In the next three posts I felt I should explain what I said in Part 2 about methods of Bible study a bit more, since I’m going against conventional wisdom. To remind you, I said that for most people the best way to understand the Bible was to read it slowly over and over again taking big chunks at a time. This is instead of a) picking the Bible apart sentence by sentence, b) picking your favorite word and doing a Bible study on that, or c) reading a small bit of the Bible every day.

When you think about the Bible remember that it is over 30,000 verses long and written by all different kinds of people in all different kinds of settings. Then think about how long it takes to read those 30,000 verses. How long does it take the average Christian to read those 30,000 verses? One year? Two years? I would guess the average Christian would read the Bible once every three to five years. That means that the person is encountering each verse once every three to five years, for say ten seconds. From this you can see the difficulty of trying to understand the Bible by studying it sentence by sentence. It would take hundreds of years to do it that way, but which time you would have forgotten most of what you studied. That either means that you think the other sentences aren’t relevant or you have such a good grip on the whole Bible that you are ready to study it on a deeper level. The last option is perfectly fine, but I don’t know anyone personally who could say this.

To be continued…