Bible Study: Where do Commentaries Fit In?

Last week’s post touched on some of the basics of how to study your Bible. We talked about reading a verse or two, asking questions of those verses, and searching in the surrounding verses for the answers to those questions. This process will usually serve you well. God did an excellent job (imagine that ) at making His Word understandable. Most of the time the answers you need are placed plainly in front of you, and it only takes some time and effort to find them. However, there are some times when you have trouble making sense of what’s going on in a passage, or you simply want to see what conclusions others have come to about a passage you are studying. When you begin feeling this way there are a couple of routes you can take.

Your first route, and probably the most obvious, is to talk with other Christians. Talk together about the scriptures you have been studying. This will help them and you! It helps them because they are talking about scripture and studying when they may not have otherwise. It helps you because you get another point of view on the scriptures you are studying. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, and don’t be afraid to defend the conclusions you have come to. If the conclusions you have come to have good evidence to support them, you just may be right! Discussing Scriptures and the application of them with other Christians is an excellent way to edify one another and to help each other grow in the faith.

Your second route is to look at a commentary. Before we go any further, we need to understand some facts about commentaries:

1. Commentaries are NOT inspired by God.
2. Reading a commentary is exactly the same as asking someone their point of view on a passage.
3. Commentaries are NOT inspired by God.

Did I write one of those twice? Ah well, too late to go back and change it now . In all seriousness, we must understand that commentaries are simply what one person thinks about a scripture. A good commentary will give you evidence and help you to look back to the text with a critical eye and take into consideration all the evidence that is there. A bad commentary will give you a conclusion with no evidence to support it. When you open a commentary and read it, you’ll know which one you have.

Studying God’s Word is crucial to our Christianity, and commentaries can help you to understand and draw conclusions about passages that are difficult. However, you must be careful with commentaries, since they are NOT inspired by God, they are the writings of uninspired men. Commentaries may have mistakes in them, they may (depending on the writer) teach false doctrine, and so caution is necessary. In the same way, we need to be careful when we talk with other Christians. They are not always right, and neither are you! We all make mistakes, but we all should continue to grow together. As you study if you remember that God’s Word is inspired and is always correct, you will do well. Next week we are going to discuss even more options for studying your Bible, and how you can find evidence on your own instead of depending on others to present it to you. Happy Studying!