Sweeter Than Honey: Enjoying God in His WordChikamu

Digest the Big Ideas

Just as nectar doesn’t immediately transform into honey when gathered by bees, the knowledge we gather in Bible study isn’t immediately easy to comprehend or apply. Digestion is a process that will regularly stretch beyond the allotted thirty minutes we usually set aside for Bible study. This doesn’t mean you need to spend all day studying your Bible. It means that, like the command to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:5-9, you continue to digest what you learned as you studied your Bible as you go about your day—walking, eating meals, going to work, washing dishes, talking with family and friends, lying down at night—remembering it long after you close your Bible.

Forager bees are responsible for gathering nectar, flitting from flower to flower, searching for sweet juice to consume and store in their honey stomachs. A forager bee might have to drink from more than a thousand flowers to fill its honey stomach—that’s a lot of gathering! Once the nectar enters the stomach, digestive enzymes start to break it down, beginning the honey-making process. Back at the hive, the forager bee passes its load off to another worker bee, who passes it off to another, and then another. The best description I’ve heard for this process is a game of “regurgitation telephone.”1 After many rounds of digestion and regurgitation, the nectar is placed in a comb and the bees beat their wings over it until it’s distilled down into honey.

Like the forager bee, our process of gathering is often a slow and painstaking process of returning to God’s Word over and over again. But once we’ve gathered, it’s time to digest what we’ve found, rolling it around in our minds and hearts, distilling all that knowledge down into the big ideas of the passage.

In How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, professors Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart explain, “The aim of good interpretation is simple: to get at the ‘plain meaning of the text’ . . . And the most important ingredient one brings to this task is an enlightened common sense.”2 Faithful gathering enables you to digest the big ideas and interpret the meaning of a passage through the power of the Holy Spirit.

When you digest the big ideas, you’ll be looking for the plain meaning of that portion of Scripture. You’re moving from the gathering stage where you asked, What does it say? to the deeper question, What does it mean? Remember: a biblical text can’t mean what it never meant, so you need to digest the big ideas of the passage of Scripture you’re studying before moving on to applying it to your life.3

As you grow in your ability to digest the big ideas, the Bible’s themes will begin to emerge. Then you’ll see how all the parts of the Bible are one story written to display God’s glory to his people so we might love and worship him.

1. Joe Hanson, “How Do Bees Make Honey?” Be Smart, March 28, 2016, YouTube video

2. Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2014), 22.

3. Fee and Stuart, 34.