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!

how to study the Bible: understand the genres

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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 How to Study the Bible, Step One HERE.)

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How to study the Bible

Step Two: Organize it by genre.

The first step to a rich and thoughtful personal study of the Bible was simply to read it. But while we are taking that step, there are several others we can implement concurrently to ensure that we’re getting more than a surface skim of the text.

One of those steps is to know and understand each of the different genres of literature the Bible contains, and which books can be shelved under which genre. Although it’s important to read the whole Bible as a story, not every book within the Bible is best approached that way, and that’s where the genres come in handy.

I study the Bible from a seven-genre perspective, although some scholars might suggest that the number is greater or fewer. How many you use matters far less than knowing how to use them, so I’ll give a short overview of each genre category I use here:

Narrative

Our first genre is also the most voluminous in Scripture, and may go by the name of narrative, history, or biography. It is made up of just what its title would suggest: narratives. Stories. If you grew up in the church, as I did, a lot of your Sunday school lessons likely came out of this genre - Moses and the burning bush, Jonah and the great fish, Joseph’s coat of many colors.

Narrative literature makes up the stories of God’s work in and through ordinary people. The key word here is ordinary. When we read and study the books of narrative, one of the most important things we can do is avoid painting the characters in black-and-white terms. The Bible’s characters don’t fall neatly under “hero” and “villain” categories; everyone in the Bible, much like everyone in our present lives, has the ability to do both good and evil. The goal is not to moralize their stories, but to look for how God works to reveal Himself both because of and in spite of them.

A helpful habit to add to your reading of narrative is a simple color coding routine, like the following:

Blue: Names of people
Purple: Names of God
Green: Names of places
Orange: Names of key objects
Red: Phrases of important action

This will help you comprehend the who, what, where, etc. that are so important to following the flow of a story. They’ll also make it easy for you to drop yourself into the middle of a narrative later on and remember all the key players at hand. (Note: Make sure to use no-bleed highlighters! Colored pencils also make a fantastic and very safe alternative.)

Law

Raise your hand if the Law is your favorite genre of literature. Anyone??

Probably not. But the Law of Israel gets a much worse rap than it deserves, mostly for the lack of understanding we have for its purpose. It’s a relatively tiny portion of the Bible - only around 70 chapters of the Bible’s 1,189 - and yet it’s an incredibly important piece of the puzzle.

Why? Because the legal literature of the Old Testament is the testimony of God’s character and holiness to the nation of Israel. Every command it contains is like a pane in the window through which we can begin, in our feeble and finite way, to comprehend God’s infinite character. Though the laws don’t pertain to us directly as Gentiles under the New Covenant, the principles they share with us of who God is and what He values are priceless.

When reading through the chapters of law, mark the divisions between each rule or legal topic and write a quick summary title of that rule in the margin. For example, you might label Exodus 22:21-24 “Oppression Law.” In the next chapter, Exodus 23:9 might get the very same title. This way, you can find out what God’s heart is on a huge diversity of issues, and refer back to them quickly and easily.

Wisdom

Wisdom literature can be the trickiest to organize, and therefore is the biggest reason that scholars’ genre counts differ. I use seven because I’m separating poetry and lament from wisdom, but the traditional understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures considers wisdom to be an umbrella term for all three categories. For the purpose of reading, that approach works perfectly fine, but I find that a bit more nuance is required for in-depth study. So I think of wisdom as its own category, containing three books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), and poetry and lament as two of its sub-categories.

Wisdom literature gives voice to the search for God’s answers to man’s hardest questions. Often, this search is like an operation in mining, requiring a lot of hard work and risk to reap the rewards. Rarely is any neat and tidy answer reached, but great spiritual maturity and submission can be developed along the way.

It helps to read wisdom literature through the lens of the question each book is wrestling with:

• Job: Does God have the right to my life?

• Proverbs: What is God’s design for life?

• Ecclesiastes: What is the meaning of life?

Poetry

A full third of the Bible’s content is written in poetic form, making this subset of wisdom literature far larger in volume than the wisdom category itself. Much of the size of the poetic genre can be attributed, of course, to the book of Psalms, but there is also a great deal of poetry found in books that otherwise fall under completely different genres of literature - especially within the Prophets. In fact, when God’s voice is recorded in Scripture, it is most often recorded in poetic form.

Poetic literature is the response of genuine worship and praise to the truth of who God is. As such, it is intended to be experienced and meditated upon more than picked apart and studied. It contains rich illustrations, beautiful imagery, and masterful poetic structure to bring us into God’s presence in a state of awe and surrender. The best way to respect this genre as you read is to simply enjoy it and to let it work in you.

Lament

Lament is a specific type of poetry that follows a unique structure:

Lamentation literature embodies the process of being vulnerable with God so that He can reshape the writer’s outlook. It’s a poetic expression of grief, pain, anger, injustice, and any other difficult emotion, which are then submitted to God for the comfort and correction offered by His character.

Key to the careful reading of lament is remembering that many of the things the author writes, though written from the heart, are not true. Habakkuk will accuse God of not paying attention to Israel’s distress, which is an accurate reflection of Habakkuk’s despair, but a false representation of God’s character. So when you read poems of lament in Scripture, make note of the turning point when the author’s perspective is shifted by God’s truth.

Prophecy

This sixth genre of Biblical literature is the one most of us would probably consider the most mysterious. It brings to mind images of multi-headed beasts or prophets being commanded to do extremely strange things. It may either seem entirely irrelevant to our time or cause us to obsess about the coming end.

Contrary to popular conception, however, prophecy is not chiefly about predicting the future. Rather, prophetic literature is the revelation of God’s perspective on humanity’s past, present, and future. We could call it “God’s view of the news” - some of it being the headlines of the future, but far more often the headlines of many centuries past. The true excitement of studying prophecy is not in figuring out the identity of the Antichrist, but in the opportunity to deep-dive into what the events of earth look like from a heavenly perspective, and what that teaches us about who God is.

When you’re reading through the books of prophecy, it’s helpful to remember that you’re dealing with a multi-layered text:

(For help understanding the historic setting of each prophetic book, I’ve created a Timeline of the Prophets chart. Click here to request a copy.)

Epistle

Finally, our seventh genre of Biblical literature - epistle - is probably very familiar to most of us. These letters to various early churches and church leaders make up the majority of the New Testament and, often, the majority of teachings from the pulpit today.

The epistles are also often (but not always, as scholars of Paul well know!) some of the most straightforward texts in the Bible. They expound on the reality of Christ’s redemption and how the Church is meant to live in it.

Being straightforward does not make them simple, however. They work through extraordinarily complex arguments and issues surrounding topics that are still debated two thousand years later. For this reason, I recommend two reading habits to employ when you get to the epistles:

1. Read them out loud, preferably all the way through in one sitting. If you can’t manage the whole thing, split it up into the largest chunks you can manage. We are used to dissecting the epistles in tiny pieces, but those tiny pieces first need the context of the whole.

2. As you read, highlight or underline only the essential words. Ignore extra words, descriptors, qualifiers, and anything that doesn’t speak directly to the author’s main point(s). Those other words are no less important, but it’s easy to get lost in them and miss the forest for the trees if we don’t take care to notice exactly what makes up the author’s essential argument.

In closing

Below, you’ll find a chart of the genres of literature and which books of the Bible fall under each. Remember, this isn’t an exact science. Parts (or the whole) of some books can often be categorized under two different genres. I’ve simply placed them roughly under the headings that I think make the most sense for the way they are best studied.

To download a printable version of this chart, click here.

Remember, Step Two can be implemented on top of Step One right away, no matter where you currently are in your reading! If you’re joining us for the Bible180 Challenge, you may want to get a copy of the Bible180 Challenge Journal, which provides a really simple framework for your reading, inspired by the different genres and the reading hints I’ve suggested in this post.

For step three, click HERE!