What is biblical literacy?
To have biblical literacy is to have knowledge and understanding through your own reading and study of what the bible says and teaches. It’s great that there are so many to help us learn, but how do we judge good and bad teaching, preaching, podcasts, YouTube, or even things that happen in everyday life, if we do not have our own personal knowledge and understanding of the bible?
To successfully become bible literate?
There are two things every Christian must have to successfully become bible literate. The first is to have a bible in a translation you easily understand. Not just an English translation, but one that is not hard to follow because of wording, dialect, or sentence structure. Be sure to choose a translation for good comprehension. The second would be to exercise your personal ability to read and study. Spend time just reading and spend time thinking about what is read.
Problems that cause biblical illiteracy
The greatest cause of biblical illiteracy is too much reliance on second-hand learning. When all of our bible knowledge and understanding is from preaching, podcasts, articles, etc. and never from our personal reading and study, we will experience gaps in our comprehension and it becomes difficult to see the whole picture of Scripture or to judge good or bad second-hand teaching.
Experiencing the Bible personally
An internet search will produce Bible reading plan options to help with focus – even ones that show the average time for reading each book (it’s not as long as you might think). For grasping the whole picture of Scripture, it’s best to start at the beginning and work your way through even the tough books. However, it is also beneficial to spend time in a book, to process what you are reading with no expectation of finishing on a schedule.
How does a quiet time fit?
A “quiet time” is a scheduled time, set aside in small chunks, for devotional reading and journaling or thinking about what was read. While this is a good practice, it can be easy to spend less time actually reading the Bible because of time constraints. Another option is to schedule 2 or 3 times a week to spend more than 15 minutes, so that you can ingest more and comprehend the flow of Scripture.
The Bible: The most exciting “story” ever written!
A frequent grievance many have that keeps them from reading the Bible personally is that it can seem boring when first getting started and without a grasp of what’s inside. But the Bible is the greatest “story” ever written. It contains real historical action, adventure, romance, family history, drama, murder, impossible feats, punishment, deception, redemption, judgment… just to name a few themes. These are all ready to be discovered, and they all have a common thread – Jesus.
The objective
Knowing the Bible is important, but knowing the God of the Bible is the objective. We were created with a purpose but sin has gotten in the way by damaging the relationship we could have with God. Jesus made the relationship possible with his death and resurrection. When we act on our knowledge of who God is, who we are, and choose to follow, the Holy Spirit acts as a guide to make our understanding possible. Don’t wait, choose Him today.
Recommended resources
- Encountering the Old Testament by Bill Arnold & Bryan Beyer
- Encountering the New Testament by Walter Elwell & Robert Yarbrough
- How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart
- How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth by Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart
- Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall & J. Daniel Hays
- From God to Us: How We Got Our Bible by Norman Geisler & William Nix
Also published with Women In Apologetics.
