Getting Some Bang for Your Buck: Post 1

Here are some “quick” tips to getting something out of reading the Bible:

1. Read Books of the Bible According to Their Genres

            This is the most violated principle of Bible reading. Proverbs, for instance, is poetry that is meant to convey GENERAL truths. “General” meaning “most of the time”. It’s not meant to be taken as rock-solid 100% truth. Take Proverbs 22:6, for instance:

            “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” (NIV)

            This has comforted parents greatly through the centuries… that is, until you see some godly pastor’s kid jumping off the deep end (permanently). What happened? God PROMISED in Proverbs that, with godly parenting, a kid will come back to the faith! God is a liar!

            Unless, of course, you understand the genre of that particular passage of scripture. This tip helps you properly exegete (interpret) the Bible.

            Another problem people run into has to deal with parables. Christians love to take every minute detail of a parable and try to match it to some truth. For instance, in Luke 16:19-31, Jesus talks about the beggar Lazarus and a rich man.

            The purpose of this parable is to tell Jesus’ audience that if Israel wouldn’t listen to the prophets and Moses, they wouldn’t listen to Jesus now. They also wouldn’t listen to Jesus after He rose from the tomb. And that is exactly what happened.

            Now some like to take every incidental detail of a parable and like to establish doctrine. For instance, in this parable Jesus describes the inhabitants of Heaven and Hell as being able to converse with each other. These Christians then turn around and claim that Jesus was saying we will be able to do that when we die.

            Now, I’m not ruling that possibility out, but “being able to have conversations with people from the other side” was NOT the purpose of the parable. It was a detail added to the story to set up the main point, which was “if Israel didn’t listen to Moses or the prophets, they wouldn’t listen to Jesus”.

            We shouldn’t try to take every detail of a parable and try to proclaim it as a literal truth. Don’t miss the forest (the point of the parable) for the trees (the details used to get to that point).

            I could go on and on with why we miss out on the great truths. Here are some more mistakes we (me included) often make: reading the Old Testament prophets just to look for prophecies about Jesus/end times, reading the words in red and think Jesus was being quoted word-for-word*, thinking God wrote the Bible directly instead of inspiring men to write it in their own personal style**, etc.

2. Read the Bible with Three Things in Mind

            There are three tiers of truths we can gather when reading a passage of scripture: 1) what truth does God want me to apply to my life? 2) How was God working in that particular situation of scripture? 3) How was God using that particular situation to accomplish His greater kingdom purpose?

            I know I often stop at that first one. I look for some way to apply a passage of scripture. When I find it, I stop and say, “Okay, that was a good study.” But there is so much more to the Bible.

            Take the story of Joseph’s temptation in Genesis, for instance. If you stopped at the first question, you would get some amazing truths. You would come away with the cost of obedience, the blessings of obedience, etc. You could answer the first question very easily.

            But if you stopped there, you’d miss the bigger truths. God was working to show His glory in an amazing way, using a prisoner to prevent Egypt from starving. How God was setting Joseph up to bring his family to Egypt to grow the nation of Hebrews. The second question reveals some amazing truths.

            What about the third question? God was using Joseph (a prideful snob, really), a nobody, to do great things. The Lord has done that many times over, using the weak and useless to accomplish His will. God then used Israel as a model nation for the world, showing mankind what happens when we obey or disobey Him.

            You can get all of that (and much more) by asking those three questions. There are more questions you can ask to get different angles, but you get the picture. What is God telling you? How was God working? And how was God accomplishing His greater goal?

Summary

            I have a few more tips, but these two are helpful ways of getting more out of Bible studies. We often think “the Bible is weird” because we read it like a fiction novel. We read it for entertainment purposes. When we don’t get that “movie in a book” feeling, we stop. But we have to read the Bible in ways it was meant to be read.

*Unlike today’s culture with quotation marks, Jesus’ culture was concerned about preserving the message of a speaker, not His words. That’s why, in the same story, Jesus sometimes uses slightly different words depending on which gospel you read. The writers were concerned about what He was meaning, not what He was saying. That doesn’t mean they were wrong per say, but we have to read His words with this in mind.

**For instance, Paul basically curses in Philippians 3:8. He writes “skubalo”, which, in the Greek, means a stronger version of “dung”. Different translations have different words depending on how strongly they want to translate that word. Some say “dung”, others say “waste”, etc. They are technically correct, but the force is definitely lessened. A more accurate translation might be the s-word, believe it or not.