In mid-January 2017 the Lord led me to begin going deeper in my study of Hermeneutics (Biblical Interpretation). This would help not only myself, but others as I taught Scripture, and helped them study the Bible for themselves.
One of the books I used in this study was Grasping Gods Word by Scott Duvall, and Daniel Hays. In it, they gave one of the best allegories I’ve ever heard of Bible study.
They say that studying Scripture is often like sitting down to a meal. We expect to eat steak, but keep getting baby food!
They follow up this thought with a process that can be used to find steak in a passage instead of strained peas.
The problem isn’t always that we don’t have a process to study scripture though. It’s that we are too easily satisfied with baby food.
Practically this moving directly to the easier parts of study (interpretation, application) while ignoring the hard part (observation). We find a very basic truth in Scripture, and simply satisfied with that.
I’m grateful for this and other tools that constantly challenge me to look for the “steak” or foundational truth found in observation of the passage. They also keep me from skipping the study portion, and reach for baby food thinking “I know what this passage means!”
May the Lord help us push away the strained peas, and dig deep into His Word.
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