Reading the Bible for Yourself

A great many people who believe the Bible is God's Word have never read it. They own one, sometimes several. They have heard portions of it read aloud for years. They could tell you it is true and would be uneasy about anyone who said otherwise. But they have never sat down and read it through for themselves, and if pressed they could not say what is in most of it.

The reasons are usually honest ones. It is long. Parts are difficult. Earlier attempts foundered somewhere in the wilderness with the measurements of the tabernacle, and were quietly abandoned. And underneath all of it is a suspicion that this is really a book for experts, and that ordinary people are better served by having it explained to them.

That last idea is the one this article is written to destroy.

1. Why you must read it yourself

There is a small account in the New Testament that settles the question, and it is worth noticing exactly what is commended.

"These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." (Acts 17:11)

Consider the situation. The man preaching to them was an apostle. If anyone in history could have expected to be taken on trust, it was he. And these hearers did not simply take his word for it. They went home and checked.

Now notice the verdict Scripture passes on that. It does not call them suspicious, or difficult, or lacking in respect for authority. It calls them more noble — and the thing commended is precisely that they verified the preaching against the text.

Two things follow. First, no teacher, however gifted, is to be believed simply because he is confident and well spoken. Second, the ordinary believer is not merely permitted to check but expected to. Every serious error that has ever troubled the church has depended on people not reading for themselves.

And the checking is possible, which is the point. God did not write a book that only specialists can follow. He wrote to shepherds and fishermen and slaves, most of whom could not read at all and had it read to them, and He expected them to understand it.

2. It is food, not decoration

Scripture describes itself in terms of eating far more often than in terms of study. New believers are told to desire the pure milk of the Word as newborn babies desire milk. The Lord Jesus Christ, refusing bread in the wilderness, said that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

That comparison is worth taking seriously, because it changes what counts as success.

Nobody eats a meal in order to be able to describe it afterwards. A man may be unable to recall what he had for dinner three Tuesdays ago and yet be alive because of it. So it is with Scripture. The question after a morning's reading is not whether you can summarise the chapter, but whether you have been fed.

This relieves a great deal of unnecessary discouragement. Many people give up because they feel they are retaining nothing. But nourishment is cumulative and mostly invisible, and a believer who reads steadily for a year will find at the end of it that he thinks differently — without being able to point to the day it happened.

3. Where to start

Do not start at Genesis and try to read straight through. That is how most attempts fail, usually around the third book. The Bible is a library, not a novel, and its books were not arranged in the order a new reader most needs them.

Start instead with the Gospel of John. It was written expressly so that readers might believe, and it says so. It is plain, it moves, and it is about a Person rather than a system.

Then read the other three Gospels, then Acts, which tells you what the first Christians did and how the message spread.

Then take Romans, which lays out the whole argument of the gospel in order — man's guilt, God's remedy, and the life that follows.

Alongside all of this, read a psalm and a chapter of Proverbs most days. The Psalms will teach you how to speak to God in every condition of soul, including the ones nobody mentions in church. Proverbs will teach you how to live sensibly among people.

The Old Testament histories and the prophets will make far more sense once you know the Person the whole book is about, which is why they come later rather than first.

4. How to read a passage

Three questions will carry an ordinary reader a very long way, and they can be asked of any passage.

What does it actually say? Before deciding what it means, be sure what it says. Read it twice. Notice who is speaking, to whom, and about what. A surprising proportion of confusion comes from people answering a question the text never raised.

What does it mean? Take the plain sense unless the passage itself signals otherwise. Scripture uses figures, and it usually tells you when it is doing so. But a reader who begins hunting for hidden meanings will end up finding whatever he brought with him.

What does it require of me? This is the question most often skipped, and the reading is not finished without it. Is there a promise to rest on, a command to obey, a warning to heed, something about God to admire?

And one caution that saves a great deal of trouble: read verses in their surroundings. Almost every serious misuse of the Bible depends on lifting a sentence away from what stands before and after it. If a verse seems to teach something the rest of Scripture denies, the fault is in the reading.

5. The distinction that unlocks most confusion

One further principle deserves a section of its own, because it resolves more apparent contradictions than anything else.

Scripture tells a workman to handle the word of truth rightly — literally, to divide it straight, as a man cuts a straight line. The implication is that the Bible has divisions in it, and that a reader who ignores them will make himself and others miserable.

Here is the simplest form of it. Everything in the Bible is for you, but not everything in the Bible is addressed to you.

Instructions given to Israel about sacrifices, feasts and a priesthood were given to a particular people at a particular time, under an arrangement that has since been fulfilled in Christ. They are profitable — they teach us about God, about sin, about what the sacrifice of Christ accomplished — but a Christian is not under them, and does not build an altar.

Grasp that one distinction and a hundred difficulties dissolve. A reader who does not grasp it will careen between guilt over ceremonies he is not keeping and confusion over promises made to another people in another circumstance.

So when you read, ask a simple question: who is being addressed here, and under what arrangement? The whole book is God's Word to us; not every command in it is God's command to us.

6. What to do with the hard parts

You will meet passages you do not understand, and some that trouble you. Every honest reader does. A few practical rules.

Do not stop. Mark the place and keep going. A great many difficulties are answered later in the same book, and stopping to solve everything guarantees you will never finish anything.

Let the clear interpret the difficult. Scripture says a great deal plainly and a little obscurely. Build on what is plain, and read the obscure in its light — never the reverse.

Distinguish what you do not understand from what you do not like. These feel identical and are not. The first calls for patience; the second calls for honesty.

Ask. There is no shame in asking a believer who has read longer than you. The Bereans were commended for checking, not for working entirely alone.

And accept that some things will remain unresolved. A book written by an infinite God that a finite reader could exhaust in a lifetime would not be worth much. Difficulty is not a defect in Scripture; it is evidence of its depth.

7. Slowly beats quickly

Our habits of reading are formed by screens, and they are almost exactly the wrong habits for this.

Scripture commends meditation — turning a verse over, staying with it, letting it work. The man of the first psalm delights in the law of the LORD and meditates in it day and night. Meditation here is not emptying the mind but filling it with one thing and holding it there.

In practice this means it is better to read one paragraph and think about it than five chapters skimmed. If a verse arrests you, stop and stay with it. That is not falling behind; that is the reading working.

The Word has been described as a lamp:

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." (Psalm 119:105)

Notice how modest the promise is. Not a floodlight over the whole landscape — a lamp unto my feet. Enough light for the next step. Which is exactly how it works: you will not be shown the whole route, but you will be given light enough to move.

8. The usual obstacles

"I have no time." Almost always this means it has no place. A person who waits for a spare half hour will wait for years. Fifteen minutes at a fixed time, before the day takes hold, will outlast every good intention. And it is worth being honest about what the time actually goes on; most of us can find fifteen minutes if we look at where the last hour went.

"I feel nothing when I read." Sometimes you will, sometimes you will not, and the second is not failure. Meals are not always memorable, and are nourishing regardless. Read for what is true rather than for what is felt, and the feeling will follow often enough.

"I don't understand it." Understanding grows by reading, not before it. Nobody learned a language by waiting until he could speak it. Read what you can follow, and the difficult parts will become less difficult as the rest of the book fills in around them.

"I keep starting and giving up." Then start somewhere easier and shorter, and do not attempt to make up missed days. Guilt over a broken schedule has ended more Bible reading than difficulty ever did.

9. What it will do to you

Scripture claims to act upon the reader rather than merely inform him.

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)

Quick here means living. This is the strange experience nearly every serious reader reports: the sense that at some point the book turned around and began reading him. It names things you have never told anyone. It gets past the defences and the long-rehearsed explanations, and puts a finger on the actual motive.

It also cleans. The psalmist said he had hidden God's word in his heart that he might not sin against Him — which is a strategy, not a sentiment. Truth stored in advance is what is available at the moment of temptation, and nothing else is.

And it sets you apart:

"Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." (John 17:17)

10. The Person the whole book is about

One last thing, and without it all the rest can go badly wrong.

The Lord Jesus Christ once rebuked men who searched the Scriptures diligently, thinking that in them they had eternal life — and who would not come to Him, of whom those very Scriptures testified. It is possible to know the book and miss the Person, and that is the saddest form of Bible study there is.

After His resurrection, walking with two grieving men, He began at Moses and all the prophets and expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. The whole book is about Him. Read it looking for Him and it opens; read it as a manual of religion and it closes.

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

11. If you have never come to Him

If you are reading this and have never trusted Christ, the book will remain a closed thing to you in the deepest sense, however much of it you can quote. The gospel is plain, and it is here:

"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)

"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)

"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." (Acts 16:31)

Open it tomorrow morning

You do not need a course, a commentary, or a qualified guide to begin. You need a Bible, a fixed quarter of an hour, and the willingness to start with the Gospel of John.

Men were burned alive so that this book could be in your language, and it is now within arm's reach of you, in a country where nobody will trouble you for reading it. That is a strange inheritance to leave on a shelf.

Do not take anyone's word for what is in it — not a preacher's, not this article's. Open it and see.

Let us Pray:

Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Thy throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Thy presence.

We thank Thee for Thy beloved Son, and for **Him** who opened the Scriptures and made hearts burn on the road. We praise Thee for Thy preserved Word, which declareth **"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet"** (Psalm 119:105), and which cannot be broken.

We confess before Thee that we own many Bibles and read them little. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for Thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

We beseech Thee for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Thy Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Thy Son before this day is done.

Strengthen Thy people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to put the Book back into the hands of every reader, and open it to him, for Thy glory and not for ours.

We pray all of this to Thee, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Most Important Prayer You Will Ever Pray

Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?

You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.

If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:

After You Have Prayed

1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).

2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).

3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.

4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.

5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).