Lesson 1 | Searching a Topic
What We’ve Learned
The ability to search the Bible for topics unlocks a wonderful tool for checking theological positions. Of course, this should include testing out what you hear preached on Sunday or on the internet. But before that, it should be used to scrutinize your own convictions. Take any topic that you have an opinion about what the Bible says, and run a search or two. Does what you believe accord with the full counsel of God in his word? If this challenge makes you nervous, that is all the more reason to do it.
This is a great opportunity to grow toward maturity!
What We Now Know
- Concordances, subject indexes, and cross-references are searches gone before us, serving as examples of what to search.
- Topic searches answer the question, “What does the Bible say about _?”
- We should usually try to search our topic wide using these strategies:
- Search multiple versions at once
- Think about different forms of the word you are searching
- Think about synonyms and other ways of expressing the idea
- When the number of results is overwhelming, we can narrow our search using word combos.
- We want to remember to pay attention to the placement of each search result within salvation history.
What We Don’t Know
We do not always know all the right terms to search. Realizing this is really important because it will encourage us to run our conclusions by godly brothers and sisters before considering them settled. Our friends and pastors will inevitably think about other words or phrases or passages that we should investigate.
We also do not know the context of every part of the Bible perfectly. If you are new to studying your Bible, you might hardly know the context of any passage, and that is okay. Let this fact keep you humble and eager to learn all the more. While we do not want to get lost in cross-references and forget our original passage of study, it is not a bad thing to wander away from a search and decide to study a particular book of the Bible!