14 Helpful Hints to Get More Out of Reading the Bible
One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was The NeverEnding Story. Now, there’s this scene at the beginning where the young Bastian, who’s running from bullies, leaps unbeknownst into a dusty book shop.
There he stumbles upon the crusty old shopkeeper, who, of course, is immersed in a book. The quizzical boy wants to know what the book is. The old man brushes him off. Bastian persists. The old man relents. This is their exchange:
Mr. Koreander: Your books are safe. While you’re reading them, you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe.
Bastian: But that’s what I like about ’em.
Mr. Koreander: Ahh, but afterwards you get to be a little boy again.
Bastian: Wh-what do you mean?
Mr. Koreander: Listen. Have you ever been Captain Nemo, trapped inside your submarine while the giant squid is attacking you?
Bastian: Yes.
Mr. Koreander: Weren’t you afraid you couldn’t escape?
Bastian: But it’s only a story.
Mr. Koreander: That’s what I’m talking about. The ones you read are safe.
Bastian: And that one isn’t?
I’ll suggest that reading the Bible isn’t safe. It’ll mess with you.
If you let it.
It can mess with you in a lot of good ways. Here are some ways to make yourself open to letting God mess with you as you read the Bible.
1. Pay attention
“How do you read the Bible? Frequently and thoroughly.”
So I’ve heard biblical scholar N.T. Wright say before. First helpful hint is to simply pay attention to what you read. Read closely. Absorb the details. Soak it in.
Who are the characters in the story? What are they saying? To whom? Does it match with what they’re doing? And then what happens next? These are just a few of the questions worth pondering.
If we have any familiarity with the Bible, this can particularly be a challenge because we feel like we’ve heard it before. Yeah, you’ve heard that story a hundred times since you were a kid in Vacation Bible School. But you might be surprised when you slow down and read closely.
2. This is not your book. This is your book.
The Bible was not written in English for you, the 21st-century North American reader. It was written by a diverse group of Middle Eastern people over the course of several hundred years. They would have had no concept of electricity or democracy or free market capitalism or any number of things we take for granted in our culture. Each time you open your Bible, flip the pages, or launch the app, you’re in for a cross-cultural experience. This book is not for you.
And yet.
God speaks in these pages. The same God who acted in these stories, the God who split the Red Sea, the God who raised Jesus from the dead—speaks even today through these stories to you and me. This story isn’t complete without us. This book is for you.
3. Don’t read the Bible alone.
Ice cream tastes better when you share it. That’s what I tell my kids. It’s lie, but it keeps the peace.
What’s not a lie, is that reading the Bible is better when you share it. Yes, it’s a good and right thing to read the Bible for yourself, but it’s also equally important to share with others what you read and to read together with others. Each one of us has a perspective and sees slightly different things when we read. So, it becomes a much richer experience when you find that a buddy sees something in a story or passage that you missed, and vice versa.
4. Jesus is the center.
It can be pretty easy to split the Bible into the Old Testament and the New Testament (and maybe even try to wish away the Old Testament). But really, there’s a complete story from Genesis to Revelation about a God who is rescuing the world and Jesus is right smack in the middle of this story. In this way, the whole Old Testament is looking forward to Jesus, while the whole New Testament is remembering Jesus. It’s all one story with Jesus in the center.
5. It’s about God, not about you.
The end goal of reading the Bible is not to apply it to your life. While the question “How does this apply to my life?” isn’t the worst question to bring to the Bible, it can be downright distracting and unhelpful to start with you.
More helpful is to start with the question, “What does this passage say about God?” Because the Bible is about, first and foremost, God. It’s about unveiling just what kind of god exactly God is. What is God like? What kinds of things does God do? What is God’s hope for the world? These are first questions. And then, once those are out on the table, then we can start with questions like: Well, if God is like this, how do I respond? If this is what God wants from people, how do I need to change to cooperate?
6. The Bible is literature.
Yes, the Bible is a sacred and holy text. But it still has the fingerprints of people all over it. And so, all the rules about literature you learned in English class can apply to the Bible. Pay attention to things like plot and character development and setting. Watch how what a character says in dialogue matches or doesn’t match up with their actions. And watch for the rhythm and beauty of the poetry in the Psalms and the prophets.
7. We read the Bible with reason, experience, and tradition.
The Bible doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In fact, when we’re reading the Bible, we’re never simply reading the Bible. We’re always reading through the lenses of our reason, our experience, and our tradition. And that’s okay. We just need to be aware of it.
We use our mind to make sense of words and sentences. Our personal experience colors what we see (and what we miss) when we read Scripture. And then the tradition we come out of, or the tradition of those around us came out of—whether that’s Baptist or Roman Catholic or Methodist or even non-denominational—has an effect on what we make sense of Scripture.
8. The Bible is all-inclusive to all cultures.
In the 5th century, Vincent de Lerins wrote, “We hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone.”
So, what’s true in the Bible is bigger than one particular cultural context. What was true for Christian communities in Rome in the 1st century is true for Christian communities in the United States in the 21st century, as well as for communities in India and Brazil and China in the 25th.
The message of the Bible crosses all cultures in all places at all times. So, in addition to asking how might I faithfully respond to God from this passage, another helpful question can be, how might someone in a different culture—someone not like me—faithfully respond to God from this passage?
9. Repetition is your friend.
Read the passage again. And again. And again.
You’ve had the experience, right, of watching your favorite movie and you catch new and different details the fifth time you watched it? The same happens with the Bible.
10. Repetition is your friend.
Read the passage again. And again. And again.
You’ve had the experience, right, of watching your favorite movie and you catch new and different details the fifth time you watched it? The same happens with the Bible.
11. Read for details. Read for the big picture.
Thanks to Google Maps, I can zoom in on a view of my house. And then zoom out and see my block. And then my neighborhood. And then my city. And then my county. And then my state. And then my region. And then my country. And then my continent. And then the whole world. And then I can zoom back into just my house again.
When we read the Bible, we can read for the close details, analyzing a particular word or phrase or sentence. But then zoom out and notice what it means in that particular story and that particular book. And we can notice where it might fit in the big picture of God’s story in Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and the Church.
12. Pay attention to context.
This is related to #11. Nobody likes being taken out of context or having your words twisted to mean something you never meant. Yet it happens with the Bible frequently.
When you see a verse by itself, always question, where does this come from? What becomes before and after? Who’s saying this and why? How does this compare with other passages in the Bible?
13. Know your genres.
This is related to #6. Because the Bible is a piece of literature, every part of it is a particular genre. When you scroll through Netflix, you know that a thriller will be a very different kind of movie than a comedy. You can expect that if you pick a family movie, everything will work out for the heroes, and that if you pick a Quentin Tarantino movie, everybody pretty much dies.
Same with the genres in the Bible. There are poems, like the psalms and much of the prophets. There are laws. There are personal letters. There is history. And for each one, we should have slightly different expectations about what they’re trying to communicate.
14. Stories are better than verses.
Reading novels are more fun than reading encyclopedias. Stories resonate with us. They change us. Very rarely do facts change us.
We live in a world of soundbites, and it’s easy to fall prey to digesting a verse at a time or reducing what’s in the Bible to easy inspirational slogans on Instagram. And while some portions of the Bible (like much of Proverbs) can work like that, others simply don’t. All of Paul’s letters are sustained arguments beginning to end. Chapter and verse numbers are a modern convenience for the sake of reference added 1,500 years later.
Verses aren’t bad. But stories are better. Stories, not soundbites, shape us. Human beings are made for stories.
And the Bible is the story about God and God’s rescue of the world.
And it’s not safe.