Is It A Sin to Write in Your Bible? : Bible Study 101
Before the color method starts, there's a hurdle a lot of us have to get over first. Rachael is about to ask you to take a highlighter to your Bible, and for some of you that feels close to sin. This episode deals with that honestly, walks through what Deuteronomy 6 actually tells God's people to do with His words, and explains why physically marking a page changes what your brain is able to take in. There's also a practical setup list for the week ahead, and none of it requires spending money.
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Chapters
0:00 Where the color method came from
1:23 Bracing you for it: I'm going to ask you to write in your Bible
2:48 Where the hesitation comes from
4:11 The misprinted Bible Rachael pulled out of the trash
6:23 The pastors who split one Bible into 66 sections
7:49 The words are holy, the paper is not
8:47 The family cookbook and the cookbook that stays on the shelf
11:38 Deuteronomy 6 and the Shema
12:59 Hearts, hands, foreheads, doorframes
13:55 What those little boxes actually are
15:15 The case on the doorframe
16:13 What Jesus was actually criticizing in Matthew 23
17:30 Shanan, the word that means to sharpen
19:08 Why marking breaks your brain's habit of skimming
21:00 The reading problem nobody talks about in church
23:23 Permission to start with a children's Bible
27:36 Can I just use the app on my phone?
29:36 What you actually need to get
32:45 The one Bible you shouldn't write in
33:51 How this week is going to work
38:11 Prayer
Is it a sin to write in your Bible?
No. And the hesitation you feel about it comes from a healthy place, so Rachael isn't dismissing it. Reverence for God's word is a good instinct.
But the distinction worth making is this: the words are holy, the paper is not. The Bible on your shelf came off a printing press, and there are thousands of identical copies of that exact edition. If yours were destroyed tomorrow you could order another one and God's word would be completely intact. What you honor is the words themselves, and you honor them by knowing them.
Rachael's picture for this is a family cookbook. Hers is stained, falling apart at the spine, full of notes in the margins, and she has nearly every recipe in it memorized. She also owns a beautiful cookbook with gold edging that she's never once used and couldn't name a recipe from. One of those books is loved. The other one is preserved.
What does Deuteronomy 6 say about God's word?
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is called the Shema, named for its first word in Hebrew, which means hear. It's what an observant Jewish person says when they get up and when they lie down, and it's what Jesus quoted when someone asked Him which command was greatest.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Verse 6 is internal. His words go on your heart. No argument there. But everything after that is physical. Hands, foreheads, doorframes, gates. God tells His people to attach His words to their bodies and their buildings.
What are the boxes some Jewish men wear?
If you've never seen these, picture a small black leather box, roughly the size of a large ice cube, with long leather straps attached to it. Observant Jewish men wear two of them during weekday morning prayer. One is strapped to the upper arm and positioned so it rests near the heart. The other is strapped to the forehead, centered between the eyes.
Inside each box is a tiny handwritten scroll with this passage of Scripture on it. So for them, verse 8 was never a metaphor. It's actual words, written out, tucked into a box, tied to the exact places the verse names.
What is the case on a Jewish doorframe?
That's verse 9. Picture a small rectangular case, usually a few inches long, made of wood or metal or sometimes ceramic, mounted at an angle on the doorframe of a Jewish home. There's a scroll inside that one too.
People touch it as they pass through the door, or kiss their fingers and press them to it. It's a physical reminder every time you enter or leave of who that home belongs to.
Wasn't Jesus against these?
Jesus mentions those boxes in Matthew 23 when He's confronting the Pharisees, and this gets misread. He isn't criticizing them for wearing them. He's criticizing them for making them extra wide so everyone would notice.
The problem was never the practice. It was the heart posture underneath it, turning something meant to point at God into something that points at you.
What does the Hebrew word shanan mean?
In verse 7, the word translated "impress" is shanan. Its root means to sharpen, the way you'd sharpen a blade. It's used elsewhere in Deuteronomy for sharpening a sword.
Sharpening happens through repeated contact with an edge, over and over, until something becomes sharp. So look at the pattern in the passage. Words on your hands. Words on your door. Words in your mouth, morning and night. Words spoken to your children. That's repetition doing its work.
God's design was for His people to live with His words, handle them, and be shaped by them, not to keep them clean.
Why does marking your Bible help you understand it?
Because you cannot mark something you didn't actually read.
When you read a familiar page, your eyes move and your brain fills in the rest. You already know what's coming, so you skim, finish the chapter, and absorb nothing new. That's just how reading works when the material is familiar to you. It's the same reason you can read a sentence with all the middle letters scrambled.
Marking breaks that. To put a specific color on a specific word, you have to make a decision about that word. Is this about God, or about someone else? Is this an action? Is this a time reference? Every mark is a decision, and you can't make a decision without slowing down enough to comprehend.
There's a second payoff. At the end of the week, when the page is finished, you can see the shape of the passage at a glance. You'll notice that a story you thought was about a crowd is mostly about one person, or you'll see where God was in a scene you'd only ever read as being about people.
What if the Bible is still too hard for me to read?
Then start with a children's Bible, and there's no shame in that.
This is the part of the episode Rachael gets most direct about. When she turned in an early manuscript, her editor sent it back and told her to bring the reading level down, because most Americans read at about an eighth grade level. That was years ago. Current numbers put roughly 54% of U.S. adults below a sixth grade reading level, and the trend has continued downward since 2020 rather than recovering. In the community where she pastored, local studies put average reading comprehension around third grade.
So on top of the real barriers in Scripture, the distance in time and language and culture, there's a comprehension problem nobody names from the platform. If the Jesus Storybook Bible is what lets you understand how a passage points to Jesus, use it. The Hearing Jesus for Kids podcast is another option, and plenty of adults listen to it. The goal is understanding, not the difficulty of your materials.
FAQ
What passage are we studying this week? John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand. One passage all week, one color per day.
What do I need before tomorrow? A physical Bible or a printed copy of John 6:1-15 that you're comfortable writing in, and something green to mark with.
What supplies do I need for the whole week? Six colors: green, blue, red, purple, orange, and yellow. Wax Bible highlighters are the safest choice since they don't bleed through. Colored pencils work fine, including the broken ones in your kids' school supply drawer. A fine tip pen for margin notes is optional. Test whatever you use on a back page first, since Bible paper thickness varies.
Do I have to buy anything? No. A pencil and a sheet of notebook paper gets you most of the way there. You can print the passage free from Bible Gateway.
Which Bible should I not write in? The one from your infant baptism, the one your great grandmother passed down, or the one with your mom's handwriting in it. Get a second copy for this. Thrift stores, Walmart, and church giveaway baskets all have them, often under twenty dollars or free.
Can I use the Bible app instead? For this series, use paper. Apps are excellent for comparing translations and searching words, but you can't layer six colors on one verse and see how they overlap, and the device your Bible app lives on is the same device your notifications live on. An iPad with a pencil is the one workable exception.
Do I need to have heard episodes 1 through 8? No. This one stands on its own, though the earlier episodes explain why we're asking the questions we're asking.
Where can I go deeper on the color method? She Hears, available on Amazon, teaches it over six weeks through the stories of six women in the life of Jesus.
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