How to Study the Bible

Today I’m continuing the blog series I started a few weeks ago. It’s a primer on how to study a Bible passage, as well as how to teach that passage in a way that is clear and compelling. I’m calling the series “Backstage Pass” because I’ll be taking you “backstage of the pulpit” to see what goes into the writing of a sermon.

As I previously said, I realize not everyone will become a vocational teacher of the Bible. Nevertheless, all Christians will spend their life studying the Bible; it’s what we do.

But how do we go about studying the book that God wrote?

O – I – A

I suppose many methods can be employed to study the Bible. I’ll admit that upfront. Yet not all methods are equally helpful. There are some ways to go about Bible study that go with the grain of the passage; they glide. They do not feel forced and manipulated because the interpreter cooperates with the text.

However, there are some ways of studying the Bible that are not at all helpful. In fact, we could say they don’t necessarily force a square peg into a round hole, but rather they batter it in with a sledgehammer. In short, they do violence to the Bible.  

Several years ago, a co-worker taught me a helpful acronym. He used it to explain (in broad terms) an effective process for studying the Bible. I’m not sure where my friend first learned the acronym. (A quick internet search shows that others are using the acronym too.)

The letters are O – I – A. I use this process each week when I prepare sermons. As I’ve written before, that’s a process stretched over twenty hours. But it certainly doesn’t have to take that long. Not that I do this overtly each morning, but when I read my Bible devotionally every day, the process lasts a little over 20 minutes.

The “O” stands for observation.
Observation is the first step to understanding a passage. To observe a passage well, you need to spend time looking at it—a lot of time!

For me, this most especially happens during the translation stage of sermon preparation. But you do not need to know how to read the original languages to accurately observe a passage. Observation can be done very effectively using only English Bibles, especially if you compare several good translations. When I’m in the observation phase, I write down as many things about the passage as I can, as well as noting what questions I have about the passage. If I’m able to answer my own questions through more observation, great. If not, I revisit them later. Sometimes I eventually learn the answers to my questions and other times I don’t.

If you get stuck in your observations and need some questions to get you going deeper, consider asking a few of these questions of the passage:

1. What is this passage saying about the character of God?
2. What is this passage saying about the grace of God?
3. What is this passage saying about the way people are saved?
4. What is this passage saying generally about people?
5. More specifically, what is this passage saying about Christians?
6. More specifically, what is this passage saying about non-Christians?

The “I” stands for interpretation.
Once you have spent sufficient time observing the passage, the next step is to determine what the passage means. This is interpretation, the necessary outworking of careful observation.

To assist in the interpretation stage, it’s helpful to consult other Christians who have also observed the passage, especially those who have studied the passage in depth. Think about it like this. If you come up with an interpretation for a passage that, after 2,000 years of church history, has never before existed, then you’re probably wrong. That’s why during the interpretation phase I typically consult several Bible commentaries on the passage. Three very helpful commentary series for pastors and non-pastors are: The Bible Speaks Today (Intervarsity Press), The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (Zondervan), and God’s Word for You (The Good Book Company). Also, the English Standard Version Study Bible is a tool I regularly use.

I know some people tend to pooh-pooh Bible commentaries (yes, a very technical term). They do this, I think, because they believe using commentaries is unspiritual. An interpreter, they say, should go to the source—God, not man. I agree that we should not prioritize commentaries to the exclusion of listening to God. Indeed, the best, highest, and most authoritative source to help us understand what one passage means is to use other Bible passages to shed light on it. Let Scripture interpret Scripture, the saying goes.

But I don’t think consulting commentaries is necessarily unspiritual. I think quite the opposite is true actually. If it’s true that God has given the church “pastors and teachers” (Ephesians 4:10–11)—which he has—then it is our spiritual duty to be learners. Before we teach, we listen to learn. Again, we are not the first people in church history to study any one passage.

The final letter, “A,” stands for application.
Once you have observed the passage and rightly interpreted it (i.e., you know what it means), now you have to apply the passage to your life, and possibly the lives of others.

During the application phase you should be asking questions like, “Based on what this says, what am I now supposed to do?” and “How should I be different because of this passage?” and “How am I meant to feel in light of the truth in this passage (hopeful, encouraged, sobered, repentant, etc.)?”

You should notice something about the way I worded these questions. They all have some variation of the phrase “based on what this passage means . . .” That’s intentional. The point of biblical application is that it flows naturally from what the passage means (i.e, it’s proper interpretation). Perhaps this is obvious to you, but I mention it because it’s not obvious to many people, and even when it is, it’s quickly forgotten.

Crafting applications that arise out of the main thrust of a passage is one of the most challenging aspects of studying the Bible. Too often applications come either from a minor or peripheral aspect of the passage. But even this is better than applications that have no basis in the text, which is sadly all too common.

If you get stuck on finding the proper applications, you can go back to some of the questions I listed above related to observation. For applications, you can rephrase them “Based on what this passage says about the character of God, I/we must do what?” This tends to jog some good ideas.  

Don’t Skip Steps

When studying and teaching the Bible, it’s crucial to not skip any one of these steps. Consider an analogy from health care. If you are sick, then you surely want a doctor to spend time observing you before she interprets your particular issues and prescribes a solution. You don’t diagnose cancer and prescribe a treatment plan after a 3-minute exam.

Additionally, another error could arise by overemphasis in the opposite direction. You don’t want your doctor to spend hours and hours (which means dollars and dollars) observing you but never come to an application.

The same is true when working with a biblical text. We must observe it, interpret it, and then apply it.

One final comment before leaving this subject until the next post in this series. In a sense, this three-step process is not only linear. It’s circular. In other words, we keep going through iterations until, in the case of health care, the health challenge is resolved, or in the case of a sermon, the passage is taught.

So, if you don’t have a “teaching assignment” already on the calendar. Just pick a short passage to try. And let the observation begin . . .

[Photo by John Towner / Unsplash]

RELATED POSTS

THE WORD BECAME FRESH by Dale Ralph Davis (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)

Dale Ralph Davis. The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach Old Testament Narrative Texts. United Kingdom: Christian Focus, 2006. 160 pp. $16.99.

As the full title suggests, The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach Old Testament Narrative Texts is a book about preaching. However, in the first sentence, author Dale Ralph Davis tells his readers,

This book was not my idea. I’m leery of saying too much about preaching.

Well then, I’m sure glad someone else had the idea for the book, because—reluctant to speak about preaching or not—Davis certainly has much wisdom to offer.

He’s eminently qualified for the task, having steeped in these passages for dozens of years and publishing commentaries on Joshua through 2 Kings. Moreover, he’s spent time as both professor (Reformed Theological Seminary) and pastor (most recently at Woodland Presbyterian Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi).

Warm, Devotional, and Spunky

The Word Became Fresh

By Dale Ralph Davis

Buy on Amazon

Early in the book, Davis writes, “If what I study won’t preach, there is something wrong with the way I study what I study” (p. 7). In other words, the upshot of observation done properly is devotional warmth and personal application. If you read enough books on theology, however, you’ll know this often does not prove true. Yet as Davis mined the biblical text, his observations certainly are.

Davis’s comments are also filled with spunk. For example, when describing the fire that Elijah called down from Heaven in 2 Kings 1, he writes that “servants of the state” were reduced to “puddles of carbon” (p. 62). That’s a poetically tenacious way to put it.

Additionally, he offers many contemporary illustrations that serve as bridges between our world and the world of the ancient text. In one place, Davis tells of a Chicago Cubs baseball player who insisted that his wife mock him whenever he was up to bat by crying, “You big bum! You can’t hit!” (p. 6-7). Davis follows with this comment:

Now biblical preaching is a bit like that. We need to hear some loving mockery behind us, crying, “So what? What difference does all this study make for anyone?” If we are constantly “berated” that way, it will make us far better interpreters.

Finally, throughout the book, Davis refreshed my belief that it is the rigorous exegesis of a passage—that is, the careful attention to how an author describes who God is and what he is doing among his people—that fuels the engaging sermon. The affections are not stirred by the light and casual skimming of Bible passages so that the preacher can find a place here and a place there from which to leap into other comments. No, good preaching is expository; it explains the text. Or said differently, Davis reminds us that in good preaching, the Bible functions not as the diving board (what you use to leap into other things), but rather the deep end of the pool (what you swim in).

A Book of Best Practices, Not “Hot” Tips

We live in a world that promises quick fixes and easy solutions. That’s not what Davis does in this book; he offers what people call in other industries “best practices,” those tried and true methods that have proven to be the most effective—not easy, but effective.

For example, on page 123 Davis demonstrates two ways to outline a passage: one that smothers preaching and another that fuels it. He uses 1 Samuel 16:1-13 as the case study. First, he writes that you could outline the passage in this way:

I. Samuel comes to Bethlehem, vv. 1-5
II. Samuel’s wrong move, vv. 6-7
III. An embarrassing moment, vv. 8-11
IV. David arrives, vv. 12-13

It’s an outline that’s faithful to the passage, sure, but, in the end, doesn’t generate much of a sermon: “some guy did this, and then some guy did that.” This outline won’t preach because “it’s not telling us what Yahweh is doing.”

Davis encourages us, rather, to consider centering our outlines on what God is doing. Imagine, instead, that our breakdown of 1 Samuel 16 goes like this:

I. The God who provides for his kingdom, v. 1
II. The God who stoops to our fears, vv. 2-5a
III. The God who prevents our folly, vv. 5b-7
IV. The God who reverses our conventions, vv. 8-13

Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we do not simply have “some guy” on the move but some God. That’ll preach.

Two Places That “More” Would Have Been More

As much as I loved the book, let me offer two improvements, which, in a way, I hope will only be received as backhanded compliments—like a man who enjoyed the meal so much that he complained he couldn’t get seconds because the food was all gone.

The first improvement is that the book needs a Scripture Index for future referencing. Throughout, I found the exegesis so rich and instructive that I could imagine myself returning to the book each time I preached an OT narrative just to see if Davis touched on my passage. Without an index, however, all his exegetical trees disappear in the forest. Sure, many of his comments are likely in his specific commentaries, but in the Preface he tells readers directly that he tried to use OT passages not covered in his commentaries in order to not double up (p. ii). I’m sure I’ll re-read this book again in the future to have my preaching juices stirred, but the periodic use as a reference book won’t happen, and that’s a shame.

The second improvement would be if Davis gave readers a fuller discussion of, and justification for, what he calls a “theocentric” approach to preaching. By theocentric approach, he means, I gather, that he doesn’t believe every preached OT passage needs to become explicitly Christocentric, that is, each sermon does not need to explicitly culminate its focus on Jesus Christ. Davis is not opposed to being Christocentric, of course; he just doesn’t believe every passage or sermon requires it.

His discussion of this topic comes at the very end of the book in a short section titled “Addendum (can be skipped).” But Davis’s theocentric approach shouldn’t surprise careful readers; by the time he addresses it directly, he’s already spent 100+ pages demonstrating it.

This review is not the place to outline all of the issues involved with a “theocentric vs. Christocentric” debate, but preachers, and even mature Christians, should already be aware that the extent to which one sees—and how one sees—Jesus Christ in the OT is a huge and sometimes thorny topic.

In fact, I have a book on my shelf that’s devoted exclusively to this topic—the topic of knowing Jesus through the OT—and in the Preface, the author, who is a seasoned and accomplished scholar, likens the experience of writing about Jesus in the OT to a soldier doing an army-crawl on his belly while live rounds fly overhead. In other words, it’s a precarious endeavor. 

But let me be clear: I’m not desiring more from Davis on this topic because it’s the polemics that excite me. Not at all. I’m a practitioner, a vocational gospel preacher. Thus, several times a week I find myself telling others, “This is what this verse means, and this is how we come to know the grace of God in this passage.” And very often, “this verse” is in the OT, and very often, I wish I had more confidence in the correct “move” from the OT to the Gospel. If Davis had offered us more on this topic, I certainly would have been helped.

Despite these criticisms, perhaps the highest compliment I could pay Davis would be to say that, as I read The Word Became Fresh, I felt both instructed as a preacher, and refreshed as a reader of the Word.

*     *     *

A Few Favorite Quotes

“We are guilty of arrogance, not merely neglect, when we fail to beg for the Spirit’s help in the study of Scripture… We may have a high view of the Bible… Yet in our own Scripture work we easily ignore its chief Interpreter. Professionalism rather than piety drives us. We needn’t be surprised at our sterility and poverty if we refuse to be beggars for the Spirit’s help.” (Dale Ralph Davis, The Word Became Fresh, 1-2)

“We tend to get irritated if God doesn’t fit our notions of what he ought to be. We don’t, truth be told, want some God we have to fear. Which is to say, we don’t want the real God.” (Dale Ralph Davis, The Word Became Fresh, 65, emphasis original)

“Don’t be afraid to wade into the nasty narratives of the Old Testament, for it’s in the nasty stuff you’ll find the God of scary holiness and incredible grace waiting to reveal himself.” (Dale Ralph Davis, The Word Became Fresh, 74)

Buy on Amazon

[Photo by Michael Wifall / CC BY]

LEVITICUS by Jay Sklar (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)

Leviticus by Jay Sklar in the Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries series (IVP Academic, 2014, 336 pages)

It is common to hear jokes about how boring and unreadable the Bible is, especially of books like Leviticus. I’m sure Jay Sklar knows this better than anyone. In the preface to his recent commentary Leviticus in the Tyndale series, he writes:

When I tell people that I’ve spent years studying Leviticus, many respond with the type of smile that says, ‘Oh well, at least he’s not hurting anyone. (Sklar, Leviticus, 9)

That’s funny, at least it is to me. But I’m sure there were moments during, say, fifteen years of in-depth study of the book, when the jokes got old. However, rightly understood, Leviticus is a cave full of treasure for God’s people. And I’m thankful for this commentary because it helped me find the gold.

Also in the preface, Sklar stated his goal for the commentary:

To make clear what is it that the Lord said to the ancient Israelites and, in doing so, to make clear what the Lord is saying to us today. (9-10)

How did Sklar accomplished this mission? Below are five of the ways.

1. Helpful Flow

Leviticus (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries)

By Jay Sklar

Buy on Amazon

The commentary opens with an extended summary of Leviticus and issues related to its study. After the introductory material, Sklar proceeds in a helpful pattern of commentary: First, “Context,” then “Comment,” and then “Meaning” for each section passage.

2. The Forest AND the Trees

The strength of all good commentaries is that they provide “hi-res” pictures of the text. But this can also be a weakness, that is, if the commentary never zooms out from the specifics to see the larger principles at work and what aspects of God’s character are on display. Sklar, however, at key junctures, was able to zoom out remarkably well. And in those moments, I think many will be surprised – although this isn’t the best way to say this – at how “New Testament” Leviticus sounds (especially with respect to God’s character and his gracious dealings with his people).

3. Not Overreaching

Another reason that I appreciated the commentary, is that it was consistently responsible and not overreaching in its conclusions. Let me illustrate this point by starting with a little Leviticus trivia.

Imagine that you are an Israelite woman in the ancient Near East that has recently given birth to a male child. Do you know how many days that you are ceremonially “unclean” after giving birth to a male? The answer is 40 days. You can find it in Leviticus 12. But what if, instead, you had a female child. Then how many days are you unclean? The answer is 80, not 40 (also in Lev. 12). But why?

Sklar, after exploring several possible reasons, writes this:

We simply do not know why the length of impurity differs between boys and girls. (179)

See what I mean by “responsible and not overreaching.” He explains only as far as the text and responsible scholarship allows. That sounds like an easy thing to do, but it’s not. The gravitational pull towards speculation is strong.

4. Asks and Answers the Hard Questions

But the whole commentary is certainly not 336 pages of agnosticism (“Well, we really can’t know…” or “It’s not fully clear…” or “Scholars disagree…”). Rather, the hard questions are asked and answers are given.

For example, which laws in Leviticus apply today? See page 57. And did the sacrifices “really atone for sin” when the New Testament states that this was “impossible”? See page 72.

5. A View Towards Accessibility

As is consistent with Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (TOTC), Leviticus is user-friendly, even to those without formal theological education. The TOTC series often has – and I would say Leviticus is a particularly good example of this – explanations of key terms, many analogies to the modern world, and helpful charts. A personal favorite chart in Leviticus was the decision tree for priests in the evaluation of skin diseases based on Leviticus 13-14. I smiled at the thought of an ancient priest making a ‘cheat sheet’ with a similar diagram.

In summary, if you are looking to engage with God and his Word on a deeper level, and you are up for doing this in a book often neglected, then Leviticus (with Sklar as your tour guide), is a great place to start.

A Favorite Quote

“When the Israelites obeyed the Lord’s covenant commands, they would experience the covenant blessings that humanity was created to enjoy: walking in rich fellowship with their divine King who cared for them and provide for all their needs. This was like a return to the garden of Eden in Genesis 2, where God’s people lived securely in a fruitful land, with all of their needs met, walking in obedient fellowship with their gracious Lord. Israel was privileged with showing the nations this vision of Eden and inviting them to experience it.” (Sklar, Leviticus, 324)

Buy on Amazon

[Image]