Start With the Big Picture: How to Get the Lay of the Land Before You Study a Single Verse
This is the second post in a six-part series walking through my whole Bible study system, one piece at a time. If you missed the overview, start with How to Study One Book of the Bible from Start to Finish.
Last week I told you about my friend’s photos from Wisconsin, the ones she has been sending to torture me while I sweat it out in Texas.
The first one was the view from her porch: a lake, and miles of woods stretching out in every direction.
That photo is step one of studying any book of the Bible, and it is where we are starting today. Before you study a single verse, you stand on the porch and take in the whole view.
In my system, this is the Books of the Bible Journal, and it is the piece people are most tempted to skip. I understand why. You came to study the Bible, not to fill out a page about it.
But skipping this step is exactly why so much Bible study feels like wandering around lost. You cannot understand a verse you have no context for, and the big picture is where that context comes from.
Why bother with the big picture first?
Here is what standing on the porch actually does for you. It answers the quiet questions that sabotage everything else before you even get to a verse.
Who wrote this, and why? Who were they writing to, and what was going on in that person’s life? What kind of writing am I even reading, a letter, a poem, a law code, a story?
When you know those things going in, the verses stop feeling random and start being part of something. You hit a hard line in chapter 3 and instead of panicking, you think, right, this is a letter to a church with a specific problem, and this is the problem he is addressing.
You are no longer yanking sentences out of a context you never learned. You built the context first, on purpose, and now everything you read has somewhere to land.
What actually goes on the page
Let me walk you through a book overview the way I fill it in, using Ruth, since that is the book we are studying together in this series.
I want you to notice something as we go. The overview covers a lot of information. Some of it you fill in up front, before you study. Other parts you leave mostly blank and let fill in slowly, as you go.
I will show you which is which, because getting that wrong is the fastest way to quit.
The groundwork: fill this in before you study
This is the part you can do in one sitting, with a first read-through and a good study Bible.
- Book: Ruth. Easy start.
- Genre: Narrative. Ruth is a story, which tells me to read it for plot and character, watching what people do and what happens to them, rather than hunting for step-by-step commands the way I would in one of Paul’s letters. Genre quietly changes how you read, which is a whole topic of its own for later.
- Original language: Hebrew. And no, you do not need to read a word of Hebrew. Noting the language just tells you which tools to reach for when you do a word study down the road. That is coming later in this series, so hang on to it.
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Context: the who, what, when, where, and why. This is the heart of the groundwork.
- Who. The author is unknown. The people the story follows are Naomi, her daughter-in-law Ruth, who is a Moabite and therefore an outsider to Israel, and a man named Boaz.
- What. A story of loss, loyalty, and redemption.
- When. Set “in the days when the judges ruled,” which the book tells us right up front in 1:1. That was a rough, unstable stretch of Israel’s history. It was written down sometime later.
- Where. It opens in Moab, foreign territory that Naomi’s family fled to during a famine, and then moves to Bethlehem.
- Why. To show how God quietly provides and redeems through the ordinary, faithful love of unlikely people, and to trace the family line that leads all the way to King David.
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Book outline: After that first read, sketch the skeleton of the book. For Ruth, mine looks like this:
- Emptiness. Naomi loses her husband and both sons in Moab. (chapter 1)
- Provision. Ruth goes to work and ends up in the field of Boaz. (chapter 2)
- The request. Ruth approaches Boaz at the threshing floor. (chapter 3)
- Redemption. Boaz redeems the family, a son is born, and we learn this baby is in the line of David. (chapter 4)
Rough is completely fine here. You will sharpen this outline later, as you actually map each chapter. Right now you just want the shape of the thing.
The harvest: let this fill in as you study
Now here is the part people get wrong. The rest of the page is not more groundwork. It is the harvest, and you gather it slowly, as you study each chapter.
- Attributes of God: You will not know all of these on day one, and you are not supposed to. Every time a chapter shows you something about who God is, you add it here. By the end of Ruth you might have collected his providence, his loyal covenant love, his kindness toward an outsider, and his quiet sovereignty over things that look like pure coincidence. On day one, this box might have one word in it. That is exactly right.
- Key verses: As you read, jot down the verses that stop you in your tracks. In Ruth that might turn out to be 1:16-17, or 2:12, or 4:14-15. You are collecting, not completing. An empty key-verses box on day one is not a box you failed to fill. It is a box waiting for the verses you have not met yet.
- Key themes: The big ideas that keep resurfacing as you go. In Ruth, they gather into loyal love, redemption, God’s hidden providence, and the outsider being brought in.
- Life applications: The so-what. What is this book actually asking of your real life, your Tuesday, your relationships, your worries? This one you can honestly only write near the end, once the book has had time to do its work on you.
You do not have to finish this page before you start
This is the thing I most want you to hear, because it is the difference between actually doing this and giving up in frustration a week in.
You do not fill this part out before you are allowed to open chapter 1.
The groundwork, the genre, the context, a rough outline, you can do that in about 30-40 minutes with a first read and a study Bible.
But the harvest section fills in over time. You add an attribute of God when a chapter shows you one. You add a key verse when one grabs you by the collar. You write the applications at the end, when you finally know what the whole book has been teaching you.
If you sat down and tried to complete the entire book overview before studying a single chapter, you would not be studying the Bible. You would be doing a research project about the Bible, and honestly, you would probably quit by Thursday. So please do not.
Lay the groundwork, start walking through the chapters, and let the page keep filling up as you go. A finished overview is something you hold at the end. It is not a hoop you have to jump through at the beginning.
But where do I even find all this?
If words like genre and author and date make you feel behind before you have started, take a breath. You are not expected to have this memorized, and you do not need a seminary degree or a shelf of thick commentaries.
Almost all of it is sitting in the first page or two of each book in a good study Bible, in the little introduction most of us flip right past on our way to chapter 1.
Read that introduction, and in just a few minutes, minutes you have your genre, a rough date, the author, and the basic context.
The book itself hands you the rest. Ruth 1:1 tells you when it is set. Chapter 4 tells you where it all lands. You're mostly just writing down what is already right there in front of you.
The honest part
Like I said last time, none of this requires buying a thing from me. A blank page with those same labels written across the top will do the very same job, and God will meet you over a dollar-store notebook just as surely as anywhere else.
What the Books of the Bible Journal gives you is the page already built, every prompt in its place, plus a completed example so you can see what a filled-in overview actually looks like. The example in the journal walks through Romans, which is a meatier book than Ruth and shows you how the same template handles a big, complicated letter.
The Books of the Bible Journal is available both separately, and inside the bundle.
Books of the Bible Journal, Bible Study Binder Bundle
If having that structure ready is what finally gets you to sit down and do this, it's worth worth it. If a blank notebook sets you free, use the blank notebook. You know which works best for you.
Your one step this week
You chose your book last week. If you are following along with me, it's Ruth.
Read it all the way through, which takes about thirty minutes, and fill in only the groundwork. Genre, the who and what and when and where and why, and a rough four-part outline.
Then stop. Leave the harvest section alone for now.
Because next week we step off the porch and walk into the woods. We start mapping chapters, beginning with Ruth 1, and you're going to watch this overview page finally start to earn its keep.
Blessings,
Katie
P.S. If you only finish three things this week, make them genre, who, and why. Those three alone will change the way you read every chapter that comes after.
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