Bible Study Magazine is a brand new print magazine (not an e-magazine) published by Lexham Press. Six times a year, Bible Study Magazine delivers tools and methods for Bible study, as well as insights from respected teachers, professors, historians, and archeologists.
Read pastor profiles, author interviews, and stories of individuals whose thoughtful engagement with Scripture has shaped their thinking and defined their ministries. Bible Study Magazine reveals the impact of God’s Word on their lives and the power of Scripture in yours.
We have a limited supply of back issues for the September-October 2009 issue of Bible Study Magazine. Get your copy while you still can!
Dr. Piper learned how to study the Bible at Fuller Theological Seminary. After completing his doctoral work at the University of Munich, he taught for six years at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1980, he took the call as Senior Pastor (now called Pastor for Preaching and Vision) at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.
In 1994, fourteen years into his pulpit ministry, Piper unveiled the vision of a resource ministry called Desiring God. The ministry offers Piper’s sermons and writings, as well as other resources, free for personal use.
Dr. Piper’s influence is considerable. With over 30 published books, including Desiring God, Don’t Waste Your Life, Spectacular Sins, and Finally Alive, he has reached countless people through print. After about three months of tweeting, his Twitter.com posts were being followed by nearly 18,000 people and growing. Nearly 23,000 readers subscribe to his blog and a video featuring him on YouTube has been viewed over 233,000 times.
Piper has transmitted the message of the Bible to countless people around the world, but how does he personally approach the Bible? BSM asked the preacher that question and others in a recent interview.
"Frankly, it was what got me back and forth through the city streets of Somolia," Struecker says about the Scriptures. "Because I didn’t have time at that point to crack open my Bible and read some of my favorite passages, I went off of what I remembered and that literally gave me the courage to head into gunfire. God gave me an extraordinary sense of peace."
Struecker recounted Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, Paul’s thoughts about being apart from the body and present with the Lord and a litany of psalms while walking—and hiding—in the war-torn streets as gunfire and tragedy enveloped him around two downed Black Hawk helicopters.
The author of Ecclesiastes if often labeled a depressed pessimist. But a careful study reveals the author to be an honest—and hopeful—realist about life, not a candidate for Prozac. It’s easy to understand why people think Ecclesiastes is depressing, or think that the conclusion of the book is that life is meaningless. Verses like “And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive” (Eccl 4:2 NIV) make the book seem less than hopeful. Even its famous phrase “vanity of vanities”—found at the beginning and the end of the book (1:2; 12:8) makes the author sound like a complete pessimist. I’ve found, though, that if you give the book enough serious attention, Ecclesiastes reveals that the author is actually hopeful, and his message can easily be applied to each of us.
Elisha’s healing of Naaman the leper, commander of the army of the king of Syria, is a familiar story to many (2 Kings 5:1–17). Naaman hears that Elisha, the prophet of Israel, can heal him, so he makes the trip. When the two meet, Elisha tells him rather dismissively that he needs to take a bath in the Jordan River. Naaman doesn’t take this well and prepares to go home. At the behest of some servants, he consents to dip himself in the Jordan. He is miraculously healed by the simple act. The display of power, so transparently without sacrifice or incantation, awakens Naaman to the fact that Yahweh of Israel is the true God. Here’s where the story usually ends in our telling, but that would result in the omission of one very odd detail—what Naaman asks to take back home.