How to Study the Bible - Week 1 Session 1

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech... There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. (Psalm 19:1–3)

Before we can rightly study Scripture, we must understand how the God who is there has chosen to make Himself known.

Welcome to the Class

I am totally blown away by how many people are here tonight. Over 90 people registered online; I originally expected only 20 or 30, and we only ordered 30 books to start. So if you're here with your spouse, perhaps share one book for now—we'll have more once the publisher catches up on shipping.

I'm genuinely blessed that you're here, because what we're going to go through over the next nine weeks is important. I developed this material about five or six years ago. I've taught at Calvary Chapel Bible College in Murrieta for about 17 years, and when the director asked what I wanted to teach, I combined a Bible study methods class and a preaching class into one course called "Pastoral Preaching." This class is about 60% of that material, focused mainly on how to study the Scriptures.

How I Approach the Scriptures

When I was about 15, I took a class like this here at this church. It was good, but the pastor began by saying, "This is not actually how I do it." That was unhelpful to me. A lot of pastors, after years of study, find that their approach becomes intuitive, and they're not sure how to teach it to someone else.

What I'm going to do instead is teach you how I come to the Scriptures—the tools and strategies I actually use on a regular basis. I don't use every tool every week, but whether I'm reading devotionally, preparing for the Bible college, or preparing a teaching here, this is how I approach the Bible. My hope is that you'll come away with clear tools you can use daily, whether you're reading a single paragraph or working through an entire book with someone.

Some of what we'll cover will be technically challenging, and you may wonder why I'm showing it to you. My aim is to introduce you to various tools and approaches so you can begin to combine them practically. For example, in about three weeks we'll talk about something called arcing. I know a seminary where this is a fifteen-week, first-semester class; we'll spend about an hour and a half on it. You won't walk away an expert—you may walk away scratching your head—but the point is to help you see how Scripture breaks down so you can understand what it says.

Learning the Language of Scripture

This is much like reading Shakespeare for the first time. People say, "It's in English," and you think, "Not the English I speak." To understand Shakespeare or Tolstoy, you have to learn how the author writes and find your way into it. In the same way, if you pick up Second Kings and start reading, you may have no idea who these people are or where they are. It takes time to familiarize yourself with how the biblical authors give forth information.

I've had the privilege of studying French, German, Greek, and Hebrew. I'm most proficient in German, but even now, when I go to Germany, it takes me three or four days of hearing the language before I can pick out where the words break. It takes time to become fluent. Even though Scripture isn't a foreign language to you, you still have to become fluent in the different terms and the ways its writers communicate.

Why This Class Matters

This class is important because the Scriptures are how we begin to know who God is and come into a relationship with Him. On top of that, God has given every Christian a commission to share what we've come to know about Him. You may never teach a Bible study or preach a sermon, but you will almost certainly share what you've learned with your spouse, your children, or your friends.

We can't grow in our faith without taking in the word of God. Peter tells us that as newborn babes we should desire the pure milk of the word, that we may grow thereby. When you first come to Christ, you grow by consuming the word; as you mature, you graduate from milk to meat. It is not enough to be fed only on Sunday mornings, through a podcast, or in a Bible study—you need to get to the place where you can feed on the word of God on your own. That is my hope for this class.

The word also transforms us. God sanctifies and cleanses us by the washing of water by His word (Ephesians 5), and He transforms our minds through the word (Romans 12). So the word is essential, both for our own lives and for sharing with others.

General Revelation: Creation, Consciousness, Conscience

Back in the 1970s, the Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer—one of my favorites to read—wrote a book titled He Is There and He Is Not Silent. I love that title. God has revealed Himself to us, and He has done so in several ways.

The first is general revelation. In Psalm 19, David says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth shows forth His handiwork." Day unto day they pour forth speech; there is no language where the speech of creation is not heard. Even where the Bible has not been translated, God still reveals Himself through creation. Paul picks this up in Romans 1: the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, so that man is without excuse.

Today even many atheists admit that the strongest argument for God is what's called fine-tuning. When we study astronomy, biology, chemistry, or physics, we find intricacy that looks designed and points back to a Designer. If you find a glass bottle eight feet underground, or a wristwatch in the middle of a forest, you know intuitively it didn't assemble itself by chance—it had a maker. The mere existence of such things points to the existence of the One who made them.

Second, there is consciousness. The very fact that you can perceive the intricacy and fine-tuning of the universe says something about God and the way He made us. I was listening to two AI researchers discuss how near we are to what they call the singularity—where computers seem conscious and could pass the Turing test, so that we can't tell whether we're talking to a computer or a human. That raises the question: what is consciousness? At its base, it's the awareness that we are—an awareness of things beyond ourselves, of the future, and of the past.

Interestingly, medical science now has thousands of documented near-death experiences, some in patients with zero brain activity on an EEG and no heart rhythm—clinically dead—who nonetheless had a conscious experience. Research with no connection to the Bible is suggesting that consciousness may exist separate from the body. That aligns with what Scripture teaches about the soul, which is distinct from the body, and it tells us something about a God who exists outside His creation.

Third, there is conscience. In Romans 1, Paul speaks of a moral law written on our hearts—a conscience that accuses or excuses us—found in every human being in every culture throughout history. Occasionally you meet someone who seems to lack a conscience; Paul speaks of a conscience "seared as with a hot iron," made callous by repeated transgression. But normally God has hardwired into us a recognition not only of right and wrong, but of true and false, beautiful and ugly, just and evil. This conscience, too, tells us something about God.

What General Revelation Can and Cannot Teach

So creation, consciousness, and conscience all point to God, and at the very least they teach us three things: that God is (He exists), that God is intelligent (an awesome mind able to assemble such design), and that God is powerful (He has the resources and ability to create).

This doesn't even get into how God created—a separate study in theology. In a room this size there are probably young-earth creationists, those who hold theistic evolution, those who hold the day-age theory, and others. Christians divide and even get angry over the particulars, but the first thing Scripture tells us about God is, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." He reveals Himself as Creator.

When you move beyond the hard sciences and think deeply with your consciousness and conscience, you can deduce still more. Our inclination toward morality says God is moral; our inclination toward justice says He is just; our sense of beauty and revulsion at ugliness says He cares about aesthetics; our deep drive to know and be known, to connect and to love, says He is into community. So the God we look for must cohere with all these things. When you examine the religions of the world, the question becomes which God is most coherent with what we understand—and my conclusion, as a Christian pastor, is that the God revealed in the Bible fits that pattern best.

But there are two main things we cannot know about God through general revelation: what God is like (His nature) and what God likes (His will). These are essentially hidden from us in creation. Left to our own rationality, we often come to wrong conclusions—looking at war, natural disasters, and evil, people conclude that God is angry, mean, or unloving. To know His nature and will, we need something deeper than general revelation.

Special Revelation: Speaking to the Box

For this we need special revelation. This is a challenge for many people you'll meet, because we live in a culture given almost entirely to naturalism and materialism—the belief that only what we can observe scientifically exists, and that nothing supernatural is real. Many of your friends and coworkers can only look inside the box that is the cosmos, and you can't find God in the box. He has left His fingerprints in the box through creation, consciousness, and conscience, but He exists outside it.

People object that an infinite being could never be grasped by finite creatures. In one sense that's true—we can't fully grasp the infinite God. But that doesn't mean we can't comprehend something of Him, or that He can't reveal Himself to us.

I came across a helpful illustration. In 1974, a company in New Mexico created what's considered the first minicomputer, the Altair 8800, written up in Popular Electronics. These engineers had moved computing from room-sized mainframes to a box that could sit on a tabletop, and they believed they'd unleashed a revolution. But they had a major problem: they had no way to communicate with the box. The creators could not tell their creation their will, because the box spoke a different language.

Two men at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Paul Allen and Bill Gates—read that article and realized they could write a basic computer language to speak to the box, to reveal their will to a creation that spoke binary code. They started a company you know as Microsoft and developed that first language. Fast-forward fifty years, and you can now say, "Hey Siri, get me a ride," and the box understands you. Engineers found a way to translate human desire into a language a creation could understand—that is a picture of special revelation.

God is the master engineer. He created the box we live in, and He created you and me within it, with a two-pound ball of flesh in your skull that still outperforms the most amazing computers we can imagine. He has the ability to communicate with us in a language we can understand, revealing His nature and His will. The people who received this word we call prophets: "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to our fathers by the prophets." He revealed His nature to Moses—"I am the Lord, the Lord God, merciful" (Exodus 34:6)—and His will—"Go down to Pharaoh... let My people go" (Exodus 3).

What Gets Lost in Translation

There is a difficulty here that anyone who speaks more than one language will recognize. When I moved to Germany in 2004 to teach at a Bible college, I taught the book of Romans through a translator named Helena. I would speak a sentence or two, and she would render it into German for Germans, Dutch, Austrians, and French students. Sometimes she would look at me and say, "Could you rephrase that? It doesn't translate well."

Some things are simply hard to carry across. God says through the prophets, "I have loved you with an everlasting love"—but love itself is a difficult concept to fully comprehend. As we go through this class, we'll see that Scripture as we have it is translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and some things don't come across perfectly. I think our English translations are very good, but there remain things we struggle with, as you'll discover in the textbook for this class.

Personal Revelation: God With Us

So general revelation has its limits, and so does special revelation. This leads to a third, necessary form: personal revelation, where God comes down to us to reveal His nature and His will directly. If we are truly to know God and have the relationship with Him that Scripture says He desires, we need to move beyond general and special revelation to personal revelation.

Do we have any testimony of God coming down to us? We do—in the man Jesus Christ, Immanuel, "God with us." Jesus reveals God because He is God incarnate. As Hebrews 1 says, God, who spoke in times past by the prophets, "has in these last days spoken to us by His Son." Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He comes to reveal God to us so that we can know God personally and have a relationship with Him—not only an earthly, temporary relationship, but an eternal and heavenly one, for He gives us eternal life through what Christ accomplished on our behalf.

A Book of Books

The Bible is the revelation of God—the apokalypsis, the unfolding of His nature. Through general revelation we find that He exists, is intelligent, and is powerful, but not what He is like or what He likes. Through special revelation He discloses His nature and will. Through personal revelation, in Christ, He comes down to reveal Himself fully so that we can have a relationship with Him—and all of this is ultimately contained in the Scriptures, where we get to know Christ.

It's important to recognize that this is not just a book—it's a book of books: 66 books, written by 40 different authors over 1,500 years, on three continents, in three languages, with a consistent storyline pointing back to the God who is there, so that we can know Him personally through Jesus Christ. This raises the question of bibliology—how we know that what we have is the word of God—which we'll address as the class goes on.

Because God has revealed Himself so that we can know Him, it is challenging to come to know Him by opening the Bible at random and pointing at isolated verses. It is my conviction that we need to go systematically through the Scriptures, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, a book at a time, so that we begin to comprehend who God is and how He has revealed Himself—that we might know Him and share Him with others. That is what we're going to do over the next nine weeks.

We'll take a ten-minute break now. If you've written down questions, we'll start with those when we return, and then move into our next section.