The Study Bible Part III

We have been looking at how to do basic word studies using your Study Bible, at this point we will shift gears and begin looking at some of the other features in your Bible. There are two other features in the Bible that we have yet to look into and those are the cross references and the verse and chapter notes.
Now when you open up your Bible you will see the text split into two columns with a small column of references in the middle in small print. These references are called cross references. Cross references look to other sections of the Bible with similar verses either structure wise or context wise. Sometimes these are helpful and other times they are not as helpful as they seem to be everyone is not created equal. Looking through some of the more advanced ones that are listed for the Beatitudes I see a lot of things that reference, “Sons of God,” and “peace” all of these serve to help and to expound on the meaning of these and also to give a basis of knowledge for what these mean and may have meant to a first century Jew. Now the Beatitudes here serve as a decent example but an even more clear example would be on the last words of Christ as He hung on the cross. These words are detailed in Matthew 27:46, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me.” Now these words to us are very curious however using cross references we can see that this is actually a reference to the 22nd Psalm. Knowing that reference the text becomes by far more important and meaningful.