How to Study Your Bible: Part 3 Session with Nathan Pearl from the Big Texas Shindig

Transcription

Nathan Pearl:  Understanding that we're going to approach this as a hard science, there are two different types of Bible study. There is a passage study and a topical study. A passage study is if I'll take Genesis 1:1 and go verse by verse through the book of Genesis. That'll be a passage study. For a passage study, the most important tool that I have is the Bible. It seems odd to put something that simple up there, but you would be shocked at how many people study the Bible without ever opening the Bible. They will read a commentary on it. They'll read what somebody says about it. They'll read the Sunday school books that have one little verse out of it and then have a bunch of two or three pages of commentary. They have no context. They have no Bible. They're just reading the one passage and then reading . . .

The first tool that you need is the Bible. The second tool you have to have is faith that the Bible's real. The biggest mess of doctrines comes when someone doesn't believe the Bible and starts reading it.

The next tool that I use is a concordance. A concordance, you'll see in a few minutes, will allow you to decipher any word in the Scripture. You can determine what any word means. You never have to crack a dictionary. The Bible's very clear about what each word means.

The other thing I like for passage study is history books. I'll use history books like going through the book of Daniel, or all over the Old Testament and the New Testament, just to get a context of what's going on in history. Understanding the history books aren't the Bible, but they still are fun.

The other hugely important thing is understanding biblical divisions. The Bible is a divided book. The most important overall thing of the Bible is understanding its divisions—the Old and New Testament, Mosaic Law versus the everlasting gospel. If you understand that Adam wasn't under Mosaic Law, it makes it a lot more understandable what was going on.

The other thing that I like using is something called the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. It's on most Bible programs. All it is, is a compilation of cross references. It's not inspired. Sometimes they'll lead you the wrong way. But if you want to jump in and study a passage and see what's there, Treasury of Scripture Knowledge makes that a lot faster.

The other way that we'll study, which is what we're looking at today, is topical study tools. Once again, the Bible. You can't study it without the Bible, faith, and a concordance. Those are all three you have to have.

The next is I use a word processor. You'll see why in a few minutes. Word processors make Bible study literally 100 times faster. I've done it with notebooks. I've done it with word processors. I like books, I like the way they smell, I like the way they feel. If you're serious about Bible study, get a laptop. It makes it so much faster.

Understanding biblical divisions is once again . . . even in a topical study, you'll see today looking at prayer that there are biblical divisions that are going to be important to what we're looking at.

Faith in the Word of God is one of the . . . you have the Bible, and then faith. Here's why it's important. This is to illustrate it: the Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

There are a few things here, one is there is no S on the end of heaven: "Created the heaven and the earth." That creates doctrine. That's a very interesting point if you read Genesis, because in chapter 2, it says, "the heavens and the earth." At some point between 1 and 2, there were a couple of extra heavens created.

The other thing that you see here is that God created it in the beginning. There's a move now where people will say that God used evolution to create the world. That God created everything, and set it in motion and it started to produce, and that God used . . .

If we have faith in the Word of God, rather than reading verse 1, without context, without any understanding, and jumping and making some screwball doctrine about God using what he created to evolve out of protoplasm and make monkeys that made people, we'll just search the Bible and see what it says about itself.

I go to Hebrews chapter 11. It says, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." It is by faith that we understand that the tangible things that exist, exist by the spoken word of God. That's where they come from.

We have killed that doctrine just by looking at the Bible, and by believing that the Bible will answer itself. If you get to a thing that is a problem for you, if you get to a passage that says something that you think, "Okay, that's difficult; that's not my doctrine. That disagrees with the science that I know about, so that I have to find a way to reconcile that," if you don't believe the Word of God, you'll go to science, you'll go to other men, you'll go to your friends, or you'll just put the Bible down and not pick it up again to reconcile something that you don't understand.

If you believe the Word of God and have faith in the Word of God, you can use the Word of God for it to explain itself.

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