how to study the Bible: marinate in it

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In the history of this blog, three of the top five most-read posts have been related to the topic of knowing and studying God’s Word. I love nothing more than hearing someone say, “I’d love to know how to study the Bible for myself” - or, “I’ve been going to church and Bible studies for years but I’m just so hungry for MORE.”

The study of the Bible isn’t just for pastors and elders. God’s Word is not only accessible to those who spend a decade in seminary learning ancient languages. I’m thankful for the people in my life who showed me that I, too, could learn how to study it for myself - because I was (and still am) hungry.

If you are hungry, too, this series is for you.

(See Step One HERE, Step Two HERE, Step Three HERE, Step Four HERE.)

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How to study the Bible

Step Five: Marinate in it

The fifth and final step in this brief How to Study the Bible series is, for me at least, the easiest to skip or disregard. It may also be the most important.

I’m speaking from my background as an American Christian when I say that we have a bit of an obsession with achievement in our culture. We love box-ticking, we love productivity, we love lists of accomplishments and letters after our names. These are ways that we measure the value of our time and, often by extension, our lives.

So this last step of Bible study is HARD.

It involves submitting to the fact that we can’t box-tick our way to a relationship with God or understanding of His Word. We can’t read the Bible once and be done. The Bible cannot be mastered or accomplished or achieved. It must be received, and then received again, and again, and again, and again - allowed to permeate our hearts and break down our toughness and flavor us with God’s character.

That’s why I call it “marinating.”

In addition to being a single story that points us to who God is, and in addition to containing seven different literary genres, the Bible is known as Jewish “meditation literature.” It was meant to be passed verbally from generation to generation, read aloud over and over again in the synagogues, and thoughtfully digested through lifelong humble reflection. This attitude of meditation can first be found in the Shema, the daily prayer of the Jews from Deuteronomy 6, which was written long before most of the Scriptures existed:

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

According to this passage, the Scriptures were meant to both fill and surround God’s people. His Word belonged in their hearts, in their teaching, in their parenting, in their dwellings, in their rest, in their work, in their journeys, in their mundane routines. It was to be bound to their hands (their actions) and their foreheads (their thoughts). It should grace the doors of their homes and the gates of their cities.

No part of life, big or small, was to be void of God’s voice.

This is what it looks like to marinate in the Scriptures. It’s day-by-day, lifelong, transformational meditation on who God is. It’s setting aside achievement and box-ticking in favor of slow, repetitive, restful rumination.

So don’t skip this step. Read through the Bible - and then do it again. Memorize a verse and meditate on it daily. Read slowly. Rest. Talk openly with God, who gave you His Word as a gift, not a burden. This is the work of a lifetime and it will continue into eternity. There is no rush.

For a bit more on the Bible as Jewish meditation literature, check out this video from The Bible Project (the rest of this series on How to Read the Bible is fantastic too):

Still hungry?

Across this series, I’ve tried to give you the five big-picture steps that I find to be most important when developing personal Bible study habits. But there is SO. MUCH. MORE. to learn. For some of you, this overview has been more than enough to get you going, but I know there are probably some students out there who (like me) want to truly dive DEEP.

If that’s you, I’m currently writing an in-depth, textbook-style guide to the study of all seven types of Biblical literature. It’s like Bible school for people who will never get to go to Bible school. If you’d like to get your copy, click here!

Available now!

Bedrock: A Foundation for Independent Biblical Study is Bible school for those who will never get to go to Bible school. Learn the practical steps to thoroughly and confidently study all seven types of Biblical literature while staying true to the nature and origins of this ancient text. Available for purchase soon!

Get the Book

how to study the Bible: make relevant connections

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In the history of this blog, three of the top five most-read posts have been related to the topic of knowing and studying God’s Word. I love nothing more than hearing someone say, “I’d love to know how to study the Bible for myself” - or, “I’ve been going to church and Bible studies for years but I’m just so hungry for MORE.”

The study of the Bible isn’t just for pastors and elders. God’s Word is not only accessible to those who spend a decade in seminary learning ancient languages. I’m thankful for the people in my life who showed me that I, too, could learn how to study it for myself - because I was (and still am) hungry.

If you are hungry, too, this series is for you.

(See Step One HERE, Step Two HERE, Step Three HERE.)

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How to study the Bible

Step Four: Make connections.

As you make progress on the first three steps, this fourth one becomes more and more important. The Bible is not a one-dimensional document to be read through once and journaled a little and then understood; it’s a stunningly multifaceted masterpiece of meditation literature. It’s meant to be read over and over, with new eyes for new revelation with each reading. Like a tapestry, thousands of colorful threads are woven together and interconnect at just the right places to make the portrait; like a gem, its countless facets shine and sparkle as we turn it in the light.

As you develop a solid study of this beautiful and complex work, you’ll need to learn how to observe and cross-reference these constant interconnections. The Bible is a story and a library, yes, but it’s also a magnificent piece of literary genius in which all 40+ authors write with the very breath of the Spirit to create a Book in which each piece adds a perfectly-fitting layer of meaning and depth to the whole.

Observe

The simplest way to begin is to pay attention. Is there a name in the passage that you’ve seen elsewhere - a person or place you remember from another chapter or book of the Bible, or a concept that was discussed in a preceding passage? What do you remember about it? Where can it be found in the Scriptures?

This is why I love color coding the narrative portions of the Bible. The colored highlights jump off the page, making it easy to scan for the names and places I’m looking for. The narrative of Israel’s history in the Bible spans centuries, yet many of the same players remain important throughout, which you’ll begin to notice when you start observing connections.

Cross-reference

Cross-referencing is a way of keeping these observations organized so you can continually refer back and forth among them. Many Bibles do some of the work for you by providing a list of cross-references in the margin, but I love to do it myself - it’s a way of keeping track of how my own study has developed over time. Every time I notice a theme, term, or idea in a passage that I remember from another passage, I try to write the reference of the other passage in the margin of the current one, and vice versa. Slowly, over the course of years of study, I am building a map through the tapestry that is my Bible.

Note: You don’t have to have a perfect memory to do this successfully. I don’t - God bless Google! Usually I can only remember a fragment of the connected verse, so I Google search that phrase to find the appropriate reference.

Dig Deeper

Observing and cross-referencing is plenty to keep you busy, but there will be times when you keep running into a word or concept that is difficult to understand, or you just want to know better. So this is going to be a very quick crash course in one of my favorite Bible study tools on the Internet: BibleHub.com.

I use this website weekly, if not daily. It’s certain to be open when I’m researching a passage I want to write about. It is truly a wealth of tools just waiting to be discovered, but for now I’m just going to introduce you to six of them:

1. The search bar. Obviously, this is where you enter the verse or passage reference you want to study.

2. Usually, the next thing you’ll see will be the verse you searched in parallel translations. This is a good, quick way to figure out if there is a pretty universal consensus on how the verse should be translated, or if there is some dispute.

3. There is a whole series of other tabs you can choose after Parallel, but the one I most often go to is the Strong’s tab. Here, you’ll find each word or phrase of the verse linked to its number in the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. If there’s a particular term you’re struggling with, click its Strong’s number and you will be taken to an entire page with its definition, uses, and cross-references throughout Scripture.

4. There is also a Commentary tab, if you’d like to read several commentaries on the verse or passage side-by-side. I don’t use this one as much, but it can be helpful if I’m feeling stuck and need different perspectives.

5. The Interlinear tab is another favorite. It gives you the verse in five different lines: The Strong’s links, the transliteration from the original language, the verse in the original language, the verse in English, and finally, each word’s grammatical part of speech.

6. Finally, possibly my number-one go-to is the Lexicon - mostly because it’s a bit more concise than the Interlinear and yet still hyperlinked to the Strong’s if I need it. It offers the verse in a set of four columns: The first is for the English, the second for the original language and its transliteration, the third for the Strong’s number and a brief definition, and the fourth for the linguistic origins of the word.

See the graphic below for a visual representation of where to find these tools on BibleHub’s homepage. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

Again, this is barely the tip of the iceberg of what BibleHub can do, but it will definitely get you started on a fruitful journey of making connections throughout the Word.

In closing

I hope this series has been helpful to you so far! We have just one more step to go in this overview of how to study the Bible. Remember, the Bible is an incredibly complex book, and there’s no way to exhaustively cover how to study it in a five-part blog series. People spend years in graduate school and still barely scratch the surface of the riches of the Word.

But I fully trust that God gave us His Word because He wanted us to know Him, not because He wanted to confuse us. I believe we can all mine its riches even if we never get to go to seminary. I believe that these five steps will help you lay a foundation of study that He can richly bless.

If you want extra guidance getting started, I highly recommend joining the Bible180 Challenge this coming year. We read together to stay accountable, and I send out weekly study resources to help everyone dig as deep as they’d like to. I’m also offering a completely offline tool - the Bible180 Challenge Journal - which is like a jumpstart guide on all five of these steps, and will allow you to start building great study habits on your own, right away. If you’d like to learn more, click here.

For step five, click HERE!

how to study the Bible: ask good questions

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In the history of this blog, three of the top five most-read posts have been related to the topic of knowing and studying God’s Word. I love nothing more than hearing someone say, “I’d love to know how to study the Bible for myself” - or, “I’ve been going to church and Bible studies for years but I’m just so hungry for MORE.”

The study of the Bible isn’t just for pastors and elders. God’s Word is not only accessible to those who spend a decade in seminary learning ancient languages. I’m thankful for the people in my life who showed me that I, too, could learn how to study it for myself - because I was (and still am) hungry.

If you are hungry, too, this series is for you.

(See Step One HERE and Step Two HERE.)

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How to study the Bible

Step Three: Ask good questions.

Now that you’re reading through the Bible with both its expansive story arc and its library of literary genres in mind, you’re ready to do the real meat of study. The goal of this step is to find the key principles of the Biblical text - that is, the timeless and unchanging truths about the natures of God and of humanity, which can be universally applied to believers in all times and places - rather than merely skimming the obvious commands and promises off the top and calling it good.

There are three broad questions that I recommend asking, and all three can be useful in any passage of Scripture. Depending on what book or chapter you’re studying, you may get a peppering of answers to these questions in every verse, or just one or two answers across a large section. It’s very important that as you answer each of them, particularly the first two, you include the specific verse reference(s) that informed your answer. This will hold you accountable to the text so that you are not merely inferring personal experience onto the text; you’re seeing truths that are actually there.

Question one: What does the passage teach me about who God is?

Remember, the Bible is the story of who God is. It paints a picture across 1,189 chapters of a stunning, multifaceted, incomprehensible Character - and barely scratches the surface of Him at the same time. This question keeps us centered on the purpose of the Word and makes it about Him, not us. It helps us to be observant of the text and take a learning posture, rather than coming at it thinking we already know who He is and what He is accomplishing in a particular passage.

Don’t be bothered if your answers to this question seem absurdly obvious. That’s part of the practice of observation. In a study of Psalm 123, one of my answers might be, “God is enthroned in the heavens” - because the first verse literally states, “To You I lift up my eyes, O You who are enthroned in the heavens!” On the other hand, some of your answers may never be explicitly stated, but make up the undercurrent of the passage. (In those cases, you should still be able to point to the verse(s) that brought you to your conclusions, however.)

Get a printable Bible study worksheet to guide you through each of these questions in your study - Click here!

Question two: What does the passage teach me about who I am, in light of who God is?

Only after we have focused on who God is are we prepared to move toward any application to ourselves. Just like Question #1, sometimes your answers here will seem ridiculously obvious and other times they may be more implicit. Both should be accompanied by the exact references of the verses that led you to your answers.

Of course, the passage is never going to address you directly. It’s never going to teach you about you, the individual postmodern Christian. It may, however, address you as part of the universal Church, or as a Christian man or woman, or as a leader in a church. That’s the meaning of the question here. I don’t ask the Bible, “What does this passage teach me about Hallie?” - I ask, “What does this passage teach me about humanity in general, or about the universal Church, or about my gender’s role, or some other larger constant group that I have in common with the original recipients of this text?”

Question Three: What does the passage teach me about how I should live, in light of who God is and who I am?

Put more briefly, “How should I respond to the truths I listed under Questions #1 and #2?” This question gives us the opportunity to begin applying the truths of the text to our own lives, while being careful not to insert ourselves into stories that aren’t about us.

Answers to this question will take very different directions for different people, even regarding the very same passage of Scripture. Unlike the previous two, this is a critical thinking question, not an observation question - which means that it can carry the highest risk of inappropriate interpretation, but at the same time can create a rich opportunity for the Holy Spirit to work in your study. To ensure that you are treading that line carefully, there are two measures you can test your answers against:

1. Test your answers against the rest of Scripture and the character of God as revealed in Scripture. If anything you’ve written is clearly contradicted by another passage of the Bible or by the truth of who God is, it is false and should be discarded. Scripture will not contradict Scripture. (Here, it is key to remember the importance of genre. Direct instruction on a topic should always trump a narrative example on that topic - so if you are working in the genre of narrative, take care that your responses line up with the Bible’s clear instruction elsewhere.)

2. Only if your studies have clearly passed Test #1, test them also against human history and experience. Human experience is fallible, so this shouldn’t be your primary barometer, but it is important to ensure that the truths you discover are universally applicable to believers in all times and places, not restricted by any cultural or contextual limits that are unique to you.

Ready to go deeper?

These three questions can transform your reading of Scripture from a dull, passive, surface-level experience into a rich and deep practice of truth-searching. They offer enough guidance to show you what to look for, but are not so constricting that the Spirit can’t speak.

For an easy way to begin this work, I’ve created a printable study worksheet that contains space for you to journal your responses to these very same questions. If you’d like to download your own, click here.

Or, if this series has left you hungry for MORE, I’d love to introduce you to Bedrock.

Bedrock: A Foundation for Independent Biblical Study is a bit like Bible school for those who have never been to Bible school. I created it with the intent of helping you, no matter who you are or how much background you have with Scripture, independently find and understand the timeless truths offered in God’s Word that point us back to who He is. It’s part textbook, part workbook; it’s dense with practical instruction but also colorful and filled with interactive activity portions to keep you engaged. It will build beautifully on what you’ve learned in this series so far about the story of the Bible, the genres of literature, and the most helpful questions to ask as you pursue your study.

You can learn more about Bedrock here, or purchase on Amazon at the link below!

For step four, click HERE!