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Lots of people of faith are interested in becoming a serious student of the Bible — but they’re unsure where to start. Becoming a serious Bible student needs a real commitment and a systematic strategy, but it isn’t as complex and confusing as some may have you believe. In this article I want to outline a view general recommendations that can help you to begin.

A Definite Plan Desired

Among the most crucial things to be stressed is that in order to be successful in Bible study you need to have an organized plan. Lots of men and women feel this is beyond them because they are too busy — but in reality, the busier you are the more you need a strategy! With a strategy in place, even if your time is limited, you will have the ability to understand exactly where you left off in your studies — busy folks do not have time to fool around using a cluttered, hit-and-miss approach. There are, of course, a multitude of different types of Bible study schedules and programs which can be found — you can find a lot of them from Christian book publishers and from online sources online.

The main issue is to get an organized strategy — if you were a pupil in college studying economics, for instance, your instructor would map out a whole program that would take you through the entire textbook — and that is the way that you must approach your study of the Bible.

The Importance of Context

Finally, on your study of the Scriptures, your final goal is to make sense of everything — to comprehend it, to interpret it properly. "Context" has many distinct levels: the instant context, which are the verses and passages that surround the one that you are studying, the publication context (how a specific Bible passage fits in with the theme or concept of a particular book of the Bible), the literary context (how one prophetical writing, for example, fits in with another prophetical writings), and finally the total context of the total Bible.

Know the Historical and Cultural Background

It’s also important to understand something of the cultural and historical setting in which the writings of the Bible have been awarded. The Biblical documents were written thousands of years back — through times far removed from our own, when different countries ruled the earth, and when different customs and manners of living. None of us is born with a built in knowledge of those early times — we have to take the opportunity to learn about them.

Fortunately, there are a great number of resources available that could assist us in understanding the historical and cultural histories of the Bible — Bible study tools like Bible Encyclopedias and Bible dictionaries can place the huge sources of biblical scholarship at our fingertips.

As you study the Scriptures, try to relate the message and meaning of a specific passage of the Bible to the total message of that whole biblical book. By way of instance, suppose you are studying Exodus Chapter 20, the account of the giving of the 10 Commandments.

Heaven Bible Study have to ask yourself questions such as — who wrote the book of Exodus? Who was the book of Exodus written to? What’s the Goal of the book of Exodus? Getting answers to those questions is essential to obtaining a proper comprehension of what the Bible is all about.

Use Great Tools

Again, none of us is born with this information already packed inside of our head — we will at some point need to look up and research this background using different kinds of biblical reference tools — which means that portion of your task as a serious Bible student is to build up, over time, a small private or family biblical reference library. It is not that you were hoping to develop into a "bookworm" — you need to see these materials as tools, just as any contractor or contractor or a electrician has their set of tools that they need to get the job finished.