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One of the biggest problems in studying the Bible is that we don’t read it or study it correctly. Let’s say you’re looking up what the Bible says about a particular topic. We need to approach it with a totally open mind, in other words we cannot have a preconceived notion and try to prove or disprove what we are looking up. I have been very guilty of this myself at times when I tried to see if it was okay, according to the Bible, to do something. I have seen this in a lot of sermons and Bible studies, that looking back at them, would try to support a particular view of the teacher. This is where a lot of things are taken out of context. Just one of the verses of many addresses the subject.

James 3:1 says “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”

Another major problem is translational errors. Anytime you try and translate any language into any other language you’re always going to have problems, especially from languages like Hebrew and Greek. They are very precise, earthly, and literal languages. In Hebrew a lot of the words can have several meanings. The only way that you’re going to get an accurate translation is by thoroughly looking at the context, the use of the word and how it is used in other parts of the Bible. In my fourth book I am addressing some examples of that.

In reading, studying the Bible and understanding the Christian faith there are a lot of factors that also need to be considered but unfortunately a lot of them are not in today’s teachings. The first thing we need to realize is that the Bible was written over 2000 years ago and therefore all the writings were geared towards the culture and what was going on at that time. Most of us when we read the Bible we read as it relates to our beliefs and experiences in our culture but it was not written yesterday.

The problem arises when we try to compare the Hebrew calendar to our calendar. Judeans start their calendar with Adam and Eve and use a lunar calendar or calendar that uses the moon rather than the sun. Their day starts around 6 PM or sunset and goes until sunset the following day ,we start in the morning. The other complication arises when we switch from one to the other we use what we think is Christ’s birth as zero or the starting part of what we call A.D. which stands for anno Domini. The huge problem here is it has been proven without a doubt that Jesus was not born in the year “0”, but actually around 4 BC as we put it. This means as soon as we start using dates after Christ’s birth we are already 4 years off. So remember, when you’re reading and trying to understand the Bible make sure that you read with an open mind and always get the full story around the passage before you make a decision about the meaning and then make sure that it agrees with the rest of the Bible.