Many years ago I purchased a book on "how to study the Bible," but I did not find it to be very helpful. It seemed, rather, to complicate the studies I had hoped to begin in a quest to know God better. It was the Spirit of Truth Who taught me how to study my Bible in the most effective, and efficient way.
God had placed a real hunger in my heart for more of Himself, and out of that hunger came an intense desire to study His Word. The method of study that came so seemingly "natural" to me may or may not be written about somewhere in some book - I have no idea. All I know is that the Holy Spirit has led me in a wonderful adventure of plumbing the depths of the greatest Book in the world!My experiences throughout the years since then have been beyond anything I could have ever hoped for. So often I have wept many tears as the Spirit has taken me from one truth to another. There have been tears of awe at the majesty of God. There have been tears of grief as I recognized how far man has strayed from the Lord in the past one hundred and seventy some years, and the apostasy that is now so rampant. There have been many, many, tears as I surrendered to the cleansing of the "washing of water by the word."
God purged me of all my old, dead doctrines with which I had grown up. He gave me a fresh new relationship with Him, and satisfied my hunger for Him with an even greater hunger for more. Only in Him can hunger satisfy hunger! That may not sound like it makes much sense, but, as a young friend of mine said, "There is no high like the Most High!" There is no place I would rather be than in His presence, engrossed in deep study of His Word.
Our English language fails miserably when it comes to translating the Word of God from the old languages. Single words had specific meaning which, in English, take whole phrases to articulate. To give one example, the Hebrew word for "blood" means "that which when shed causes death." In order to understand how the defection from truth (apostasy) came about, we must know the significance of "flesh" and "blood" according to God’s eternal scheme.
The method:
As an example, let's take the word "flesh."
In the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Old and New Testaments, with the Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, all occurrences of the word "flesh" are listed in the concordance. In the Hebrew, there are three different words translated, "flesh." The first one means, basically, "body" or "person." This is the one used in Genesis 6:3, where God said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for that he also is flesh."
The English words, "body, nakedness, and self" were also translated from the same word. The other two Hebrew words mean, "flesh, as food," and "kindred by blood."
As led by the Spirit, I wrote out all of the verses in the Bible that contained the word "flesh," as well as each of the other English words that were used in translation from the Hebrew and Greek dictionaries.
In the New Testament, the words are translated from the Greek dictionary. There are two Greek words that mean "flesh." The first one means "meat." The second one means "flesh (as stripped of the skin), i.e. (strictly) the meat of an animal (as food), or (by extension) the body (as opposed to the soul [or spirit],...or (by implication) human nature (with its frailties [physically or morally] and passions), or (specifically) a human being (as such)." The English words, "carnal", and "flesh" are taken from the exact same Greek word.
As I wrote out every verse containing each of the English words that was translated from the Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, I learned what the Lord had to say about "flesh", and "carnal." When I was finished each word study, I put it in a folder, labeled it, and filed it for future study.
This same method was used with every word study I have done. The result is that I have thousands of pages of hand-written word studies, in due-tang folders, which I can take and read like a book.
Each word study that I undertook was not necessarily of my choosing. The majority of the studies came about as I read the context where a word was found that I was working on. The context consisted of several verses and, at times, whole chapters and more. This led to other words of the Lord's choosing because He was teaching me more than just word meanings. His purpose was to undo all of the error in which I had been steeped for so many years. All that I am sharing on this web site is a result of what the Spirit of Truth so patiently taught me.
There are no words in the English language to express the depth of understanding that the Holy Spirit has given through the method He chose to use in teaching me the truth that Jesus died to give us.
I invite you to go the Rick Meyers' e-Sword web site. There you can download the whole Bible with Strong's Concordance, referenced for study. With that great study tool you can check the meanings of any Bible words you wish to study. It is a good place to check and see if what I am saying is true.
