I’ve been posting about using digital tools and we started talking about commentaries. Here’s the rub: there are a whole mess of Bible commentaries.
It’s not enough that we have the printing press and modern theologians writing a whole mess of them; we also have 2,000 years of church history filled with commentaries.
First take a glance at the multifaceted corruptive flesh-system on its own. You have unbelievers who are more noble-minded when it comes to the Gospel (like the Bereans) then you’d have others who are outright enemies of righteousness (Saducees). You have some that are very zealous for God but not according to knowledge (like many of the Pharisaic Jews) and some that are zealously sinful but by ignorance (like Paul). Then you have others who say they can see but are blind (the group in John 9) and yet others who take a wait and see approach (like Gamaliel). All of these are rightfully merely human souls. They are acting of their own wide range of wisdom, according to God’s common grace, but all are naturally fallen and thus utterly lost in their foolishness.
Neither is more fallen than the other. Neither is more mature in their falleness than the other. Sure, some of their sins are more numerable and heinous than the other—so that some who are saved will say that there was much forgiven—but none of them, by their mere activity, pop into the Church as Christians by Self-Action.
Second, note how good the assembly at Corinth looked:
Every now and then I like posting something incisive that was written in the past because it speaks so well into the present. The sweet thing about this is that these guys, who are often waved away today, have dealt with a lot of the same issues while remaining simultaneously (by the modern mind) ignored. This one comes from the Warfield.
I’ve been posting about using digital tools to aid in a Bible Study. I’ve repeatedly mentioned reading the Bible, and that’s no different at this point where I want to merely state (without substantiating it very much—really can’t do all that in under five hundred words) that you should be using commentaries.
I’ve been highlighting tools that can be used to do an effective Bible Study and so far we’ve underscored reading the text. Repeatedly. And taking notes while reading. But now I want to highlight how a person might want to examine the meanings of words.
One of your better tools is the English dictionary. If you’re using the KJV, this winds up being more difficult but the point here is that words mean something and sometimes our misreading can be predicated on what we think a word means.
Sometimes, folk want to see the meaning of the original language by examining a word, like the word love or church (for example).
I don’t think that this is the best way for most of us to study the Bible.