Every aspect of the Bible study process is meant to lead you to life application: the concrete changes you commit to making in your attitudes, affections, actions, associations, and ambitions in response to what you have learned during Bible study. Beyond its intellectual value, studying the Bible with a posture of faith, humility, and dependence on God also has great transformational value, intended to transform you inwardly so that your outward behavior is a true reflectio

There are several phases of the interpretation process that ultimately lead to discerning the biblical author’s main point: answer the questions you asked of the text, specify how the original audience would have interpreted and responded to the author’s message, explain how the author describes the nature of God, then explain how the author describes the nature of humanity, and finally, identify the main point of the passage.

Observation is the process of noticing how biblical texts are constructed. Accordingly, more than asking the foundational question “what does it say?” which could simply refer to the words that are used in the text, it is important to ask “what specific literary features does the author use to construct the passage?”

To properly interpret and apply biblical texts, it is essential to prioritize discovering the historical-cultural, literary, and theological contexts of the texts we are studying. In this article, I will show you how to discover these contexts.