Helping ordinary people learn to study the Bible
The Lord gave us not one but four accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. Steve Burchett wants to help you appreciate and understand them better. He explains that the stories of the gospels:
Burchett goes on to offer practical suggestions for reading and understanding these stories rightly.
Have you wondered what to do with the genealogies of the Bible? In his piece “Why Genealogies?” Jacob Toman explains what role the Bible’s genealogies play, along with examples of some of the most significant genealogies in the Bible. Toman looks at Genesis 11, 1 Chronicles (with implications for Ezra-Nehemiah), and Matthew 1.
These lists give the reader of the Bible a historical account that shapes an overarching story worthy of reading, worthy of remembering, and worthy of our study.
It’s hard to imagine the American restaurant landscape without the drive-through window. It wasn’t always this easy, but now about 70% of fast food customers make their purchases from the comfort of their cars.
The convenience is undeniable. I’ve driven past a coffee place in my town numerous times and seen a line of cars wrapped around the building. (I always wonder how much faster it might be to park and go inside.)
Many of us treat our Bible reading like a trip to the drive through. We want it to be convenient, we want it to be easy, and when we’re finished, we want a neatly-packaged takeaway to sustain us (spiritually) for the day.
Our desire for a strengthening spiritual nugget is part of what has fueled the daily devotional industry. Every year, publishing houses produce dozens (hundreds?) of collections of short, prepackaged, easy-to-digest Bible teachings designed to help Christians start their days. These often end with a thought or question of the day related to a spotlighted Bible passage.
This seems like a modern and processed form of an ancient practice called meditation. Bible meditation is the practice of thinking pointedly about a verse, passage, or idea for an extended period of time. And Bible meditation is a wonderful way to grow in our understanding of, love for, and obedience to God. But Bible meditation is not the same as Bible reading.
(For the record, I am not opposed to all devotional materials! Many of them are good and edifying.)
In our desire for a takeaway from our daily Bible reading, we may simply be confusing forms of Bible intake. Bible reading, Bible study, and Bible meditation are certainly related, but they are not the same.
Bible reading is the most straightforward—this is reading or listening to portions of the Bible. Daily Bible reading is often part of systematically making one’s way through a book or longer portion of the Bible. Bible study is a slower, deeper look at a Bible passage with an effort to understand what the author was trying to communicate and then apply that truth. And we defined Bible meditation above.
If we are frustrated that we do not have a takeaway from our Bible reading, it may be a blurring of categories. The main goal of Bible reading is exposure to the larger themes and threads of the Bible, while Bible study aims for deep understanding and application. Bible meditation has a more narrow aim: to turn a specific verse or concept over in the mind for our transformation.
For those who feel frustrated by their daily Bible reading, I have two short bits of advice.
First, it’s okay. Coming out of your Bible reading without a thought/truth/question/application for the day does not make you (or your Bible reading) a failure. Hopefully you have other opportunities and outlets in your life for deeper, engaged thinking and prayerful interpretation of the Bible, but that doesn’t need to happen every morning.
Second, keep going. The greatest value of daily Bible reading comes not from pointed epiphanies but from the accumulation over time of familiarity with the things of God. We cannot get very far with a few long jumps, even with Olympic-level ability. But if we put thousands of ordinary footsteps together, one in front of the other, we can travel quite a distance indeed.
When we observe the text of Scripture, we must take notice of the grammar. Grammar is not popular, nor is it something we think about often. But it is important, as the different grammatical number (singular vs plural) of pronouns and verbs can make a big difference in our interpretation of a passage.
In many languages, the difference between singular and plural pronouns and verb agreement is obvious. And in English, this is clear almost everywhere. We can easily recognize the difference between the first person singular (“I”) and plural (“we”) and between the third person singular (“he/she”) and plural (“they”). However, since “you” is used for both the second person singular and plural, we usually need more context to make the same distinction.
This wasn’t an issue when the 1611 King James version of the Bible was published. In the second person, “thou”/”thee”/”thy” was used for the singular and “ye”/”you”/”your” was used for the plural. Easy enough.
As English has changed over time, however, we have run into the you/you problem described above. This is compounded in our individualistic modern Western cultures, where we tend to think everything applies to me (singular) instead of to us (plural). So, even when the Scriptural context makes a plural “you” clear, we are biased toward reading in a singular fashion.
Imagine a father eating breakfast with his four children. His oldest son asks if there will be time for baseball today, and the father responds, “Remember, you need to wash all the windows first.”
If all of the children are gathered at the table and engaged in the conversation, this statement is ambiguous. Is it up to just the oldest son to wash all the windows? Or, are all the children on the hook for a day of window-washing? The father might indicate this through his facial expressions or gestures, but if we only have the words, we cannot be sure.
To bring this to the Bible, consider the following two examples.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Cor 3:16)
…since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16)
Whether Paul and Peter have individual Christians or groups of Christians in mind for these statements really matters!
Most of us are not readers of the original Biblical languages, so we need some help to make these observations. Fortunately, there are many places on the internet to which we can turn!
Here is a list of resources for the New Testament Greek. There are options here for those who know Greek well and for those who don’t know it at all. Here is an interlinear Bible for both the Old and New Testaments. It takes a little bit of figuring out, but when you hover over the correct symbols, the site will parse the word in question.
The most amusing resource I can suggest is the Y’ALL version of the Bible. This is a site in English with plural pronouns replaced with—you guessed it—”y’all” (and the appropriate variants). I encourage interested readers to visit the site’s About page for more information.
I’m not suggesting that every student of the Bible needs to consult an interlinear Hebrew or Greek resource every time they sit down with the Scriptures. My point is this: most of the Bible was written to groups of believers and not individuals, and that should affect the way we interpret and apply the text.
Of course, commands to or statements about groups of Christians always have implications for individuals. (The oldest son in my earlier example is going to be washing windows even if his father’s use of “you” was directed toward all the children.) However, understanding when the collective/group is in view provides valuable context, and when we neglect this context we might be straying from faithfulness to God’s word.
Consider the example from 1 Peter 1:16 cited above. The “you” in this verse is plural, as Peter is quoting Leviticus 11:44. In addition to paying attention to the context in 1 Peter 1, we need to know that Peter is commanding the group of Christians to be holy as God is holy. That certainly should influence what individuals are to believe, think, say, do, and love, but because the command is collective it goes beyond that. It is not enough for each individual to seek individual holiness; the community must also reflect God’s design as a group.
Sometimes the structure of a book of the Bible makes the audience clear. Most New Testament epistles are addressed to churches or groups, while 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are addressed to individuals. So reaching for an extra resource is not always necessary.
However, for most of us the singular/plural distinction is not on our radar screens. But if we would seek to honor the Lord in the way we read the Scriptures, we should pay attention to this subtle piece of grammar.
Over the last few months, I’ve written a sequence of posts connecting Christian doctrine to Bible application. In particular, I’ve explored eight things the Bible teaches about the human experience, in order to highlight how that doctrine can improve your ability to apply the Bible.
My purpose has been to demonstrate that a firm grasp on what the Bible says generally enables you to apply the Bible far more specifically than you may have expected. As my co-blogger Ryan has written, we really want to help you move beyond the “Big Three” (read the Bible more, pray more, share the gospel more) in your regular application.
Here are the eight points of doctrine I covered:
These are not the only eight doctrines we could cover. They are merely the ones that I find most directly beneficial when studying nearly any text. If you master these doctrines, you may be surprised by how rich and penetrating your application questions become, in both personal and small group study.
I don’t cover all eight areas with every text. Usually one of these doctrines will be more closely aligned than the others with the passage’s main point.
But if you feel your ability to apply the Bible has become stuck, dry, or rote, consider taking a deeper dive into the Bible’s teachings about humanity and the human experience. When you grasp how a text might apply to human hearts broadly, you’ll be able to suggest ways it might penetrate any specific human heart, including your own.
A firm grasp on the most common misuses of God’s law will take your application skills to the next level.
People tend to misuse the law of God in one of two ways. I’ve written about these misuses before as opponents of heart application. Now I’d like to identify the benefits of recognizing these common misuses when asking questions for application.
The first misuse is legalism, which flows from a belief that law keeping makes us right with God. And from a desire to be or remain right with God, we add rules that God has not given to our lives. So though the Lord Jesus commands us to abide in his word (John 8:31), he does not command the practice of a daily quiet time. And the New Testament commands believers to pray (1 Thess 5:17), but it does not command attendance at Wednesday night prayer meetings. Prayer meetings and quiet times are very good and helpful things to do, in the right circumstances. But we must be careful not to elevate them to the status of divine commands.
The second misuse is license, which is a belief that grace eliminates the righteous requirement of the law in the life of a believer. In other words, because you are saved by grace alone, you can live however you want to live. This licentious approach may take the form of a refusal to acknowledge the moral authority of biblical imperatives or an aversion to any commands at all. It may sound mature and appropriate to conclude every study with “We can’t do what this text commands, but only Jesus can do it. And he did it for us.” There is truth there, but if we’re not careful, emphasizing that truth over others may end up subverting a biblical author’s intention (if he’s clearly expecting his people to do what he commands, with the help of the Holy Spirit!).
These two misuses are not mutually exclusive, and a person or community may easily bounce back and forth between the two. The New Testament epistles spend tons of time dealing with either or both of these issues, so it should not surprise us to discover how hard it is to grasp how God’s law and God’s grace work together in harmony.
So how does this doctrine help us to improve at applying the Bible?
In nearly any text, you can ask “misuse of the law” questions with respect to the author’s main point:
I am intentionally sidestepping matters of creation, gifts, strengths, grace, and redemption when I ask these questions. That’s not because such matters are unimportant, but only because the focus of this post is on the common misuses of God’s law away from the moral requirements of God for his people.
Sometimes, robust reflection on the potential misuse of God’s law will give us ample material to speak into the issues of our age: grace, patience, shame, identity, ethics, accountability, power—to name just a few.
Deepen your grasp of the potential misuse of the law, and you’ll take your application skills to the next level.
A firm grasp on the goal of God’s law will take your application skills to the next level.
When lamenting his countrymen’s replacement of God’s righteousness with their own, the apostle Paul makes a remarkable statement:
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
Romans 10:4
This phrase—”the end of the law”—does not mean that Jesus has brought the law to end. No, the word “end” here has the connotation of goal or purpose. Paul’s point is not the law’s mortality but its purpose.
According to the argument of Romans 9:30-10:4, Jews have been seeking righteousness before God but have failed to find it. But those who have found it are Gentiles who weren’t seeking it. How can that be? Because by and large, the Jews have sought their own righteousness through works of the law. And many Gentiles found God’s righteousness by trusting in Jesus Christ.
The reason this state has befallen the Jewish people of Paul’s day is because they have failed to understand the law’s purpose. The law of Moses was never given to make people righteous before God but to lead them to faith in Christ. Miss that purpose and you’re bound to misuse the law. In Romans 10:5-13, Paul demonstrates this purpose from the law itself.
So the law is not a bad thing, as long as we recognize its purpose. It cannot make sinners acceptable to God. It cannot vindicate the people of God against the enemies of God. It is a good gift from God to help people come to trust in Jesus. (And, as I showed last week, to show us how life works best.)
So how does this doctrine help us to improve at applying the Bible?
In nearly any text, you can ask “end of the law” questions with respect to the author’s main point:
I am intentionally sidestepping matters of creation, gifts, strengths, grace, and redemption when I ask these questions. That’s not because such matters are unimportant, but only because the focus of this post is on the purpose of God’s law to show us Christ and his righteousness.
Sometimes, robust reflection on the end or purpose of God’s law will give us ample material to speak into the issues of our age: politics, leadership, authority, liberty, influence—to name just a few.
Deepen your grasp of the proper purpose of the law, and you’ll take your application skills to the next level.
A firm grasp on the proper use of God’s law will take your application skills to the next level.
In some Christian circles, the word “law”—or more specifically, the phrases “God’s law” or “law of Moses”—is a dirty word. Something to be avoided. We certainly don’t want to be guilty of enslaving people under law do we (Rom 6:14, Gal 3:23)?
However, if the law is nothing but a slave master to be thrown off in Christ, our friends the Gideons should stop including Psalms and Proverbs in their pocket New Testaments:
Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation al the day.
Psalm 119:97
The one who keeps the law is a son with understanding, but a companion of gluttons shames his father
Proverbs 28:7
The problem, you see, was never with God’s law but with the way people try to use it. If we use to attain righteousness before God, then Christ died for no purpose (Gal 2:21). Those who use the law to become righteous will, in the end, lose not only righteousness but also the very benefits of the law (Rom 9:30-32).
So what is the proper use of the law? The Bible gives a few of them, but I’ll highlight just two of them relevant to the skill of Bible application.
First, the law of God provides knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20, 7:7-12). The law of God reveals God’s standards of right and wrong, true and false, moral and immoral. If you get rid of God’s law, you must invent some other standard by which to define good and evil, right and wrong. And a cursory glance at contemporary western culture ought to be enough to show what a failure such an experiment has been. We need the law to define sin and righteousness for us so we might become aware of how far we fall short. In this way, the law is like a mentor to lead us to find grace and mercy in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:23-4:7).
Second, the law of God shows us how life works best (Rom 13:9-10, Eph 6:2-3, James 2:8-13). While the law of God cannot make a sinner righteous, it can make any society a far more pleasant place to live. God made the world to work, such that keeping his law would result in great blessings and breaking his law would result in miserable curses. God is pleased when his people honor his law in submission to his appointed king, Jesus, the Son of David. The New Testament regularly roots its ethical instruction in the revealed law of God. Paul goes as far as to call it a “debt” or “obligation” to obey God through the empowering of God’s adopting Spirit (Rom 8:12).
So how does this doctrine help us to improve at applying the Bible?
In nearly any text, you can ask “use of the law” questions with respect to the author’s main point:
I am intentionally sidestepping matters of creation, gifts, strengths, grace, and redemption when I ask these questions. That’s not because such matters are unimportant, but only because the focus of this post is on the proper use of God’s law.
Sometimes, robust reflection on the proper use of God’s law will give us ample material to speak into the issues of our age: ethical dilemmas, attention to the environment, abortion, marriage, transgenderism, care for the poor, euthanasia, sexuality and sexual identity, greed, taxation—to name just a few.
Deepen your grasp of the proper use of the law, and you’ll take your application skills to the next level.
A firm grasp on the essence of sin will take your application skills to the next level.
The essence of sin lies in the fact that humans tried (and therefore still try) to replace God. We see this when the serpent first tempts the woman in Genesis 3:5.
God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
The temptation was to be like God. And how would they become like God? They would “know good and evil.”
That phrase, “know good and evil,” cannot mean a simple grasp of the concepts of good and evil. Adam and his wife already understood both concepts, when God told them what to do and not do (Gen 1:28-29, 2:16-17). Clearly, it was good to obey God and evil to disobey him. The first humans were not cognitively deficient.
In the Hebrew Bible, to “know good and evil” is a mark not of intellectual capacity but of maturity. With respect to the promise of Immanuel, God says the following to Isaiah:
He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.
Isaiah 7:15-16
The point for Isaiah (and King Ahaz) was that a child would soon be born. And by the time that child was mature enough to make wise moral decisions, the attacks on Jerusalem will have come to an end.
So what does this have to do with the temptation to sin in Genesis 3? The temptation was attractive because it came with a promise of maturity, but in the wrong way. That made it a promise of escape from submission to God’s authority. An offer to the woman and the man to become their own authorities and make their own decisions about what is (or should be) good and evil.
This is where sin got its beginning in human history, and it is where sin drops anchor in the human heart.
Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
James 1:14-15
God confirms that the “knowledge of good and evil” has to do with maturity (wrongly acquired in this case), when he says that “the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22). The humans have seized a god-like position of deciding between good and evil instead of trusting God and waiting for him to mature them and raise them up in his way. And God—in his mercy—refuses to allow them to live forever in this state (Gen 3:22-23). He sends them away from the tree of life so that they can die, as he promised they would. But that gives him the opportunity to raise them from the dead and make their condition far more glorious than it even was to begin with.
The essence of sin, therefore, is the desire to get what you want. To make your own decisions. To throw off the yoke of righteousness God requires and fashion your own. I believe this is why Jonathan Edwards allegedly (I haven’t been able to trace the source) said that “The smallest sin is an act of cosmic treason against a holy God.” And this is why God’s wrathful judgment against human sin looks like God giving people the very death they want (“God gave them up” – Rom 2:24, 26, 28). Does someone most want a world without God in it? In the end, they will get their wish (2 Thess 1:9).
So how does this doctrine help us to improve at applying the Bible?
In nearly any text, you can ask “cosmic treason” questions with respect to the author’s main point:
I am intentionally sidestepping matters of creation, gifts, strengths, grace, and redemption when I ask these questions. That’s not because such matters are unimportant, but only because the focus of this post is on the implications of sin’s treasonous nature.
Sometimes, robust reflection on our outright rebellion against God’s authority will give us ample material to speak into the issues of our age: postmodernism, relativism, materialism, greed, situational ethics, individualism, stewardship—to name just a few.
Deepen your grasp of the essence of sin, and you’ll take your application skills to the next level.
A firm grasp on the doctrine of creation will take your application skills to the next level.
Humans were created to be different from every other creature. Humans alone were created in the image of God.
God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27
The fact that humans were created by God means that those humans are not themselves God. There remains a distinction between creatures and their Creator.
And yet there’s something special about humans. They are not merely a part of the “circle of life,” distant cousins to other species on planet earth. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
What does that mean to be made in God’s image? In the most basic sense of defining terms, it means simply that humanity is like God. Humanity reflects or represents God. But in what way does humanity reflect God? In what way are human men and women like God?
Does it mean that the human body looks like what God would look like if we could see him? Does it mean that humans have a unique capacity for morality, intelligence, or relationship? Does the phrase “image of God” simply identify the unique value of every human person?
Such questions are worth considering in light of the rest of Scripture. But in the argument of Genesis 1, the way humans are like God has particular reference to God’s delegation of authority to rule the earth. After stating his intention to make man in his image, God gives them dominion over all the earth. And the narrator concludes: “So God created man in his own image.”
And how is humanity to rule the earth? If men and women are reflections of God, what should they learn from who God is and what he does?
In Genesis 1, we should learn that we—in contrast to every other creature—were made to be creative like God is creative. We were designed to bring order to chaos. To fill the empty spaces of our planet, and to spread the true knowledge of God in all the earth.
God made us for these things. He gave us authority to do these things. And he has equipped every one of us to follow through on these things.
So how does this doctrine help us to improve at applying the Bible?
In nearly any text, you can ask “creation” questions with respect to the author’s main point:
I am intentionally sidestepping matters of direct sin, repentance, and redemption when I ask these questions. That’s not because such matters are unimportant, but only because I haven’t gotten to them yet.
All I’m doing here is applying the doctrine of creation. Drawing application from the way God originally intended (created) things to be. There is much work to be done in our application, before we even get to our sin and need for Christ.
Sometimes, robust reflection on God’s creation of humanity will give us ample material to speak into the issues of our age: human rights, the environment, secular humanism, same-sex attraction, gender identity, global justice, racism, stewardship, work and rest—to name just a few.
Deepen your grasp of the doctrine of creation, and you’ll take your application skills to the next level.
