Bible Study: What Are Some Tips for Doing Biblical Word Studies?

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The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish. God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

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How to Approach Biblical Word Studies

On this episode of Bible Bashed, we will be answering the question, what are some tips for doing biblical word studies? And the individual asking this question was asking in particular about doing a word study on prayer.

How would one go about doing a biblical word study on prayer or learning about what the Bible has to say in general about prayer? What are some Bible study tips? How can we approach these things? Now, as it relates to Bible study in general, one of the things to realize is, and this is something that I learned early on in my Christian life, is that the best way to learn the Bible or to study the Bible is to read the Bible.

So there really is no substitute for repetitive reading of the Bible. I would say that 90 of Bible study is probably reading the Bible repetitively. Anytime that I've sought to preach or teach on a passage, I try to get that passage in my mind at least 100 times.

I try to read it over and over and over and over again. And if you want to know the context, if you want to know the argument of the passage, if you want to know what's actually going on, there really is no substitute for just repetitive reading.

Sometimes we can make Bible study a bit more complicated than it actually is. And the truth of the matter is, the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. And God's Word, all you have to do is just get it in your brain.

And it's not really meant to be overly complicated. There are some techniques that you can learn to adopt that will help you in your study, but I wouldn't want to advocate any kind of technique that is essentially taking the place of repetitive reading.

In fact, a lot of people, when they're attempting to study the Bible, one of the sad things about it is, if you're trying to answer the question, what does the Bible say about prayer? Many times, people's standard impulse is to go and find a book on prayer or something like that.

And while I think that there's some value in reading books on prayer, or whatever the topic that there actually is, there is no substitute for your own personal study. And you have no way of interacting with whatever is being communicated in that book or in that online resource or whatever else if you're not a person who is in the Bible yourself.

So there's no way to short-circuit these kinds of things. I mean, if all you do is just consult secondary sources instead of looking to the Scriptures to try to answer these kinds of questions, what's going to happen is, inevitably, what's going to happen is that you're basically going to read a book and you're going to say, okay, well, that's my theology of prayer.

And then the problem is that later on in your life you may read another book and then that other book may contradict this book in a primary way. And you'll have no way of judging which book is right because you don't have enough information in your head to even know how to evaluate these things.

And for me, often, the secondary sources are the last thing that I do. The first thing I'm going to do is try to repetitively read. But then that being the case, how would you go about doing something like trying to study prayer, for instance?

What would you do? Now, one of the things that I would do if I were trying to— and this is something I have done as it relates to this topic. But if I'm trying to figure out what does the Bible say about prayer, I would go to books of the Bible that speak to this issue primarily.

So one of the things that I've done is I've tried to do a biblical study on prayer is that I basically have put the Psalms on repeat in my brain. And so I try to listen to the Bible because one of the things that that helps me to do is it helps me to make the best use of my time.

So when I'm driving, in particular, I try to listen to the Bible as much as I possibly can. And I would encourage people to try to speed up their listening and see how much you can push yourself. And so I typically try to listen to the Bible at least two times speed, maybe two and a half speed, sometimes three speed if I really try to push myself.

But you can get yourself pretty high, but then the advantage of that is repetition. So if you can get through a book a hundred times in particular, you're going to find that you know it a lot better than doing it once.

And their standard approach to trying to get to the Bible is just they start in Genesis and they try to do their read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year kind of thing, and then they get bogged down in some of the genealogies and they end up giving up.

But what I encourage people to do is just try to read repetitively, read over and over and over again or listen over and over and over again. And one of the things that you're going to find is that if you were just to sit down and listen to Ephesians on two times speed and you were to do that every time you do a commute for a month, you could probably get through it several hundred times and you'd really know it at the end of it instead of just having the kind of knowledge that comes from listening to it once.

So if I were to do a biblical study on prayer, one of the things I would do is try to listen to the Psalms over and over and over again just to get the Psalms in my head. Now another thing you can do is just do word searches on prayer.

So one of the things you're going to find is that there's no simple way to get everything the Bible has to say on prayer because there will be plenty of times where you can look up the word pray in particular.

And that word, you can look it up in a Bible software program. But there's plenty of times where individuals are praying but the Bible doesn't use the word pray. And so if you're going to do something exhaustive as far as that goes, then you're going to have to think more broadly than simple word studies.

But word studies can get you most of what you're going to find if you do a careful word study. Now in order to do a good word study, certainly you can read through the whole Bible and make a list of all the times that the word prayer comes up.

But now that we have software programs, there's software programs that you can just enter in a word like prayer or some kind of variation. I use BibleWorks software in order to do a lot of my Bible study.

They have a feature on there. You press period and then star and then you can do pray and then star again. And then when you do that, it's going to show you searches for everything that has the four letters pray in it.

So it will show you prayer, prayerful, praying, all of those. So it will show you all of those. But any different program that you use is going to have different kind of search options. You might familiarize yourself with how they actually work.

Goodfree software, Esword is a Goodfree Bible software that has a lot of your standard versions out there that you can do some word searches. Assuming that you read through the whole or just listen to psalms over and over and over again, you're going to get a general feel for how the psalmist prays.

But then you might want to look up passages on prayer. And so you're going to have Old Testament passages of prayer and you're going to have New Testament passages on prayer. And you want to learn from both.

So you look up every usage of the word prayer. And one of the things that I would do is just make a list of all the verses. And then under each verse, I just make certain observations about what's actually happening in there.

So as I'm looking up these different prayers, I might say, well, David is praying for physical safety here. Or David is praying that his enemies have their teeth broken. So these are imprecatory prayers.

And so I would try to categorize them. As I've done a study on prayer, I've tried to categorize it. So here's an imprecatory prayer that's praying that God stops the wicked. And I put those all in one group.

And then here's a group of prayers that God would give us to stay our daily bread kind of prayers. And these are prayers for spiritual things. And then I would try to divide them up under what kind of spiritual things are Paul praying for or the biblical authors praying for.

So Paul frequently prays for boldness. And so as I'm looking up all the kinds of prayers and the things that are being asked, here's for boldness, here's for salvation of individuals, here's that the Ephesians have the eyes of their understanding be illumined, that they may know God.

So what you want to do is start making observations about each one of these passages and say, hey, what is this individual praying for? And then make a list of the things they pray for. And in verse after verse after verse, what you're going to find is you're going to just make those basic observations.

And that would be just a simple way to approach a study like this if you're going to ask yourself what is the Bible saying. And then you might contrast what you find in the Old Testament prayer with what you find in the New Testament prayer and then draw some kind of conclusions from that.

But basically what I'm trying to say is that if you really want to know what the Bible has to say about this, yes, you could do a word study. But then you're going to have to make a bunch of observations and try to push yourself to make as many observations about these individual prayers as you're going to find.

Organize them in some way. Outline them in some way. Put them into usable form. And then at the end of it, you're going to say, hey, this is the kind of things that biblical prayer looks like. And so here's the kind of things that are prayed for.

And, you know, if you look at that, you do that kind of study, and you realize that the vast majority of what Paul was praying for is spiritual things and not physical things, then you might have an observation there to make as far as how that actually works.

But that would be part of how you would go about doing that. Now, if you're completely unfamiliar with the original languages, I would encourage you to be cautious in the kind of conclusions that you're going to draw from software related to, you know, what you're going to find in the original languages.

So for an individual who doesn't know Greek, if you're going to do a word study, there's a lot of programs out there that will give you some information about, you know, the Greek words behind these English words.

And I would just encourage you to demystify those words. I mean, they're just these words are not uniquely Christian words in most cases. They're just pagan words, Greek words that were used. They're just a different language that you're using.

And so there's not just this inherent spiritual significance in these words. And there's a lot of fallacies that people actually use or fall prey to when they're doing word studies. A lot of the fallacies that people commit are what's called word study fallacies because they don't know enough about how languages work to keep from being dangerous.

And so just a few things to think about as it relates to that. There's what is called the etymological fallacy. And this is I'll just give you two that are very common. If you really don't know much about languages and you're doing a word study, like a word study on prayer, just be careful at this point.

There's what's called the etymological fallacy, and that essentially is a fallacy that assumes that the meaning of a Greek word is going to be found in terms of the sum of its component parts. Just to give you an example of this in English, no one would assume that a butterfly is a fly that produces butter, okay?

But then there's a lot of word study fallacies that are made as it relates to the Greek languages, Greek language itself. So ekklesia in the Greek is a word that people try to divide up in ek, which is a preposition from, you know, or out of, and then klesia, which is called, a word that can mean called.

And so people assume that, well, the church is the called out ones, but that's committing the etymological fallacy. The church is an assembly. That's what the word ekklesia means. It means assembly. So just like a butterfly is not a fly that produces butter, so also ekklesia is not, you know, the called out ones.

It's not a uniquely spiritual word in that way. So you don't want to assume in some simplistic way that whatever the Greek word means, it's the sum of its parts. That's not the way that language actually works.

But then another one that people make is just you assume that each word, the univocal word meaning fallacy, there's different names for it. But what you don't want to assume when you're looking up these Greek words is that each one of these Greek words has one unique meaning or some sort of basic meaning that you're going to read into every single passage.

That isn't the way that language works. If I were to ask you what a trunk is, then you're going to, you could answer in a variety of different ways. What's a trunk? You know, you could say, well, maybe it's a tree trunk or it's a car trunk or it's a box that you hold things in.

So trunk is a word that's very flexible. So it could mean tree trunk. It could be car trunk. It could be a box that you put things in. It has other usage as well. And the only way you're going to know what that meaning is is context it.

But you're not going to read into every single passage that you see this word trunk as. What you're not going to do is read into every single passage the same meaning. You have to figure out the meaning based on context clues.

And the same thing is true of these Greek words. If you look up these Greek words in these online resources, you might find that there's five meanings that are there, and you can't just pick whatever meaning you like.

And you can't just read whatever meaning you like into every single passage. These words can mean different things depending on the context. So I would be very careful if you don't know much about the Greek language to draw a lot of conclusions related to the meaning as far as that's concerned.

But if you're going to do a Bible word study on prayer, or on any topic, I would just say, hey, read the Bible a lot. Read the Bible a lot. Look up examples of it. Make as many observations as you can.

Do simple word studies. That's going to get you a lot of information. But just remember repetition, repetition, repetition is key, and making as many observations as you can and trying to take those ideas and group them into some sort of usable form would be helpful.

Word Study Fallacies and the Meaning of Greek Terms

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