The modern church prizes chapter and verse memorization, and has a very subtle tendency to look down on those who do not, as though you perhaps aren't that serious about Jesus. But I have some news for those folks; Chapter and verse markers are handy ways to find your way around, but they aren't part of the scriptures, so the Holy Spirit clearly didn't think it that important, and all the New Testament writers did a pretty good job of quoting the Old Testament without them.
If you can remember them, by all means do: it is a good thing. If not, no worries: it's what is actually written there that God wants in your heart and mind. With that in mind, I have some Practical Bible Tips.
Preface
The Bible is a rather unusual book. For one thing, it has an incredible amount of information packed in it. A neo-pagan friend of mine once asserted to me that the Bible was like a set of assembly instructions, like for an entertainment center, and there was no real point in reading and re-reading it once you'd read it through. What an incredibly ignorant view of the riches that are packed into the Bible! ...though I fear that many Christians have a very similar mindset. The Bible, though, is more like DNA: such an astonishing amount of information packed into such a tiny space.
Like DNA, the real marvel of the Bible isn't actually in the volume of information itself, it's in the unpacking of the information, it's in the actual doing of the thing. Incredible though it is, the DNA packed into an acorn is of no real value just sitting around on the shelf. It's what happens when the conditions and the timing are right, and that acorn begins to unpack the information that is encoded in the DNA and actually use it. It begins to break out, take root, and grow upward and leaf out. It makes a whole, mighty, giant oak tree, spending all its life in the doing of the thing written in the volume of the DNA. It needs that DNA all its life, and refers to it in everything that it does until the day it dies – then lots of other organisms do the things written in their DNA to take advantage of the material resources that have been invested in that massive, dead, oak tree.
That is what the Bible is like.
Practical Tips
After God came, I bought me a brand new Bible. I was so excited, I went and found a Bible with all the notes you can think of. At the time that was the John MacArthur Study Bible®, in NASV®, with More Notes Than Any Other Bible Ever. And boy did it have notes. I mean it really did have notes. In fact, after a couple of years, I found that it had so many notes that the notes actually got in the way of the Bible itself. Eventually I decided that most Christians, including me, needed to spend way more time reading the actual scriptures themselves, and way less time reading somebody's notes about it, even if the somebody were John MacArthur®. So, I gave away my John MacArthur Study Bible®, and bought, instead, in small, plain, portable Bible with just some cross references and minor textual notes.
• Tip 1: Study Bibles
A good annotated study Bible can be a good thing, on your shelf, ready to pull out at times if you need it to look into something more in depth. But you'll be better off for the most part with a good, plain, simple, well bound Bible you can actually keep around handy all the time and just read the Scriptures. So if it's one or the other, ditch the Study Bible.
• Tip 2: Translations
Choose a good, solid, non-trendy translation. We prefer the New King James Version (NKJV). Of course, the King James Bible is the classic English translation, and a good one. The KJV scholars put everything they had into meticulously producing an accurate translation that was a literary classic. My primary issue with it is that the language is truly so archaic that in many places you have to work through the 'Shakespearean' English first to get to the word itself. NASV is OK, and, perhaps, even the NIV will do in a pinch – but I would have to be pinched before I resorted to it. If you care anything at all about accuracy in translation, stay as far as possible from silly versions like The Living Bible, New Living Translation, and The Message; and yes I do mean silly and no I will not apologize for it. In fact, if silly is the worst that could be said about these versions I'll be surprised. I think other adjectives such as 'dangerous' might well be warranted. If you don't care anything at all about accuracy in translation in the Bible, back up and check to see if you are really saved to start with.
• Tip 3: Highlighting and Bible Tabs
You may have noticed that some study bibles have handy little tabs cut into the edge of the pages so that you can see immediately where a given book is. You can also buy a set of these that stick onto your page edges if your Bible doesn't have them. This might possibly be a help to some baby Christians until they are used to finding a given book quickly, but really, either one of two things is going to happen: You are going to quickly learn your way around so that you don't need the tabs and they are just in the way, or you are going to stop using the tabs anyway because you aren't actually using the Bible. My advice is to skip the tabs, use the Bible, learn your way around, and grow in Christ!
But I want to tell you about a different kind of tab.
Lots of people highlight passages in their Bible. If you are growing in the Word you almost certainly are to some extent. But you often wind up with scattered highlightings that are of little use unless you happen already to be reading that section anyway, and if you really dig into the Word, over a period of years, you can wind up with so much highlighted that it works against you. If your whole Bible is highlighted, then nothing is really highlighted!
Here is my solution.
I decided it would be much easier to post some photos than to describe this with mere words.
Somewhere, my wife bought me a double ended highlighter, which I thought was very cute. I had already been attempting to bring about some structure in my highlighting by using both yellow and orange highlighters. I found that with these two colors I could highlight different verses in three distinctly visible colors: yellow, orange, and yellow-orange. This is very useful if you are trying to highlight different verses for different reasons, but keeping two highlighters and a black pen too was a bit cumbersome. So when she saw the double-ended highlighter it seemed to her the natural solution. I am afraid it took me a little longer to catch on and realize how useful a tool it really is.
Now at all times I keep a black pen and my double-ended yellow/orange highlighter with my Bible. But I also keep nearby a yellow/blue highlighter, a yellow/pink highlighter, and a roll of 3M Scotch brand matte finish tape. This now gives me a range of color combinations, and when I highlight, I divide it up according to various categories, and highlight in color-codes accordingly. Then I tape on a small, folded over Bible tab from Scotch tape and mark the tab according to it's category. For instance, if I find a previously unmarked passage in the Old Testament about the coming Messiah, I highlight it yellow with a thin orange stripe through, and make a tab marked 'M' for Messiah, which I can now easily find at the page ends. All these passages I can instantly access without having to dig around and search out.
This all got started as I was reading the end of Luke's Gospel. I saw in 24: 27 it says, "And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them the things concerning Himself." Then in verse 44 Jesus admonishes the disciples, "...that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me." So I got to wondering what all these things were, and I started searching them out. As I searched them out I highlighted them, and then I started tabbing them to find easily. So far I have 41 tabs on this topic.
I now have twelve different categories that I tab for quick reference:
M = Messiah: Old Testament (OT) scriptures about the coming Messiah.
J = Judgment: OT scriptures about the coming Judgment.
R = Resurrection: OT scriptures about the coming Resurrection
S = Satan: OT scriptures about Satan
LS = Lord's Supper: New Testament (NT) scriptures about the Lord's Supper, often erroneously called 'communion'
C = Childrearing: Scriptures throughout the Bible about raising children
E = Ekklesia: This is mostly to mark every occurrence in the NT of the word 'ekklesia' or 'ekklesias', which is the correct Bible word for 'church'.
D = Discipline: NT Scriptures about discipline and judgment within the ekklesia
T = Trinity: NT Scriptures pertaining to the Doctrine of the Trinity, and to the Deity of Christ.
LOS = Loss of Salvation: NT scriptures warning that a loss of salvation is a real concern.
CON = Congregationalism: NT scriptures showing congregational (democratic) function in the Biblical ekklesia.
ELD = Elders: NT scriptures pertaining to eldership in the Biblical ekklesia.
As you can see below, there may be multiple topics highlighted on a given page. At the top of the right-hand page is the topic ELD for elders. You can see there I recently began a practice of putting a sample of the appropriate color coding under the tab tape. That helps to identify when I have a page full. On these two pages I have Elders, Trinity & Deity of Christ, Ekklesia, and Childrearing; with assorted other notes.
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