4 Essential Questions When Reading the Bible

Life is all about asking the right questions in the right place at the right time. This certainly applies each and every time we open the Bible. When it comes to the Bible, some questions are better than others. Some questions are essential and need to be asked first before going on to other questions.

Asking the right questions makes all the difference in the world. You don’t open a work of historical fiction asking it, “How do I make potato soup?” You might get lucky and find some characters who happen to be chefs making soup, but those odds are slim.

There are always better questions to ask. This is a general life rule, whether you’re reading the Bible, navigating a relationship or buying a refrigerator. What’s the most important question I need to be asking right now? When you open the Bible, are you aware of the questions that you’re asking?

Who’s Epaphras? What’s Ephraim? What’s the book of Jonah even doing here? There are no bad questions, but there are questions that are more helpful than others.

Unfortunately, for many of us whose imaginations have been shaped by Christianity in the West in the late 20th century and early 21st, the question guiding us has been some version of “What does this have to do with me?”

But the Bible is not about you.

The Bible is first and foremost about God.

The Bible is secondly about who are are—collectively, corporately, communally.

Only when we wrap our minds around these first two truths can we grapple with our individual story. Our own personal story does matter, but not in a vacuum. We can only find meaning in our own story once we’ve centered it within both the stories of the whole human community and of God.

The world presented in the Bible offers us an alternative imagination for living in the world.Opening the Bible is crucial to a dynamic Christian life because, as Alan Roxburgh writes “the Scriptures challenge and turn upside down some of the most basic and cherished assumptions we have about what God is doing in the world.”

Do you want to change the way you think about things? How you feel about things? How you experience things? This is why we come to the Bible attentively, open, listening.

Whether you’re reading by yourself, or better yet, reading together with others, here are some helpful questions to start with:

What do you see?

Start by naming what you see. Nouns. Verbs. Adjectives. Characters. Settings. Dialogue. Who’s doing what? Does the text say why? Does what a character says line up with or contradict what they’re doing in the story? What happened just before this? What happens after? Are there words or phrases that are repeated?

We come to the Bible in a posture of listening. Paying attention to the Bible is a critical skill, especially if we’ve spent extensive time in church and with the Bible and suffer from a kind of overexposure. It’s an unhealthy habit to fall into shortcuts, thinking, “I’ve already heard this.”

In naming what you see, it’s like spreading out all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle out on the table. We’re not assigning meaning yet. Don’t rush connecting the dots. Simply start out by noticing all the dots. Otherwise you start connecting dots you think are there but aren’t. Be patient and slow down.

Summarize what you see in your own words. If you’re in a group, hold one another accountable to not missing anything.

What does it say about God?

God is the central character in the Bible. When we start reading and immediately jump to asking, “How does this apply to my life?” we’re reading the text selfishly, putting ourselves in the center. But it’s not about us. It involves us, it invites, it welcomes us, but the Bible is not about us.

The Bible reveals to us what kind of god God is like. The Pentateuch shows us the God has made the world and God is working to redeem it. The historical books show a God who shows up in time and space on behalf of the people of Israel. The wisdom books display the daily ordinary things, like suffering and love and household duties, that God cares about. The prophets show God’s passionate heart.

The Gospels reveal God extraordinarily putting on flesh and blood in the person of Jesus. The letters of the New Testament show how God forms and nurtures the community called “church.”

Writing about the power of the “word of the Lord” that comes to us in the Bible, N.T. Wright says, “It is as though, to put it one way, ‘the word of YHWH’ is like an enormous reservoir, full of creative divine wisdom and power, into which the prophets and other writers tap by God’s call and grace, so that the word may flow through them to do God’s work of flooding or irrigating his people.”

Whether we’re reading Numbers or Galatians, Nahum or Revelation, we’re reading something that shows us what God is like. The books of the Bible peel back layers for us as we daily discover God.

What does it say about humanity?

Not only does the Bible reveal God, it also reveals to us all the complex depths of people. And what we see in people like Abraham and Gideon and Mary and Peter is people have an incredible capacity to say “no” to God. At the same time, these same people have an incredible capacity to say “yes” to God. When God initiates, what are human beings capable of?

God speaks or acts, and people respond, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. The stories within the Bible host a vast array of options for ways that human beings experience God. These stories give us an imagination for all the various possibilities we might experience God.

It’s through the human beings in the stories that we find our own place in the stories. We relate to the suffering of Job. We know the all-at-once arrogant, naive, and confident faith of Peter. We connect with the disbelief of Sarah.

Each one of us is part of the human family, and God’s work involves redeeming all of us—man, woman, adult, child, rich, poor, every race and nationality.

What is God saying to me/us?

If we’ve come to some true conclusions about what God is like and what people are like, what does this mean for us today? Once we’ve been attentive to God’s story and the human story, now we can finally find ourselves in the story. Now it can be personal.

It’s unhealthy to start with yourself, but it’s just as unhealthy never to allow the story to get inside you. I remember a Bible professor once praying before class that our experience might be something like the board game Operation, that even as we analyze and dissect the text we would be shocked by its electricity.

We want to walk away from reading Ecclesiastes and Habakuk and 2 Peter having had some kind of personal encounter with God. That God shows up and speaks to us in these pages it what makes it different from reading Moby Dick or Harry Potter.

How do you respond in cooperation with God?

And now, if these things about God and people are true, and God has spoken to you, what do you do with it?

Jesus says, “Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me.”

If I ask my kids to pick up their toys because they’ve made a mess of the living room, and they don’t, there’s a problem. If they get together with their friends to discuss all the ways that it’s important to pick up their toys, and they still don’t pick them up after I’ve asked, there’s a problem. If they memorize my request to pick up the toys and quote my request on social media, but they still don’t actually pick up their toys, there’s a problem.

It’s far better to read a single verse, be changed by it, and respond cooperatively with God than it is to read the entire Bible and walk away saying, “Well, that was interesting.”

Respond cooperatively—that’s where we want to land. In our household with our kids we use the language of “cooperate.” We were drawn to that because of the way it communicates invitation and relational participation rather than coercion. I think it works for our relationship with God, too. Some days it might be a task, like praying for your enemies or reconciling a broken relationship. Other days it may simply mean being and resting with God.

There are no prizes at the end for Bible trivia. The Bible is one means by which God’s voice is available to us. We can listen. We can learn. We can be present and attentive. Over time, we can be changed, and we have eyes to see and ears to hear God’s activity in the world and in our neighborhoods.

We get to this place by asking good questions of the Bible.