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When You Want to Study the Bible But Don’t Know How to Start
It’s not as complicated as it might seem
Let’s say you’ve been reading the Bible for a while (great job; keep it up) and you keep hearing people talking about studying the Bible. How is that different, what do you need, and is it as boring as 9th grade Algebra? Let me answer the last question first, with an emphatic “no.” The first question will yield different answers depending on who you ask, but I will try to answer it as briefly as possible before moving on to question number two.
You can, of course, read the Bible like you would any other book; many universities even have “The Bible as Literature” classes. The Bible is one of the foundational books of Western civilization, so you’ll benefit from reading it even if you have no religious beliefs at all. Christians (typically regardless of denomination) believe that the Bible is a record of God’s revelation of Himself to people throughout a specific period of history and that this revelation continues to be valid today, so for believers even a cursory reading will tell you a lot about God…and yourself.
Bible study, as the name implies, goes deeper. It will often focus on a specific topic (such as prayer), character (like Moses or Paul, the Apostle with the greatest name ever), or a single book (such as Luke’s…
