Episode Details

Bible Study 101: Why Does John Mention the Passover in John 6? Hearing Jesus, Devotional

This episode is part of Bible Study 101, a series teaching a method Rachael calls the color method. You take one passage and read it several times, marking something different in each color, and by the end you see things on the page you'd never catch reading at normal speed. This week the passage is John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand.

Today's color is purple, and purple marks timing. Words like then, after, already, when, near. That sounds like the least interesting color of the week until you get to verse 4, which is six words about a festival. It has no people in it, nothing supernatural, and nobody doing anything, so it sat blank on the page for four straight days while everything around it filled in. It's also the sentence that tells you what kind of story you're actually reading.

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Chapters

0:00 What we're doing this week

0:28 The difference between reading and studying

0:55 What purple marks

1:24 Why timing is so easy to miss in Scripture

2:30 The two things timing words do for you

3:53 Reading John 6:1-15

5:41 Marking the timing words

8:29 Back to verse 4

9:23 What Passover actually is

10:26 A crowd in a wild place with no food, during Passover season

11:33 This is not a story about a picnic

12:03 Why the crowd calls Him the Prophet

12:46 Why this is the argument for the whole method

14:19 Writers don't waste sentences

16:06 The grass, and the green pastures

17:03 The mountain, twice

17:32 Prayer

18:20 Homework

What is the color method?

It's a way of studying Scripture that Rachael developed while teaching sixth and seventh graders who had never been shown how to read the Bible for themselves. She later published it in her first book, She Hears.

You take a short passage, ten to fifteen verses, and mark it with colored pencils or highlighters. Each color answers one question. Green marks the who. Blue marks the supernatural, the things only God could do. Red marks the action words. Purple marks timing.

The colors aren't the point. The point is that you can't put a color on a word without making a decision about that word, and you can't make a decision without slowing down enough to actually read. Most of us skim familiar passages without noticing. This makes it impossible.

What does purple mark?

Timing. Think of purple as the clock.

You're looking for when something happened, how long it took, what came before, and what came after. Words like then, immediately, during, already, when, after, again, the next day.

Why does timing matter so much in the Bible?

Because Scripture handles time in a way that reading a normal book doesn't prepare you for.

There are 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. You turn one page and four centuries have passed, and nothing on the page tells you that. Inside a single passage you can cover generations in three sentences.

Timing words do two things. They tell you the order events happened in, which matters because our memories compress stories and lose the sequence. And they locate the passage inside the larger story of Scripture, so you know whether you're before the rescue or after it, before the kings or after the kingdom fell ap