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 This was the main subject of the first day-long seminar organised by the Open Bible Trust. It was held on the last Saturday in August at Stapleford Methodist Church, near Nottingham. About fifteen people
participated in the three 90 minute sessions lead by Michael Penny, who also covered ‘How to lead Bible Studies and House Groups’ and ‘How to write articles’.
The first session outlined the theory of how to study the Bible systematically and focused first on the need to distinguish between people; i.e. Who wrote this? Who is it addressed to? Who is it about? Clearly God said different things about believers and unbelievers, but what about faithful believers? And a number of differences were pointed in what was said about Jews and Gentiles, and even between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in the period covered by the Acts of the Apostles.
This lead onto considering six different time periods in the Bible; three in the Old Testament and three in the New. These were from creation to Abraham; from Abraham to the giving of the Law through Moses; from then to the end of the Old Testament; the Gospel Period; the Acts Period; the Post Acts Period. Although some teachings remain constant in many of those periods, some things changed. (Click here for the chart Progressive Revelation which gives the three divisions of the New Testament.)
These two variables—people and time—are very important in studying the Bible systematically, and so is another variable, where?, and some time was spent considering this question as well.
Following this, the ‘theory’ was then applied to the subject of circumcision and various other examples.
All in all, those who attended found the day valuable and all said they wanted another seminar next year and 80% of those said they would like a seminar on Studying Prophecy Systematically. God willing, this will be arranged for 2009. Please watch our website.
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