Four Mistakes I Was Making with Bible Study and How Not to Make Them

Reading out of literary Context is the one mistake that, if corrected, would make the most significant difference in how people understand and interpret scripture. We live in a world of coffee-mug Bible verses, verses of the day, and scripture art. While I don’t have a problem with any of these things, when we only know a single verse without knowing any of its context, we can easily misunderstand it. Read at least some of the passages surrounding the one passage you are studying to get an idea of what is going on in the overall picture.

I read through my own cultural lens. After literary context, this is probably the second biggest mistake we can make. Reading something written over thousands of years by multiple people from diverse cultures requires effort. We must understand that the books and letters of the Bible were written to a specific audience in a particular situation and culture. If we take some time to understand more about the history and culture, we can make a better interpretation. My favorite beginner’s resource for this is The Complete Bible Guide by Stephen M. Miller.

Making it all about me–what do I get out of this? My understanding of the Bible was that it was a “guidebook,” so to speak. It was written to help me make all the right decisions for my life and overcome my problems. Before the internet, if there was a struggle I was trying to overcome, such as fear, I would go to the strong’s concordance or the concordance in the back of my Bible and look up “fear” and then read all the verses about fear. What happened is that going back to the first mistake, I was reading out of context. I was missing vital information to help me better understand how to apply the particular verse to my life. I would quote all these verses about fear and wonder why I still lived in fear. If I had read the context, I would often have seen instructions or promises before or after the verse that would encourage me or give me a way to deal with the fear.

It’s not wrong to go to the Bible for guidance in specific areas of your life. But if this is the only way you read the Bible, I want to challenge you to try something new. Choose a shorter book of the Bible, such as Philippians, or one of the other shorter epistles/letters. Read it all the way through in one sitting and ask one question: What does this tell me about God?

Relying on limited interpretations–my own and others‘. I relied heavily on what I had been taught by other people and my own thoughts about what I read. Relying on teachers is not necessarily a bad thing, but when we learn from people who all hold the same views, whatever mistakes they’re making work to form wrong perspectives and interpretations in our minds. When I read scripture, I would already have in mind what had been taught to me thus far, and I would have my own experiences and cultural lenses to view things through. Reading widely across denominations and traditions, cultures, and times helps us to catch strange ideas that may have come about because of culture. When we see things consistent throughout church history, those are the things we can be more sure are reasonable interpretations.