Making Observations As You Read

One of the most important things you can do when reading the Bible is make observations. This is the key to understanding the context without adding to the meaning from what you have read elsewhere. One of the biggest problems people make when trying to interpret what the Bible is saying is by bringing their presuppositions to the text and not letting the text speak for itself. Part of the reason for this is because the Bible is not easy to read and it takes time if you truly want to understand it. There are essentially 4 stages that you need to go through as you read the Bible 1. Observations – this is probably the most time consuming because it takes diligence to think about what you are reading without giving up. 2. Interpretation – Here you pull together a coherent meaning. What does God mean and what did the human author mean. 3. Application – Here you look for commands to obey, promises to proclaim, examples to follow, sins to avoid, truths and principles about God. 4. Correlation – Here is where you connect the passage with other parts of scripture. (Usually this is the first step people take to understand the passage and usually why they misinterpret it.)

Since the observation process is the hardest, most demanding, and time consuming let me give you an example of how to make observations in the text.

John 5:24-25 NIV
“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned: he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.”

1. We not only need to hear the words of salvation we need to believe them.
2. If we hear the words of salvation and believe them we have eternal life.
3. Eternal life does not have an end.
4. The words we hear and believe keep us from condemnation.
5. The words bring spiritual life to the spiritually dead.
6. We are being told truth.
7. “Whoever” means this is open to anyone not s specific group of people.
8. The living will pass on the words to the dead to give them life.
9. The time is coming.
10. The time is now.
11. We must believe God sent Christ to give eternal life.
12. We all begin spiritually dead.
13. The Son of God has already come and given the words of salvation.
14. We are no longer dead because of what Christ said.
15. We need to be listening to hear the words.
16. Condemnation is judgment on the dead.
17. There is no judgment on the living.
18. The son of God brought words that bring freedom from judgment.
19. God doesn’t want to judge anyone so He sent His Son.
20. God judges those who reject the Sons words.
21. Your judgment is because you chose not to believe.
22. The reason we live is because we heard the voice of the Son of God.
23. The voice of the Son of God is powerful.
24. The Son of God has already spoken.
25. We don’t have to wait for life we can have it now.
26. The reason you are still dead is because you are not listening or you have not believed.

I am sure given more time you could add to this list but this is not supposed to be completely comprehensive just an example. (It took me about 2 hours to come up with this list… it is very time consuming and demanding) Since the observations have been made you can now begin to go through the other stages of interpretaion, application and correlation. Now that you have seen what it looks like to make observations I challenge you to take the next 3 verses John 5:26-29 and see how many you can come up with. If you are willing to spend the time in deep thought and meditation prayerfully reading you will begin to hear God speak and the text will become alive right before your eyes. After all, this is the living breathing word of God. Hope this helps someone out there in their pursuit to read and understand the Bible more clearly.