[A.W. Bowman]

Complicated? It sure can get that way quickly! But the responsibility for teaching others the word of God is indeed a heavy responsibility, and the practitioner falls under a heavy judgment.

Reading the word is one thing - studying it requires a lot of work, time, and dedication - it is not a trivial task, as some teachers seem to consider it.

A serious student of the word will take up the task for themselves, and not rely just on some preachers take. But, a teacher must know what the word was actually meant to communicate - in terms of what the original author intended to communicate and how the original hearers understood what was said. At least as close to the original as we might be able to get.

Effective study requires looking into the historical, cultural, religious, and language of the original text, which means understanding the original shared worldview. Taking an ancient document, 2000 to 3500 years old, written in a language few today can fully understand, removed from a very different culture with a foreign religious practice, without understanding the history of the events and the people, and written a language that has little to no meaning in the 21st century American tongue will indeed become complicated very quickly.

Perhaps this is one reason folks like to talk about the Bible more than they like to discuss what the Bible says. This approach makes it a lot easier to make the Bible say what we want it to, rather than what God intended for it to say.