[Steve Myers] Another key to understanding the Bible is to use study aids properly. There are so many of them out there. I've got one with me today. This is a Strong's "Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible." A concordance can be a really helpful study aid. Now, so many don't use books anymore, and these things are online. You can get them electronically. But what you'll find in a concordance is a listing of scriptures that contain various words. So you can look up a word and study every single scripture that contains that particular word, both in the Hebrew in the Old Testament, and Greek in the New Testament. So it can be kind of fun to look through that and really zero in on a word study.

Now, concordances are just one study aid that you can use. You can use lexicons. Lexicons are books that study word meanings. And so, because the Bible is not written in English, we can get into the meaning of the Hebrew or the meaning of the Greek that may go beyond just the translation that comes into English. So lexicons are wonderful books that can help us to dig into the word of God.

In fact, it doesn't end there either. There are other study aids, like Bible dictionaries, that can help us to understand some of the traditions and what life was like at the time the Bible was written. You might also find maps. Map books can be very interesting when you see locations of where different events took place, especially when you compare when things happened in certain times of the Bible and other things happened in almost the same exact places. It can be very interesting. In fact, that's not the only study aids that there are. You can also look at commentaries. Commentaries are just writings that talk about different passages in the Bible, authors that comment on passages. And so that can help you.

Now, of course, we always have to be aware that none of those things are particularly inspired of God, only His Word. The Bible is the inspired word of God. But those helps, when we use them in the right way, can really be a key to understand the depth of the Bible. So check those things out. If you haven't been using them, now's a good time to take a look at all the various study resources that are out there, especially that's available electronically, and so many of them are available free online. So just type in "free Bible lexicon" or "Bible concordance," and you'll see all kinds of things pop up. And when you use them properly, you'll find it is a key to understanding the Bible.

That's ''BT Daily.'' We'll see you next time.