Knowable Word

Helping ordinary people learn to study the Bible

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Don’t Let Study Replace Reading

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A few weeks ago, I gave two of my daughters new study Bibles. But along with the Bibles came a few rules I expect them to follow:

  • Don’t use the study Bible as your main Bible, but keep it on the shelf as a reference.
  • Don’t use the study Bible just because a passage feels hard to understand. Work on the passage as far as you can first.
  • Don’t crack open the study Bible unless you’ve got a specific question on a specific text.

Ben Hicks has a thoughtful piece about not study Bibles in particular but the process of Bible study in general. In “Don’t Just Study the Bible, Read it!” he addresses the numerous ways that “study” could get in the way of direct interaction with the Scriptures. For example,

If you want to get started reading your Bible, there’s a lot of help available. Literally thousands of books, podcasts, videos, and other resources have been designed and published to help you study the Bible, many of them free of charge. You could listen to sermons every hour of the day, every day of the week and not begin to make a dent in all the sermons that were uploaded to that internet from that previous Sunday. All of this is wonderful, and could rightly be described as an “embarrassment of riches.” We have near limitless assistance in better reading the Bible. The danger, of course, is that these wonderful tools can become a replacement for actually reading the Bible.

He’s absolutely right. Let’s not get so caught up in the supplements that we starve ourselves of the true feast.

Hicks’s piece is worth a bit of your time. Check it out!

4 Keys to Understanding the Book of Revelation

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Daniel Hyde proposes that “Revelation is Not a Puzzle,” and he provides four keys to interpretation to back it up.

The book does ask to be understood. Yet not in the way so many think. The seals, trumpets, and bowls are not a collection of coded predictions that we can confidently match, one by one, to individual events in a modern timeline. If each symbol pointed to one datable event, how would we identify which event among thousands? Thus, we’d get endless interpretations and no certainty, and the book would stay closed.

That’s why I say Revelation was not given like a mass of puzzle pieces to be solved. God did not give Revelation to be interpreted by us but to interpret the world for us. That one sentence changes what you’re doing when you open it. You’re not the detective. You’re the one being shown something.

So how do you read Revelation? Here are four keys: Read it as a book about Christ, to reveal, written in Old Testament signs, and to be heard and obeyed.

His brief piece is worth your time, as he explains each of the four interpretive keys to help you read this book well.

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Don’t Fear Silence in Small Groups

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Douglas Allison helpfully wonders about the causes and cures of silence in small group discussions. Especially, he warns leaders against speaking themselves just to fill an awkward silence:

Small group leaders can tend to believe that something is going wrong if the conversation is not flowing. Silences can be awkward. Wrong answers can seem to beg for correction. But small group leaders do well not to correct every error or to fill every silence.

He goes on to address some of the potential causes for silence, reflecting on what a leader can do about it.

Even if it is unintentional on the leader’s part, the silence could be due to him. In any case, the leader does not help the group by filling the silence with words. In that case, the leader is not building relationships in the small group but compensating for the lack of it.

The best kind of silence in a small group is one in which all or the majority of the students are thinking hard about what to say. It is the kind of silence that is filled with thinking rather than attempting to read one another. It is a kind of silence in which students are actively processing what was said and eagerly developing ideas in response. It is the kind of silence that is called pregnant.

If you are part of a small group Bible study, these keen musings are worthy of your curious reflection.

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Academic and Devotional Reading Should Overlap

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I appreciate JoAnna Hoyt highlighting a point I’ve been making for years: academic and devotional reading should overlap.

This is just one of 9 suggestions Hoyt has for those involved as students or professors at Christian universities or seminaries. But it’s an important point for anyone who seeks both inputs and outputs from Scripture. In other words, this idea is not just for students reading the Bible to write a paper on it, but also for small group leaders reading the Bible in preparation to lead a discussion.

Even if you are reading for outputs (such as writing a paper or leading a small group), your reading should impact yourself first. If it doesn’t, you are not qualified to teach it. How hypocritical is it to ask someone else to apply a text to their life that you have refused to apply to your own life?

For this reason, you don’t need to have separate “devotional time” and “prep time” in the Bible. Your Bible learning should inform your Bible teaching. Walk with Christ, and then call others after you to do the same. Please don’t separate or reverse that order.

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Clear Answers are Not Always the Best Goal

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Douglas Allison has a thought-provoking post on leading small groups, where he argues that there is a time not to give clear answers to people’s questions.

In particular, it is better to promote exploration than to explore answers. We do better to teach people how to think over teaching them what to think. And we can capitalize on their own questions to help them learn to ask even more and better questions.

Arriving at a conclusion but not necessarily resolution means that small group leaders can be ok leaving the students wondering at or puzzling over something. There does not always have to be a clean and clear answer to every question a student asks. In fact, it is often better for leaders to encourage further thinking and more discussion than to try to answer the question and move on.

Allison provides much helpful insight into our leadership of others in small group settings.

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It’s Not Too Late

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Tim Challies knows what you and I both know, but might hesitate to say aloud: We easily get off-track and discouraged in our daily Bible reading. Maybe you started the year with great intentions, but circumstances have eclipsed your plans, and now fall is just around the corner.

You could decide to just wait out the next 4 months and try again in the New Year. Or you could make something great happen right now. Challies wants to help you with the latter option, and so do I.

I simply want to encourage you not to surrender the rest of this year. In fact, I want you to believe that you can still make this an extraordinary year of reading your Bible. However, for that to be the case, you will need to take a bit of time to consider how to read, what to read, and how to either form a new habit or re-form an old one.

Are you willing to try again? Challies has a few great ideas:

  • Make your devotions relational
  • Listen to the Bible and pray out loud
  • Involve someone else
  • Use your commute

He then offers specific suggestions for Bible reading and for prayer time. This might be just the sort of advice you need!

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Why the Bible is Not Always Easy to Understand

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Kenneth Berding used to think everything in the Bible should be easy to understand.

There was a part of me that thought that the Bible should be easy to understand. I mean, if it’s really from God and if God wrote it to teach us his character and ways, including the way of salvation, you would think that it would be easy to understand, wouldn’t you?

But the same grounds—connecting the nature of the Bible with the nature of God—eventually leads to a different conclusion.

I was assuming that God should be easy to comprehend—that everything about God should be immediately accessible. But unless God himself chose to create a world in which everything is simple to understand—and tells us that it is so—I was simply forcing my assumption upon God that his communication should be easily and quickly understood, at least by me.

If you have struggled with wondering why parts of the Bible are so difficult to understand, Berding’s reflections may encourage you.

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The Bible is More Desirable, More Delightful

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Clinton Manley asks why we don’t read the Bible, connecting his answer to two Old Testament characters who believed something was more more desirable or more delightful than God’s Word.

In other words, when we (like Achan and Samson) find other things more delightful or desirable than Scripture, the problem is not Scripture; the problem is us. This is good news, because taste can change; godly taste can be cultivated. And that’s exactly what David is trying to do when he describes God’s word: He’s trying to help us taste and see that the word is good. So, let’s follow him.

Psalm 19 explains that in keeping God’s word, there is great reward (Ps 19:11). Manley traces that idea through the Scripture to calibrate our taste buds.

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Contextualization as Servant not Master

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Matthew Adams has some helpful reflections on our use of context in Bible study. In particular, he’s noticed a trend, where people hand the keys to cultural context to drive the car of interpretation.

Of course, context matters. Context is a crucial aid to interpretation to help us grasp the meaning of the text.

Only after we have understood a passage within its literary context, its historical setting, and its place within the unfolding history of redemption do we finally ask how it addresses our own culture.

But cultural context is not an excuse to deny the plain meaning of the text. Nor is it our job to adjust the Bible to be more palatable in our own culture. So, for example, cultural context may help us to understand why Paul said a particularly difficult thing to a certain audience. But that does not mean we are authorized to dismiss that message as being therefore irrelevant to our cultural audience today.

The mission of the church has never been to make the gospel comfortable within the world. It has been to proclaim the Word of the Lord until every knee bows before King Jesus.

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Bible Reading Tips for Beginners

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This piece by Kevin Halloran would be a great one to send somebody just getting started with reading the Bible. It covers the most important background, offers strong motivation, and provides a practical path toward a habit of communion with God through his word.

Halloran gives 15 practical tips, some of which are:

  • Understand what the Bible is
  • Understand what the Bible does
  • Read prayerfully
  • Read humbly
  • Read in community
  • Read in context
  • Expect difficulty
  • Don’t give up

I commend this article for your consideration and to share with friends and converts.

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