“Daddy, why are you writing in your Bible?”
My son’s eyes widened as he looked at the black squiggles in the margins of my Bible. His question was sincere. After all, when you’re six years old, and you’ve been taught not to scribble in the Bible, it can be alarming to behold—in permanent ink—the evidence that your father has transgressed this law.
“I’m writing down things about the Bible that I want to remember,” I replied, “things God is teaching me as I read.”
When you’re a parent, you always have to think on your feet! That was the best answer I could give at the time.
Since then, however, I’ve put more thought into the benefits of leaving notes in a spaciously formatted copy of the Scripture. Here are six kinds of “squiggles” I tend to make.
Kinds of Marginal Notes I Make
1. Personal reflection on the text
As I read the Bible, its truths intersect with specific areas of my life. God’s goodness confronts my pessimism, his holiness my irreverence, his compassion my despair. When these confrontations take place, I want to record my responses. I want to be encouraged and inspired again. I was recently overwhelmed with comfort when reading Jesus’ words to his disciples when he came to them walking on the stormy sea: “Take courage! It is I!” I simply wrote in my margin: “I need to hear these words from Jesus!”
2. Recurring themes
Often when I read through a book of the Bible, I begin to see a recurring theme, a secret path through the forest of revelation. I want to plant flags along that path so I can retrace it and perhaps study it further. For example, in my reading of the Psalms, I began to notice the theme of finding refuge in Yahweh. Psalm 1 hints at this theme (“the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish”); Psalm 2 makes it explicit (“Blessed are those who take refuge in him,” ) and many following psalms echo it: “You, O Lord, are a shield about me” (3:3); “you…make me dwell in safety” (3:8); “let all who take refuge in you rejoice” (5:11), “O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge” (7:1); “the Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed” (9:9); “In the Lord I take refuge” (11:1). So in the margins, I jotted down the references to previous verses that expressed this theme. When I come back to these marginal notes, I can follow these references like a chain.
3. Big-picture connections
These recurring these themes will often remind me of larger themes that span the Old and New Testaments. Consider again the theme of taking refuge in Yahweh. The first explicit mention of this theme points to Christ: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” Finding refuge, then, must involve a relationship with the ultimate Anointed One, Jesus Christ. Next to Psalm 2:12 (“blessed are all who take refuge in him”), I jotted down the reference Hebrews 6:18, which speaks of fleeing “for refuge” to Jesus.
4. Summaries
When I feel I have grasped the gist of a section of a book of the Bible, I want to write a summary of it. That way, I’ll quickly grasp the book’s flow of thought when I come back to it later. I found this especially helpful when trying to wrap my mind around the dialogue among Job and his friends. For example, after sorting through the poetic language of Bildad’s speech in Job 18, I wrote at the head of the chapter: “Bildad implies that Job is wicked.”
5. Questions
Sometimes I simply do not understand what I am reading. Other times, I understand but find myself perplexed about how it relates to other truths in Scripture. In such cases, I’ll simply jot the question down in the margin. For example, I recently read Jesus’ statement that “whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Matthew 18:5). I wrote down this question: “What does it mean to receive a child in Christ’s name?” Later, I came back to the question, and (with the help of a commentary) discovered the connections to Jesus’ statement Matthew 10:40-42, and the answer became clear. (Curious? Check it out for yourself and see if you can figure it out.)
6. Outside Illustrations
I read many other books besides the Bible, but my mind is often pondering how those books relate to the Bible—do they agree with the Bible? Or disagree? Do they shed light on the meaning of a text? or illustrate it? When I find a significant connection, I’ll sometimes write the reference to it in the relevant margin. Recently, I was re-reading Plato’s Republic, and got to the part in which Socrates makes an argument for God’s immutability. It was a tidbit I thought that might help illustrate the Scriptural truth that God is always the same. So I jotted down the reference to Plato’s Republic next to Malachi 3:6, “For I the Lord do not change.”
There are other good reasons to write in your Bible (such as the ones Joel Arnold gives here). But these are just a few ways I’ve found helpful.
Give God’s Word a Rich Dwelling
And of course, there’s nothing necessarily “spiritual” about having a Bible packed with minuscule marginal notes, just as there is nothing inherently godly about keeping the pages clean. The point of all this is to give God’s Word a rich dwelling in our hearts.
We should heartily embrace anything that helps us understand, remember, and apply the Word of God. Whether journaling, margin-writing, note-taking, or memorization, let this be the testimony of our lives: “In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word” (Psalm 119:14-16).
