The Problem with Bible Study

It’s Friday night. People have arrived. We chit chat over food, catching up on the week’s happenings. At some point in the evening, the leader tries to gather everyone else together and says ‘I think it’s time to start…” And then either prayer or a couple of songs follows with, “tonight we’re studying the book of Daniel.” What ensues is 45minutes of discussion. We’re trying to understand what on earth Daniel meant. Someone lobs a question out – but “I don’t get this verse…was Daniel just going vegetarian, detoxing or what? Why did he have to stop eating the king’s food? 10 more minutes of animated discussion – everyone’s throwing around ideas….no-one really has a clue. Someone consults their online commentary which gives no real help at all. We decide it’s probably something we don’t quite know what it is and then we move on to the next question. After 45minutes of this. We realise that we’ve only got a few minutes left. So we come into land for a few minutes of prayer. And that was our evening. Now, this is not an untypical CG night in what would be considered a ‘good small group’. I’m not talking about those which spend all their time discussing their aunt Agatha’s ingrowing toenail or their child’s latest temper tantrums. No, the Bible was discussed, it seemed central. But the question is: did we disciple each other? Did we help each other to encounter Jesus? Or did we merely go away having discussed some ideas about an ancient piece of literature?

Study vs trembling

I’m increasingly convinced that much of what I have done as ‘Bible study’ in the past was merely engaging with information not truly bringing God’s word to bear on mine and other people’s lives. And the fact is that mere information does not transform lives or turn us into disciples who love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. May be the problem is that the word ‘study’ sounds like school – it is an educational event where ideas are formed. The Bible was never meant to be merely studied like an academic textbook. If these are the words of the living God, speaking in time and space to people in the past and through them to us then we should have an entirely different attitude to engaging with his Word. Isaiah 66:2 says “Who is the one to whom I will look, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.” When my dad rang me up to tell me that my mum was on the verge of dying, and we weren’t sure if she’d make it through the night. I was attentive to every word. My world was invested in each word he spoke. The consequences made me tremble for they could impact my every decision in the next few hours. Are we the same with God’s word? Do we tremble in our CGs as we open the pages of a book that people have died just to read one page of? I remember hearing of a village in China where Christians had been caught reading the Bible. The regional officials wanted to dissuade anyone else from engaging in such activities so they invited the whole village to publicly humiliate them. There they placed a pile of Bibles on one side and a pile of human excrement on the other. Before the watching eyes, they dragged up the Christians with the challenge – will you burn the Bibles? If you won’t, we will make you eat all this excrement. Without a moment’s hesitation, these believers grabbed the pile of dung and started scoffing it down. The officials looked on stunned. The villagers were stunned. Then, without warning, the villagers ran forward grabbing as many pages of the Bibles as they could. What these books contained must be of such value, so precious, that these believers would rather eat excrement than live without it. In a city where we have 100 Bible versions easily accessible, do we see God’s word as that precious? Do we hunger not just to hear from God’s word, but to encounter the living God and for him to speak to us? Are we pondering Jesus, sin, repentance and how we become doers of the word or are we discussing just ideas? Is there a sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence here when we read and dwell on his Word? Or are we content with simply informing our heads with some more Scriptural knowledge? Perhaps we should call our time together ‘Bible trembling’ instead of ‘Bible study’.

The root of our problem

What blocks us is our pride. Our obsession with knowledge more than repentance. With information more than transformation. We often want to understand every little thing in the passage. But sometimes transformation only requires understanding one thing and drilling deep into it. Sometimes we need to give more time to allowing God to convict us, to praying the passage, meditating on the passage, or asking ourselves – do I truly live this in my life? The more familiar we are with a text, the easier it is to think ‘we know it’ instead of incessantly drilling down like those oil well excavators which pound away until liquid gold comes out, we take a wall drill to God’s word and are satisfied in our current enlightened state, not allowing it to penetrate any deeper. For every passage we must come with fresh eyes. Come with a fresh expectancy that the Spirit of God will take those words off the page and reveal them to our hearts with power, with conviction and with life. For if life-changing news is being proclaimed to us week-by-week – we cannot treat it as an academic exercise. So before we read: quieten yourselves and humbly ask God to reveal himself through his Word. Ask him to unclutter your heart and unstop your ears to hear what he wants to say.

Read to understand:
• What does this tell me about Jesus/God?
• What does this tell me about myself?
• And then practically how should I respond to this?

I find it helpful to unpack my response to a passage with these questions:
• How do I need to pray differently in the light of this?
• How do I need to see Jesus differently than I see Him at the moment?
• Where do I need to repent in the light of this?
• What one small step could I take to move towards Christ in this area?

But more than anything, let us be those who no longer settle for doing Bible studies, but
who come hungry and trembling at his word in our CGs.