cyprus, would not have owned land in Israel, but maybe the land he owned was in Cyprus.

Another example might be Paul not being ashamed of the gospel in Romans 1:16

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Maybe the gut reaction for a modern reader is, “Of course not. I’m not ashamed of the gospel. I know it’s my purpose to share my faith and make disciples.” And that’s fine. Yet given Paul’s education, the amount of suffering he’s been through for the name of Jesus, his need to spend 10 years reworking everything he knew about Judaism and the scriptures in order to land where he has on the expected Messiah, you would not be faulted for thinking it’s gotta be deeper than that.

The question you might ask is, “Why does Paul even have to note that he’s not ashamed of the gospel?” Could he have left this detail out and not changed the message to his audience? Paul doesn’t just add extraneous detail. It must mean something. In the passage he mentions Jew and Gentile. This is a touchy area for the Jews; you don’t associate with Gentiles. And if you’re familiar with Paul’s communications you know that the Jew-Gentile relationship, and the Gentile inclusion in God’s family, is foundational to how Paul understands the work of Jesus. In that case, perhaps he’s doubling down on not only not tiptoeing around the issue but raising it in the opening of his communication. Maybe there are other reasons he could be ashamed but isn’t. The gospel crescendos with the kingship and lordship of Jesus as opposed that of Caesar. Paul’s proclamation of the gospel undermines and subverts the government, the lordship of Caesar, and the gospel attached to Caesar, and Paul’s not ashamed to subvert this.

Asking questions of the bible will help you identify topics for further study in order to understand its context. That will help you get a better grasp of what your bible means, not just what it says.

Wrapping Up

Understanding the bible is difficult because we don’t live in the context of the original author and audience. These practices will help you start to get into their minds and that context. If you add these to your discipline of bible study you’ll open up more meaning in the bible you read.

* You can add the NET bible for free on YouVersion and other apps. With nearly 61,000 translator notes hyperlinked right in the text, it’s a super easy way to check what you’re hearing in a sermon in real time. You know, like the Bereans.