Why should I study the Bible?

You hear the Bible preached during a church service. A man who has spent the week in the passage stands up and explains it to you. So why open it yourself during the week? Often we assume that the study of Scripture is simply the preacher's job.

It is his job. It is not only his job. And the word Paul used for the work is worth looking at, because it is not the word most people expect.

2 Timothy 2:15 (NKJV)

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Paul is writing to a young pastor, and the picture he reaches for is a tradesman. The phrase behind “rightly dividing” means to cut a straight line. Study, in Paul's sense, is not scholarship. It is care. It is refusing to be careless with something that came from God. An ordinary Christian with an ordinary Bible and no training can do this, and Paul assumes he will.

The first reason to do it is that sooner or later you will be taught something that is not true. The Christians at Berea knew this, and Luke thought well enough of them to say so.

Acts 17:11 (NKJV)

These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.

Look at who they were checking. It was Paul — an apostle, preaching the gospel he had received from Christ Himself. Luke does not call them suspicious or divisive. He calls them the better congregation for it. Notice also that they did two things at once: they received the word eagerly, and they went home and looked it up. That is not cynicism; it is the ordinary care of people who intend to believe something and want to believe the right thing. A Christian who does not know his Bible is left at the mercy of whoever speaks with the most confidence, and there has never been a shortage of confident men.

The second reason is that God gave the Bible to do work in you that an hour on Sunday cannot finish.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 (NKJV)

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Paul lists four things Scripture does, and they arrive in an order. It teaches you what is true. It shows you where you are wrong. It puts you right. Then it trains you in how to live. And all four are heading somewhere: a man who is complete and thoroughly equipped. That last phrase describes readiness — a workman kitted out before the job begins, not scrambling for tools once it has started. This is why the sin you struggle with and the doubt that arrives at two in the morning are arguments for studying now rather than then. Nobody learns the way out of a building while it is burning. The exits are found in advance, on an ordinary day, by someone who thought it was worth knowing.

There is a third reason, and it is the one that keeps a Christian reading long after the first two are satisfied. Everything you believe about God's character came from somewhere. If it did not come from His book, it came from what you were told as a child, from what you have assumed, or from what the people around you find plausible. God has not left His people to assemble a portrait of Him from fragments. He has told us what He is like, at length and in writing, and He has told us what He is doing in the world and where it ends. That is not information a summary can carry. You get it by reading the thing He wrote.

None of this makes Bible study a matter of effort alone. The same Spirit who moved men to write these words must open them, or a man will read the page and see nothing on it. The psalmist knew this, which is why he asks for something before he asks for anything else.

Psalm 119:18 (NKJV)

Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law.

He is not asking for information. He already has the book in front of him. What he does not have, and cannot manufacture, is the ability to see what is there. Ask God for that before you open it, and the reading changes — not because your method improved, but because He answered.