Resources for Bible Study

A lady friend at church has loaned, given, and passed along many study resources for me. One of them is a little book called How to Study the Bible, by Robert M. West. (Thanks, MaryAnn!) Good little book, covering some important topics...readying our hearts to study, various study methods, interpreting Scripture, and pitfalls (for example, a quote from David Cooper: "If the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense or it will result in nonsense.") His assertion that we always need to look at context, and not pull single verses out of their context, and that we always need to look at what the original author intended to say and mean, I thought was very good. Certainly a good reminder for our own studies.

At the end of this little book (it looks like one that you would find in a grocery store rack, small book) there is a list of Internet resources for Bible study, so I thought I would explore them a little. There are lots! And many of them are so exhaustive that you could easily spend days in each one.

So I thought I would report and pass along some of these resources to you, once or two at a time, and let you know about them.

This first one, bible.org is worth exploring. It has a study tool called Lumina, that gives notes on any Bible text, notes alongside the text about the original language (Greek, Hebrew) that looks pretty sophisticated, but which you might find useful for deep study. There is a section for Women's studies, and that looks very good, (bottom of opening page) adhering to the principles of Observation (What does it Say?), Interpretation (What does it mean?) and Application (How does it apply to me?) with a ton of different authors and study topics, both Old and New Testament. Some of these studies cover weeks, so it's not just light reading. At the bottom of the opening page, there is a link called "What's New" and that will lead you to sermons and writings, some of which are audio, so good to listen to while your hands are engaged (painting for me, knitting?, crocheting? for some of you, maybe)

I can't vouch for the doctrinal purity of all the content, but what I listened to and read seem spot on to me. I think you'll find it worth using.