Top 10 Books to Help You Study Your Bible

Reading and understanding the Bible is something most of us do intuitively. At least, that is, until we encounter someone who has interpreted a passage in a way that seems completely at odds with what it’s plainly saying. Suddenly, we realize how important it is to have some guidelines for interpretation. The goal of these interpretive guidelines must be to extract the author’s original intent. If we fail to ground our interpretation in the original intent, the Bible becomes putty that we can manipulate to mean whatever we might want. Such ungrounded reading is often harmless and might even seem spiritual (think of the athlete with Philippians 4:13 written on his shoes). But when ungrounded reading leads people to deny or undercut plain biblical truths, we realize interpretation must be grounded. It’s not enough to study our Bibles. We need to study them following sound interpretive principles. Fortunately, there are many excellent resources to help us learn how to faithfully interpret the Bible,1 and I’m convinced that anyone can learn faithful methods for Bible study. With that in mind, I want to highlight a few of the most helpful resources, especially accessible books that cove...