2: Three Steps to Effective Bible Study

(00:00) Stephanie: Here we go! Season 4, episode 2. Welcome back to On the Trail with Marcus and Stephanie Warner. We’re so happy you are here with us. I just want to remind you that if you want to stay up to date with every episode that we release as we’re launching our new season right now, make sure you’re subscribed on whatever platform of choice you listen to podcasts on. Welcome!

Hello, Father.

(00:47) Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to dive back into Bible study.

(00:51) Stephanie: I love it. I’m so excited! Bible study is a good thing. So last week we talked about the Bible’s bias and taking aim on the text, the importance of finding the author’s intended message.

This week we’re going to be setting the foundation for three steps to effective Bible study. And as you mentioned last week, we’re looking at a literary approach to the scripture with this 3-2-1 Bible study method. And we are going to continue unfolding some of these topics.

So right now we’re going to do a framework  because I think it’s really important for us to understand the context in which we’re talking about things. But don’t worry, we’ll take things deeper after this episode. So, Father, framework for effective Bible study – observation, interpretation, application.

(01:44) Marcus: Alright, so let me back up even one step further. 3-2-1 Bible Study Method is actually the name of a small book I wrote and the three, the two, and the one stand for the following: Three is what we’re talking about today. There are three steps to the Bible study method; there are two important principles; and then there is one checklist. We’re gonna be walking through today what those three steps are.

Now these three steps are not unique to me, I didn’t invent them. They’re pretty standard throughout the world in terms of how you study the Bible. But it’s good to know them and to have them clear in your mind. Step one is observation and when we talk about observation, this is where we talk about being a car mechanic or a detective.

And where the mechanic idea came from was, I am not good with cars. I can remember for years, I’d lift the front of the car, lift up… What do even call that? That’s the thing you, yeah, the hood. You lift up the hood. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So you’d lift that up, look down at the engine and I had no idea what I was looking at. Somebody said, “Well, check your carburetor.” I didn’t know which one of these things was the carburetor. I didn’t know which of these ports you put oil in. I mean, I was really bad.

And so one of the things I found is that if you don’t know what the world you’re looking at, it’s really hard to figure out the solutions of what the problems are. It’s really hard to go anywhere. So part of biblical study starts with just knowing what you’re looking at and you’ve got to do a certain amount of study before you begin to realize, “I know what I’m seeing here. This is an important word. I recognize this place, this is really key.”

And so what happens is the more you study, the more observations, the better the observations you’re able to make because you’re like, okay, I recognize this, I recognize this, I recognize this, I know what I’m looking at here. And it makes it easier, then, to figure out what you’re doing. But you gotta start somewhere, right? So even if it was my first time lifting the lid, the hood of the car, looking in the engine, it can be helpful to have a guide to say, “Well, this is what this thing is and that’s what this thing is.” But even if I don’t, some of it I can learn just by observing what’s going on.

And so I would say that the best Bible students are the ones who make the best observations. And that is, they’re really, really skilled at noticing what the clues are that the author has left behind in the text, and then recognizing how those fit together. That’s really what we’re after and that takes time to get there. That’s not something you just open up the Bible and do. But we start with observation.

Now here’s the good news. When you’re doing observation, the only wrong answer is something that’s not actually in the text. At least we can know that word was in there, so that’s a valid observation. So that’s where we start is observation.

(04:55) Stephanie: So while you’re reading, pay attention to clues for the author’s intended message. So we are going to unpack the checklist, the 3-2-1 checklist. That checklist is all about observations and giving you kind of a tool, but we’ll unpack that later. If you want to address any of them now, feel free, Father, but we’ll address that later. What are some of the basic principles of observation, aside from ‘that word is there’?

(05:20) Marcus: Yes, basic principles of observation is that you’re looking for certain things and that’s what the checklist is for and so I’m just going to walk through it because the word is STORIES. The checklist is on the word STORIES. I originally developed this as a checklist for interpreting narrative passages because traditionally narratives are the hardest passages to come up with what’s the meaning?

It’s a little easier to know, what’s Paul trying to tell me in this letter? That’s a little easier than, what is the meaning of this story and why it is the author’s intended purpose and message here. And so the idea of STORIES was that you pay attention to the Speeches because a lot of times the author doesn’t just tell you what the meaning is, but he’ll put it in the mouth of the character. So you pay attention to the speeches.

The T is Terms. Are there key terms like, I see ‘land’ getting used a lot here and I see ‘seed’ getting used a lot and I see, ‘I will be your God and you will be my people.’ There are terms that are getting used a lot and so I pay attention to, are there theological terms that are important to this? And then O is the Order. That has to do with the arrangement of how the author has ordered the material.

R is Repetition. And I love what my former pastor used to say about this, “Repetition is God’s highlighter.” It’s God’s way of saying, “Pay attention to this.” He’s repeated it multiple times. So I want to pay attention when things are repeated. Then I is for Introductions and conclusions, things like that. The author will often tell you a clue to what he’s doing in the introduction or in the conclusion to a story. So paying attention to how he sets things up and how he wraps things up is important.

And then finally, the last S has to do with Shifts that the author, well, I skipped one. E is Edits. And that takes a little more explanation but every now and then, the author will kind of break that fourth plane like they do in some TV shows or movies where they don’t just talk to each other. They turn and they talk directly to you. We call that an editorial comment where the author is writing about this story and they’ll say, “And by the way, when I’m talking about Bethel, that used to be called Luz. Okay, now back to the story.”

And so he’ll make these comments so we want to pay attention. If the author has taken the time to break away from the story, to talk directly to me, I want to pay attention to that. And then finally is Shifts, and that’s a shift in genre. Genre, like did he go from a poem to a genealogy to a story to a speech? Know what shifts have happened. Did he shift locations? Are we in Mesopotamia now or are we in Egypt? Did we move from this part of Israel to another part of Israel?

There are all kinds of different shifts that the author will introduce points of view, so all of these things you learn to go, “Okay, these are the kinds of things I need to make observations about.” And then there are other sets of observations specifically for poetry, specifically for epistles, and things like this which we can get into.

But the idea here once again is that, just like an expert mechanic can open up the hood of the car and know exactly what he’s looking at and go, “I recognize that, I recognize this, I recognize that,” his or her ability to make good observations is the foundation of everything else. And it’s the same whether you’re a doctor, whether you’re a scientist, whether you’re a lawyer. In almost every field, the ability to make good observations is the starting point. No different with Bible study.

(09:11) Stephanie: Tangentially, it reminds me, in writing circles, we say you can’t edit a blank page. We need to have our observations. We need to write in order to start making the interpretive conclusions or applications. So awesome.

On that note, second step, interpretation. So we’re asking questions about our observations, doing more research or praying through it and things like that. You take it away.

(09:36) Marcus: So when you get to the interpretive part of this, the core question is ‘why?’ It’s like, “Okay I’ve made these observations. Now, why are they there? Why did he do this? Why is it written this way? What’s going on here?” So let me say this: interpretation and translation are fundamentally the same thing because what’s happening is the author wrote in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic to an audience at a particular place in time in the past. The more we know about those languages, the more we know about that place in time, the more we know about that audience, the better the translation is going to be.

And so interpretation is an extension of the translation process, because when I’m translating, I’m trying to get across the author’s intended message, “This is what the author was trying to say here.” Interpretation just continues that and says,”What was the author trying to say here? How do I pick that up?” The key to this is observations and some of these observations are honestly behind a curtain to most people. And that is, they don’t know the original languages. They don’t know the atlas, like the back of their hand. They don’t know about the cultures of the ancient world.

And so that’s one of the things that scholars can bring to the table. They can help the average person who doesn’t have access to those things get them. That’s why Bible study tools can be so helpful. Like, “What is the Hebrew word here? What does that mean?” But even if a lot of that is behind the curtain to us, the good news is that just by asking the question, “Why did the author include this and not that? Why did the author order it this way? Why is the author doing things the way they are?” Some of this is a little bit of common sense and you can often see where the author’s trying to take you.

And so that’s what you’re fundamentally trying to do with interpretation. The deep, deep dive in interpretation is that it’s an extension of the translation process. I want to understand exactly all of those things. But to the extent that those are hidden from me, I need to do research, I need to do study. But the good news is I can get part of the way there and sometimes accurately where I need to be just from what I have in my English text and asking the question why is it put in the way that it is?

(12:12) Stephanie: I’m so glad you brought up translations. I think that’s huge. It’s part of why I went to get my master’s in biblical studies because I didn’t want somebody else’s translation between me and the text. I wanted to wrestle with it myself and try to interpret that translation myself. But even if you aren’t wrestling with the original languages themselves, this is why you have so many editions, so many translations of the Bible.

So if you just think, in English, how many translations there are of the Bible, I would encourage you find an index of where on the scale of, we’re taking this translation super literally to we’re taking this translation more paraphrased. They’re trying to get the author’s intended message through, but not necessarily using the literal word to word translation. There’s kind of a scale. And so if you’re wanting to do some Bible study, see which Bibles fall on what part of the scale, and then compare them as you’re doing your Bible study. That is one way that you can go about your interpretations.

(13:27) Marcus: Right. The basic thing that helped me understand this is, there are two main reasons why there are so many different versions of the Bible in English. The first one is just money. The Bible is the best selling book in the world and every publishing company wants its own version. But once you get past that more monetary motivation, the other is that each translation has a different philosophy of what it’s trying to accomplish and that’s what you’re getting at.

There are a lot of new translations since then, but it used to be, the NIV was written at a sixth grade vocabulary. The NASV was written for a senior in high school. It’s like, how simple is this? The NIV was written for public reading of scripture so that it would be easier for everybody to understand what was going on in one reading. The New Living Translation is much more of a, let’s just get the concepts. It’s a concept for concept translation.

The closer you get to the New American Standard, New King James, they try to be more word for word as much as possible. So it really does depend on what you’re after and understanding what the philosophy of the translation was. There are a lot of podcasts and things out there that cover this sort of thing.

(14:52) Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll let us keep moving. Third step is application. So the goal of the application process is to provide practical guidance for life. Could you unpack honestly? Well, okay. You can say whatever you want to say about application, but then I thought we could also talk about the ‘then-always-now’.

(15:13) Marcus: Sure. So the application obviously is what do I do with this? How does this affect the way that I live? Not every verse of the Bible is gonna lead you directly to an application, and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s enough just to be in the process of pondering and unpacking and living with all this stuff. And you don’t always have to do all three steps every time you sit down and study the Bible, but it’s good to know where you’re headed.

And so when it comes to this, I had a professor at seminary named Grant Osborne, and he taught this real simple model of application. It started with, What was the message to the original audience? So we call that ‘then’. Back then, when it was written, what was he trying to say to that audience? If we can figure that out, that’s step one. And that’s what we’re doing in the interpretive process. What was his message to that audience?

Then we ask what’s the universal message to all people that grows out of that? So if that’s the message to them, how does that apply to everybody in every situation? What is the universal principle? And then the idea is now bring it to me, right now, in the present, in my situation, how does this universal principle apply to what I am facing in my life?

So that’s why we talk about ‘then, always, and now’. What did it mean then to the original audience? What did this always mean to everybody everywhere? And specifically in this situation. Because you think about it, sometimes I’m trying to apply it to my life. Sometimes I’m trying to apply it to a particular situation that maybe the ministry’s facing or our church is facing. Sometimes it has to do with culture.

Sometimes it has to do with other things. So the ‘now’ isn’t just about me. It can be about something that’s going on in the contemporary world in which we live and I need to figure out how does this apply. And that’s really also where the Holy Spirit I think is very much involved in all three things, right? He helps us notice what we need to at the observation level. He can speak to our hearts about the core meaning of this that he needs us to recognize.

And then he can help us to see how it applies and where we need to be looking for an application in our current world, whether that’s to me personally at a heart level or whether that’s to my family, whether it’s my church, whether it’s the culture. All of those things are possible application points.

(17:53) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, and I feel like it’s important to note, too. One of my professors in seminary had an engineering background, and I loved how he hammered through going through a process very similar to this, the importance of not losing the foundations as you move to the next stage, right? So you observed something, and now you’re interpreting it. Make sure you’re interpreting what you observed.

And now you’ve made these interpretations and you’re making an application, make sure your application is actually rooted in what you interpreted and that you aren’t just saying, “Hey, I did all of this work and now I’m gonna say what feels right.” You know, being careful.

(18:34) Marcus: Yeah, you know, it’s sort of a pet peeve of mine, shall I say, or just an observation growing up in the church. Because of the family I grew up in, because of the education that I got, it was really easy to see when pastors were making mistakes in their interpretation. And it felt like a typical sermon I would listen to had a pretty good application. There’s nothing wrong with the application. It just really didn’t grow out of the text.

And I got used to that, like, okay, I can live with this, I guess. But it made me want to, once I became a pastor, once it was on me to do this, to make sure that I was showing what the original message was so that I understood that this application does grow directly out of this process. So I agree. You’ve got to anchor each step in the one before.

(19:28) Stephanie: Yeah, and we’ll get to this again, I’m sure. But just the warning. There’s a temptation, and sometimes it’s done completely out of ignorance, of coming with a pre-thought, “Hey, I have this idea in my head. I want the Bible to now prove it.” We call that eisegesis versus exegesis, which, big words.

(19:51) Marcus: Yes, eisegesis, exegesis. Eisegesis: ‘eis’ means ‘into’. I’m reading something into the text, and ‘ex’ is ‘out of’. I’m reading out of, I’m trying to pull out of the text what is there and so that’s the author’s intended message. It’s exegesis, right? I want to pull out the author’s intended message. I don’t want to read in the preferred application or message I want.

(20:05) Stephanie: And I don’t say this to spread shame or fear on people who are doing Bible study. It’s just an awareness. This is something, as we are learning and as we are practicing going through how can we apply these and get as faithful to the text as we can? And it’s a fun little adventure with God as he says, “Did you see this? Did you see that? This is what I want to tell you.” It’s awesome.

Okay, I’m gonna take a little bit longer. Dad, I love it when you talk about how this three-step model can also be a way that you could easily lead a Bible study. Would you talk about that?

(21:09) Marcus: Yes, when I originally wrote the book 3-2-1 Bible Study Method, it was for small group leaders and it was to try to help them feel a little more confident in handling the Bible. One of the first lessons in there is that if you understand observation, interpretation, application, you can, without any preparation, walk your group through the study of any text in scripture. Because the first round of questions that you ask are observation questions like: What do you see? In this text that looks like it’s important to you?

So there’s literally no wrong answers here as long as it’s actually in the text. And it’s a great way to get the people talking to get them in there like, “I noticed this, it could be important.That kind of stood out to me.” As long as it’s there, it’s a great way to get people involved in the conversation.

Then you go to interpretation: Why do you think of the things that we notice that were in there? Why do you think that the author would have put that in there? What kind of comes to mind as to what you think they might have been where they might be taking us? And so now you’re asking opinion questions, but you’re still creating engagement, getting people there.

And then finally, it’s application: Out of what we’ve discussed so far, do you feel like the Holy Spirit’s got something jumping out at you that he really would like you to do as a next step here? And voila, you’ve just led a very successful little Bible study.

A lot of people feel like they’ve got to already have done all of the exegesis, and they’ve got to present it, and they’ve got to guide people to the correct application, and that’s called a sermon. You can do that, but in a Bible study when you’re trying to get group involvement, this is actually a great model for doing that.

(22:57) Stephanie: Huzzah! I love it. Simple and effective. It’s like how Jesus is our wonderful counselor. He does the heavy lifting.

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All right, Father, final thoughts on observation, interpretation, application.

(23:44) Marcus: Yeah, you know, this is probably the most basic approach to Bible study there is. I still use it today, right? It’s still the thing that guides me through here. Let’s make good observations. Let’s pay attention to what’s here. Let’s dive into the interpretive process of where does it seem like the author is taking me here? And then at each step I’m praying, “God, what do you want me to see? How do you want me to understand this? Where are you trying to take me on my journey in terms of the application?”

And so by including conversational prayer throughout the process, it’s also just a really wonderful, simple way to do your own personal devotional study of scripture. And that is, walk through observation, interpretation, and application, talking to God throughout it, and paying attention to what jumps out at you.

(24:37) Stephanie: So important. Thank you.