Lesson 1 | Searching a Topic
Aim of This Course
The Bible serves the hungry soul with a never-ending cache of glories to explore.
But if you are going to reach awe inspiring destinations and unveil the beauty in the details, you will need powerful tools to get you there and enable you to see all that you can.
Whether zooming out to try to catch the panorama of a jungle canyon or zooming in to focus on the details of a flower, awe and insight begin to occur only when you are enabled to see what’s already there. This is also true of Bible study and meditation, and Biblearc’s search tool will help you see both aspects. (1) It will enable you to search wide in order to understand the entire panorama of a topic. (2) It will also help you search deep so that you can savor every detail found in a particular passage.
Seeing the Breadth of the Panorama
Let’s say you were in a philosophy class and were being told that truth was simply a social construct, relative to the will of the subject, able to be personalized, and culturally adaptable. Ugh! You are not just being taught one lie about truth, but an entire collection of them. In responding to this scenario, a broad search will come in handy—one that collects multiple aspects of biblical data on “truth” so that you can counter one worldview with another.
In these three verses alone, we can already begin to compile a summary of the Bible’s teaching on this theme. Jesus came to testify to the truth, certain people are “of the truth” (i.e. on the side of truth)—namely those who hear Jesus’ voice, testimony is either true or it is not, truth can be known, truth is the opposite of lies, and knowing truth affects who or what we worship. This summary will be a powerful tool to carry into that classroom!
Seeing the Nuances of the Details
Or, let’s say you were in a Bible study working through 1 Corinthians 3 when, in verse 17, you observe that some translations read, “If anyone destroys God’s temple…” whereas others use the word defiles. Somebody asks why there are two different translations and what are we to understand here. You make a couple of taps on your phone and are quickly able to examine the nine places in the NT where the Greek word behind these translations is used.
The second hit sheds good light on the question. We are told that bad company “ruins” good morals. Remembering that God’s temple in 1 Corinthians 3 refers to God’s people in a local church (cf. 3:9), it now becomes clear what Paul means and why both “destroy” and “defile” are sensible translations. The person in a local church whose teaching and behavior is truly “bad company”—so much that it leads to the defilement of that local church and effectively destroys it—such a person should be in great fear; sooner or later God will be coming around to do the same to him/her. How substantive your Bible study has become through a search that has helped you better understand this stern warning.
Course Structure and Purpose
The flow of this course begins with the broad theme of searching a topic. Following that, it moves forward into the more specific process of exploring theological questions. We then pull out the microscope and zoom in on the details of particular passages. Finally, our course will end with searches empowering us to explore the original languages. (No knowledge of the original languages is required!) The aim of this course is to equip you with skill and efficiency in your Bible searches, enabling you to adapt to any need that may arise in Bible study, personal devotion, ministry, teaching, and counseling.