What Is the Big Picture of the Bible? …If you walked into someone's home, picked a big book off a shelf, and read a single line on a random page, one thing is certain: you would not understand it. That is because we receive meaning through words by seeing them in their context. One of […]
What about bible translations? If you are wondering what English translation of the Bible to use, know this: you are blessed with an array of excellent choices. In the past few hundred years, interest in and reverence for the Bible has inspired major efforts involving thousands of researchers, linguists, and translators. The complete Bible is […]
What Is the Most Natural Way to Read the Bible?…I shudder to think how close I came to giving up on the Bible. Like many people, I tried for years to read Scripture in ways that were doomed to fail. My way of reading made the Bible hard to understand, and it made me think […]
What Are Some Good Disciplines for Reading Scripture? I still cherish my boyhood memories of going fishing with my grandfather. It seems like it was yesterday. One day while I was sorting through the wide variety of tackle I had collected, fidgeting with lures and sinkers and bobbers and the rest in my fancy tackle […]
How Can We Hear God's Voice in Scripture?…Some years back, I did a survey of our church's congregation with the simple question: "If you could ask God one thing, what would it be?" I was not surprised that the most frequent response had to do with the problem of evil in the world, but I […]
How Can We Refine Our Understanding of Biblical Theology? Theology is not limited to the work of professors and clergy. Any serious Christian who has invested time in reading and studying Scripture is doing the work of theology, because theology (from the Greek words theos, meaning "God," and logia, meaning "utterance, speech, reasoning") is simply […]
What Help Can We Get So We Understand the BibleBetter? Do you understand what you are reading?" That was the question Philip the apostle asked a man from Ethiopia who was riding in a chariot on a desert road leading from Jerusalem toward the Mediterranean Sea (Acts 8). The man was the finance minister of […]