One of our greatest failures in Bible study is our tendency to treat the text atomistically.
We look for inspirational words or sayings, while failing to grasp how the author used those words or sayings to persuade his audience of a message. We love to grade the behaviors of Bible characters. We distract ourselves with endless word studies. We fail to grasp the context.
For example, we treat Daniel and post-conversion Paul as “good” and Jacob and Samson as “bad.” We think of “Immanuel” as little more than a prediction of Messiah. We apply “don’t be anxious about anything, but … make your requests known to God” as a generic encouragement for the Christian life.
But how much changes when we form a habit of boarding a passage’s train of thought!
The Train’s Value
When you observe well, and you ask and answer good interpretive questions, you are going somewhere. These skills are not merely academic exercises. They have an end goal: to determine the author’s main point.
And the way you pull together all of your observation and interpretive work is by capturing the author’s train of thought in the text.
If we fail to capture the train of thought, it will be very difficult either to get to the main point, or to have much confidence that what we’ve got is in fact the main point. We’re left with only guessing, or landing on whichever atom in the text excites us the most.
So please understand: the value of the train of thought lies in its power to surface the author’s main point. When we have captured that train of thought, we are well on our way to mastering the text. Which, frankly, is primarily a matter of clearing out the rocks and weeds so it can master us.
The Train’s Capture
By “train of thought,” all I mean is: How does the author get from the beginning of the passage to the end of the passage? How does he shape his message in such a way as to bring his readers along with him, to persuade them?
We can capture this train only after we’ve gotten lots of good answers (from the text!) to our interpretive questions. We then investigate those answers with further questions. We circle around and around, back and forth between observation and interpretation, like a cyclone—all funneling into the author’s single main point.
As we follow this process, we start to see the shape of the author’s argument. The author wanted to persuade his audience of something, and our task is determine what that was so it can shape our hearts and lives as well.
Because the train of thought has to do with the text’s shape, in your notes it will typically look like an outline. But it’s not simply an outline of the contents. It’s not a list of what the passage says. It is a list of conclusions—or sometimes a list of commands—that capture what the passage means.
The train of thought can be an outline as simple as this, for Ephesians 2:1-10:
- You were one thing – 1-3
- But God has made you another – 4-6
- So that his grace would be evident to all – 7-10
Here are three more quick examples I’ve given from other texts. And here are two examples drawn from narrative texts. See our interpretive book overviews for examples of what it looks like to follow the train of thought over entire books of the Bible.
In your Bible study, please do not fail to capture the train of thought.
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