Hank's Bible Study Resources

Part 7 of the series “Written For You, Not To You,” on the proper way to read the Bible.

We have spent six posts taking things away from you. You are not the hero. It is not your mail. That is not your promise. If that were the whole series, I would have done you a disservice, because a Bible you are afraid to touch is not much better than a Bible you misuse. So this last post is where I hand everything back, with interest. Because the same rules that stopped you from making the Bible about you are the rules that finally make it yours.

Here is the key. It is one sentence, and it changes how you read every page.

The Bible is one story, and it is about Jesus, and you are in it.

Jesus said this about His own Bible

This is not a clever framework I am laying over the text. It is what Jesus said the Old Testament was doing. On the road to Emmaus, walking with two heartbroken disciples who could not make sense of the cross, “beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” Luke 24:27. He did not give them a new set of verses. He took the whole Old Testament, the only Bible they had, and showed them it had been about Him the entire time.

He said it again to His opponents. “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, and these are they which testify of Me.” John 5:39. The word there for testify is martyreo (μαρτυρέω, G3140), to bear witness, the root behind our word martyr. The Scriptures are a witness on the stand, and the testimony they give, cover to cover, is Jesus.

So when you ask “how is this passage about me,” you have asked one question too soon. The first question is always “how is this passage about Him.” Find Christ first. Then, and only then, find yourself, because you are not the center of the story. You are something better. You are a person the center of the story came to rescue.

The story in four words

The whole library tells one story with four movements, and if you keep them in your head you will always know where you are standing on any given page.

Creation. God makes a good world and makes people to know Him. This is the world as it was meant to be.

Fall. People rebel, and everything breaks. Every ache in the Bible and in your life traces back here.

Redemption. God launches a rescue. He calls Abraham, forms Israel, sends prophets, and finally comes Himself in Jesus to do what no one else could. This is the largest movement, the one the whole Old Testament is straining toward and the whole New Testament is celebrating.

Restoration. God makes it all new. The end of the story is not an escape from the world but the healing of it. “Behold, I make all things new.” Revelation 21:5.

Every passage you open sits somewhere in that arc. When you read a psalm of grief, you are hearing the Fall ache toward Redemption. When you read a law, you are watching Redemption take shape in a people. When you read a promise, you are hearing Restoration break in early. Put the passage in the story, and it stops being a fragment and becomes a chapter.

A method you can use for the rest of your life

So let me give you something concrete, a simple order of questions to run on any passage. It gathers up everything in this series into a habit you can keep on a Tuesday morning with a cup of coffee and no seminary degree.

1. What did it mean to them? Who wrote it, to whom, about what. Read the whole book, read the introduction in a good study Bible, find the situation. This is the “to.” Never skip it.
2. What kind of writing is this? Narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, gospel, letter. Let the genre tell you how to take the words. Do not read a poem like a contract or a story like a command.
3. Is this describing or prescribing? Is the text showing you what happened, or telling you what should happen. Do not turn a description into a rule God never gave.
4. Where is this in the one story, and how does it point to Christ? Locate it in Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. Ask how it testifies to Jesus. Find Him before you look for yourself.
5. Now, in light of all that, what is God saying to me? This is the “for.” And notice, it comes last, not first. When you get here, having honored everything above it, the application you find will be real, because it will be the meaning God actually put in the text, not the one you brought and left behind.

That is it. Five questions. What did it mean to them, what kind of writing is it, is it describing or prescribing, how does it point to Christ, and now what is God saying to me. Run them in that order and you will read the Bible better than most people who have owned one their whole lives.

Why this makes it more personal, not less

You might have worried, somewhere back around post two or three, that all this care and context would put the Bible behind glass, turn your warm devotional book into a cold artifact for experts. I want to close by promising you the opposite, and I want you to feel why.

When you made every verse about you, the Bible was actually smaller than you knew. It was a book about your problems, your giants, your promotions, your fleeces, a mirror that could only ever show you yourself. But when you let it be about Him first, it opens into something vast, a true story that runs from the first light of creation to the healing of all things, and you discover that the God at the center of it stepped into the story, went into the exile you could not escape, fought the giant you could not beat, and wrote you into the ending in His own blood.

That is not less personal. That is the most personal thing in the universe. The maker of the stars knew you before you were born and moved heaven and earth to bring you home, and He left you a Book so you would know it, so you would know Him.

It was not written to you. You were reading someone else’s mail the whole time.

But God preserved every word of it for you. And when you read it His way, on His terms, about His Son, you will hear Him speak to you as clearly as He ever spoke to anyone.

That is the proper way to read the Bible. Not with yourself at the center, but with Christ at the center and yourself, at last, found.

Now go read it. It has been waiting for you the whole time.

Soli Deo Gloria.