Every genre found in the Bible presents unique challenges for understanding. Here are guidelines for studying epistles.

There are 2 consequences to our sin: 1) We experience death and futility. 2) Our rebellion is wrong and we now owe a debt to justice that must be paid. Justification is the payment of that debt.

Understanding the gospel means we must understand the problem that the gospel solves. While the word gospel means “good news,” understanding the gospel begins with bad news: death.

How do you know if you’ve successfully understood a passage of Scripture? Start by understanding and embracing these basic interpretative convictions.

After you’ve done your observation, word studies, outlining and answered the questions you generated, it’s time to start putting it all together. In this step, you want to collect, refine and organize all those details you observed into a coherent meaning.

The first step in Bible study is observation. The goal is to slow down your reading and generate a list of questions that must be answered to understand the passage. I tend to break observation into the following 4 steps which generally correspond to my first few readings through the passage.

You may have heard the “rule” in Bible Study that a text always means what the author intended it to mean. But how do you evaluate whether a particular interpretation hits the mark of authorial intent? You can test any interpretation with the five C’s.

When learning how to study the Bible, you’ve probably heard the expression “context is king”, meaning context is the arbitrator that rules a particular interpretation valid or not. But how do you use context to decide between possible interpretations?

Wondering how to put all the tools and pieces of Bible study together so that you can tackle a specific passage of Scripture? Here’s the overall procedure.

We use figurative language all the time: “I’ll have to face the music.” “I’m bored to tears.” “She has a green thumb.” “Don’t let the cat out of the bag.” “He died of embarrassment.” Biblical writers also used figurative language and vivid imagery. How are we to understand it?

Word studies are one of the basic tools of Bible study. With today’s tools, you don’t have to know Greek and Hebrew to do a good word study. Here’s how.