If we truly want to become disciples of Jesus Christ we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of confusion caused by denominationalism. Often the Christian denominations involve men’s doctrines and traditions that makes brethren separate, when according to Apostle Paul that is not supposed to happen with Christ’s servants (See 1 Corinthians 1).
If we stay in God’s written Word then we will automatically know which denomination is the right one to belong to, i.e., Christ’s Church of The Spirit. Like God said in Isaiah 2:22, “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?”
Beyond asking my Heavenly Father and His Son to give me understanding in His Word, I got down to a chapter by chapter, verse by verse, line upon line study of God’s written Word. And because of His promise of The Holy Spirit for those of Faith and that are baptized in Christ Jesus, He was my Guide in study.
Did I still rely on tools developed by previous Christian Bible scholars? Yes, but they certainly were not my primary source. God’s written Word was, and still is.
One of the tools by Bible scholars I used was E.W. Bullinger’s KJV study Bible, called The Companion Bible. Bullinger was a 19th century British Christian Bible scholar, a good one, even though I do not agree with all that he believed (like the pre-trib rapture theory that had become popular in his day in Britain). Bullinger’s side margin notes are scholarly notes, not simply pushing the traditions of men like most other study Bibles do. When I went to Christian bookstores to look for a copy, I found only one store that had a copy, and it was hid way in the back shelves. When I looked at the preface of Genesis 1 and outline and side margin notes, I could see the reason for their wanting to hide it. Bullinger understood something called the ‘Gap Theory’ that there was an actual unknown time gap that existed between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, and within that Gap sometime was when Lucifer first rebelled, and God ended that old world. Bullinger goes into the Hebrew to show that, so it is not just a whimsical idea. And over the years I have asked several pastors about it, and quite of few of them agree with Bullinger, but they told me they don’t teach it in their Churches. Some Churches that have a Hebrew scholar do teach it.
But go to various denominations, and most will want you to get off of any seeming controversial issues in God’s Word like that. They have been trained to get you back on the ‘milk’ of God’s Word, and stay off the “strong meat”. This means if you really want to know… what God has shown in His Word, you are going to have to learn to study for yourself. So there’s one tool I recommend, The Companion Bible. Just the amount of research Bullinger did in the Appendixes is enough to warrant having a copy.
My second tool of choice is the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance by Dr. James Strong first published in 1890. I recommend pre-1990 editions, because Satan’s little workers have been busy trying to edit Strong’s work, one version doesn’t even have the Hebrew and Greek Lexicons in the back like the original, which makes it useless.
What Dr. Strong did was assign a number to each word in the Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic per the 1611 KJV Bible, and gave the definition for each word or phrase. What you can do with that info is look up a word how it appears in the Bible manuscripts and the Strong’s will give you a cross-reference of all the places in The Bible where that same word appears. That way you can discover how the Bible translators brought that manuscript word into a different language, like English. Many other scholarly study tools use Strong’s numbers.
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