The Study Bible

When it comes to Bible Study, there are several methods on how to do it. I have read books with up to 30 different methods, Rick Warren in a magazine article named off 12. The unique thing about this, is that for the most part, most of these methods deal with much of the same material. I will admit that not all of them do, some try to zero in on one particular things such as history or various words, but most general Bible Study methods do include aspects of all of these. In this study I am trying to present a very generic way of studying the Bible, and in that, we will be looking at how to use the tools that are available, and maybe not available to you. However, it isn't just about the tools it is also how you use them and in what order.
I would like this process to be as interactive as possible so I will be doing two things with this study. First, I will be focusing in on one particular passage in this case we will be looking at Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. The second thing will be that the work will not all be done for you. Much of the work that is to be done will already be done, however, I will purposely leave things out to make it more meaningful and beneficial to the person doing this on their own.

Thinking of these two things, we will start with the simplest of books which many have in their homes and progressively work our way up looking at the things that can be done and the benefit of using certain tools which for many are at their fingertips. Today I will be looking at something that many have, the study Bible.

THE STUDY BIBLE
You may notice as you hold your study Bible up that, for a Bible it is unusually large. Not only is it large but as you flip through from page to page you will notice notes and footnotes throughout the Bible, sometimes there are even more notes than text. We may sometimes wonder to ourselves if this is right, should we be reading all of this extra stuff on top of the Bible? However, all of these things are not the Bible, nor would we ever pretend that they are, but they are tools, and just like all tools some are not right for the job, and some are just not good tools at all. This is also true with some of the things in the Study Bible. There will be times when the notes or something else will be wrong in the Bible, but these notes where created by humans and humans are sinful as well as imperfect and make mistakes even when they are not trying to. You will also find that not all the tools are right for the job, sometimes you need the notes, sometimes they do more hindering than helping. In our study we will try to create an order by which to study the Bible using most of the tools available. In future studies we will be doing much of the same work that we will do with the Study Bible, the major difference being the amount of depth we can reach with outside sources.

STEP 1

Today we will be looking at Matthew 5: 1-11. So the first thing we need to do is also the most obvious, before we can do anything, before we can read notes and look at concordances we have to read the text. This is the most important step we can have. we must read the text, we must read it plain, without anything to bog us down, we shouldn't even read the introduction to the book of Matthew, at least not at this point, we should just read the text.

If you have a sheet of paper (I hope you do) I would suggest at this point you create a headline that says something to the effect of, "first read" or something that signifies that this is the first time reading through without any notes or helps in any way. Once the header is written, and you have read the text, feel free to jot down what you think the text means, what do you think it is all about? What gave you problems? Where there any words that popped out at you that you thought were significant or hard to understand. Write all this down in a short paragraph maybe five to six sentences in length.

STEP 2

Now you have read the text we will be studying and you may even have some questions written down, so we move on to step two. Step two handles the second most obvious question, "where is it?" we have handled what it is by reading it, but what is the context? Is Jesus speaking or not, who is he speaking too, is this before or after He has resurrected from the dead. We need to know when and where this is taking place, so we need to read at least the chapter before our text and through the chapter that follows our text to get a general idea of where chronologically this is taking place. If you have time, it would be nice to read the entire book of the Bible, but I know that not everyone has time for that. Looking back at your earlier paragraph, see if anyone of your questions are answered by looking at the context.

STEP 3
Now we have looked at the text as well as the context, but we still have more questions to answer, maybe there are words which we still don't quite know the answer to just yet. One of the first questions will still deal with context, is there anything we can still learn about the context of our text. Lucky for us, most study Bibles including the one which I use the Lutheran Study Bible or the LSB on this Blog, have included an introduction to each book of the Bible, usually these introductions go through the purpose of the book, the people who the book is being written to and so on. At this point it would be good to read that, see if there are any new things that pop out as you read it, does it help to explain anything.

NOTE: It is at this point that we begin using things that are outside of the Bible, written by man and therefore the possibility of errors grow. If, while reading, something that doesn't seem right, or just something that seems wildly new to you pops out, do not be afraid to test where the information came from, if you are wrong you will learn even more about the Bible, if you are right, you will have caught an error and know to stay away from it in the future.

At the point we will conclude this first post. The Study Bible topic will continue in my next blog so begin your study and get to this point before reading it (when it is actually posted)