When the big idea of a book is located, it helps you connect the biblical passages in the book to one another because you can see how they are all relating to—or expanding on—the overall theme of the book. Passages in a biblical book change from being random stories, arguments, or poems to being important pieces in the overall point that the book is making for its audience.

The Crux of Each Book

Just as every Bible passage has a main point, so does every biblical book, and it’s very important to find it. The crux tool—a hermeneutical tool—can help you do that. By using it well, you can discover the message or theme of any biblical book.

Understanding This Tool

The idea of finding the main theme or big idea for an entire book of the Bible may seem intimidating because some of those books are very long. So I want to give you a few basic hints about how you can begin working to identify the crux of any book of the Bible by using this tool. This is a very important tool, and here is why: every author of the Bible was inspired by God’s Holy Spirit to write, and they wrote with a very clear purpose—a big idea. Unless we identify that big idea—that crux—for any particular book, we will become confused as we study the individual passages within that book. We need to have a good grasp of the overarching point in order to understand the points of the individual parts. The crux tool will help you do that—and will serve you well as you study smaller passages within any book.

Here are the hints that you can use to help you as you seek to pinpoint the crux of a book:

Purpose statement. You can look for a purpose statement. Some biblical authors make it very easy on us; they obviously and openly tell us why they are writing the book and what their main point will be.

Beginning and ending. You can look at how a book begins and ends. Many times, a biblical author will start by giving you an idea of the main purpose or crux of his book, then will conclude with a restatement of that point. Again, this is a very helpful way to find the crux. It’s not very different from the way that many of us were taught to write essays in school—by giving an introduction that states the main point, writing the body of the essay, and then restating the main point in the conclusion. Some biblical authors do this more explicitly than others.

Repetition. You can often discover words, phrases, and ideas that keep coming up throughout a book of the Bible. Many times, what the author keeps repeating is an important hint as to the overall crux of the book.

Obviously, a key part of using these three hints is actually taking some time to read through books of the Bible—even multiple times—and ideally in one sitting. The best method by which to find your way to the crux of a book is to read it again and again, and to work hard to determine the book’s shape, trajectory, and major themes. You will get better at using this tool the more you read the Bible. Don’t cheat yourself out of the experience of actually reading an entire book of the Bible all the way through; there is no shortcut to good Bible study.

Remember, this tool is a very important one for your tool belt because you cannot understand the various parts of a book unless you grasp the crux of the entire book.

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