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Lots of people of faith are considering becoming a serious student of the Bible — but they are unsure where to start. Becoming a serious Bible student needs a real commitment and a systematic strategy, but it isn’t as complicated and confusing as some might have you think. In this column I want to outline a perspective general recommendations which can help you to begin.

Small Group Bible Study Desired

One of the most crucial points to be stressed is that in order to be successful in Bible study you need to have an organized strategy. Lots of men and women believe this is past them cause they are too busy — but in reality, the busier you are the more you need a plan! With a plan in place, even if your time is limited, you’ll be able to understand exactly where you left off on your research — busy people do not have time to fool around using a disorganized, hit-and-miss approach. There are, of course, a great number of different types of Bible study schedules and plans that are available — you can discover many of them out of Christian book publishers and from online sources on the Internet.

The main issue is to get an organized strategy — if you were a student in school studying economics, for example, your instructor would map out a complete program that will take you through the whole textbook — and this is the way you must approach your analysis of the Bible.

The Importance of Context

Finally, on your study of the Scriptures, your final goal is to make sense of everything — to understand it, to interpret it — properly. And among those basic rules of proper Bible interpretation is to think about the context of a Bible passage. "Context" has many distinct levels: the immediate context, which are the poetry and passages that encircle the one that you are studying, the publication context (how a particular Bible passage fits in with the theme or concept of a specific book of the Bible), the literary context (how one prophetical writing, for example, fits in with the other prophetical writings), and ultimately the total context of the total Bible.

It is also important to understand something of this cultural and historical setting in which the writings of the Bible were given. The documents were composed thousands of years back — during times far removed from our own, when distinct countries dominated the globe, and when different customs and manners of living prevailed. None of us is born with a built in knowledge of those ancient times — we must take some opportunity to learn about them.

Luckily, there are a great number of resources available that can assist us in understanding the historical and cultural histories of the Bible — Bible research tools such as Bible Encyclopedias and Bible dictionaries can set the huge sources of biblical scholarship at our fingertips.

Get a Larger Perspective

As you study the Scriptures, attempt to relate the message and significance of a specific passage of the Bible into the overall message of that whole biblical book. You have to ask yourself questions such as — who wrote the book of Exodus? Who was the book of Exodus written to? Obtaining answers to those questions is critical to obtaining a proper understanding of exactly what the Bible is all about.

Use Great Tools

Again, not one of us is born with this information already packed inside of our mind — we will at some stage need to look up and research this backdrop utilizing different types of biblical reference tools — that means that part of your job as a serious Bible student will be to build up, over time, a tiny personal or household biblical reference catalog. It is not that you were hoping to develop into a "bookworm" — you should see these materials as tools, just as any painter or plumber or a electrician has their own set of resources which they will need to get the job done.