How much about the Bible did you learn while you were growing up? If your parents were believers in Jesus, you might have learned a great deal. If they weren’t, chances are you grew up knowing basically nothing at all about the Bible or what it teaches. There was a time in America when most people grew up with the Bible. It was taught in school and found in nearly every home. Even those people who didn’t believe the Bible were at least familiar with it. That is no longer the case, however. In most American households, if the parents are not believers in Christ, the children usually grow up without knowing anything about the Bible at all. If this is your background, then this article might help you get startedreading and understanding God’s word.
What is the Bible?
Let’s start at the beginning. We often think about the Bible as a single book, because it looks like just one book. That is, it’s all together under one cover. In reality, however, the Bible is not one book, but a collection of books, written at different times, by different people, and only later put together. The books of the Bible contain many different kinds of literature, including stories, poems, songs, laws, discussions about how to live, and prophecy. You’re not crazy if you think that some of the books have a different tone or a different style than others; they do. They were written separately, over a period of more than 1,300 years, so it’s only natural that these kinds of differences would be there. Nevertheless, they tell one consistent story about God and his relationship with humanity.
Almost any Christian Bible you find in the book store will contain sixty-six books (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles have a few more). Thirty-nine books are grouped together in the Old Testament, and twenty-seven in the New Testament. The Old Testament contains the record of God’s dealings with Israel, including many prophecies about a savior who was coming. The New Testament is about the coming of that savior, Jesus. The Christian Old Testament is also the Jewish Bible. The additional books in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bibles are called the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books. I will save discussion of them for a future article.
The Bible is sometimes called “Scripture” or “the Scriptures” (from a Latin word meaning “to write). We also frequently call it God’s word. So before we go any further, let’s unpack what that means.
The Word of God
Some people picture God dictating the Bible, word for word, to human authors who do nothing more than write down what they’re told. But if this were really the way it happened, how do we explain the differences in tone and style that we find in different books? Those book written by the Apostle Paul, for example, have a different tone than those written by John, or Peter, or Moses. But on the other hand, if the Bible were just human words expressing human thoughts, it would not be able to tell us very much about a God who is infinitely far above humanity. And how would we explain the fact that much of the prophecy has been fulfilled?
Instead of either of these options, Christians believe that the Bible was inspired, but not dictated, by the Holy Spirit. That is, God worked with human beings, guiding their thinking so that what they wrote expressed exactly what God wanted to say, while still being the words and thoughts of the human author. Bible scholars call this concept dual authorship. It’s a partnership, so we can say that the Bible is a fully human book that is also entirely God’s word, similar to the way that Jesus was both fully human and fully God.
Finding your way around the Bible.
It’s very important to realize that the books of the Bible are not arranged in chronological order, but grouped by category. Misunderstanding this will lead to a great deal of confusion. In the Old Testament you’ll find, first, the five books of the law (sometimes called the Torah, the Pentateuch, or the books of Moses). These are followed by books of history, twelve in number, then five books of wisdom, five major prophets and finally twelve minor prophets (so called because they’re shorter than the books of the major prophets, not because they’re less important).
The New Testament begins with four biographies of Jesus, called the Gospels. Next, the book of Acts tells the story of how the church began. Following this are twenty-one letters, or epistles, written by Jesus’ disciples to various churches. Last of all is a book of prophecy named Revelation (without an “s” at the end).
Some books in the Bible are much longer than others. Each book is divided into chapters, and each chapter is divided into verses. You should be aware that the chapters and verses were not originally part of the Bible. They were added much later, simply to make it easier to find things. They are not inspired, and don’t always match the natural divisions in the original text. Punctuation marks were not in the original text either; they weren’t invented until long after the Bible was completed. And, in case you were wondering, the words of Jesus were not originally written in red ink.
Context matters.
Did you know that the Bible says there’s no God? It’s right there in black and white:
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1).
This silly example is meant to point out something critical; everything must be understood in its proper context. In this case, the Biblical author is obviously not expressing his own view, but rather telling us what fools believe.
As this example illustrates, the Bible is not a collection of sound bites to be taken individually. Context always matters; both the kind of context you learned about in school (if you were paying attention) and the historical context in which each book was written. A common saying among Bible scholars is, “the Bible was written for us, but it was not written to us.” In other words, every book in the Bible was originally addressed to some specific person or group. Many (although by no means all) of them mention at the beginning who they were originally addressed to. It is our responsibility, as followers of Jesus and students of the Bible, to try to understand the principle of what is being taught and apply it to our own lives in the present day. Sometimes this is very easy. God doesn’t change; Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so everything the Bible teaches about who God is remains true for all time. But our lives today are not like the lives of people in the past, so we may need to think through how to obey God in our own, modern world. For example, the ways we can help the poor won’t necessarily be the same as the way that farmers in ancient Israel did it.
Getting Started
No one knows better than God how his word should by interpreted. Reading the Bible should therefore start with prayer. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you the wisdom to understand what you read, and to obey it. And as you read, keep asking yourself, “What does this passage show me about God? What does it show me about myself?”
Most people read books by starting at the beginning and reading straight through to the end, and there’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible that way if you like. The first book, Genesis, was probably the first one to be written, and it tells the story of God creating the world and humanity. The story continues until you get partway through the second book, Exodus, but then you’ll run into a long section of laws and ceremonial regulations. If you’re not expecting this, it can be confusing and a little intimidating. Many of the laws in this section no longer apply, but you have to get all the way to the New Testament to find out why. If this is your first time reading through the Bible, it’s perfectly okay to skim over these laws and focus on the story instead. Or to jump ahead to the New Testament.
Finally, don’t expect to understand everything in the Bible in a short time. For believers in Christ, reading the Bible is a lifetime vocation. There’s no chance you’ll ever reach the point where there’s nothing left to learn. You’ll definitely discover things the second time through the Scriptures that you missed the first time. And you’ll discover things on the one hundredth reading that you missed on the ninety-ninth. There will also be things God will show you in the Bible that others might have missed, and vice versa. We need to share with one another.
We need each other for another reason, too; none of us is perfect. It’s pretty much a guarantee that if you seriously read the Bible, you will occasionally misunderstand what it’s saying. That’s just part of being human, and I honestly think God likes it that way, because it means that we can’t be Lone Rangers. We all have to be humble enough to learn from one another, or we’ll end up going the wrong way.
Of course, the most important thing to remember is that the only way to get any benefit from reading the Bible is to actually do it. A lifetime adventure begins when you sit down, pray, and then open the book and begin reading.