I’ve decided to take my notes from a class I taught on Understanding Scripture last year and upload them as posts to this Blog. This post is about summarizing large quantities of text into smaller bits so that you can better understand the big picture. Originally, this material was taught in five sections. Here, it has been split into more manageable chucks. Several posts came before this one. You may want to check them out before you start this one.
Why summarize?
The idea behind summarizing is to move from the specific to the general. Books contain messages (an argument, if you will). Every section of the book, then, will contribute to the communicating of the author’s message; each part of the book will have some part in making the author’s overall point. Turning large sections of text into summary statements will enable you to deal with the author’s concepts more easily. You can see the flow of the message much more clearly.
Books were often read in one sitting, making it easier to get a feel for the author’s overall message. Longer books, however, are not easy to read in one sitting; summarizing enables us to see the author’s arguments that make up the whole argument much more quickly. Summarizing also forces us to try to understand each part of the original author’s message and decide what the overall message is. It’s easy to focus on individual words, phrases, and concepts without paying attention to the book as a whole; summarizing should help us to avoid that.
How to Summarize
The idea is to move from the specific to the broad. When summarizing, it’s usually best to start with paragraphs. Take a paragraph unit in your Bible (paragraph beginnings are marked in bold in the nasb) and summarize it into a sentence or two. Look for the thrust of the message throughout the paragraph, the point the author is making and summarize it into as few words as possible. Once you’ve summarized all the paragraphs in a chapter, you can take those summaries and form a summary of the chapter. Once you’ve summarized all the chapters, you can take a shot at summarizing the book.
If your summaries appear disjointed and it seems like the author is just randomly changing topics, you might be doing something wrong. Take a look through your text again. Make sure to note any time that the author says “therefore” or “so.” You need to try to understand why it makes sense that the author sees the concepts before and after as being related. “I am wearing my green socks, therefore my feet are cold” does not make sense unless you understand that the author’s green socks are wet. This information would probably have been given to you earlier in the book; if you missed it, you’d be confused.
You will find that you’ll need to rework your summaries a lot. You may have an idea of where an author is going, but then be surprised as you move further into the book. It will obviously be helpful to have read the book several times so you have an idea of what’s coming. In any case, though, you’ll probably end up revising your summaries a lot. Don’t be discouraged; it’s a sign that you’re letting the text speak for itself.
The Message of Scripture
There are some important things we should try to remember before moving on. We will be prone to reading the Bible in light of our culture instead of the culture to which the book was originally written. We’re very prone to make the Bible out to be about us. The Bible isn’t about us, though, it’s about Jesus (we talked about that during chapter one). It’s a good thing that the Bible isn’t about us. First of all the Bible would be really boring if it was about us; we’re just not that interesting. More importantly, though, the fact that the Bible is about Jesus is good because Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15); Jesus is how we know God. He is also how we find life (we talked about that when we discussed John 5 in chapter one).
How does all that work out, though? People jump to crazy conclusions sometimes and there have to be rules, right? Well, there are rules. We’ll talk a little bit more about them inlater, but for now I want to lay out a general principal. You need to make sure that you understand how an Old Testament audience would have understood a message before you apply the New Testament to it. Let me give a quick example and then we’ll move on.
The book of Judges repeats “In those days there was no king in Israel” many times (see Judges 17:6, 18:1, 19:1, and 21:25). It is clear, even from just reading the book a few times, that the author wanted to make the point that Israel needed a king. More research would probably reveal that the author was specifically trying to promote the idea of a king from Judah (like David). He paints a particularly ugly picture of Benjamites and seems to really like Judah. The message the original audience would have gotten was that Israel needed a king, and that he should probably come from Judah (this makes extra sense in light of Genesis 49:10). The original audience would not have assumed this was Jesus; they would have assumed it was David. We need to understand that. Once we have that idea down, we can take a look at the story and message in light of all of redemptive history.
Having a king was better for Israel than having no king, and King David was a better King than Saul. The trouble is, though, that even David had flaws; most notably, he sinned and eventually died. A Christocentric message we can take from the book of Judges is that we need a better king than David; we need a King who will never sin or die. We need Jesus.
So yeah, the book of Judges is about Jesus. We didn’t, though, have to make silly jumps like saying that the cutting of Samson’s hair was like plucking Jesus’ beard. We asked what the original message was, and then we sought to understand how it applies to us. In your summaries, make sure you are going after the message to the original audience; don’t jump ahead. We’ll talk more about this toward the end of this series..
