Knowable Word

Helping ordinary people learn to study the Bible

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Great Resource for Studying the Bible in Context

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You should check out Bible & Context. The site is designed to help “readers see the words, world, argument, and story around every passage so Scripture can be read clearly, faithfully, and in context.”

The site has guides that you can search by Scripture text. The guides include simple maps, historical info, cultural practices, and the train of thought to help you study each passage in context. Care is given to controversial matters, highlighting why interpretive differences exist.

There is much here that can benefit your Bible study. Check it out!

Difficult Texts: Slaughtering Prophets of Baal

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Scott Hurst has a useful piece at TGC Canada, where he takes a look at Elijah’s showdown on Mount Carmel and the subsequent slaughter of 450 prophets of Baal. Seems a little vengeful and unchristian, doesn’t it?

Hurst takes a close look at the literary context, biblical context, cultural context, and flow of thought to help us understand the passage in its time so we can properly apply it to today. This is a good model for how to approach a difficult text.

Even if we aren’t wavering between competing gods, perhaps our choices have opened windows for sin. The urgency of Elijah putting Baal’s prophets to death is an urgency the New Testament presses upon us in putting sin to death. Consider the words of Jesus: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matt 5:29). Wavering with sin, in any form, compromises the integrity of our walk with the Lord.

When you read 1 Kings 18, instead of thinking about how you can be like Elijah and who you want to call down fire from heaven in front of, consider the ways you are prone to wander. Then you can hear and apply Elijah’s call to repentance with the ears of faith.

Check it out!

Addressing the Real Reasons We Don’t Read the Bible

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Marshall Segal introduces a series of posts that will take a stab at addressing the real reasons we don’t read the Bible.

If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of modern American excuses boil down to one: I’m just too busy right now.

Really?

Am I really too busy to hear from God? Am I too busy to have my soul revived by his living and active word? Am I too busy to receive the wisdom I desperately need in all of my busyness? Am I too busy to have my dim eyes awakened again to ultimate, spiritual reality? Am I too busy to have my easily distracted mind focused on the most important things? Am I too busy to taste the sweetest honey and receive the finest gold? Are we really too busy?

We’re not — and we know it. So, why don’t we read God’s word more than we do? In part, because we haven’t admitted the real reasons we don’t read the Bible.

Segal goes on to mention apathy, pride, illiteracy, and attention spans as some of the “real” reasons, which will be covered in other posts in the series. These reflections are well worth your time.

Check it out!

What ‘Inductive’ and ‘Deductive’ Really Mean

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I’ve written before about why I never use the term “Inductive Bible Study” for what we do on this blog. My problem is not with what inductive Bible study is; my problem is with what it’s called. The conventional definition—that induction means starting with particulars and moving to generalities—is not accurate. So we simply use the label “OIA Bible study” for our method.

In addition to what I’ve cited elsewhere, I now provide further evidence from the apologist William Lane Craig.

Deduction and induction are not about movements between particulars and generalities, but about certainty vs. probability. We use both kinds of reasoning in OIA Bible study.

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Hebrews: A Sermon on Psalm 110

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Dennis Johnson explains something I’ve been considering for many years: Could the book of Hebrews be a transcribed sermon based on Psalm 110?

Many scholars have pointed out the fact that Hebrews is more sermon than letter (the author self-identifies his work as a “word of exhortation” – Heb 13:22, Acts 13:15). The funny thing is that references to Psalm 110 come up over and over again. Could it be that the sermon to the Hebrews was expositing the implications of that psalm for the new covenant community?

Check it out!

Become a Better Bible Interpreter

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Derek Brown has 10 tips for you:

  1. Pursue holiness and humility by faith in Christ.
  2. Pray diligently that God would enable you to understand and believe his Word.
  3. Be willing to bring your thinking, feeling, and practice into compliance with the Word of God.
  4. Discipline yourself to read through the entire Bible on a regular basis.
  5. Work hard! Spend a lot of time with the biblical text before you visit commentaries and other resources.
  6. Learn from other excellent Bible interpreters (like in their commentaries and other resources).
  7. Write for the sake of your own clarity and learning.
  8. Regularly read good books on theology, Christian living, church history, and Christian biography.

I’ll stop there and encourage you to click over to see the last two, along with explanations of each tip.

Check it out!

After 5 Years, You’ll Be Unrecognizable

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Back at the New Year, Ben Hicks offered some encouragement for regular Bible reading. Now that the year is almost half-over, perhaps some encouragement is in order. Keep on keeping on. It’s worth it!

Writing about the student who is tempted to quit his Bible reading because he hasn’t been perfectly consistent with it:

No, he doesn’t quit. You don’t expect to see a drastic change overnight. But he continues to work at it. Some days he misses. Occasionally he makes sinful choices that really set him back. But he stumbles along, developing the skill of Bible reading and getting better and better at it. After a week nothing looks that different. After a month, you can kind of tell. After a semester, there’s noticeable change. After 5 years, he’s unrecognizable.

Have you been struggling? Are you tempted to give up? Don’t do it. Get back and try it again. Little by little, “you are turning the central part of you…into something a little different from what it was before” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

Hicks might provide the encouragement you need. Check it out!

And then get back into the Scriptures.

Can You Trust Your New Testament as a Legitimate Text?

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John Samson has a wonderful article walking through, in non-technical language, the history of how we got the New Testament text we have today. In so doing, he addresses the foolish and cartoonish claim that reading the Bible is like a cosmic “telephone game” through history.

Samson explains:

The telephone game is fun exactly because it was designed to distort the message. It is one slim chain, one whisper at a time, and you cannot check the whisper you heard against anything else, not even the whisper before the one you heard. By the end of the line, you have no way to test anything that occurred along the way. Distortion is basically guaranteed.

The New Testament is the exact opposite to this.

Samson goes on to admit that we don’t have the original manuscripts, and there are many variants, but none of that is reason for concern.

If you’d like to know the truth behind how the text of your Bible landed in your hands, and why we have such an embarrassment of riches as evidence for its legitimacy, Samson’s article will not let you down.

Check it out!

What it Means to “Apply” the Bible

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Chen Xie has a fascinating article about what it means to “apply” the Bible. He explores not only how to apply the Bible but also why it works the way it does. He explores different models for application that various biblical scholars have proposed. In so doing, Xie shows how they don’t contradict but fit together, tending to highlight one aspect or another of a larger framework.

In the end, Xie suggests that we can identify “right” application according to three criteria:

  1. Faithful use: We apply (use) the text as a norm in a way that is faithful to the canonical text and to the history of its orthodox reception in Christian tradition.
  2. Fitting relevance: We apply (relate) it to our present situations and make judgments that are fitting to new cultural contexts.
  3. Fervent devotion: We apply (devote) ourselves fervently to participate in the text’s world—God’s kingdom—and let it transform our whole person.

Xie also supports the robustness of the head/heart/hands model we promote on this blog. If you’re interested in understanding why we do what we do in application, Xie’s article is well worth your time.

Check it out!

OT Quotes in NT: Excel Version Available

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Years back, I posted a spreadsheet listing every instance where the New Testament directly quotes the Old Testament. I included only direct quotes of OT texts, not allusions or echos of OT language, nor references to OT characters or events.

You can find my analysis of the information here, along with a series of posts highlighting the most quoted books, verses, etc.

This document has always lived as a Google Sheet, available to anyone who finds it on our Resources page. One such person, the keen and studious Matt Kauffenstein, wasn’t happy with Google Sheets. So he took matters into his own hands to convert it into an Excel spreadsheet, which you can now find here.

In addition, Matt improved the sheet with a search feature, so instead of scrolling or using Ctrl-F (Cmd-F on a Mac) to find a particular passage, you can now simply enter the text you want into the search box, and the sheet shows you all the matching results. You can search in this way for an OT text or a NT text.

You can find that improved document here. Both documents will settle down and build themselves a nice little cabin on our Resources page with all the other goodies there.

Thank you very much, Matt, for creating this for us and making it available to our readers!