A simple look at the contemporary church, for example, makes it abundantly clear that not all “plain meanings” are equally plain to all

“You very rarely have to go outside of the Bible to explain anything in the Bible.”

He realized that the more you compare Scripture with Scripture, the more the meaning of the Bible becomes apparent. The parts take on meaning in light of the whole.

One can usually recognize the cults, for example, because they have an authority in addition to the Bible. But not all of them do; and in every case they bend the truth by the way they select texts from the Bible itself

As we think about the last step of Bible study, correlation, we kind of have to pull together what we’ve already done in the passage and then look to see how that fits with other things that are going on on that theme in the Scripture

Correlation connects a given passage to other passages that are in the Scripture

what does this passage over here say that’s in addition to or alongside with what I’m seeing in my own passage?

Using a concordance, you can put together things that appear isolated in the text; and they take on greater meaning in relation to each other

One can usually recognize the cults, for example, because they have an authority in addition to the Bible. But not all of them do; and in every case they bend the truth by the way they select texts from the Bible itself

One textual feature that quickly becomes evident in any portion of Scripture is the interplay among topics, ideas, characters and places—some of the important devices that make a text of any kind interesting

We must ask continually, “How does this part of the Bible fit with the wider purposes of God as revealed elsewhere in the Scriptures?”