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In this podcast episode, Dr. Steve Posey discusses the three main parts of studying a book of the Bible: survey, analysis, and synthesis. The survey gives an overall view of the book, analysis focuses on interpretation, and synthesis involves summarizing the main points. To avoid being overwhelmed by details, it is helpful to pay attention to chapter divisions and use cross-reference Bibles and Bible dictionaries for additional understanding. The ultimate goal is to understand how God has worked in the lives of individuals and in the history of Israel, leading up to the coming of the Messiah. This is Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. I'm your host, Tom Terry, and in this podcast, we'll be exploring the various ways of doing Bible study so that you can get the most out of your time when studying God's Word. Our guest for this eight-week series on basic Bible study is Dr. Steve Posey. He's an instructor with International Leadership University. Dr. Posey teaches Bible study methods and conducts other training for crew staff all across Africa. He is with us for our concluding episode of Rightly Divided to help you get a firm grasp on how to study the Bible according to its various types of genre. For this episode, we'll be talking about how to do book studies. Let's get started, Steve, with describing the basics in a brief description. What are the three main parts of studying a book of the Bible? Well, the three main parts are survey, analysis, and synthesis. Interestingly enough, if you remember, Tom, way back in the beginning of our little series, we talked about inductive Bible study, which was observation, interpretation, application. And survey would be very similar to observation. Analysis is basically interpretation, and synthesis is basically application. You put it all together and say, here's what it means, what does it mean for me? So we're back to where we started. We're back to where we started in the first eight-week show. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's been a great show today. Thank you very much for listening, and just go back and listen to episode one. Okay. I think we've got to do a little bit more than that, Tom. Okay. All right. So you've got the three. Okay. So a brief description of what each one is. I guess you've kind of done that. Yeah. You've alluded to inductive study. Basically, the survey is getting the overall view. Right. It's what I call a bird's-eye view from 10,000 feet. If you fly in airplanes, it's a view from 30,000 feet. Yeah. But a bird's-eye view is enough, because we're talking about a single book. We're not talking about the whole Bible. Yeah. That's the survey portion, which is essentially taking a look at, what do I have here in my hand, so to speak, when I'm looking at this book? What is it all about? We'll talk some more about that later in the other questions. And then in analysis, we could almost use what we said before, as I've already said. What does it mean? Why was this book written? To whom was it written? Why did they need it? What events took place to cause it? Isn't that part of observation? Well, not really. Observation is just, what do I see there? Okay. Whereas this, in analysis, I begin to ask, well, why did they write this? Because I'm going to step into that interpretive type of mode, where I'm going to say, oh, so he had this going on, so he wrote this in answer to it, so that means this. That's the interpretation aspect of it. Okay. Yeah. And so as we come to the synthesis portion, we basically write a summary or a synopsis of what we found in the book. Very important. Not only did we see, but what do we think we saw its meaning, and that summary tells us what we got out of the book. And with that, then we're able to make the application portion, which is the synthesis portion. Okay. In many of the books of the Bible, from narratives or whatever you're looking at, there's a lot of information to take in. Sometimes, just a few decades may be represented in a single book, like Samuel or the Book of Acts, but in some books, like the Kings and Chronicles, hundreds of years are involved in those stories. So how can you get a fuller idea of what these books are trying to communicate without being overwhelmed by the details? Right. Well, there's a thing that each of these books have, and that is a thing called chapters. And people have read them. The chapters weren't in the books when they originally were written, and neither were the paragraphs in that sense, but the sentences were. And so we have these chapters, and that tells us these chapter divisions, and that tells us, as people have read this and scholars have looked at it, they see that we've moved from X to Y, and now we're in a different chapter. Some of those chapters are very closely related. Some of them, all of a sudden, you jump ahead 10 years or 20 years or 50 years, especially in the Old Testament. Whereas, for example, in the book of Acts, as you said, that covers decades of the life of Paul and Luke and Barnabas as they're out there spreading the gospel. It covers decades, and so we have to be attentive to that fact. And yet, basically what you begin to see is Luke, the author of Acts, divides up the book, and I wasn't planning on saying this, he divides up the book into six portions, and he ends each portion with a specific saying, and the church grew and many were added to it. And then he moves on to a new one, and so that helps you to understand what you're doing. And in any book, as you're reading, you just let the common sense of what the book is saying direct your thoughts. You don't come with this, oh, wow, what's going to be here that I haven't looked for. You come with, I want to understand what he's talking about. And for example, in the book of Ephesians, Paul is speaking to certain issues that are in the church in Ephesus, and those issues have been building over a few years, but the issues are what he's focusing upon and how that affects the lives of those believers. Okay, so when I read, let's say, Chronicles or Kings, you've got a ton of stories there about all these different rulers, and each one, it seems to me, they're trying to communicate a certain point or a certain truth by illustrating the life of that leader. But then, of course, at the same time, it seems to me that there's an overall truth or principle that they're trying to communicate as a whole. How do you divine what that is? Well, I think the first thing is what you've said is very important. Each person that's being investigated, we're learning something about that person. And we said before in one of our other sessions that we want to find out about the character qualities of that person, and we want to find out what his or her character is, and how God stepped into the midst of that and utilized that character or modified that character or went against that character if this person was an evil person. Well, the writer of, for example, 1 Kings, he wants us to get a flow of what God is doing in the history of his country, Israel. And he wants to show how God has raised up people and entered into the midst of their lives into the, as we used to say, down into the nitty-gritty of where they live and how he interrupted their lives in the positives and if they were evil people in the negatives. And so the idea is what that one, what that author wants you to know is how God has worked in the life of Israel through the history of these individuals. Now, when I look to the New Testament and I see that Jesus talks about how Moses and the other writers wrote about him, and then you see that in Luke on the Emmaus Road, he teaches them, he opens the scriptures to them about what was written concerning himself. Now if I look at the Old Testament apart from the New Testament and don't think of it with a goal for Christ, aren't I not going to interpret something maybe wrongly or make a mistake without mixing the upcoming of the Messiah into that mix, if I can say that correctly? Well, you're way ahead of me there, Tom, because that's true. In the buildup to understanding who the Messiah was and how he would come to this earth, remember we go back to the Abrahamic covenant and God has promised through Abraham to bless not only Israel, but the world, and he's going to bless the world through a Messiah. Bit by bit, the Jewish people and scholars begin to understand how God and prophets begin to understand how God was going to bring that Messiah into place. Now Paul tells us that we get to understand, New Testament people, we get to understand what the prophets didn't even understand. They knew they were pointing forward to a person, but they didn't know who, and they didn't have all of the details. We now have the details. So when I say that, as I said earlier, that the writer of that Old Testament book is utilizing these historical figures to show how God is working, I include in that the thought of how God is preparing Israel and the world for the Messiah. Okay. Let's use some narrative as an example. What kind of things do we need to look at in history to help us study a book of narrative, like say 1 Kings or perhaps Acts? What do we need to have that's outside of the Bible to help us gain understanding? Well, probably a very helpful tool would be a Bible, a cross-reference Bible. It's not outside of the Bible, but make sure you've got a cross-reference Bible because that's going to tell you other passages that speak to what this passage is speaking to. And there are basic different types of cross-references. Let me just say what those are. First, you have the pure cross-reference, which says exactly the same thing as the verse that you're looking at. So you go to that other cross-reference verse and you say, well, that's exactly what it just said. Now you have the illustrative cross-reference verse, which is a verse that illustrates what the verse you're looking at says. And in history, it illustrates what that history was. And so that's very helpful. But you also have a contrasting cross-reference, which says something exactly the opposite of what you were looking at. But in so doing, it shows you and helps you to understand better what you're looking at because it's the exact opposite, contrary contrast. So we use those cross-reference Bibles, that'd be first. Then I would say a Bible dictionary. One of the most famous, at least in the English language, is Unger's Bible dictionary. Another one would be the Wycliffe Bible dictionary. Those are two very great reference tools. They will give you insights into situations that you find in a narrative account. They will give you insights a bit into the culture that was surrounding the people and that type of thing. So very important. Bible encyclopedias, that's more in-depth than a Bible dictionary, and they'll have topics that they'll talk about which can relate to an entire narrative that you're viewing. Another thing that is very good, but you want to do this last, is a commentary. That's where a person who's scholarly and understands the Scriptures speaks to the specific passage at which you are looking. And that's very good. The only problem being now you have that person's thought, his or her thoughts, and you need to be careful about that. They can sway you. They can be very persuasive. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you want to make sure that that balances out with what you're learning as you look directly at the Scriptures by itself. Another good thing, if you're not a very big fan of, let's say, geography, is to get yourself a Bible atlas. So that way you'll know that Philippi, to whom the book of Philippians was written, the people in Philippi, the church in Philippi, isn't in Africa. It lies in Greece. And so, you know, the Bible atlas really helps you to see things. For example, the book of Ephesians, written to the believers in Ephesus, very important city. But where was it? Well, it's right on, if you will, the shore of Asia Minor, which is today Turkey, right across the Aegean Sea from Greece. And it was a primary Roman city. If you will, the Roman road went through Ephesus. So it is a very strategic place. So all of those things help you understand a little bit of the context. We've talked about this before, but context is so important in a narrative. What is the context in which we see this person doing this? And what is the context in which the history is told to us? Okay, well, let me do a little bit of a plug here for PreachItTeachIt.org. A lot of the resources that you just talked about are available for free on PreachItTeachIt.org when you go into the Lesson Launcher application on the website. And so you'll be able to not only look up things from current writers and contributors that they might say on these topics, but there's also legacy materials going back many, many years from commentaries and dictionaries and things of that nature. So PreachItTeachIt.org, if you're looking for that kind of information, just look for the Lesson Launcher. Okay, so take us through what a study might look like using this method that you're talking about. Okay, well, let's choose a short book, and that's one of the – well, it's a primary point I'd like to make to our listeners right at this point. If you haven't done book studies previously, or if you've done it and haven't had a great success for it, be very careful. The longest book in the Bible is the book of Isaiah. Now you could do a book study of the book of Isaiah, and I think you'd be done in three or four years. Yeah, I was about to ask you, can we start small? Yeah. Philemon, here we come. Philemon or the book of 1st or 2nd Corinthians, but probably more Philippians or Ephesians or Colossians or Galatians. That's a good place to study or start your study because, for lack of a better word, it's controllable. You're not going to be there until you're very, very old trying to get it. Now, having said that, one of my favorite things is to study the book of Acts because so much of what we see in the rest of the New Testament after the Gospels is included in the book of Acts. It came out of what was happening in the book of Acts. So we want to be able to do that. But for example, if you're going to study the book of Acts, divide it in half or divide it in thirds and study for a while in those first— You divide it by personalities, actually, as well. Well, very good. That would be very important. And you want to take the time or put yourself in a position where you can take the time to really understand what you find, what you've found. So you start, in terms of a survey, by reading through the book. Another reason not to choose the book of Isaiah. It only takes three or four days to read through. And I'm joking, of course, but you can read through a book like the book of Philippians in about 30 to 45 minutes, an hour, and you want to read through. Second point, read through and ignore the chapter divisions at this point. Just read the book. Ignore the chapter divisions. Ignore the paragraphs in the sense of, oh, what this paragraph says. No, no. Just read through the book. Then after you've gotten done, read through it a second time. I was going to ask you if we should do that. Yeah. So most of the time, the second time, you pick up your pencil and you begin to make notes of what you're observing. Remember, we're trying to find out what we see. So you begin to say, well, I noticed this, what's that? And so you begin to take notes as you're reading through it the second time. You know, I have to say that in my Bible study, one of the things that has helped me with my inductive study of the Bible has been to read and reread and reread several times before I get any farther because I find that certain things then begin to connect or jump out that I didn't get with the first reading. And so for me, it would not be unusual if I'm reading three, four, five times just doing a straight read before I start to pick things apart. Yeah. Well, I think that's fair. In fact, I was just about to say, and after you start taking notes and you've read it through the second time, read it through again and take more notes because it's exactly what you said, Tom. You notice things. Where did that come from that you didn't see the first couple of times? Read it through three, four, five times. Another reason to start with a short book. Then you come to where you begin to ask the questions of analysis. You're moving into the analysis portion and you begin to look at the background of the book. You begin to do a background study of the book. And I mentioned some of those things before. What was the situation, the historical situation in which this book was written? What about that historical situation caused the book to be written? Who wrote it? What do we know about him or her? And those types of questions help us to begin to understand more than simply reading through it, but to understand who it is we're talking about, what it is we're seeing, what's being explained to us. So we want to begin to do that background study. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through later. But then you want to make a book chart. Now I hate making charts. And so this was something that was the last thing for me to want to do until I understood, wait a minute, I can make a book chart because someone else has done a whole bunch of work for me. I make some columns and I make each column represent each chapter of the book. Another reason to have a short book. You know, I can get it all on one page. I don't have to determine what's in each column. Someone else has already helped me with that. So I just go by the chapters. And then as I go down through, that would be at the top of the chart. And then as I go down, I use the paragraphs, someone's already done that work for me, to help me understand sections within each chapter. And I begin to note what I see in that paragraph and I move on to the next paragraph. What do I see here? What's unusual? Who's being talked about? What's being talked about? Why is it being talked? I'm asking all these questions all the time. They're going through my head. You know, where are we talking about? That's another background book thing. And we're down into our chapter chart. But that chart helps me to see the whole book. Now I can look down and I can see the whole book in one fell swoop. However, at the top I may find, for example, that there are sections even in a short book. And I'll put those above the chapter columns. So they might, for example, let's use the book of Ephesians. The first three chapters of Ephesians talk about something a bit differently than the next three chapters, chapters four through six, one through three. They talk about, and I put that down here. They talk about who the members of Christ's church are. Talk about what it is to be a member of Christ's church or a member of the church. In other words, what is it to be a Christian? And the Apostle Paul, the author, in those first three chapters talks about who is that type of person, who is a Christian. And then in chapters four through six, he talks about what are these church members to do? How are they to live life, in other words? So you have two basic sections. Now you can put those two sections above the chapter titles of those columns. So the last three columns in the book of Ephesians are about doing. The first three columns are about being. And so you can put those words in there if you do it. And remembering that chapter six is a specific chapter, a famous chapter, because it's how do we deal with spiritual warfare? How are we equipped and what do we do? Very important book and very important chapter in the book because he's telling the Ephesians how to live the Christian life in their specific situation. That's why it's very good to know the background. They were in the city where the idol, the statue of Artemis, called Diana by the Greeks existed. And there was an entire, entire religion built around her. And they had to deal with the demonic forces who were behind that religion and were, if I can say the word, interfering in their life on a daily basis. So that last chapter in the book of Ephesians is very important. But it's a part with chapters four and five also. Okay. Okay. What are some of the benefits of a book study over other types of studies that we've talked about? Well, I think one of the big benefits I see is that the book study brings it all together. We mentioned the word context earlier. The book study brings it all together in that we see it once again from 10,000 feet, the bird's eye view, but we see how it all relates. One of the very difficult things today in our world, and it has been for hundreds of years, is people come along and they pick a verse out of a book, out of a chapter in the New Testament. And that verse says X, Y, or Z, and they say, see, this is the gospel, and now we have a cult. Yeah. And now we have a cult. And so that's because they didn't look at the entire book in which that verse was written. They just looked at the verse or one or two sentences, and then they were able to turn that into whatever they wanted. We're not here to name cults, but we probably all, all of our listeners have encountered this type of thing where the cult is built upon one verse, sometimes upon one word. So book study gives us the context, and it's preventative. It doesn't stop that, but it's preventative. That's very helpful. The second thing is with the book study, and relates back to this, we begin to understand better what passages mean, verses mean, and that helps us to understand what the person is truly talking about so that we can make personal application into our lives. Whereas if we just pick out a verse and someone says, thus says the Lord, you're not supposed to shave, and you go, hmm, and now you're confused. Yeah, especially me with my face. Yes, that's true. But here's the thing, the book study, the entire book, you see it in the context of that entire book, and you're better able to interpret that if I can use that word. Right. Final question before we wrap up. What should the average believer expect to get out of his or her study of a whole book? Well, I think that's an important question, and it's different for different folks in this sense. I study some books, for example, because I'm interested, for example, I've studied the book of Ephesians because I was very interested in how Paul told them to deal with demonic forces, with Satan and his horde. So that's why I went there, and I came away excited about what I had learned. But I may be, for example, in the book of Philippians, and I'm to rejoice always. And again, I will say rejoice, a type of a situation where I'm looking at what Jesus did there in chapter 2, how he didn't count it as worthy of him to try to beat God and take God to Father's place, but he humbled himself to the point of death. And that instructs me about an attitude I need to have in life, an attitude in dealing with people. And so different books offer us different things. Not that they're different than the gospel, but it's different aspects of the gospel. Once again, we were talking about Ephesians. In chapter 4 of Ephesians, it helps me to understand how I'm to live with my wife, and how I'm to love her, and that type of thing. So we need to understand that different books are going to offer me, well, we talked about some of the Old Testament books. They're going to offer us foundation to understand the Messiah when we see him in the New Testament. So it's a wide variety of things. Usually I choose a book that's going to minister to me where I'm at at this point, not just for an intellectual exercise. That's just me. Okay. All right. Well, Steve, this has been a really rewarding eight weeks walking through Bible study with you. Oh, thank you. Rewarding for me, too. It was great. What fun. Thank you again. You've been listening to Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. Today we've been discussing how to interpret or study books of the Bible. This is the last in our eight-part series on how to study the Bible. More episodes with new guests are coming. I'm your host, Tom Terry, with PreachItTeachIt.org. Be sure to visit our website for tools and resources to help you craft your sermon or Bible study that you lead. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next time on Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org.