There are many ways of studying the Bible. One is to read it through slowly, verse by verse, meditating on what is being said. This tends to miss the overall message of the book as a whole. The opposite is the marathon Bible reader who gallops through all 66 books at least once a year. Sadly, there is little spiritual food gained.
Another obstacle that often dead-ends people in their desire to absorb Scripture is their use of some archaic translation of the Bible. Our mind cannot flow easily with the words and thought forms. When I want to just sit and read Scripture, I recommend the God’s Word Version or The New King James Version, both excellent up-to-date and highly readable translations. For more serious study, I recommend the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB). It derives from the most respected Translations like the American Standard Bible, but with more contemporary language.
Two companions for the journey
While we link the scriptures into these pages so they are easy to reach as you read, it is helpful to have a printed Bible in your hand. As you go, I suggest a Bible and a journal as your two companions on the journey. The two translations I recommend are set out on the Translations page.
Buy a Bible you are willing to ruin
Buy a less expensive binding, so that you feel comfortable writing in it. Mark it up. Wear it out and get a new one.
There is a practical reason for this beyond thrift. A Bible you are afraid to mark becomes a Bible you open at the same few places. When you are free to write in it, the underlining spreads, and you notice where you have never been. It will help you avoid going to the same passages all the time and never exploring the new.
What the journal is for
Keep notes of your questions and your struggles. Not a summary of what you read — the parts that troubled you, and the things you could not make sense of.
Many people find that further study answers those questions in time, and that the struggles find their answer in God’s wisdom in the Scripture. That happens far more often than people expect, and you will only see it happen if you wrote the question down when you had it.
I suggest this whether you are new to the journey or have been walking it for many years. I have not outgrown it.
We do not meet with God for ten minutes or even an hour a day. He lives in us, and we live in Him! He is our life. We do not cross the road or enter a building to meet with Him, for we are never separated. The time set aside to read His Word and meditate is quality time with the God with whom we live, move, rest in. It is a time when every demanding thought is set aside to see life through His eyes in His written Word.
One of the first and continuing steps in meditative reading is the use of our imagination. Our imagination is not only God-given, but an activity only enjoyed by the one creature made in the image of God. With this faculty, we can project ourselves anywhere in time or geography.
The following is a brief outline to help you as you come to examine and experience the Scripture:
- Ask the Holy Spirit to show you what He wishes to speak to you in this passage. I do this very simply and expect Him to do so.
- Remind yourself that you are dedicated to hear exactly what God is saying to you through this particular passage you have chosen.
- Become thoroughly acquainted with the Scripture, reading it over in as many versions as you can lay your hands on.
- As you read and re-read, write down any questions that arise from the passage. Always begin by asking who was the person speaking, and to whom were they speaking?
- Turn to your reference books. If you plan to share God’s Word with others, you should begin to build up a reference library.
- Apply what you discover. Ask yourself how you can live out this new insight in your life today, or in this week. Write a brief note of what you believe God is saying to you personally.
Convictions that shape this study
Everything on this site is read through a few settled convictions. They are not a prerequisite for reading — if you are just beginning, start with a Gospel and come back to this later — but they are the method behind the way the story is laid out here.
- Scripture addresses the history of man and God’s purposes within it. It is not a window into what came before mankind, or a map of what lies beyond.
- Scripture is one truth. It is consistent with itself from beginning to end, and a passage that seems to stand alone rarely does.
- There are themes that can only be understood in the context of the whole. Read a book in isolation and you will miss them.
- New Testament truth is best understood against the Old. The writers of the New Testament assumed their readers knew the older Scriptures; where we do not, we hear less than they intended.
- The seed of all truth is contained in the Torah, the first five books. Almost everything that follows is that seed worked out.
This is why God’s Story runs in chronological order rather than canonical order, and why it begins where it does.
Job may belong in the age of the patriarchs, but it is printed after Esther. Most of the prophets spoke during the reigns you read about in Kings and Chronicles, yet they sit in a block of their own hundreds of pages later — so a reader meets Isaiah with no idea which king he was speaking to. Reading canonically you get the whole of one kind of writing at a time; you do not get the story.
Chronological order puts the events back in the sequence they happened, and sets the prophets beside the kings they actually addressed. That is what this study does, and it is why the road here does not match the order of the contents page in your Bible.
(The word canon means a rule or a measuring rod. The canon of Scripture is the settled list of books recognised as carrying that authority — so “canonical order” simply means the order of that received list.)