You Read It. But Did You Read It?

I worked at a high school in an urban community where many of the students were performing below grade level. At one point, I was tasked with tutoring an eighth grader who was reading at about a third-grade level. As a recent college graduate with absolutely no classroom teaching experience, I was out of my depth.

Looking for wisdom, I called my self-proclaimed second mom. As a preschool owner and an obviously anointed child educator, she was more than happy to point me in the right direction. The problem wasn’t necessarily that my student couldn’t read the words. He struggled to comprehend what he was reading, and he had difficulty drawing conclusions, making inferences, and connecting what he had just read to what came before it.

Her solution was simple: Stop. After every page, I was supposed to stop him and ask the five W’s: Who? What? Where? When? Why? Naturally, he was not a fan. But we kept at it. By the end of that school year, he had gone from reading around a third-grade level to at least a fifth-grade level. Now, I’m not about to pretend that the five W’s single-handedly performed an academic miracle. But they gave him a framework for slowing down and actually engaging with what he was reading.

About a year before that, I had been given that same framework for a completely different kind of reading. My pastor at the time had us participate in a Bible-in-a-year challenge. Each week, we were assigned a book of the Bible along with homework: find the five W’s. Who? What? Where? When? Why? This was my first exposure to personal Bible study.

Since then, I’ve used many different methods of studying Scripture. Some are more detailed. Some suit certain genres of Scripture better. Some require a little more digging. But every now and again, I come back to the tried-and-true; especially when I need a kickstart to being motivated to study personally after a “dry spell.” So that’s what we’re going to do here.

For our first study, we’re heading to Mark 2:1–12. You may already know the story. A paralyzed man. Four friends. A crowded house. A hole in the roof. Jesus.

WHO?

Let’s start with the easiest question. Who is in the story? Jesus, obviously. There’s a paralyzed man, four people carrying him, a crowd, and some scribes. But here’s something interesting: Mark doesn’t give most of them names. We don’t know the four friends’ names. We don’t know the paralyzed man’s name. And yet Mark spends a considerable amount of time telling us what these unnamed people did. Interesting. Sometimes the text doesn’t tell us who someone is. It tells us what they do.

WHAT?

Now, what happened? A man who couldn’t walk was brought to Jesus. The men carrying him couldn’t get through the crowd, so they found another way in. They lowered him through the roof and placed him in front of Jesus. Then Jesus says something that might make you stop and say: "Wait." What? Jesus doesn’t immediately tell the man to get up and walk. He tells him his sins are forgiven. Now, if I’m one of the friends who just carried somebody onto a roof and tore a hole in it, I’m probably thinking, Jesus, respectfully, that is not the problem we brought him here for. But notice something.

Does Mark actually tell us why the friends brought him? He tells us they brought the man to Jesus, but he doesn’t explicitly tell us what they expected Jesus to do. We can reasonably infer that healing was the hope. But that’s an inference. And this is where studying the Bible gets interesting. What does the text actually say versus what am I assuming it says? Those aren’t always the same thing.

WHERE?

Where is all of this happening? Mark tells us Jesus is in Capernaum, and that He’s in a house. People hear that He’s there and gather until there isn’t even room around the entrance. That detail matters. The crowd isn’t just background scenery. The crowd creates the problem. The friends can’t get their friend to Jesus through the front door. So, they find another way.

Sometimes paying attention to where a story happens helps explain why people do what they do. And, honestly, I have questions for the homeowner. Because imagine sitting in your house listening to Jesus teach and suddenly hearing somebody dismantling your roof. Mark gives us no indication that a permission slip was involved. But that’s a conversation for another day.

WHEN?

Now for a question the passage doesn’t completely answer. When did this happen? We know we’re in Jesus’ earthly ministry, and Mark gives us the sequence of events. Jesus returns to Capernaum, word spreads that He’s home, the crowd gathers, and the four men bring their friend. But Mark doesn’t give us an exact date. And that’s okay. Sometimes the answer is, “The text doesn’t tell us.”

WHY?

Now we’ve arrived at the question that changes the whole story. Why did Jesus forgive the man’s sins before healing him? Thankfully, we don’t have to guess. The scribes are questioning Jesus in their hearts. They think His declaration of forgiveness is blasphemous because only God can forgive sins. Jesus knows what they’re thinking. Then He essentially asks: Which is easier to say, that his sins are forgiven or to tell him to get up and walk? And then Jesus heals the man. But why?

Jesus tells us. The healing was meant to demonstrate that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. And there it is. Jesus didn’t just heal this man to prove that He could make someone walk. He healed him to demonstrate something about who He is and the authority He possesses. The miracle is connected to the message.

And suddenly, the five W’s have taken us somewhere. We noticed people the text never named. We separated what Mark actually said from what we inferred. We noticed that the crowd created the obstacle. We recognized that the passage doesn’t give us every answer. And when we had a question about Jesus’ actions, we looked at what Jesus Himself said.

That’s the practice I want to encourage: before immediately searching for somebody else’s explanation, look at what the Bible says about itself. Ask the question. Read the surrounding verses. Look for repeated words and ideas. Pay attention to what comes before and after. And if the Bible doesn’t answer your question, don’t force it to. Sometimes the most biblical answer is: “I don’t know. The text doesn’t tell me.”

Some who read this may know Mark 2 very well. But knowing the story isn’t the same as studying the story. That’s the lesson I learned tutoring that eighth grader. Reading the words isn’t the same as comprehending them. And I think the same can happen with Scripture. We can read a chapter. We can know the famous verses. We can know the Bible stories. We can even know what we’re supposed to say about them. But have we stopped long enough to notice what the text is actually doing?

The five W’s aren’t the most sophisticated Bible study method you’ll ever encounter. They’re not supposed to be. They’re a starting point. They teach us to slow down. To observe. To ask questions. To notice repetition. To consider context. To distinguish between what the Bible actually says and what we’ve heard someone say about the Bible. And sometimes, that’s exactly where deeper study begins.

Try It Yourself

The next time you open your Bible, pick a passage and stop. Ask: Who? Who is speaking? Who is listening? Who is involved? What? What is happening? What is being said? What keeps repeating? Where? Where is this happening? Does the location matter? When? When is this happening? What came before it? What comes after? Why? Why is this being said or done? Does the text give you the answer?

And if you don’t know the answer? Write that down too. “I don’t know” is a perfectly respectable place to begin studying the Bible. Because the goal isn’t to prove how much you already know. The goal is to become more biblical. And sometimes becoming more biblical starts with something as simple as stopping at the end of the page and asking, Wait. What did I just read?