Ultimate Bible Note-Taking System

what's up everybody we're going to talk about the best Bible note-taking system in the whole world today on my YouTube channel my name is Matthew Everhart I'm the pastor of gospel Fellowship PCA we're a Reformed bible-believing Church just north of Pittsburgh well listen I've done a lot of videos on Bible note taking before the problem is some of them are getting old some of them the audio is kind of bad some of them have a bunch of different ideas spread out all over my various playlists so today what we're going to do is we're going to put them all into one video called taking

Bible notes a complete system where I'm going to show you basically the distillation of everything that I've been learning and practicing these skills and attributes that have been accumulating over the years to hone in my own Bible note-taking system I think I've got it all here in one place for you today so anyway glad you're here let's go ahead and dig in now by the way I think that uh it's perfectly fine to write in your Bible I'm not one of those people that thinks that the pages or the leather or the paper or the glue itself

of the Bible is Holy but it's rather that it's the inspired and infallible and inerrant word of God so writing in your Bible is not a problem theologically please don't think that you're violating what it says at the end of Revelation that you're adding to scripture or subtracting from it or anything like that you're just taking notes you're learning you're you're being discipled by what the word of God teaches but this is probably what your Bible might look like and there's nothing wrong with just taking notes you've got some highlighting here you've got some underlining maybe you threw some boxes around maybe you're trying to

jam some notes in some corner places like this and you're writing sideways and you're you're doing this and that but uh you know the really if you think about it you've got three problems with the way that you're doing notes right now first of all your colors don't mean anything you just grab whatever pen that you're you happen to have on your desk or in your hand and you're just using that so your color system while it looks beautiful it doesn't really mean anything we're going to try to solve that problem here today in this video the second problem is that you're jamming notes into every odd little space you're writing in a

little return paragraph areas you're writing sideways you're right and upside down anything you can to jam stuff in everywhere that you can and then third you just don't really have the room to write out any sort of full thoughts you have some big ideas and so you write down a word or two but a lot of times what happens is you can't remember exactly what you're talking about later you refer to Pastor so and so sermon but what was that well I'm going to show you a way that we're going to solve all three of these problems at the same time we're going to bring your

color system into a theological order we're going to give you a symbol system so that you can cue yourself to Major doctrines without having to use a lot of space and then we're going to solve the biggest problem of all which is that you don't have room in your Bible to write out all of the thoughts that you have on a particular passage with the ability to reference them in some sort of a systematic way later so we're going to solve all of those problems now let's jump in and solve first of all the problem of your color system um grabbing any pen you want is totally fine and I'm not a huge color person

myself so this is more going to be a do what I say and not what I do part of my little lecture here for you today but um you can come up with whatever color system you want to I'm just saying that if you want to use the basic primary colors it does seem best to me to assign a particular Doctrine to each one of those particular colors and I think probably the most logical way is to do it like this black would stand for God God speaks in black and white right and so your main pen that you're probably

going to have is going to be black anyway so you might as well use black to write down your thoughts on God his nature his attributes what he's like things that refer to Trinity Etc and then green would be a fantastic color to do something with creation obviously the world is a big beautiful blue and green orb or sphere so you might as well make green your color for creation Brown would be perfect for sin because Brown is just kind of an ugly color and sin is really ugly as well and then red would obviously point to Christ and the

atonement anything that has to do with blood or Jesus or the cross or his glory things like that would be red orange could be the holy spirit for you and probably that makes a lot of sense because the spirit is often imaged as like a fire and fire is orange and so orange would be perfect for the Holy Spirit blue would be great for the church because of baptism to be brought into the church is to be baptized and so baptism Blue Water you got that purple eschatology here we're thinking about the Royal nature of Christ who's going

to return as king he's already the king of all things but he's going to return gloriously as the king so purple being a royal color would fit that well yellow the color of blessing just think of gold gold and God's blessings upon you and then whatever else you want to add for me I happen to be Presbyterian so I think in terms of reformed theology a lot so a bright color like pink could be a special cue to look for things like the doctrines of Grace or the Tulip doctrines Etc so now you've taken your kind of scatter

shot notes in your Bible and now your Bible is going to look something a little bit more like this where your colors actually mean something so here this green block is going to stand for creation I've got the spirit of God underlined in Orange here because orange is my color for the Holy Spirit and then I've got the section of blessings down here underlined in yellow and so as you see your Bible visually now your brain is just going to connect doctrines with colors and things like that and so your note taking is already going to look a whole lot better just doing that if

that's the only change you made you'd probably already be improving your note-taking system in your Bible now let's go to something else here that I think is really important I use this all the time if I'm not so much devoted to color coding in my Bible note-taking though I think it's a good idea I am much more devoted to the idea of taking notes by way of symbols symbols can convey a lot of information in a very small place now what I'm going to give you on the screen right here is an example of the symbols that I use and

what I would say is why you're free to borrow anything I do in this particular video please don't think you need to immediately do exactly what I've done I've had people email me before and say please give me your exhaust exact symbol list that's fine if you want to use it but it would be best if you came up with your own symbol so that again your brain would connect with what you're doing here so what I've done is I've created a a bunch of little symbols that I use all the time and so I have a symbol for the Trinity because there's all kinds of passages where the father son and the

spirit are spoken of in the same context especially in the book of Acts or in the gospels I've got one for the resurrection here the resurrection of Christ I've got one for repentance notice it's going down and turning back to the right which is what repentance is you have to humble yourself and turn to what is Right atonement is like an a with an arrow to it we're being atoned to something money Messiah typology that's an important one for me especially in my interpretation of the Old Testament a c for Covenant kind of in Brackets A J

with an f sign justification by faith love Psalm singing the Tulip doctrines total depravity unconditional election limited atonement irresistible Grace and perseverance of the Saints if you're wondering uh reprobation prayer and then of course a little asterisk meaning see the reference below now I've got this little page of the Bible right here maybe you even have this exact Bible the Supreme standard ESV this is like the Thin Line also a lot of Bibles in the pews look

exactly like this so notice that these Pages don't have a lot of room in the margins for note-taking so my symbol system is going to be able to do a lot where I don't have a lot of room to write and so let me give you some examples of what that might look like so here I've added a couple of symbols here I've got an asterisk I've got a t for typology I've got a heart and I've got a C for Covenant so let's just kind of work through these now my typology here is on verse 15 the Lord God took the man and put him in the

Garden of Eden to work it and to keep it well that's a reference to Adam but remember Adam is typological of the greater uh the greater head the greater Covenant head who is Christ to come and so there's an interesting overlap between Adam and Christ discussed in Romans chapter 5 for instance where Christ does what Adam fails to do and even as Adam is a covenant head I guess I'm lecturing now aren't I a Christ is going to be the greater Covenant head of his people so that little typological symbol there just reminds me that

there's deeper meaning here other than just mentioning Adam uh notice here I've got this asterisk and this is a basic symbol everybody should be using this probably the asterisk like in many books takes you down to the bottom of the page and here I just have a note to myself by the way all of these notes are just made up by way of example okay see burkhoff Systematic Theology Pages 205 and 670. so that's just a little way to cue yourself to books that you're reading on the same topic very often you'll be reading a Bible passage and you'll say

man I really have to remember that this corresponds with you know this this or that book what C.S Lewis said or what John Calvin said or whatever a simple asterisk system is going to solve that problem for you and then of course I've got my other little symbols here for love and the covenants in the Bible by the way holding fast as covenantal language here and so all of these little symbols here they just help me to put a lot of dense information into very small uh usage of the margins and the pages of

my Bible I think that's probably going to be a very good habit to get get into as you advance your Bible note taking system now let's talk a little bit about making much more sophisticated types of notes in your Bible and this is where I think this video is really going to be helpful to a lot of people first of all again this is what your Bible note taking probably looks like right now you're trying to smush in entire little paragraphs of thought into the random little corners and nooks and crannies of

the pages of your Bible the problem is most Bibles unless they're a wide margin Bible or a journaling Bible or a note-taking Bible they don't have a lot of blank space I mean that's what Bible Publishers do is they try to get a huge book into something that you can essentially carry around in your your hand or in your purse or in your backpack so that's a lot of stress on the publisher so they try to smush everything in and usually that means you don't have a lot of spaces so we try to do things like this right down the side and things like that but

the problem is this note here is already taking up a lot of a lot of space a lot of usable space and so that's not really a great way to utilize a little bit of margin room I have so what I want to do is I want to show you a better system that I've been using now for years and it has really really benefited me and to be honest this system is not something that I came up with out of the genius of my own brain there's not a lot of Genius in my brain if any at all but rather it comes from the man that I've been studying his life and his theology for many years and

that would be Jonathan Edwards 1703-1758 one of the later Puritans I guess actually he's an American so he's not technically a Puritan but we could talk about that in other videos he's well known for his work in the Great Awakening his thoughts on revivalism his famous sermon sinners in the hands of an Angry God but Edwards also had a remarkable system called his miscellany system which I'm going to show you a variation of that in this particular video here so look how much cleaner this

note page would be if you could make some reference system to an external notebook which is a exactly what Jonathan Edwards constantly did he's constantly making various external notebooks that he could bring his full note ideas into other places so that he didn't have to use up the marginalia of his Bible so look at this we're going to do something like this and I'm going to show you how to do this hang with me here miscellany number one on creation miscellany number two on the Trinity miscellany number three on Mosaic

authorship well what in the world does that mean well the miscellany number right here is a number of that particular note that you're going to write more fully in an external notebook outside of the particular Bible that you're physically carrying around with you and the fact that these are numbered notes means that I can easily find out exactly what I was thinking about in that particular moment and in fact I can continue to add even more thoughts to it as I go let me show you how some system

like that would work practically well what you're going to need is to get yourself an external notebook and this is going to be called your miscellaneous notebook now I have to have whoops as I smack my microphone I happen to have mine right here you've probably seen this in the background of my videos if you watch videos on this channel it's a rather large notebook it's about the same size as my Bible so they're both kind of big books I don't really want to carry this around this is why it sits on my desk here in my office for most of the time but the first thing you're

going to have to do in your miscellaneous notebook is you're going to have to create for yourself a table of contents that you're going to continue to add to over the years okay so you're going to want to leave yourself several pages of space in the very front the very front of this notebook for filling out your own table of contents you're not necessarily going to do it by page number so don't worry about the page numbers on the book but you are going to do it by miscellany number okay and so your first miscellaneous here miscellany m001 now

you can just do M1 but I do it m001 because my brain likes to think in terms of perfect lined categories all right so so this is going to allow me to have up over a thousand or about a thousand miscellaneous in one particular Journal assuming I have that much space in that in that journal so miscellany m001 it's going to tell me that it cues to Genesis 1 1 and the topic is going to be creation and so too also with miscellany number two on Genesis 1 2 the

Trinity miscellany 3 on Genesis the book related to Mosaic authorship of the pentateuch and so on you're going to go you're going to leave several pages in the front of your miscellaneous notebook so that that table of contents can grow as you work through your Bible note-taking habits over the years now you're going to flip to the first page of your miscellaneous journal and you're going to write at the top m001 and here again is your topic creation Genesis 1 1 and here's your full note

you can write as much as you want you could write a whole page you could write two pages you could write 10 pages you are free to write as much as you want you can write some little uh shapes or you could write some symbols or you could do some sketches or some drawings you can make all sorts of references to other books to systematic theologies or other books you're reading the point is that now that you've queued this to Genesis 1 1 every time you're reading the book of Genesis and you see that miscellany note you're going to remind yourself that you have this whole set of

thoughts on this particular verse okay and so too you're going to do it with these over and over again miscellany number two is going to be on the Trinity from Genesis 1 2 you see how the system works and as you go what you're going to notice is that your table of contents is growing okay now some of you are going to say ah but what if I get out of canonical order with my entries no problem whatsoever the point of the table of contents is to keep reference to everything that you're studying but

it does not have to be in chronological or can a canonical order so notice I just happened to make the first three in the Book of Genesis just by way of example but I could jump to Ephesians 1 I could go to Colossians 2 I could talk about Calvin's view of the Lord's supper or so on Leviticus or Romans or first Timothy or Leviticus again that's what Jonathan Edwards did he did not make this in canonical order but rather the order in which he took those particular notes and that's why your

table of contents is going to be so key to you so that you can later find these things but as you're again as you're reading through your Bible you're going to have those notes placed in the margins so you can always find where the note is in a relationship to its content its topic and its scripture verse now you may say to yourself well what if I don't have my miscellaneous notebook with me you said pastor Matt that this is a pretty big book and you leave it here on your desk well that's why I have a carry around miscellaneous book two I

call this book X now you can call your books whatever you want to I don't know why I call this notebook X I don't know why I started with M for miscellaneous and then jumped to notebook X but I just thought X sounded cool if you were more logical and sequential than me you could start with notebook a or notebook b or notebook C and then just go in alphabetical order but I went with notebook X and so I carry around in my little backpack all the time notebook X and so here I'm going to do the

exactly the same thing I'm going to make my table of contents and I'm going to begin to write my miscellaneous entries into this and the fact that it's x001 is going to remind me that it's in this particular notebook and not in this particular notebook this is my M notebook and this is my X notebook and that's going to keep it clear so I could have multiple notebooks I could have a tiny little notebook I could have a pocket size notebook I could one have one at home I could have one at church I could have one at work the point is the

letter is going to cue you to what notebook the note is in and the number is going to tell you what the number and the order and then that the scripture reference where you can find it and then whatever topic you happen to be talking about so there's no problem with running out of space in any way one of your notebooks you just go on to the next notebook it's no problem if you leave it at home you could have a small notebook in your car your bag whatever this is going to solve all of those problems for you so here let's imagine that we're looking back at the same page in your Bible again but now you've been working

on it for let's say a couple of years you didn't just start it now this is what your notebook or your Bible looks like uh years from now so remember the letter is going to tell you which notebook and your number is going to tell you which entry so now I have m001 on creation m002 on the Trinity I've got X number 382 I've been doing a lot of note-taking have an eye on lights here's M number 529 boy that notebook is really getting full I've got m262 on the waters x447 on Heaven you just imagine

there's a lot of note taking happening but that's exactly what you want you want to fill up your Bible with notes there's so much you could be writing here in the same space that you could have wasted by just jamming in one kind of crams just kind of haphazard style note right there in the margins if you're really trying to just smush everything in which I don't think is the best way to do it um now some people will ask me this well what should I be taking notes on I am

not sure what I should even be writing down well my answer to that is well practically everything uh first of all you could write down background information related to the text that you're studying what kind of background information would there be about Genesis chapter one or the Book of Genesis in general you could add personal illustration something that helps you to illuminate the particular passage by connecting it to your own life you could put prayers in your bar in your Bible in

your wide margin or in your miscellaneous notebooks we'll say more about wide margins here in just a moment you could put inspirational quotes and thoughts again things that you've read in Thomas Watson or Charles Spurgeon or something else that you're reading the Fulfillment of biblical prophecies would be an excellent way to take some notes subject and topic lists you could smush in there somewhere academic citations again referring to other books or theological works that you're reading

textual footnotes and variants alternate translations theological and doctrinal notes historical anecdotes anecdotes and especially of course links to your other notebooks you may have many notebooks as this whole process continues to build for you as you go now some people are going to ask me about tools and resources so I thought about this ahead of time this is a question that I get all the time and so I'm going to head it off of the past people ask me what is the best pen for use in Bibles my answer to that is very

simple and it's the same answer I've been giving for years the best pens to use in your Bible are the pigma Micron pens here described in this particular picture here you can get this on Amazon in fact what I'm going to do is put a link in the description of this particular video These are archival quality pens they have very fine nibs which is the tip of the pen which allows you to write very small and very neat and they do not smudge and they do not wear away so this is going to be the one pen that you're going to use for all of your note-taking now you might use other

pens for your actual miscellaneous notebook for instance you might like the gel pens or something like that that's fine but for writing in your Bible you're going to want to use the pigma Micron pens again Link in the description people have asked me about what is the best highlighters the answer to that is the zebra mild liners now there's a bunch of good highlighters out there but you got to worry about some bleed through and from all the testing that I've done over the years I would tell you that this is probably the best because they're mild they're not quite as bright as any other highlighter is

and so therefore the see-through is not quite as bad uh most highlighters you're going to get some see-through this is the most minimal highlighter that I've found and again I'm going to post a link in the description of this video so you can grab this on Amazon if you're so inclined um I will tell you let me just go back to highlighters if it's just you and a highlighter okay Sharpie is better than Bic I have tested this over and over again for some reason and I can't explain it Sharpie highlighters are better than Bix if

you're going with the cheap off the shelf kind of Staples style highlighters use yourself a Sharpie and not necessarily a Bic I want to mention too that there is a special kind of Bible called a wide margin Bible I've been talking about wide margining for a very long time this is what a wide margin looks like remember the other Bible I showed you had hardly anything as far as margins a wide margin is one that has wide margins thus the name okay it's not rocket science here this gives you a lot more room to write marginal notes in

your Bible but again I still think that your miscellany system is actually going to pay dividends as you go so I use mine for both I'll go ahead and just write a note right in the margin but I also very often use my miscellaneous system for things that require a lot more space consideration so I will post an example of a wide margin and Bible in the description of this video as well there's a bunch of them out there really just search it up I'll show you the one that I have or at least the nearest approximate I think the one that I

actually have is now out of Prints but there's one that's pretty similar to it that you can you can get all right now there are journaling Bibles too I want to mention that a journaling Bible like this one right here from Crossway I've done reviews on these Bibles that's the kind of Bible that has a big huge wide journaling space right here and so you can write a lot in a journaling Bible but again even if you write a lot notice how many verses this has really gone kind of well it's taken up all that space that you're you might want later and so even if you have a journaling

Bible I still think the miscellaneous system is going to be better for you because it's going to look like this you tell me which one looks better now that does look kind of pretty okay but I think this is going to give you far more room to go ahead and make those notes that you've been thinking about especially if you want to use the same Bible for years and years and I do think that's a good idea the miscellany system is going to give you much more space than any other system even journaling Bibles okay so let me let me wind up here with just five or so extra tips that I've learned over the

years I think are going to be helpful for you first of all test all of your writing implements on the concordance first okay if you're going to test highlighters and pens and markers and pencils and things like that go to the concordance where it really doesn't matter and test them out there the last thing you want to do is just go to John 1 and use some pen that's going to bleed through six pages okay please don't do that test it in an inconspicuous place somewhere else in your Bible Second Use blank pages for creating

lists of key doctrines now what I mean by that is this here's an example if I can find it right in the beginning of the New Testament there's usually a blank page or two if you can see that can you this right here is a list of all the Messianic prophecies that well at least a bunch of them that I've discovered in my Bible whenever you have a blank page and there's not many of them in your Bible use it for as important of a thing as you can possibly think of you might want to think a little bit before you just start using those blank pages because

most Bibles don't have a lot of blank pages but when you have them use them up third cross-reference your notebooks to each other now I've mentioned here having multiple notebooks an M notebook and an X notebook and so on and so forth I actually have various other notebooks as well that have notebooks on philosophy and other such things I have a digital miscellaneous notebook as well which is miscellaneous that I keep on my computer it's really good to cross-reference those things to each other so let's say you've got miscellany number one on

creation but you also have something somewhere else let's say Aristotle's view of Creation in your philosophy notebook just link it just make sure to take a note in both places that there's something else in a different notebook that's going to help you to stay familiar with your own topics as the system builds over the years fourth tab in extra pages for extra note-taking there is a process called tabbing in an extra page you can't do it too much because

eventually it's going to stress your Bible if it gets really chubby with a lot of extra pages that you've put in there but basically what you do is you glue in an extra Page by making a very small fold on the edge of that extra paper gluing that tiny little tab that you've created and stuffing it into a nice little spot in your Bible you can see that I've done that once or twice or Thrice in my Bible let's see here you see this tab that in I just glued it right on in there and that's extra space

for me to make a catalog of things that I'm keeping track of and then finally I do think it's probably a good idea to stick with one main Bible for as long as possible and then I guess I have an extra one here sixth one create a digital miscellaneous system on your computer too for alphabetical entries that's right yeah the nice thing about a digital miscellaneous system is that you can make them alphabetically because you know you can return space and just add things right in between them can't really do that on paper

but you can do it digitally on your computer right so that's all of my thoughts on Bible note taking all in one place all in one video now thank you so much for checking in to my channel don't forget to check out the links that I'm providing in the description of this video because there are some good ones I do love you lots and we'll talk to you later