Memorize the Bible

Before I answer the title question for this post, I start by asking you to think about what Bible you use.

The point of this post isn’t about the obvious kinds of questions about what Bible you use that you might think — which translation, does it have room for your notes, is it a “study Bible” with pre-existing notes, does it have maps in the back? Is it even a printed Bible or is it electronic on your computer, tablet, or smartphone?

Instead, the point is that you have a printed Bible of whatever sort and with whatever details, while Jesus didn’t. He carried the Scriptures in his head. He had them memorized.

And that’s what I want you to do, within realistic limits of how much we can actually memorize.

Of course you will still have your paper or electronic Bible so you can look up exact wording, but the goal of this website is to help you develop what I think of as a “good working knowledge” of every chapter of the Bible.

For example, most Christians have a good working knowledge of Hebrews chapter 11 that involves starting with the chapter reference and immediately having a good idea of what the chapter is about. Imagine that you are hearing someone give a Bible talk about Jacob and while talking about how Jacob was a man of faith the speaker says something like “turn with me to Hebrews chapter 11.” If you don’t know your Bible, you might have no idea what the quote will be about, but if you have even a basic knowledge of the chapter you should recognize it as a chapter that largely gives examples of faithful people. Let’s temporarily call this “level one” knowledge about the chapter.

If you know the chapter even better, you might remember that Jacob is one of those examples. Let’s loosely call this “level two” because you know that Jacob is listed here.

Better yet, you might remember that his specific example of faith in this chapter is that he blessed his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh and that he did something involving leaning on the top of his staff. We’ll loosely call this “level three” because you can remember specific details about the passage.

Finally, we might imagine that you imagine you have the text memorized word for word, in which case you would have what I loosely call “level four” knowledge.

Using these temporary terms, Jesus had “level four” knowledge of the whole Bible. That was the Bible in his head rather than in printed form. With such knowledge, he could think about relevant Scriptures for any situation he was in by just searching his mental Bible.

Before moving farther, at the moment I want to emphasize that I am only focusing on basic factual knowledge here and not yet dealing with understanding and/or interpretation.

Everything starts with factual knowledge, and if you don’t get the basic facts straight, then your interpretations and understandings will likely be wrong.

At some level, this website’s specific goal is to help people get the basic facts about the Bible straight and into their brains, and while I am of course interested in understanding as part of broader Bible knowledge, the focus here is on the basic facts. Think of it as learning your addition and multiplication tables so you can do more advanced math later. If you don’t memorize the basic 10×10 addition and multiplication tables, later math becomes extremely hard.

Back to our example of Jacob in Hebrews 11, think about how great even “level two” knowledge would be off the top of your head for every chapter of the Bible, let alone “level three” or even the probably-impossible-for-most-of-us “level four” of actual memorization.

Such knowledge would not only mean that you had a feel for what the Hebrews 11 example would be about, but because it gives examples based on other parts of the Bible, you might also immediately know that Jacob’s “leaning on top of his staff” is at the very end of Genesis 47 and that his blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh is the topic of Genesis 48, which along with “level two” or “level three” understandings of those chapters would give you an instant context even though you don’t have the Bible memorized at “level four”.

So that’s the goal in one sense — as part of understanding the Bible which itself is only one part of discipleship, aspiring to “level two or three” knowledge of the WHOLE Bible provides a solid foundation for good understanding and interpretation and can be a firm basis for reforming both your life and the lives of those around you.