How To Study The Bible - Week 4 Session 2

Paul and Timothy, bondservants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons... (Philippians 1:1)

Learn to mine Scripture for yourself—how a free website turns anyone into a careful student of the original text.

Setting Up Blue Letter Bible

I want to show you the basics of Blue Letter Bible and how to use it. I'd encourage you to set up a free account. Up in the upper right-hand corner you'll find a place to register. Once you have a free account, you can configure it for yourself—your default Bible version (mine is the New King James Version), and whether passages display verse-by-verse or as paragraphs. It will hold whatever defaults you set when you log in, and those same settings carry over to the app if you download it on your phone or tablet. You log into the app using the same account.

When you go to blueletterbible.org, type a reference like Philippians 1 into the search bar at the top. At the top of the passage there's a button to switch between verse and paragraph mode. When I'm studying, I usually keep it verse-by-verse so I can move quickly through a passage, but paragraph mode helps you see where the breaks and sections are.

Right next to that, there's a "listen to this passage" option. You can hear it narrated in King James, New King James, NIV, or NLT. Some versions are dramatized—different voices with music in the background, which drives me crazy. I listen to everything at double speed, which is probably why I talk so fast. You can also turn on red letters so Jesus' words appear in red in the Gospels.

A Bible Program Is a Search Tool

Fundamentally, every great Bible program is a concordance—a search program. It used to be that if you wanted a concordance you'd buy a giant Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, the size of a doorstop, and look up a word like "love" to find every place it appears. Blue Letter Bible, Logos, Accordance, BibleWorks, Bible Hub, Bible Gateway—these are all search programs.

So I can type a reference like John 3:16, or I can search a phrase like "for God so loved" and find everywhere it appears. I can search one word—"God"—and learn it occurs 4,407 times in 3,844 verses in the New King James. On the side I can switch versions, and the count changes—in the CSB it's 4,179 times in 3,640 verses. Why the difference? In some Bibles a translator chose "He" with a capital H where another chose "God." I can also limit a search to a single book, like Job, and see every occurrence there.

I can search "faith"—245 times in 229 verses. Or multiple words: "faith and Christ" appears together in 39 verses. If I put quotation marks around "faith in Christ," it zeroes in on just that exact phrase—six times in six verses—and I can compare it across translations.

There are search operators. A capital AND, OR, or NOT tells the engine I want a logical operator, not the literal word. "Jesus NOT Christ" finds Jesus where Christ does not appear. "Abram OR Abraham" finds both forms. An asterisk is a wildcard: "faith" returns faith, faithful, faithless, faithfulness; "call" returns called, calls, calling. There are extensive help videos and search tutorials at the bottom of the site. I haven't memorized the whole Bible, so when I half-remember a verse about "Lot and Abraham" somewhere in Genesis, a quick search takes me right to it.

Parallel Bibles, Cross-References, and Dictionaries

To the left of each verse is a "tools" menu. One option is Bibles, which shows the same verse in multiple translations. You can grab and rearrange them—put New King James at the top, then NIV, then ESV—and if you have an account it saves that order. There are dozens of versions, including Greek, Arabic, and Spanish.

The purple tool is one of my favorites—the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, a cross-reference tool. It highlights words in the verse and links to related passages. In Philippians 1:1, "Paul, a bondservant" links to Romans 1:1 and 1 Corinthians 1:1. "Timothy" links to Acts 16, where we first meet him, and to 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians. "Saints" links to Romans 1:7 and 1 Corinthians 1:2. This is invaluable when studying a book like Jeremiah or Isaiah and you want to see where a passage corresponds in Kings or Chronicles.

A great example: Isaiah 6 opens, "In the year that King Uzziah died." The cross-references take you to 2 Kings 15 and 2 Chronicles 26, where you learn Uzziah died a leper after disobeying the Lord—something the plain text of Isaiah 6 never tells you.

Under dictionaries, the tools menu gives articles on people and places in the passage—Smith's Bible Dictionary, Easton's Bible Dictionary—so you can learn about a place like Philippi, a city in Macedonia, and expand your understanding of who Paul was writing to.

Commentaries and Other Resources

Commentaries are other people's research on a passage. For Philippians 1 you'll find John Courson, Chuck Smith, Bob Hoekstra, J. Vernon McGee, John MacArthur's study notes, and David Guzik's notes—many of these are Calvary Chapel men. If you want Guzik's most recent edits, go to enduringword.com; it's the same text, but it's under constant editing, and once a book or collection is finished it's sent to Blue Letter Bible to be updated there.

There are also text and audio/video commentaries, book outlines, and the recently added Cres Biblical Resources, which give brief chapter-by-chapter outlines through the whole Bible.

The Interlinear and Word Studies

The last tool I'll show you, which we'll use for homework, is the Interlinear Bible. The New Testament was written in Greek, the Old Testament mostly in Hebrew with some Aramaic. Take Philippians 2:12—"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Click into the Interlinear's full page and it breaks down every word—conjunctions, verbs, nouns.

The word "salvation" is the Greek soteria. Click its Strong's number (G4991) and you get the definition: "deliverance, preservation, safety, salvation—salvation as the present possession of all true Christians." That's how you do a simple Bible word study. (My friend Justin Alfred, who's nearly eighty, is our audio pronunciation expert—a giant of a man who played football for Mississippi State and used to spar with us at "100 percent" no matter what speed we agreed on, with a thick Southern accent: "Strong's G4991, soteria.")

You won't use these word tools often, but they can be powerful. Take Matthew 5:48: "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect." For most of my Christian life I read that as a command. But looking at the original, the verb is in the indicative, not the imperative—it's not "you shall be perfect" as a command, but "you will be perfect." Read in context—"love your enemies... that you may be sons of your Father in heaven"—it's saying that if you love your enemy, you will be perfect like your Father, which of course you cannot do without the help of the Holy Spirit. It's a truth to believe more than a command to perform.

Another example is Zacchaeus in Luke 19. When Jesus invites Himself to dinner, the crowd grumbles, and Zacchaeus says, "Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything by false accusation, I restore it fourfold." I always heard this taught as his repentance. But the verbs "I give" and "I restore" are present active indicative—he's describing what he already does, not a future resolution. That challenges the assumption that he was a wicked hoarder. These details are invisible in English.

Greek is a very technical language. Each verb has a tense, voice, mood, person, and number. Clicking "indicative mood" in the tool tells you it's "a simple statement of fact, something that has really occurred." You don't have to learn the words or how to pronounce them—just knowing some basics lets you discover key things the English leaves unclear.

Your Homework: A Word Study

This week's homework is a word study using Blue Letter Bible. Choose one of two passages.

The first is John 20:3–10, focusing on the word "saw." In English the word "saw" appears three times—verses 5, 6, and 8. Go to the Interlinear and check whether they're the same Greek word. In verse 5 it's blepo ("to see, to discern with the bodily eye"). Write down the English transliteration (you don't have to write the Greek), note a few definitions, then check verses 6 and 8 to see whether the word is the same or different. When we get to inductive Bible study next week, one thing we look for is repeated words. "Saw" is repeated in English—but it may not be the same word underneath, and that may be exactly what John is signaling.

The second option is John 21:15–17, focusing on "love." Jesus three times asks Peter, "Do you love Me?" In English it's just "love" repeated. Go to the Interlinear and check the word Jesus uses and the word Peter uses each time. One of the words here is agapao, the verb related to the noun agape—but there may be another word used as well. Write down which words are used, their basic meanings, and your own thoughts on what John is communicating. Something is unlocked in the original that isn't clear in the English. You don't have to be a Greek scholar—just click the tools and read a few things.

One More Resource: Precept Austin

I promised one other tool—Precept Austin. Select the book of Philippians and watch how much material this one man in Texas has compiled from all over the internet: content from Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway, MacArthur, Guzik, and many others, verse by verse, with links to full exegetical commentaries on archive.org (like Marvin Vincent's), sermons, and authors like John Walvoord. He's done this for every book of the Bible. The amount of work is hard to imagine—David Guzik has spent time with him and says he's quite a character.

A Word on Other Languages and the Difficulty of Translation

Right now the study tools on Blue Letter Bible are English tools, and they're working hard to bring them into other languages. With Enduring Word we have a goal over the next ten years to translate Guzik's commentaries into the fifteen most-used languages. We currently have commentary in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, French, Italian, Dutch, Tamil, and more.

Why are words hard to translate? In Logos I can do a word study on phileo—another Greek word for love—and see how it's used not just in the Bible but by Homer, Josephus, and Plutarch across different eras. One word carries a whole range of meanings. In English we say "I love my wife," "I love my dog," and "I love burritos," hoping those loves aren't the same. We have an implied range; Greek often has a specific word. There are four primary Greek words for love—agape, phileo, storge, and eros—and three of them appear in the Bible. A great short read on this is The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

So your homework: all you need is Blue Letter Bible. Study "saw" in John 20:3–10, or study "love" in John 21:15–17—choose just one. I'll stay afterward for questions, or you can text them and we'll discuss them at the start of next week, when we'll talk about inductive Bible study.

Closing Prayer

God, I pray that You would give us understanding and wisdom as we study Your word this week, and give us a passion and love for Your word and for time spent with You in it. I pray that this word study would not be a discouragement, not too big a hill to climb—I don't think it will be—but would You open our hearts and our minds to receive from You, to see how Your word speaks and how You speak through it. Lord, draw us into a deeper fellowship with You through Your word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.