Reading and Understanding the Bible

August 26, 2025
  1. The article below is a short extract from the Crosslands Foundation course, Reading and Understanding the Bible.  The full course covers:
  2. Reading with understanding
  3. Reading wisely
  4. Reading biblically
  5. Understanding epistles 1
  6. Understanding epistles 2
  7. Understanding Gospels 1
  8. Understanding Gospels 2
  9. Understanding Psalms
  10. Application:  hearing and doing

On one occasion Jesus was speaking to the religious leaders of his day.  It’s recorded for us in John’s Gospel, chapter 5.  Jesus was rebuking their attitude to the Scriptures, and he said in verses 39 and 40:

‘You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.’

Here were people who were studying the Scriptures  –  what we call the Old Testament  –  with great devotion.  They read them often.  They read them with great care.  But strangely Jesus doesn’t congratulate them.  He doesn’t say, “Well done for reading the Bible so much!  I wish more people read it all the time, like you do.”  Instead he criticises them.  And he criticises them because they’re reading Scripture looking for the wrong thing.  They’re reading the Bible looking for eternal life.  That sounds good, but what they’re really looking for in the Bible is things they can do, commands they can keep, so that they can say to themselves, “I know I’ve got eternal life because I’ve kept all those commandments.”  “Where you’re going wrong,” says Jesus, “is that you won’t see that the Scriptures testify about me  –  that the Bible is really all about me, that God has given you the Bible so that you can see me in it and come to me and abide in me.”

So it’s possible for us to devote ourselves to reading and understanding the Bible, and yet completely miss the point.  We’ll miss it if we don’t see that God’s purpose in giving us the Bible is to give us Christ, and to keep us in Christ.  That shows us what our motivation ought to be, when we spend time learning to read the Bible better and understand it more deeply.  Our motivation ought to be:  Christ  –  knowing him more deeply, remaining in him with greater perseverance, serving him with deeper devotion.

That thought might lead us to think of someone in the New Testament Gospels who is a better example:  Mary, the sister of Martha, who we hear about in Luke ch.10.  Martha had invited Jesus into her home, and she was rushing around seeing to all the practical arrangements that needed to be made to look after her guest.  Her sister Mary, though, just sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his words.  Martha is upset:  “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself?  Tell her to help me!”

Jesus did care for Martha, but not in the way she wanted at that moment.  “Martha, Martha”, he said.  “You are worried and upset about many things, but few are needed  –  or indeed only one.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

In making the time to study this ‘Reading and Understanding the Bible’ module, you may well have had to put aside many other tasks that could have filled your time.  But at heart what you’re doing  –  like Mary  –  is devoting yourself to Jesus and to his words.  And in doing that, Jesus says, you’ve chosen a very good thing.

So let’s just be aware for a moment of other motivations that might float around in someone’s heart when they sign up for a module on ‘reading and understanding the Bible’.  Someone might want to take this module so that they can impress other people in church with their Bible knowledge.  They might take it so that they can say clever-sounding things when they lead a Bible study.  They might take it so that they can preach a sermon that prompts people to say what a great Bible-interpreter they are.  The seeds of those kinds of motivations can begin to grow in all of our hearts.  But I trust that the strongest motivation in our hearts is simply…  Christ.  It’s him we love most of all, and he says that Scripture testifies to him, so that’s why we want to devote ourselves to understanding Scripture.  We love the Bible because we love Christ and he says we’ll find him in the Bible.

One last introductory thought:  Psalm 119 is the longest of all the Psalms and it’s all about God’s word.  The second verse says:  ‘Blessed are those who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart.’  The two halves of that verse are not about two different things but are two side of the same coin.  When we are keeping the Lord’s statutes, knowing and understanding and obeying his word, we are seeking him with all our heart.

Doctrines of Scripture

We often misuse things when we don’t understand what they really are.  A young child who starts playing with a mobile phone is misusing it because they wrongly think it’s a toy.  Someone who wants to read the Bible well needs first of all to understand what the Bible is.  If we don’t grasp properly just what the Bible is, we are likely to misuse it in the way we read it and interpret it.

Through Christian history, some basic ways of describing what the Bible is have emerged.  They are called ‘doctrines’ of Scripture, that is, teachings about the nature of the Bible.  In the rest of unit one we’ll think about the most important ones:

  • The Bible is God’s inspired word
  • The Bible is God’s sufficient word
  • The Bible is God’s clear word
  • The Bible is the word of the Father, the Son and the Spirit

The words we have in the Bible come from the Father, who shared them with the Son, who gave them to the Spirit, who received them faithfully and passed them on to the apostles, who wrote them down.  That’s how thoroughly ‘from God’ the Bible is.