Welcome to my new "Bible Study" series! "Bible Study" will be a collection of miscellaneous principles and tips that I find are often overlooked or contradicted in most personal or group study. I'll try to keep the posts short and not bite off more than you can chew and digest. They will build off of one another, so it'd be best to read them in order.
Principle #1- Be slow to leave the text you are studying.
Each text of Scripture has its own thing to say that is slightly (or majorly) different than any other text. In composing his perfect word to humanity, God did not waste words. There is no true redundancy. There is no simple repetition. Therefore, our task in studying a text in the Bible is to understand what THAT TEXT is communicating in itself. We are not trying to understand what the Bible says about the topic that text deals with (that would be theologizing from a text rather than studying the text itself), because in doing so we gloss over the real and special meaning of our passage and guarantee that we will not understand all that the Bible is saying about the topic that it deals with. This goal, to understand what our text is communicating in itself, forces us to give each section of God's Word the respect it deserves.
Moving on.
In order to meet our goal (understand what our text is communicating in itself) we must be slow to leave it. In approaching something we do not well understand, there are two great temptations. First, we are tempted to deny that we do not know the thing and delude ourselves into thinking that we do know it. It's so much more comfortable to face a thing that you know than a thing you don't. Second, we are tempted to leave it and flee to a thing that we know or have previously fooled ourselves into thinking we know. Christian, much if not most if not almost all of the Bible is unknown to us. It is a strange book and a hard book to understand because everything in our world except God works against us understanding it, including ourselves. So when you approach a text, be honest about how well you understand what it is saying. Let me rephrase that. Be honest about how well you ACTUALLY know what the text ITSELF is saying. Then face it. Face it and don't look away. Read it and read it and read it and read it. Read it in different translations. Read the whole book that it is a part of. Read what comes before and what comes after. Refuse to become bored with it, because it is not boring.
In reading the text repeatedly, at least two things will happen: you'll become more aware of which parts you get and which parts you don't, and your understanding of it as a whole will deepen. The skeleton understanding you had before will start to take on flesh and bone, and the uniqueness of the message will take shape in your mind. But this is a process worked out over time. It will not happen with one or three or five readings. It will not happen with half-hearted reading. The text will divulge its secrets to the Spirit-filled reader, but in return it demands a level of loyalty and devotion that few are willing to give it.
I know what you're thinking. "But Ben, the whole Bible is true and non-contradictory, so I should use the parts I understand to help interpret the parts I don't understand." Yes, but there are a few problems. First, you likely don't understand the parts you think you understand as well as you think you understand them. And even if you do, you likely don't understand how the understood passage you are thinking of actually relates to the text you are study. If either of these things are true, you will twist, cover, or ignore the meaning of your text in the process of using a different passage to interpret it. Second, when you cross-reference for better understanding, you are necessarily adding information to your pool of consideration. You're adding ingredients to the soup. Adding ingredients won't correct any problems with the soup. Adding ingredients may enhance the soup, which is why we will cover effective cross-referencing in a later post, but it will never make bad flavors become not-bad. In the same way, your confusion regarding your current text cannot be resolved by another text, only covered up by the new information
So there you go. Stay long in the text you are studying because it has something unique to say and you'll miss it if you run away from it.
Happy studying!
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