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<\/a><\/p>\nIf you are reading your resources on Kindle or the like, and you cannot take notes and highlight things IN THE TEXT which you can come back to later and do some more reflection on, then you may not be serious enough about how you read the Bible and its contextual resources. These are pages from the book on the Canon which I reviewed in yesterday\u2019s post.\u00a0 \u00a0I have a system of underlining, bracketing, key pointing, and page number circling to make it easy to come back to later.\u00a0 I would not say Kindle is all bad, but it does make things more difficult to do serious study of the Bible and to find things\u2014 kind of like Bible for Kindle-garten students :).\u00a0 \u00a0Save Kindle for pleasure reading.<\/p>\n
The next thing to say about serious study of the Bible is you need a good lexicon, a dictionary of Biblical terms.\u00a0 Bible Dictionaries in general are helpful tools, but they are not lexicons and preferably you need a Greek (and Hebrew) Lexicon or two. The Greek one I now recommend is the massive one published by Brill, assembled by Montanari (and yes the entries are in English).<\/p>\n
I hope you are beginning to get the idea that while a BSF approach to studying the Bible is o.k. as a starting point, it\u2019s not a good approach if you want to advance in your study of the text.\u00a0 In general deductive study, standing on the shoulders of those who have come before and studied well is better than inductive study of the Bible, which usually begins with your own impressions or thoughts about the Bible.\u00a0 At this point I\u2019m happy with most any approach that makes Christians less Biblically illiterate, at least knowing what the Bible says, if not yet much about what it means, but no one should want to stop at that level of study.\u00a0 \u00a0 The good news about things like BSF is that you study God\u2019s Word as a group, so you are pooling human thoughts about the Bible not just your own.\u00a0 It is then up to the group leader who studies the Bible using good resources to make sure the session doesn\u2019t just become a sharing of various sorts of ignorance or uncorrected misperceptions about the Bible.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve probably said enough for one post, but I would remind all the readers that you are exhorted by the Bible itself to \u2018study to find yourselves approved\u2019 and study so you can not merely know the truth, and be set free by it, but obey the truth as well, and oh yes\u2013 share the truth with others.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While it is certainly can be true that reading the Bible can produce joy and other positive emotions, the Bible was not written for mere pleasure reading, like reading a summer novel by Grisham. As Ps. 119 makes clear, the Bible is meant for serious reading\u2014 but what does that look like?\u00a0 \u00a0Especially what does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":59156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13721],"class_list":["post-59150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-study-to-find-yourself-approved"],"yoast_head":"\n
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