The Bible alone

[What I'm saying in this post is there are no short cuts with the Bible. The Holy Spirit rewards dedicated reading, complete reading of the Bible. He rewards it with real understanding. This is how a street Christian like John Bunyan can impress an honest, mature, highly educated Christian like John Owen. I see seminary types making exhaustive lists of commentaries for each book of the Bible like that is how you get real understanding of the word of God, but it is the actual living language of the Bible that has to be engaged to get the deep understanding that is parts in relation to the whole and beyond the surface level where dictionaries and commentaries and outlines reside.]

I've always found that commentaries on the Bible don't help much. They can help to understand a difficultly worded verse or passage, but they don't give deep understanding. They are surface level. Also, outlines of Bible chapters and books. They don't really help much in gaining deep understanding. They are eye candy when the effort to engage the actual words of the Bible is unwanted effort.

Similar Bible helps are the same.

It seems the Spirit really only rewards direct and dedicated reading of the Bible. Complete readings in particular.

An exception seems to be systematic theology. Of course I mean on-the-mark systematic theology (once one has the raw material of the Bible in one from complete reading.) Reformed Theology being the gold standard there. Reformed Theology says what the Bible says. With rare quibbles in sacramentology and ecclesiology. For the most part. Systematic theology seems to have the energy of the Spirit in it.

The most powerful means, though, of getting deep understanding of the Bible is direct meditating and pondering, away from the page, which can only be done by being able to draw verses and passages into mind from memory. This not only enables one to see what the Bible is saying closely, especially in relation to our experience and state, but it engrafts the word of God into us essentially.

I was doing this with Psalm 38 and was seeing worlds of things I would pass over if just reading the text in the usual breezy manner. By pausing, memorizing, turning from the page and bringing up verses on my own into mind I could see how seemingly similar verses actually were relating different psychological and emotional phenomena - and describing real experience - and drawing different realizations out of me (all the myriad things the words of the Bible do). I could also see how verse 18 of that psalm was the central verse. A usual run-through reading would not have seen that.

In this post I have used words that the legions of shallow pastors and theologians would stupidly grin at. Bible *alone.* Seeing my own *states* and *experience* in the words. For some of them even the notion of reading the Bible complete draws 'concern' from their idiot minds. Indoctrinated in shallow, culturally Marxist seminaries. Engaging the word of God in real, deep ways will always be seen as 'dangerous' by the dead souls of establishment Christianity. They see themselves as necessary mediators between God and man (and Bible and man). They know nothing of spiritual warfare. They can't discern the spiritual battlefield. They practically deny the Holy Spirit Himself. They are shallow and operating under the authority of demons.

The pastors and theologians need to come out of that devil-run system.