Today’s study has seven steps.
1. Pray. Connect with God before you start studying. Confess your sins, invite Jesus to your study and into your heart and, if time permits, worship him in song. For more details about prayer, see The Biggest Mistake We Make When Reading the Bible.
2. Open a Bible concordance and find or type in “Jonah”. A concordance is an index that tells you the places where a word occurs in the Bible. Better ones also provide you with excerpts from all the verses where the word is found.
A. The easiest, free way to do this is to go to a website like Blue Letter Bible (BLB) and type “Jonah” into the search box (type with quote-marks, because otherwise it would take you to the Book of Jonah).
B. You should get the following results:
C. Under the heading “Search Results” you’ll see four tabs. The one that is of interest (Primary) is already open; the other three are not important for now and we will come to them later in the series.
D. Below the tabs, next to the “Word search” box, is a drop-down menu where you can choose from different Bible translations.
E. After that you have data about the number of occurrences of “Jonah” in the chosen translation and then, below it, a list of all the verses where the word “Jonah” occurs. Every verse is given in full.
F. Since the number of occurrences is not high, scroll down the list before concentrating on any of the verses. This is to get the picture about the distribution of the name Jonah in the Bible. You will notice that it occurs in one place before the book of Jonah, and then the majority of occurrence come in the book of Jonah itself, with several occurrences in the New Testament – in some of the gospels. You can also find this information in another way, by scrolling slightly down the list and then looking to the right, where you will see two boxes, one with the number of results in other translations, and the other with results by book in the chosen translation. See the picture below:
G. The main reason why the number of hits varies from one translation to the other is because the translators used proper names instead of pronouns and vice versa to make the English text flow better. There are also some other possible reasons, but we will explain them later in the series, when we get to comparing Bible translations.
3. Read all the verses from the list except those found in the book of Jonah itself. The goal of this step is to get the big picture of what the Scriptures reveal about Jonah outside his book.
4. After reading all the verses, go back to the Old Testament verses at the top. Studying the New Testament references to Jonah will be more fruitful when you get to Jonah 2 and Jonah 3. The main goal of today’s study is to concentrate on the Old Testament references to Jonah. Since the Search Results by Book revealed that Jonah appears in only one Old Testament verse outside the book of Jonah, that one verse from 2 Kings will be the focus of today’s study.
5. Open your Bible and find the verse about Jonah from 2 Kings.
A. Determine the beginning and the end of the passage it belongs to. Subheadings in your Bible will help you here, telling you where the account about a particular king begins.
B. Read the whole passage where the verse of interest is found (2 Kings 14:23-29).
C. Explore what the passage reveals about God.
D. Carefully analyze what 2 Kings 14:25 reveal about Jonah.
E. Think about God’s and Jonah’s relationship.
F. As always, take detailed notes about all your observations and conclusions.
G. Review your previous notes about God, Jonah, and their relationship and think about them in the light of today’s study.
6. If taking all the steps takes more time than you have in one day, divide the study into two or more days.
7. Pray. Talk to God about what you’ve just learned. Prayer should always be the culmination of your Bible study because fellowship with God is one of the main goals of studying Scripture.
If you have any questions, you can write them in the comments below or send me an email to matej@pbsi.online.
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See you on the next post. Until then, dive into Scripture every day – observe thoroughly, interpret carefully and apply with all your heart in order to become more like our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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