Episode Details

Is the Feeding of the 5,000 About the Boy? | Bible Study 101

Today the color method actually starts. One color, one question: who is this passage about? You'll mark every name, every title, and every pronoun in John 6:1-15 in green, and by the end you'll be looking at something most of us have never seen laid out visually. The boy with the loaves and fish, the one we've heard entire sermons about, gets exactly one mark. Jesus is in nearly every verse. Rachael walks the passage verse by verse so you can do it alongside her.

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Chapters

0:00 Moving from the why to the how

0:59 What you need in front of you today

1:28 Why we always start with the who

2:19 What gets marked in green

3:14 What if my whole page turns green?

4:34 Why pronouns carry more than you think

6:22 A bonus habit: draw a line back

7:20 Reading John 6:1-15

9:44 A note about your translation

10:46 Do this before you read your study Bible notes

11:44 Why Rachael uses a separate Bible for this

13:35 Marking the passage verse by verse

20:19 Now sit back and look at your page

21:45 The boy in verse 9

23:49 The title in verse 14, and what the crowd wanted

25:44 Prayer

What does green mark in the color method?

Green marks the who. Every name, every title, and every pronoun that refers to a person.

So in John 6 that means Jesus, God, the Lord, but also Philip, Andrew, the disciples, the crowd, the boy. And it means all the pronouns attached to them. He, she, them, we, you, I.

Yes, that's a lot of marking. On some passages your page will be almost entirely green, and that's fine. That's information, not a problem. It's telling you something about the passage.

Why does marking pronouns matter?

Because pronouns carry meaning we skip right past.

Here's a sentence in plain English: he gave it to him because he asked for it. If you're not paying attention, you might read that as one person. It's two. All three pronouns are masculine, and you have to slow down to sort out who is who.

Scripture is full of this. In a single paragraph Paul can be referring to God, to Jesus, to himself, and to the church he's writing to, all through pronouns. If you build this muscle on an easy narrative passage now, the letters get significantly easier later.

There's a bonus habit worth picking up. When you hit a pronoun and you don't immediately know who it points to, go back and find out, then draw a small line or arrow connecting them. It forces you to make a decision instead of assuming you know. Rachael has been doing this for years and still gets tripped up and has to work backward three or four verses.

Watch out for pronouns that aren't people

Verse 9 has a trap in it. Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?

That "they" is not people. It's the loaves and the fish. So it doesn't get marked.

Verse 13 does the same thing. So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets. The "they" is the disciples, so that's green. The "them" is the leftover pieces, so it isn't.

That's exactly the kind of thing you never catch at reading speed.

Is the story of the five loaves and two fish about the boy?

No, and the green makes that impossible