Getting real understanding of the word of God

[Note: I wrote a post about my latest complete reading of the Bible elsewhere which brought to mind this:]

To an academic (seminary type) reading that post they would grin when they read that I didn't start getting understanding of certain whole parts of the Bible until a third or fourth complete reading.

The fact is I could have gone straight to commentaries and so forth. And you know what? I probably did.

Yet there are different kinds or levels of understanding of the Bible. The way I did it was a very organic (from the inside out) growth in developing understanding of the Bible.

The commentary route and other secondary reference material is a surface approach. One wonders even if some seminary types have ever read the Bible cover-to-cover, i.e. a straight-through dedicated effort. It requires not only effort and time but valuation for the word of God as something worth committing yourself to in that manner. There is one well known seminary type who is a pastor who makes endless lists of Bible book commentaries as if he is assembling a large canonical book of Bible commentaries and gives the impression that all he reads is commentaries.

Systematic Theology is underrated as a source for getting commentary on the whole of the Bible, by the way. I mean that role ST plays is understated. Commentaries just as a form are pretty impractical. Like reading a phone book. All bark and no forest. Obviously they have a role once you have the foundation. Get the foundation first though.

I learned early on that I would get almost nothing from reading outlines of books of the Bible, for instance. But when you enter the text in that complete, cover-to-cover dedicated reading way that requires time and effort you are really engrafting the real thing, the living word, into you. Fusing it into you. And at first it is all a muddle, out of focus, etc.; yet with repeated reading it all slowly comes into focus and into understanding. Understanding the parts in relation to the whole.

You also pick up even in the first seemingly most unprofitable complete readings very big things you don't even realize you get at the time of the reading. Like for instance you go through Samuel and Kings and can't discern a Joab from an Abner or know what is going on in the most basic narrative sense, yet you subtly pick up very new knowledge and awareness of the deep subject of idols, which runs through those books like a subterranean stream.

I believe the Holy Spirit rewards time and effort spent reading the actual word of God.

As I write this I'm currently in my 7th dedicated complete cover-to-cover reading of the Bible, AV1611, almost through Isaiah.