Posted on December 6th, 2022.

1. Studying the Bible matters because God matters.

We study the Bible because it is God’s word to the world. We want to hear him. We want to slow down and carefully, thoughtfully, and reverently hear what he has to say to us.

How valuable are these words? “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). Two of the greatest pleasures our world pursues—money and food—and the Bible satisfies us more than both.

The apostle Paul wrote, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Just as you “breathe out” every word of yours, God “breathes out” every word in the Bible. It alone is inspired in this sense. We cannot say this about any other book on any other shelf anywhere in the world—only the Bible.

2. Studying the Bible is different than reading the Bible.

When we read the Bible, we move through a text at a natural reading pace. But when we study the Bible, we slow down and we think things through. We ask questions and we search out meaning. We consider implications.

You may read Ephesians 1:1-14 in thirty seconds, but you can study it for years. You may come to the end of reading the gospel of John in two hours. But you can never come to the end of searching its depths.

This means we can expect a lifetime of happily moving deeper and deeper into God’s word.

3. Studying the Bible requires diligence and dependence.

We give ourselves to study—that’s diligence. But we must also pray for God to open our minds to understand—that’s dependence.

Paul said to Timothy, “think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything” (2 Tim. 2:7). We do the thinking, God gives the understanding.

When the evangelist George Whitefield became a Christian, he started to read the Scriptures with intense, daily devotion. Notice his humble posture: “I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books and praying over, if possible, every line and word. . . I daily received fresh life, light and power from above.”

Whether we choose to kneel when we study or not, that should be the posture of our hearts.

4. When we study the Bible, we seek the author’s intended meaning.

We honor people when we seek to understand them. We dishonor them when we carelessly put words in their mouths. We express our love for God by seeking to know what his word actually says, not what we wish it to say.

Every text in the Bible has two authors—the divine Author and the human author. The divine Author ensured that the human author’s words were exactly as he intended. Peter wrote, “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 Pet. 1:21). Our task is to seek the divine Author’s meaning by discerning the human author’s meaning.

5. A key to studying the Bible is asking the right questions.

We often leave our time studying the Bible with answers to the questions we asked. In light of this, one of the best ways to make progress is to learn to ask the most fruitful questions. Here are five:

What does this word mean?
What is the author’s flow of thought?
How did the author organize and structure this text?
What is the author’s purpose, or aim, in writing this to his audience?
How does this text connect to the gospel and the larger storyline of the Bible?

6. Literary context is crucial.

Another important question: “How does my text fit in with the larger literary context of this section in the book?” In other words, “why did the author write this here?”

If you received a three-page letter from a distant friend, you wouldn’t just read page 2. You could spend all day “studying” that page, but until you read pages 1 and 3, you will not fully (or perhaps even rightly) understand your friend’s message.

The human authors of the Bible organized their books intentionally. So, we step back and think through the author’s flow of thought. Studying the Bible involves thinking paragraph-by-paragraph, section-by-section, and seeing how everything fits into the overall structure and flow of the book.

Text and image source: Things You Should Know about Studying the Bible .