Podcast: 6 Tools That Change the Way You Study Scripture (Jon Nielson)

August 04, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The “Why” and “How” of Personal Bible Study

In this episode Jon Nielson discusses how the unified story of the Bible is there for everyday believers to study and understand, and he lays out 6 helpful principles to apply when reading it. Jon discusses how reading the Bible isn't just for pastors, it's for everyone, and how with careful reading we can come to know and see Jesus better in his word.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS

Understanding God's Word

Understanding God's Word

Jon Nielson

In this accessible guide to biblical interpretation, pastor Jon Nielson presents 6 hermeneutical tools and demonstrates how to use them effectively to improve personal or small-group Bible studies. 

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:28 - Do We Need a “Professional” to Help Us Understand the Bible?

Matt Tully
Jon Nielsen serves as the senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and he is also the author of a number of books, including Understanding God’s Word: An Introduction to Interpreting the Bible, which is part of the Theology Basics series from Crossway. Jon, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jon Nielson
Thank you, Matt. Good to be with you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re talking about the how of Bible study. But before we get into some of the tools that you outline in this new book of yours, tools designed to help us normal, everyday Christians get into God’s word and understand and apply it rightly, I wonder if you can just start by reminding us a little bit about the why of Bible study. Why is it worth investing our limited time and (maybe more acutely) our limited energy in Bible study on a regular basis?

Jon Nielson
To answer that question, I think I’d start with just remembering what the Bible is, what a gift it is. We’re created by a God who has not chosen to remain silent. He’s given us his word, and it is an eternally beautiful gift. The God who made us has communicated with us intentionally, clearly, perfectly, salvifically. He does not desire to remain unknown. He wants to be known by his creatures. And so I look at Bible study as, ultimately, responding with gratitude to the gift of God’s word. Our Creator has spoken, and he has not remained hidden from us.

Matt Tully
As Christians, most of us listening would probably affirm what you just said. We know that intellectually, but I think sometimes even though we know Scripture is meant to be this incredible gift to us that helps us in so many ways, we can sometimes feel pretty intimidated by the idea of studying the Bible for ourselves. And we can maybe prefer to let the experts, like you, the pastors out there, tell us what it means, study it, and then communicate that to us. What would you say to somebody who says, “I’m not sure I can do that very well”?

Jon Nielson
I’m glad you asked that question, because that’s the whole reason for this book—trying to equip everyday believers in reading, handling, applying, and interpreting God’s word. And so absolutely it is my conviction, and I think it was rediscovered in the Protestant Reformation, this idea of the priesthood of all believers, that not only do we all have access to God by faith in Jesus Christ, who’s our high priest, but every believer should be digging into God’s word in a language they can understand for themselves. We should all be students of the Bible. I mentioned the Protestant Reformation. You see that in Scripture in Acts with the noble Bereans who are digging into the Scriptures themselves and measuring everything the apostles are saying against the Scriptures. And so I think it’s biblical. I think it’s part of the Protestant Reformed tradition, that everyday believers should be able to handle the Bible well for themselves.

Matt Tully
And not just even the example of the Bereans, but I think of how often Jesus is quoting from and alluding to and referencing Old Testament passages that he often is saying are about himself, or some of the other New Testament writers who are constantly drawing from the Scriptures of that day as evidence, as support, as explanation of things that happened. And so there was the expectation their hearers would understand the Scriptures for themselves.

Jon Nielson
Yeah, that’s exactly right. One of my underlying convictions in offering this book to the church would be we cannot leave Bible study for people who have doctorates. This is not something that’s reserved for the academy. It’s not something that’s reserved for people who’ve been to seminary, not people doing “full-time ministry.” This is a worthy and important and vital endeavor for every follower of Jesus Christ to be well equipped to handle God’s word for himself or herself.

Matt Tully
This is a little bit of an aside, but where did that impression, though, that can be fairly common among normal Christians that this stuff is just too far beyond their level, that they really need a “professional teacher” to help them understand? Where might that idea have crept in?

Jon Nielson
As a pastor I will be quick to say a lot of times it’s the fault of pastors. There can be, I think, a prideful tendency, and I’ve had to combat it myself, to set ourselves up as the guru or the expert or the one who has this special knowledge that we’re imparting Sunday after Sunday. And I think that mentality is actually against the heart of Ephesians 4, where Paul explicitly says that Jesus gives the pastors and teachers to the church to equip the saints to do the work of gospel ministry. To be a pastor-teacher, of course it’s teaching and preaching God’s word, but it has to involve an equipping of the saints. So, I think I’m every bit as much an equipper as I am a teacher-preacher, according to God’s word. So, I think a lot of times it’s the pastor’s fault, and we like to feel like we’re the scholar-guru-expert, and we’ve tapped into something that our people can’t. And I just want to say in this book, no, everybody can. There’s no magic formula. And in fact, I know we’ll get into the book, but the stuff that I’m offering in this book is stuff that came to me from a few different directions, but ultimately from pastors training other pastors. and it’s stuff that I didn’t get in seminary. It’s been the most helpful stuff for me as a preacher, and it wasn’t in seminary. It was just in personal training with older, more mature believers who helped me grow in my understanding and application of God’s word.

06:29 - Developing the Right Instincts for Bible Study

Matt Tully
That’s a great segue to my next question: When it comes to studying the Bible, this topic of hermeneutics (which is another word for this, there are a lot of different methods. There are a lot of different approaches and formulas. A lot of books have been written on these broad topics. But in your book, you break up your approach into six distinct tools, which is what you call them. Before we get into the tools, where did you get this? Is this stuff that you’ve developed yourself, or are there some significant influences in your life that have helped to shape this approach?

Jon Nielson
For the second question, my answer is absolutely not. This is a regurgitation and a reapplication of some principles or tools that are now everywhere. They originated, as far as I can understand it, from a pastor named Dick Lucas, who was the longtime pastor and preacher at St. Helen’s Bishop’s Gate in London. In the early nineties, he called them Lucas Lessons, and he’s got a lot more than six. He probably has a couple dozen principles for interpretation and application. It’s really all about careful reading. It’s just reading the Bible carefully.

Matt Tully
And we will get into this, but some of the principles, when you take them out of the context of Bible study and you think of them just in terms of reading any other book, they make a lot of intuitive sense. They don’t seem complicated. They seem almost second nature. And yet, when it comes to the Bible, sometimes we do need them explicitly spelled out.

Jon Nielson
I think that’s 80 percent of the work in what we’re doing in bible study or hermeneutics is just being good, careful readers in general. And the ironic thing, or the thing where I see some incongruity sometimes even with really smart people, is that we’ll approach the Bible in a different way than we’ll approach a great novel. With a great novel, you’d never rip out one (maybe you would) quotation totally out of context. You’d read it in the context of the whole story. And with the Bible, sometimes we’re ripping things out of context because we want a verse for the day, and we’re actually doing to Scripture something we would never do to The Brothers Karamazov. But anyway, with Dick Lucas and the Lucas Lessons, he came over in the early 90s and spent time with Kent Hughes at College Church and his pastoral staff (Kent has been a long time board member with Crossway), and he kind of retrained them in these principles or these tools. And out of that came a few different organizations: the Charles Simeon Trust (stateside), which trains pastors in Biblical exposition; Word Partners, which used to be Leadership Resources International, uses versions of his tools and his principles as they train pastors internationally. And what I’m doing in this book, really with the encouragement and support of some of those people, is applying those principles or those tools to everyday believers in their study of the Bible. So, it’s not focused on just pastors, preachers. This is really for all of God’s people as they study the Bible carefully.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the great things about this book. This isn’t just stuff that you sat down and thought, I want to write a book on hermeneutics. The ways of talking about these issues and the metaphors that are used for actually approaching some of these things have been really well-tested with hundreds and thousands of people in classroom contexts, but also in church contexts and small groups. And so it really is an effective approach to thinking about how to actually study the Bible for ourselves.

Jon Nielson
That’s right. And the other word I would use to describe it—we use the word tools, we use the word principles—I would also say it’s a book about developing the right instincts. So this is not an exhaustive introduction to the science of hermeneutics. It’s also not an exegetical book necessarily—how you do careful exegesis.

Matt Tully
You’re not going to parse different parts of speech and try to get people to memorize them.

Jon Nielson
No, that’s not what it is. But it is about training yourself as a student of Scripture to develop the right tendencies, the right instincts. And so that’s why I’ve called them tools. You might need more tools if you’re doing a construction job, but here are six ones that you know you’re going to need.

10:33 - The Context Tool

Matt Tully
Here are the ones to put in that tool belt and always have with you. Let’s talk through these six tools. As we go through them, I wonder if you could answer three basic questions about each of them. The first question would be, What is this tool all about? What is it, and what’s it doing? Number two would be, What are the pitfalls that we might fall into if we ignore this tool? And then number three would be What does it look like in practice? How do we actually start to use it in our work with the Bible. So, the first tool that you have is the context tool. So what is that?

Jon Nielson
I already alluded to that one by contrasting Bible study with the way we study Brothers K or other great novels. And we know this. We know that you and I hate being taken out of context. If someone rips something we say and they put it in the newspaper or put it online, we say, “No, that’s not what I meant. You didn’t hear the whole context of the conversation.” And my point in this tool is that we do, especially because we’re trying to find a thought for the day or an inspirational Bible verse, we tend to be tempted to do that with Scripture. That is, rip verses out of their historical context (what was actually going on), their biblical context (where it fits into the whole story of redemption), and also even the literary context (where it fits into the letter, or the historical narrative book, or poetic work, or prophetic book). So, context is the tool that is basically just trying to encourage Bible students to consider those three things I just mentioned: historical, biblical, literary context for every passage that you’re studying. Dave Helm at the Simeon Trust is fond of saying, and he might have gotten this from Dick Lucas, “A text can never mean something that it never meant.” So, you go back and you say, considering Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, how would they have heard this? And you start there, and then you’re able to say, okay, what might this then mean for us as followers of Jesus today?

Matt Tully
As I thought about it, one of the tricky things about this whole tool is maybe one of the reasons why we tend to do this with Scripture is because we do intuitively understand that Scripture is different. It is unique from any other book. It isn’t like Brothers K, to take that example, in that it is divinely inspired, and we believe that. Sometimes I think that’s maybe behind our tendency to just take a verse and apply it to whatever situation we’re in, or just kind of read it on the surface and not do the hard work of digging in because this is God’s word. We maybe feel like it should have this universal application or a timelessness to it. So, help us understand how this conviction that Scripture is God’s word and it is written for us as his people, how do we fit that with this importance of understanding context?

Jon Nielson
That’s a great question. The way I would parse that would be to say God’s word can have a particular impact in our lives or in the life of a church, but in the process of inviting that and wanting that to happen, we are not to abuse the text and to try to make it mean something that it never meant. You could go to all kinds of examples where we do that. The danger is that you actually use a verse in Scripture to say something opposite from its original meaning.

Matt Tully
Which is possible to do when you totally ignore the context.

Jon Nielson
Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” becomes this promise of accomplishment. It’s written by an aging apostle who’s in prison who, from an earthly perspective, is accomplishing nothing.

Matt Tully
He’s pretty limited.

Jon Nielson
He’s limited. And what he’s been talking about in the verses right before that is the way that God, in Christ, has strengthened him to be content in all circumstances. So, absolutely, that is God’s living word, and he might use that to help me grow in my contentment here in 2025, but I’m not meant to take that and say, “Oh, here’s a promise that I’m going to do anything or I’m going to accomplish everything I want to because I belong to Jesus Christ. I’m going to win this game.”

14:38 - The Courtroom Tool

Matt Tully
I’ve seen that verse put on graduation cards for seniors, and it’s sort of like, hey, you’re going out into the rest of your life, and you can do anything you want with God’s power. And that’s just not really what it’s talking about. This is actually a great segue into the second tool that you highlight in the book, which is the courtroom tool. So, speak a little bit to what the courtroom tool is and how that even relates to what we’ve been talking about.

Jon Nielson
The title for that alludes to what you swear if you’re called as a witness: Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? And that is our fundamental commitment as we come to the Bible. Seeking to interpret it and apply it faithfully is to say neither more nor less than what the Scripture is saying. We’re not adding to it, even if it feels good.

Matt Tully
We’re trying to help it out almost.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. Help it out.

Matt Tully
It’s often with the best of intentions.

Jon Nielson
That’s right. But we’re letting it speak for itself, but we’re also not taking away. We’re not trying to water down biblical teaching so that it’s more palatable for the culture. We’re trying to be faithful with letting the Bible speak for itself—not adding, not taking away.

Matt Tully
And I would imagine most of our listeners are probably pretty well-attuned to the danger of saying less than the Bible says on any particular issue. But I think sometimes maybe for our circles, the danger could be assuming a passage is saying more about a given topic than it actually does. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit. Have you seen that at play in how conservative Christians who love God’s word can sometimes maybe violate this rule?

Jon Nielson
The ultimate example of the first person in Scripture who does this is Eve in the garden. In response to Satan’s question (Did God really tell you you can’t eat from any of the tree and trees in the garden?), she says, “No, it’s just this one tree, and we’re not to eat of it, and we can’t touch it, lest we die.” So, she adds this prohibition on touching the tree, which God never said. Really, it’s her inching toward legalism and adding a human regulation to what was a clear divine command. And that’s actually what the Pharisees do thousands of years later as they build a hedge around the Law of Moses in their human tradition. And then they begin enforcing that on other people with the force of God’s law. And that’s legalism. And so that’s where I think we’d see it today. Even in what we might call “faithful Christian conservative circles” is a human tradition added on top of God’s word that can begin to take on the force of God’s word itself, especially when believers try to enforce it in the lives of other believers and guilt them. You could think of all kinds of examples, but I’ll use one from a previous generation, because it’s not as applicable today.

Matt Tully
It won’t be as controversial.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. Teetotalers are those who would say, “Hey, if you’re a Christian, we know drunkenness is a sin. The danger toward drunkenness is so significant that a real Christian shouldn’t drink alcohol at all.” Which the Bible doesn’t say, and then they begin enforcing that on other believers: “Oh, you had a glass of wine? Shame on you.” And I do think in our generation that’s less the case.

Matt Tully
Less common. But the tricky thing about this whole topic is that so often we’re talking about applications of the text itself. And so all of us could read a passage and then come to the conclusion that I think the Lord wants me to apply this passage in this particular way in my life. And we would say that’s a valid thing. But the difference is when we can conflate the application with maybe the meaning of the text and we try to universalize it.

Jon Nielson
I think that’s exactly the right way to look at it. The phrase I’ve used in my pastoral ministry is there may be personal elective legalisms that we choose for ourselves. For example, if you have a history with alcoholism and you turn to Christ and leave that behind, you may joyfully say, “I’m never going to touch a drop of alcohol again for the sake of Christ.” And that’s a joyful application and demonstration of your repentance. But for you then to take a step past God’s word and try to enforce that in the lives of other believers who may enjoy alcohol with temperance is actually to say more than what God’s word says.

18:53 - The Crux Tool

Matt Tully
Let’s go on to the third tool that you highlight in the book, the crux tool. What is that?

Jon Nielson
The crux tool is basically trying to get at what is the main point of an entire book. This is one where it’s related to the context tool, but it helps you look at a whole book, and I think I’ve got some methods in the chapter on how you get a sense of what an entire book of Scripture is about. You look at the beginning and the end. You look at repeated words and phrases. Some biblical authors are incredibly helpful in that they give a really clear thesis statement: “This is why I am writing.” Jude is a wonderful example of that where he says, “I wanted to write to you about our common faith, but I felt compelled to write to you to contend for the faith, because these certain people have crept in unnoticed to abuse the gospel and twist the Scriptures.” So, Jude tells you, “Hey, a big point of my little letter is to tell you to contend for the faith against this false teaching that’s crept in.” And so basically the idea of the crux tool is you’re keeping the big picture of a book in mind as you study any particular part of it. And that kind of keeps you grounded. It keeps you from going off in weird directions that, frankly, at times you’d have to say that might be unrecognizable to the biblical author that you’re doing that with this passage. So, you’re always pulling yourself back to what’s the main point of this biblical book? What is the author trying to do? What has he told us he’s trying to do?

Matt Tully
Some people might hear what you’re saying about the crux, the core idea of a biblical book being this really important thing to keep in mind, and might wonder if that is in danger of oversimplifying what a biblical author might be saying or their message. I can think of books that I’ve read or a letter maybe that I’ve received from somebody, and it’s not always as simple as there’s just one main point that this person who wrote me this letter is trying to communicate. Couldn’t that also be true with the biblical text?

Jon Nielson
Yeah. There are obviously complexities. The book of Romans would be a really good example of that. You could say Roans is probably the greatest theologically robust explanation of the gospel in Scripture, especially chapters 3, 4, 5, 6. They really just explain so well what happens on the cross and how we are justified. But I remember years ago what Kent Hughes (I’ve mentioned him before) showed me from Romans. Let’s look at the beginning and the end, and let’s look at these phrases that Paul is using to both introduce and conclude his letter. The obedience of faith, grace of God, the obedience of faith for all nations. And then again in chapter 16, the obedience of faith for all nations. And his point was that Paul’s heart in writing this letter to the church in Rome, and he makes this clear, is actually to convince the church in Rome that the gospel needs to keep going forth to bring about the obedience of faith in all nations. And he actually wants to send it ahead of him because he wants the church in Rome to send him off and support him in his ministry to Spain. He wants to go to Spain and share the gospel. So, I remember Kent Hughes saying we think of Romans as this dense theological. He says it’s actually missional. Yes, there’s a theological explanation of how the gospel works, but Paul’s whole point is to convince them that because this is what the gospel is, it’s got to keep on going out to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations.

Matt Tully
And that emphasis, that understanding of Paul’s main point in writing, really does start to influence how we’re interpreting any given verse.

Jon Nielson
It does. So, you’re in the dense center of Romans, and Kent Hughes would say the gospel is the theological engine of Romans, but the top and tail gives you the crux. And that is that it’s not just let’s make sure we understand the mechanics of the gospel and get our theology right. Yes, it’s that, but it’s also that Paul wants to convince us not only that this is what the gospel is but this is where the gospel has to go. We’ve got to share this, and it’s got to go from Rome to Spain to the ends of the earth.

23:10 - The Construction Tool

Matt Tully
Let’s move on to tool number four, the construction tool. And this is the tool that I think sometimes we can get tripped up on because it can sometimes feel a little bit harder to discern, especially the first or second time we’re reading a passage.

Jon Nielson
This is the tool where people can react by saying, “Oh no. I’m going to have to do sentence diagramming.” Because it is. It is the tool that is—

Matt Tully
It’s looking at the structure of a passage.

Jon Nielson
That’s right. What is the shape? And you are talking about grammar. How is the author putting this together? I guess I want to convince Bible students that, number one, this can actually be kind of fun because once you discern the shape of a particular Bible passage, it all of a sudden makes the main point pop. And I think that’s actually an exciting moment. And one of the places that it happened for me probably twenty years ago was looking at Luke 15. So often people study the parable of the prodigal son on its own. And it is a beautiful parable on its own. But when you look at how Luke is structuring that part of his Gospel—the beginning of the chapter is Jesus gathering with sinners, and the scribes and the Pharisees are grumbling. And then Jesus tells three parables in a row. And the climactic third one is the prodigal son. And the first parable is the lost sheep. Something is lost, and then it’s found, and then there’s great rejoicing. And then it’s the lost coin. The coin is lost, it’s found, there’s great rejoicing. And then in Hebrew style, he tells a longer one about a son who’s lost, he’s come back, he’s found, and there’s rejoicing. But then there’s a surprise ending. The older brother is grumbling. And then you go, Oh my goodness. Jesus is telling these parables in succession to go back to what just happened in the setting at the beginning of the chapter, where he’s seeking to seek and save the lost, and the religious leaders are grumbling. And so you see the shape of that whole chunk, and you realize, first of all, Jesus is a genius. But even the way Luke is putting together that part of his Gospel is masterful.

Matt Tully
You’re so right that this is one of those things that the more time, the more effort, and the more care that we put into this tool in particular, the more it’s going to pay off and we’re going to see things that we’ve never seen in the text that are legitimately there, but they take a little bit more careful thought and work.

Jon Nielson
That’s exactly right. And similar to the crux tool, it’s careful reading it. A lot of times with the construction tool, a lot of it is figuring out what’s the right chunk of text to take? Where does this part stop and start. And a lot of times in the Old Testament narrative, it could be several chapters. And you’re realizing these chapters are all a part of this movement that the author’s structuring for us to show us this main point.

Matt Tully
And that’s where other extrabiblical resources, other commentators, pastors, or people who have studied these things maybe longer than we have can be such a great resource to help us get ahead a little bit in terms of starting to see some of this structure in the text.

Jon Nielson
Yeah, and that’s a really good point. This book is not a book meant to convince any student of the Bible that you don’t ever need to look at a commentary or you shouldn’t listen to the experts. It’s meant to say no, you can do good bible study on your own. But yeah, this is a tool where you might absolutely say, Where did he divide this text? Let me see what he told me the break was.

Matt Tully
Look at your study Bible. At the beginning of each book, the ESV Study Bible has a whole outline of the entire book, and that’s going to be doing some of that chunking for you as well.

Jon Nielson
Yep, that’s exactly right.

27:00 - The Clarity Tool

Matt Tully
Yeah. Let’s move on to the second to last tool, the clarity tool. What do you mean by that?

Jon Nielson
The clarity tool is one that I definitely would put squarely, and I use that word instinct at the beginning of our conversation. It has to do not so much with a method but more with a mindset that you bring to Bible study. And it’s the idea that as much as possible, it’s never 100% possible, but as much as possible, I want to leave my stuff, my baggage, my hobby horse, my pet emphasis at the door when I come to Bible study. And I want to allow the biblical text to speak with power and clarity for itself. Dick Lucas would always talk about letting the text be king. And so often—I see this more and more, actually, in younger generations, so my age and younger—we want to bring our own agenda and lay that on top of the biblical text and make it speak in the direction we want it to speak instead of sitting under the authority of Scripture and saying, look, as I come to this text, I am fully prepared that it may actually tell me something I don’t want to hear, or something I need to hear but I didn’t even know I needed to hear it. So, it’s trying to leave our agenda behind and let Scripture speak for itself. And so in that chapter I use all these examples of agendas or mindsets that we could bring to the text that we need to intentionally leave behind.

Matt Tully
As I was reading through this section of the book, I was struck by just how foundational and fundamental to rightly applying this principle is we need to have our own self-understanding of the ways in which we’ve been influenced by our own culture, our own context, our experiences, or our upbringing. And sometimes we struggle to be aware of that. We can’t feel the water that we’re swimming in, and so how have you sought to try to be more aware of what you are bringing to the text?

Jon Nielson
It’s not only a good question but it’s the right question that we should be asking. Where are my blind spots? Where is my particular cultural niche, social niche, church tradition niche? Where does that push me? How do I make sure that none of those things are bigger than the authority of Scripture? And I actually think, as a Presbyterian Reformed guy, I think that’s the heart of the Reformation is saying it’s not my church tradition and Scripture on equal level; it is Scripture. Sola scriptura. I think it’s asking good questions. I think it’s saying, yeah, this is the interpretation I’ve heard for years, but I want to read the text for myself. If you get to the point where you’re getting Greek and Hebrew and you’re training in the original languages (I want to read it in the original languages myself and do my own translation of it), the caveat to that is to always say if you think that you’ve stumbled upon a new interpretation of a biblical passage that no one in the past 2,000 years has ever discovered except for you, you probably need to check yourself. Like a hundred times.

Matt Tully
That’s not a good sign.

Jon Nielson
That’s not usually a good sign. But with that being said, you don’t just take someone’s word for it because he’s a seminary professor in your particular tradition.

Matt Tully
And that’s where the conviction that we have the Spirit in dwelling us, that we want to solicit input from maybe a variety of perspectives and contexts, make sure that we are checking against church history to some extent. There are many ways that we can go about checking ourselves when it comes to the clarity side.

Jon Nielson
Psalm 46 was one that came up recently in our church. We were preaching through the Psalms, and I think it’s Psalm 46:10 that says, “Be still and know that I’m God.” How many sermons have we all heard on this, desiring to comfort people, which is a good desire by the way. This tool touches on good motivations: I want to comfort my people with a verse. And yet you go to that psalm and you let it speak for itself, and you realize what’s going on in Psalm 46 is God basically saying “Shut up” to the raging nations of the world. And yes, he’s calling his people to take refuge in him, but in that particular verse, he’s saying, “Be still,” that is, “Quiet down. Stop raging and know that I am God.” So, it’s actually a word of rebuke to the rebellious nations. It’s not a word of parental comfort to his people. Even though there’s other Scriptures you could go to to get that.

31:34 - The Cross Tool

Matt Tully
Sometimes it’s not a matter of if this is a biblical idea or a notion; it’s just where are we going in Scripture to actually get that? And that goes back to the context question as well. I love how all of these kind of relate to each other. They feed into each other. And as you said, as we cultivate these instincts of interpretation, we’re going to find ourselves just more in line. So, the final tool that you highlight is called the cross tool, and this one’s got a unique significance as we think about what it means to approach the Bible rightly. Explain what you mean by the cross tool.

Jon Nielson
It relates to what we talked about at the very beginning. If our creator-God is ultimately the author of Scripture—Scripture is over forty human authors, sixty-six books, and yet one divine author who inspired every word—then number one, we can assume that there should be a kind of unity, a connection between the parts. This is a divine book given to us by the God of the universe. And also that every part should have a right and proper relation to what is clearly the climactic saving work of this God that is sending his Son to fulfill all of the prophetic promises and expectations of the Old Testament and then to be the Lord of the church, to whom the Epistles are given in the New Testament. And so basically this tool is saying one instinct you need to develop is the dogged discipline of asking of every particular Scripture passage you study, How does this relate to the gospel of Jesus Christ? How does this show us his saving work, either in an anticipatory way from the Old Testament or in an explanatory way as you look at the New Testament text? And you really haven’t done your Bible study faithfully and fully unless you’ve answered that question.

Matt Tully
This is such an important point to emphasize, and it’s one that has explicit biblical support to it—the idea that all of Scripture, including the Old Testament, is ultimately connected to Jesus. Jesus himself teaches that when he’s walking with these disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. There are other passages that speak to that as well. But one thing that I think some of us, though, could maybe respond to this one with is just we’ve maybe seen this done poorly. There’s certainly a way to do this that is maybe not very faithful to the text. What might that look like, and how do we make sure that we’re being Christ-centered in our reading of the Bible in the appropriate way?

Jon Nielson
And some of the pushback that you get is legitimate because sometimes this can be interpreted as (and I forget what pastor or writer talks about this) playing Where’s Waldo? with Jesus. What could be representing Jesus here? Where’s he hiding? And it becomes almost a game.

Matt Tully
And it starts to violate some of the other principles.

Jon Nielson
That’s exactly right. I was just going to say that. It can actually violate a careful reading of the text in context. Especially with the Old Testament, it can kind of lend itself to almost an ahistorical reading of the text.

Matt Tully
An allegorical reading.

Jon Nielson
An allegorical reading, and you ignore this is real stuff that really happened to real people. It’s not just playing Where’s Waldo? The classic example from church history is the scarlet cord that Rahab lowers from the walls of Jericho. Oh, that represents the blood of Jesus. Well, no. God’s redeeming work for his people does foreshadow the work of Jesus, but the scarlet cord was just a scarlet cord. And the authors probably just were narrating descriptively.

Matt Tully
That’s what color it was.

Jon Nielson
That’s right. So, I think it’s important to ask, What is the relation to the saving work of Jesus Christ? It also doesn’t mean that every single text is teaching the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement.

Matt Tully
That’s an important point.

Jon Nielson
It could be that a particular text is really shining a spotlight on the kingship of Christ, or pointing to the resurrection of Christ, or pointing to the suffering of Christ.

Matt Tully
Or even our need for Christ.

Jon Nielson
Or our need for Christ. That’s exactly right. If you get to the end of 1 Samuel and you’re preaching the passage where Saul dies, when he goes to the medium of Endor—

Matt Tully
A very odd passage. Odd story.

Jon Nielson
It’s a super weird passage. She sees this vision of Samuel, Saul falls down as though dead, and then he gets up and eats just enough to give him strength to go die in battle the next day. How does that show you Christ? Well, it’s showing you the hellish depth and despair of a life that has completely turned away from God and his word. And it’s showing you our need for grace, for repentance, for Christ.

Matt Tully
That’s why it’s such an important nuance in this whole conversation about a Christ-centered reading is it doesn’t mean that every passage is about Christ in the same way. Every passage and every story of the Bible connects to the gospel in meaningful, true ways; but they don’t all connect in the exact same way, and there’s not always a Christ figure that we can just point to and say this person represents Jesus.

Jon Nielson
That’s exactly right. We call it the cross tool, but there are some passages in the New Testament that assume the work of Christ on the cross, and Philippians 2 would be one example, where the primary thrust is Christ as our example. And you’ve got to preach that or teach that or study that for what it is.

Matt Tully
It’s an important part of what his work means for us.

Jon Nielson
He’s our Savior, but he also explicitly—John 13, where he washes his disciples feet. “I have given you an example.” Jesus actually says it explicitly: “That’s how you apply this.”

Matt Tully
Thanks for walking us through these six tools that you highlight in this book. Again, they are tools that are very accessible for us, and one of the things I love about the book is that it is very organized and structured where each chapter is exploring one of these tools, giving examples of what it looks like in practice. There are even some practice passages for the reader to work through to learn how to actually use the tool in the real study of Scripture. Is there anything else you’d want to say about the structure of the book? How could this book be used in a church context or a small group context or even just personally?

Jon Nielson
Certainly, you could use it personally. I’ve been encouraged. Our church here in Wheaton is using it over the summer. There’s a group of about forty women in our church who are going through it chapter by chapter just as a way of equipping them. Some of them are teaching (women teaching other women) in the context of our church Bible study, but a lot of them are just small group leaders or helping with community groups in our church, and they just want to be equipped to better understand and apply God’s word. So I think a group setting like that to go through it is good. There’s a DVD that Crossway did that accompanies it. But I think you could also do it in a smaller group setting—a group of eight to twelve people could just go through a chapter at a time. The nice thing about the tools is that you can come up with more biblical examples to work through. You could say, Let’s go to this passage and apply all six of these tools at once.

Matt Tully
You can kind of pick anything.

Jon Nielson
That’s right.

Matt Tully
So, maybe as a final question for you, Jon. We’ve been talking a lot about Bible study, the importance of Bible study first, but then the how of Bible study. I wonder if you could just share what passage of the Bible you are studying right now, and what God has been showing you through that.

Jon Nielson
I’m a little boring in that I’ve used Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s read through the Bible in a year plan for probably fifteen years. So, I’m usually in four different places of Scripture in the mornings during personal devotions. We’re getting ready to do a summer series in the Minor Prophets, so I’m in Habakkuk 1 this week. We just finished the Gospel of Matthew, so Habakkuk has been a nice change of pace.

Matt Tully
They are very different.

Jon Nielson
Very different. And the odyssey of the first chapter, really the first couple chapters: God, want you to clean up, I want you to purify the sin of your covenant people. Man, God, I’ve got an issue with you using the Babylonians to do it. How can God remain holy and just while using such an evil people to accomplish his purifying for his own for his own covenant people? So, that’s been a good thing to wrestle through this week.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing. Whenever I’ve had seasons of good, intense Bible study in different contexts for different reasons, as you said way back at the beginning of our conversation, there’s something really exciting about studying the Bible as we get into it. As we invest the time and the effort into it, really does pay off, so to speak, every time.

Jon Nielson
It does. It rewards hard work, careful reading, and sweat.

Matt Tully
But it does take that sometimes. Jon, thanks so much for joining us today and for helping us walk through these important tools for Bible study.

Jon Nielson
Thank you.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.