A Quick Guide to Help You Get More Out of the Bible

Just this past Sunday I completed a 25-week Bible Survey course in my church’s Sunday School. While I had taught through the New Testament twice before, I had never before led a class through the Old Testament, so this extended study was new for me.

As I sat down to prepare a study of the Old Testament books, I wanted to do it in the most helpful way possible for my students. I had to ask myself: if we’re doing a flyover at 30,000 feet, does it really make sense to study all the History books, then the Poetry, and then the Prophecy (beginning with the larger books of prophecy and then moving on to the smaller)? Would it really help my students understand the Word better if we studied almost every author and book outside their historical contexts?

Although I had access to a number of survey books when I began this study, I couldn’t find any that organized the survey chronologically, in a way that would provide my students the context needed to understand the biblical narrative as a unified whole. Instead, every book out there (including this one, Talk Thru the Bible) surveys the Bible in the haphazard order in which the books have long been arranged, by genre and by size.

It annoys me how fastidiously we cling to this genre-based order of biblical books, because while the Bible itself is inspired and inerrant, the arrangement of the books and epistles are not! Now, lest I lose you with an extended gripe against such tradition, let me silence myself by simply saying that I ultimately wrote my own chronological Bible survey by piecemealing the pertinent information I found in the many Bible study and survey books, because context matters.

No that I’ve got the out of my system, I must say that of the handful of books I used to gather information for my class, this book by Bruce Wilkinson and Kenneth Boa had the most succinct and pertinent info of all. Praise God, they didn’t include of ounce of the liberal J-E-D-P nonsense, focusing instead on what matters, the text and its knowable context.

They break each book of the Bible down into its: introduction and title, author, date and setting, theme and purpose, involvement of Christ, contribution to the Bible, survey and suggested outline. The information is clear, cross-referenced, and full, and I found this book entirely useful for my purposes.

Besides not being organized chronologically, the only other critique I would offer is the unnecessary repetition in the book’s introduction and its, well, “Introduction.” Virtually every book includes this information twice, which ends up being about 30 extra pages of unnecessary text.

I would recommend this book both to students and teachers of the Word, and I am glad to have had it available in the preparations for my study. I hope to publish my own chronological notes to this site one day, but even so, this would be a helpful asset to anyone’s Bible library.

©2021 E.T.