Throwback

July is the time to start preparing for your fall Bible study. Are you overwhelmed by the details or don’t know where to start? Assuming your study starts in September, here’s my summer ministry preparation checklist.

Once a friend confessed: “I know an essential step of any Bible study is observation. But what am I suppose to observe?” So glad you asked! Sometimes we take this step for granted when talking about how to study the Bible, but observation is a skill we learn and practice like any other.

Generally, the study process begins with the big picture, zooms into the details and then returns to the big picture to put it all together. Observation takes place in the “detail” stage.

Here’s are a few basic things you can “observe”.

The first step in Bible study is observation. The goal is to slow down your reading and generate a list of questions that must be answered to understand the passage. I tend to break observation into the following 4 steps which generally correspond to my first few readings through the passage.

After you’ve done your observation, word studies, outlining and answered the questions you generated, it’s time to start putting it all together. In this step, you want to collect, refine and organize all those details you observed into a coherent meaning. Observation primarily focuses on the questions: “what does it say and how do I know?” Interpretation focuses on the questions: “what does it mean and how do I know?”

https://www.wednesdayintheword.com/how-not-to-interpret-the-bible-dont-think-twice/

In the Christian Bible, the Old Testament is divided into 4 main parts based on genre. Within each genre, books are organized by author, chronology and size.

While not a complete list of early church heresies, these groups are the ones that the New Testament authors seem to write against and respond to most often

Why was the New Testament written in Greek while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew?