Six Online Tools that Can Help You Dig into (and Understand!) the Bible

Author's note: This is a revised and updated version of a post I initially wrote here.

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I love encouraging people to read the Bible - to discover the "living and active" Word of God (Hebrews 4:12), and that all Scripture - both the Old Testament and the New Testament  - is given to us by God and is useful for teaching us, correcting us, rebuking us, and training us to we're equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

But I also know that people want and need help reading through and understanding the Bible.  I know this because people often approach me and other pastors I know wanting this sort of help.  To someone with no foundation for knowing how to read and approach Scripture, a whole lot of the Bible can feel big and foreign and weird.  The Bible can feel like a maze.  (And, to be honest, parts of the Bible can continue to feel that way - even for people who have been reading it for a long time!)

As I encourage people to read through the Bible, then, I also want to help them lay a foundation on which they can read the Bible well.  I've posted before on some "big idea" principles that can help people do this.  And this is why I'm such a big fan of the Institute class on "Bible Basics: An Important Class about God's Word."

Since a lot of people want some help understanding the Bible, and since they're going to go somewhere to try and get their questions answered, I've also found it useful to have a handful of websites that I can point people towards, that will steer people in a right direction as they understand and apply the Bible.

Here are six sites that I often point people towards first:

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Bible Gateway (Biblegateway.com)

This site is a a good resource for getting into God's Word and doing some basic, important study.  Besides providing access to a BUNCH of different translations, one handy feature is that Bible Gateway lets you do keyword searches (for example, seeing every place the Bible uses the words "Holy Spirit," or doing a study on how Paul uses the word "love").  Also, Bible Gateway has some (generally older, more classic) commentaries that can help you with understanding the meaning of certain passages.  Spend some time exploring the site (the main menu runs along the top bar) and you'll get the hang of things pretty quickly - the site is nice and user-friendly.  There's no cost to access this site, and there's also a free app available.

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ESV Study Bible (www.esvbible.org)

The ESV is a great translation, and on this site you'll find notes on verses (to help with understanding what God's Word says), as well as a bunch of helpful articles (for example, introductions to biblical books so you can have an overview), maps, and other resources.  Creating an account is free, and this gets you access to the text of the ESV Bible, along with a few other basic features.  However, to access many of the additional resources ("apps") you'll pay some money.  The nice thing is that you can purchase the apps you want, and ignore the ones you don't.  Once you create an account, just follow the menu along the top left corner of the screen, click on "visit the app store" under the App icon, and you'll see what I'm talking about.  (Personally, I've only added the "ESV Study Bible Online" App [$29.99 as of this writing] and have been very impressed with the resources bundled into it.)

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Bible.org (bible.org)

Another site with a ton of resources to help you study the Bible: articles and audio, Greek and Hebrew helps, study notes, and more.  There's way more to explore on this site than I'll introduce you to now, so consider that an invitation to do some exploring on your own.  With that said, one of the more broadly-helpful features of the site is its studies on different books and verses of the Bible.  From the homepage, scroll across the "Study" tab on the menu and you'll be able to do some of your own digging by topic, book of the Bible, verse, etc.  Another helpful feature on this site is the Lumina Bible Study Tool.  This tool allows you to read God's Word in a number of different translations (including the NET Bible) in the left-hand side of the screen, and you can tailor the right-hand side of the screen to fit your needs - whether that be additional study notes on a passage ("Notes"), comparing versions (Bibles), doing some language study ("Greek"/"Hebrew"), discovering other articles from the site that relate to the passage ("Library"), etc.   To my knowledge, there's no cost to access the features on this site, or at least not the features highlighted here...

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Best Commentaries (bestcommentaries.com)

For pastors, teachers, Bible study leaders, or anyone who's digging deeply into particular books of the Bible, commentaries are a great resource to serve your study of God's Word.  This site helps identify helpful commentaries on each book of the Bible, and ranks them in different ways (e.g., "technical," "pastoral," "devotional") so you know what might be a fit, and what you're getting into.  Reviews are also included, so you can read what some others have thought about the particular commentary.  Please note that this site does not actually include the text of the commentary itself!  Instead, it helps you know what commentaries are out there and how they might be helpful for you.  There's no cost to access this site, but you'll still need to purchase any commentaries you decide you need - and then do the work of diging into them yourself (which is a good exercise, by the way).  If you're looking for a few other good, "go-to" print resources that can help you start to build a biblical/theological library, check out these suggestions here.

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The Bible Project (www.jointhebibleproject.com)

This is a site that I've been introduced to fairly recently, and I love how they're working to produce video summaries of each book of the Bible (each about 5-7 min) that capture the storyline of that book, even as they keep the larger storyline of Scripture in mind.  As of this writing, they've got videos done for a number of books of the Bible (not every one), and they're also doing videos tracing how certain themes are developed throughout Scripture (e.g. "Messiah," "Holiness," "Heaven + Earth," etc).  The videos are biblically faithful and creatively done.  While these video won't necessarily get into some of the "nitty gritty" questions that come up as you read through Scripture, they'll help you keep the larger context of the book of the Bible in mind.  And I'm a firm believer that this larger context of the biblical book should always be in the back of our minds, even as we wrestle with the "nitty gritty" questions (because of how they help us approach the "nitty gritty" questions in a right way).

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The Gospel Coalition (www.thegospelcoalition.org)

OK, OK...this isn't specifically a "Bible study site," but I still recommend it often.  It's got tons of great articles and resources (sermons, video conversations, etc.) on Bible passages and areas of interest for evangelicals.  Spend some time exploring the "Resources" button along the top menu of the homepage and you'll see what I'm talking about.  While presenting a number of different views on topics (in other words, it's not "narrow" in a weird sense, and remember that it's always good to practice discernment!), it at the same time keeps the focus on the gospel of Jesus Christ and spotlights the beauty of the gospel in many ways.  There's no cost to access this site, and there's also a free app available.

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What other helpful sites for digging into and understanding God's Word have you run across that I didn't mention in this post?