Reading the Bible
This is the third session at the Youth Day Camp held in June 2024. Nicholas helped our youths understand how to read the Bible themselves.
So, how should we approach the Bible? Now that we know its bigger story, what steps should we take every time you read the Bible? One of the most helpful models I’ve found for studying the Bible is this 4-step process outlined by a pastor named David Helm. The four steps are this – Text, Audience, Christ, and Us.
Each of these steps is important if we want to read the Bible well. Let’s walk through each step one by one.
Text
So the first thing you want to do when you come across a piece of Scripture is ask - “What is this text?” Basically, what kind of text are you looking at? There are different kinds of texts in the Bible, meaning there are different genres in the Bible. Now, a genre is a specific style or category of writing. And every genre will have its unique features that you want to look out for when reading it.
For example, on the back of my packet of mints, there is a section called ‘nutritional facts’. Some of its key features are things like sugar or fat content, percentage of sodium etc. No matter what food you are talking about, this genre of ‘nutritional facts’ is going to have similar features — a column of key ingredients, and a column of the percentage or amount that this particular food contains.
But if you go to a different genre, like a novel, you are not usually going to find two columns of nutritional facts and percentages. Instead, you’re going to find words grouped together in sentences, and those sentences grouped together in paragraphs, and those paragraphs grouped together into chapters. So the things you look out for in a novel are different from those in a nutritional facts table.
What, then, are the genres in the Bible?
Narratives - Who, what, when, where, why (plot); editorial additions
Poetry - images, parallel lines that amplify or expand an idea (Psalm 22:5)
Prophecy - covenant-breaking, promises made
Discourse - logic, grammar (connecting words like therefore, but, because)
And then you want to ask “Where is it found?”. This is where knowing the Bible’s big story is so crucial. By identifying which part of the Bible’s story we are at, we can know what happened before and what will happen after. That will give us better handles on how we can read this story accurately. Remember the pattern example I shared yesterday? Looking at the shapes you already have can help you discern what shape goes between. We need to understand the context — in terms of the chapter, book and place in the whole Bible’s story.
Some helpful questions we can ask include:
“Where are we in the Bible’s big storyline?” — A helpful tool to use is the picture that Josh gave us yesterday, the one who shows the whole Bible’s story.
“At this point in time, how is God establishing His kingdom?” — Through a family, through a people group, through a kingdom, through Jesus
“At this point in time, what covenants has God made with His people?” — Moses, Joshua, David, the Prophets, Jesus etc.
Audience
After we’ve figured out what the text is, and where in the Bible it is located, we want to ask ”How would the original audience of this text have received it?” The reason we ask this question is because the Bible is a real historical book, written to real historical people. Before we understand how it applies to us, we first need to understand how it applied to them. Some good questions to ask are: “Who wrote it, who did they write it to, and why did they write it?” We ask these questions because we want to understand what the author intended when they wrote this text. Figuring out an author’s intention is important because if we don’t understand it, we can be prone to misread texts. So how can we find these things out?
It is also important to read the text. We might often be tempted to go to outside sources like a history book or commentary to figure out who wrote this book, who they wrote it to, and why. But very often, we can find the answer simply by reading along. Remember the game we played in the first session, how so many of you got the author’s point wrong? Well what if I had given you a bit more of the book, maybe even the whole book? Then you wouldn’t need me to give you the answers, you could just keep reading and find out for yourself! It’s the same thing with the Bible - the text itself often tells us all we need to know about who wrote it, who they wrote it to, and why they wrote it. A clear example is John 20:30-31, where John tells us that the reason why he wrote this gospel is so that we would “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” and that by believing we would have life in Him”. Look at the start and at the end.
If you read and read and you still can’t figure it out, then yea you can ask your leaders, or read a good commentary. But again I want to help you see that the answers to these questions can be found in the Bible itself. In fact, if you have questions as you read the Bible, I would encourage you to keep reading! More often than not, the questions that we have when we read the Bible get answered as we continue reading.
Christ
This is the crucial part of reading the Bible — understanding how that particular text points to Jesus. We spent most of the first session covering this particular step — to recap, the Old Testament points forward to Jesus through Patterns and Promises, while the New Testament points backward to Jesus, telling us who He is, and how we should live in response to Him.
This step is important because, well, we want to read the Bible as Christians! There are a lot of wonderful texts in the Bible, things like the psalms, or even exciting stories like the Exodus. You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate them, or even benefit from them. That’s why stories like David and Goliath are so popular even among non-Christians - they like the story of a small guy beating up a much larger guy. But if we don’t see the story in the context of the whole Bible, and crucially, how it points to Jesus, then we’re really missing the whole point of the Bible, which is to tell us how God is establishing His kingdom, and how you can be a part of it.
Us
This is where the text becomes something we don’t just study, but actually apply. A helpful way to apply a text can be using the three ways that we should response to Jesus: Faith, Repentance, and Obedience
Faith: What is He asking me to believe?
Repentance: What is He asking me to turn away from?
Obedience: What is He asking me to do?
How can you apply these tools and questions in your own Bible reading?