Well, with the recent launch of John Piper's new book, "Reading the Bible Supernaturally," we have a lot of Bible reading questions in the APJ inbox, and we love it. Keep sending those in to us, including this question that comes in to us from a man named Philip. "Dear Pastor John, I really enjoy the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly by breaking them down and explaining each part.

I understand that meditating on small parts of scripture can be helpful as we suck out all the nourishment from it. But sometimes my problem is in understanding the entire chapter or larger sections of the Bible. I read something like John 8, and although I can understand small parts of it, I really get lost and fail to follow the entire flow of Jesus' arguments or where the chapter is going.

Sometimes reading a psalm can be quite incoherent to me too, and I don't quite get how one sentence flows into another. So could you help me? Help me figure out ways to understand larger sections of scripture as a whole, rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts." Let me see if I can help.

First with an analogy, namely an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle, and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter whole, and then give an example from my own experience. Think of a larger unit of scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters.

Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle. For me, this is just like the way I go about it. There are 500 pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them, they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box.

They are just one big jumble. And that's how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible when you try to think of the chapter as a whole. There are just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things, but my, oh my, they don't make one big picture.

How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of 500 scattered pieces? And of course, the Bible doesn't have a picture on the top of the box. You're working a little harder here. How do you see a chapter as a whole with a main point, with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point instead of just seeing 60 or 70 scattered clauses and phrases?

That's the goal. You take one piece, right? I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out. You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully. You don't just keep scanning your eyes. Over 500 pieces superficially, oh, let me see something.

Oh, let me see. No, no, no, no. You get nowhere that way. You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully. And you notice that half of this piece is solid red, and the other half is gold, solid gold. And you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half, and half of it is gold, and half of it is red.

And from this, you infer with careful thinking that there is another piece somewhere here, somewhere that will be half red and half gold. And instead of a protrusion, there's going to be an indention in the bottom of the piece leading up into half red and half gold. And now you're looking very specifically for that piece.

And you scan the 500 pieces, this time looking specifically for that. And you find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red, half gold. And you slide them around looking for how they can fit together. You push them off to the side of the table in a corner, and you find one or two that fit, and then another, and another.

And pretty soon you realize that you've got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together. And you notice, oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne. So that's going to go here probably. You set that mid-size unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again with another piece with its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.

So that's how you build little pieces into mid-size units. We might call those two or three verses or a paragraph. And we've got maybe five paragraphs that are going to fit together. But now you've got several, maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight mid-size units. And you should be able to discern of those three, four, five verses in each unit, what's the main point there because of how they fit together.

Now here's my exhortation. One of the reasons we don't move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible is because it is very hard work. It is hard work to fit all the mid-size pieces together so as to see the whole. For most of us, I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our head.

And there's where people run into trouble. They're reading devotions, and they're trying to do this in their head. Well, I can't even begin to do this in my head. We have to do it on paper. We have to write it down. Now I don't think there are computer programs good enough to do this yet on screen because of all the jumbled jotting and line drawing and circling I have to do.

We have to jot down the main point, the red and gold mid-size unit means robe over the arm of a throne, that kind of a thing, and then we jot down the next main point of the next mid-size unit and so on until we've got it on a piece of paper, six, seven, eight sentences, which now each one sums up the mid-size unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we're trying to understand.

And then we try to go about seeing how those mid-size units relate to each other. And my exhortation is simply don't give up on that. Use a pencil and a paper. Draw lines between them. You have no idea how they might all fit together. You'll be amazed at what you're able to see by trying to fit those mid-size units and their main point together to make the larger piece.

Now here's my closing example of how I've done it recently. I've been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8. It seems like the main point is, "Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth," because it begins with that and it ends with that.

And that's a wonderful structural thing to see. But in the middle, you've got these babies who cry out, "And God gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants." And so I jotted that down recently. I even made a look at the book about this just a few weeks ago.

I jotted that down. I said, "Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the Psalm, just the first couple of verses, seems to be God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things." And I have no idea how that works. None. That's just what it says. So I jotted that down.

And then the next unit, which seems just totally different, "I behold your heavens and the things, your handiwork, and what is man that you're mindful of him, and through this man who's just a little lower than the heavenly beings, you govern the whole world with fish and birds." And I said, and I tried, now what's the main point?

I've put a few pieces together here. I want to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this mid-sized unit. And I jotted down, "God exercises dominion over his earth through insignificant man who compared to the stars seems like nothing." And as soon as I wrote it, I saw, oh, I get it.

The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies, and man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man, and then he ends it. How great is his glory and his majesty. Surely then, the point is, one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty and glory of God is that he gets his victories, and he exercises his dominion through the use of weak and insignificant things.

Amen, amen. Praise God. And it's exactly the use that Jesus makes of it, or that Matthew makes of it, as Jesus enters the city on Palm Sunday where the babies are crying out, "Hosanna," and he's on a donkey of all things. So the point is, look at the pieces very carefully.

Fit them together in mid-sized units. Jot down the main points of the mid-sized units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then think and think and pray and pray and think and pray and think and pray and organize and draw lines and try to fit them all together until they fall into place, and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the mid-sized units are in a flow that make one big overarching point.

And you will be surprised if you take up pencil and paper and do this what you will see. Wow, that's a lot of help, and puzzles are a great metaphor for reading large sections of Scripture. Thank you, Pastor John. That is doing Bible reading in the macro picture, putting together big chunks.

And in a couple of weeks we have a question about how to read a particular passage, really doing Bible reading in the micro sphere. Stay tuned for that. We're going to cover that more in future weeks. Well, we have run up again against the weekend, and that means it's time for me to remind you to subscribe to our podcast and to find our audio feeds and search our episode archive, and even reach out to us by email with a difficult question you might be facing or a Bible study question on the brain.

Please send those in to us. You can do all this through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, speaking of hard questions, what do we do with the lingering sense of regret that we feel for wronging people with our sins in the past, wrongs that cannot be forgiven by the ones we have wronged?

What do you do when it's too late for reconciliation? This is a sobering and humbling question, and it comes to us from a listener who wants to know. We will begin next week with it. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. We'll see you on Monday.