For the last month or so we have blogged through Fee and Stuart’s book, How To Read The Bible For All It’s Worth. The foundational lessons that Fee and Stuart provide are very helpful in studying God’s Word, which is valuable beyond description. Above all helps that Fee and Stuart provide, our greatest need in [...]

The Nature of Revelation: The hermeneutical problems are intrinsic. The book is in the canon; thus it is God’s Word, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Yet when we come to hear that Word, most of us in the church today hardly know what to make of it. At the same time, however, there is a [...]

The Nature of Wisdom: Three Old Testament books are commonly know as wisdom books. Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Job. Also a number of Psalms can be included into this category. Finally, there is the Song of Songs, also commonly called the Song of Solomon.  All of these books contain a great deal of material considered to [...]

The Psalms are a collection of inspired Hebrew prayers and hymns. The fact that the Psalms are often appended to copies of the New Testament and that they are used so often in worship and meditation has given this particular book a certain prominence. Yet despite the fact that they are well known, they are [...]

The Nature of the Prophecy: More individual books of the Bible come under the heading of prophecy than any other heading. Four major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel) and twelve minor prophets (the final twelve books of the Old Testament), written between about 760 and 460 BC. The first mistake that most of us make [...]

What the Law is: The Old Testament contains over six hundred commandments, all of which are contained within four books; Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. While Genesis does not contain any of these commandments it is also considered to be part of the law. The largest problem for most Christians in reading and studying this [...]

The Parables in History: Parables have suffered misinterpretation second only to Revelation. One of the keys to understanding them, however, lies in discovering who the original audience to whom they were spoke; although many times they did come down to the evangelist without a context. It’s not that Jesus was trying to be obtuse; he [...]

The Nature of the Gospels: Gospels may be divided roughly into sayings and narratives, that is, teachings of Jesus and stories about Jesus. Theoretically you should be able to use the principles of studying the Epistles for the one and the principles for historical narratives for the others. Having said this we need to look [...]

Acts: An Overview The exegesis of Acts includes historical questions like, what happened? But also the theological ones such as, why did Luke select and shape the text in this way? When reading Acts you must think paragraphs, like in the Epistles, but also move beyond that to think whole narratives and sections of the [...]

The Nature of Narratives: Over 40 percent of the Old Testament is narratives and since the Old Testament constitutes three-quarters of the bible it is no surprise that the single most common type of literature in the entire bible is narrative. Narratives are basically stories. Stories that we refer to as God’s story—a story that [...]