Memorize the Bible

While this website will be all about improving everyone’s factual knowledge about the Bible, I think it is important to keep things in perspective. So let me talk about my ultimate goal and then work my way down to where I see how this website fits in.

In a simplified form, one way of expressing my overall goal is to encourage everyone to recognize that God is our Creator and that we need to respond to His love with loving thankfulness ourselves.

When in the final week before his crucifixion, Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34), he famously quoted Deuteronomy 6:5 by saying that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord our God with all of our being (my paraphrase) and then adding that this also meant by implication that we likewise should “love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.” (again my paraphrase)

Sometime several months earlier, when he had been asked a similar question, he gave a conceptually identical answer though the exact wording was different, and then in the follow-up discussion he gave the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37 for the parable, Luke 10:25-37 for the full story).

When compared to similar statements about how love fulfills the law of God (in for example Romans 13, 1 Corinthians 13, Galatians 5, and James 2), this is a reminder when compared to the entire context of Scripture that returning a heartfelt loving thankfulness to God our Father is our highest duty and that this has implications for how we treat other people.

Our personal salvation is NOT the goal. It is incidental to what we should be concerned about. We should be concerned about God and about others. When that is our focus, it will be God’s good pleasure to save us, and during our lives it should even reduce some of our anxiety and stress because we know that any problems in our lives are but a “momentary, light affliction” (2 Corinthians 4:17, the context is essentially all of 2 Corinthians chapters 4 & 5). But our stress levels and our salvation are not the goal.

One part of truly acting godly as good disciples of Christ is to understand what God has revealed about Himself and about His plan and purpose. This involves both hearing and/or reading the written Scriptures God has provided and having an accurate and reasonably full understanding of them in their entirety. Chapter 10 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans explains this in context, though I won’t elaborate on it here.

Knowledge is not an end in itself, and our salvation is not dependent on taking some knowledge test and getting some minimum passing score. But knowledge of the Scriptures does have its place, and true disciples should generally improve their knowledge of the Scriptures over time.

I could go on in detail and try to explain the exactly perfect nuance of this point by citing multiple Scriptural references, but here I want to keep it simple and just point out that we should generally improve our knowledge of the Scriptures over time, and that means “all” of the Scriptures and not just a few favorite passages.

So in simplified form that is the goal of what I am trying to do with this website as it gets built and as people start to use it — knowledge of the Scriptures is not an end in itself, but it does have its place, and so without losing track of the bigger picture about returning loving thankfulness to God our Father and likewise “loving our neighbor as much as we love ourselves”, this website will aim to help all people gain a better factual understanding of God’s holy and beautiful Scriptures.