Bible Study: Rule #1

Before I put up my next post addressing four of the most common questions I receive when talking about the “Wisdom Method” of understanding God’s will (next post will be on the Work of the Holy Spirit), I want to take a brief moment to talk about my thoughts on the proper reading of scripture itself. Whole books have been written on this subject, but I want to focus on one guideline that, more than any other, prevents the misuse and abuse of scripture.

This guideline has been labeled “Never Read a Bible Verse,” by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason. Upon hearing this, one may think, “That’s easy, I do that already. Can’t remember the last time I even cracked my Bible.” Obviously, this isn’t the point the title is meant to drive home. What it means is: never read a Bible verse, read at least a passage, better yet several paragraphs, in order to get the flavor of what the author wants to communicate.

We Christians would never read any other book the way we often read the Bible, and the way many pastors and teachers teach from the Bible: single verses snatched, almost at random from various places throughout the book. If you think about it for just a moment, the problems with this approach are clear. Reading just one verse, without taking the time to read the context can lead to incorrect conclusions about the passage. For example: What if the author is being sarcastic (as Paul and even Jesus were known to be from time to time)? Reading a single, sarcastic verse divorced from the greater context would prevent virtually anyone from catching the sarcasm and cause him to take what was being said in precisely the wrong way. Even the meanings of common words can be easily misunderstood and a wrong understanding of them arrived at (thus changing the meaning of the verse) without the larger picture of the author’s subject and line of thought clear in the minds of the reader (I will address a specific example of this precise error in my next post on the Holy Spirit).

This single-verse-grabbed-here-and-there approach many often take when reading the Bible causes us to think of the Bible more as a collection of single sentence sayings rather than well thought out, coherent ideas developed over many pages, as most books in the Bible actually are (I don’t even exclude Proverbs, as I can think of several passages that I have seen regularly misused because the verse was removed from it’s context).

I write all this as an explanation of the way I tend to quote verses, particularly when I write. As you will see in my next post, which will be unusually heavy on scripture quotation (sorry), I am often primarily interested in one verse, but will post several more surrounding verses as well in order to confirm that I am not misusing the verse and to provide the context for understanding the idea I believe is communicated in the verse.

There is a method to my madness. Unfortunately, that means you have to plough through a lot more text.