Dig Deeper

Deep calls to deep. —Psalm 42:7

I am a newly enrolled seminary student. So far, I am earning a degree in humility and constantly learning that there’s so much I don’t know about God and His Word. But I’m also learning how much I need to grow in focus.

In one assignment, the professor asked us to make twenty-five observations about a single verse. It was hard, I thought. Until the next week, when we were instructed to make twenty-five more observations about the same verse. Then the next week, we were tasked with making twenty-five more observations! It was a verse we were all familiar with, so before the exercise, we looked at it through a shallow lens. But the more I dug, the more treasures I found.

My professor told us, “The harder you work at observation, the less mistakes you will make at interpretation and application.” He’s right, of course. If we’re going to know God through His Word, we must learn to pay attention and to manually override brains that have been rewired to settle for what’s on the surface.