How to Find a Scripture in the Bible

Steps

Learn how the bible is organized. It is divided into Book Chapter:Verse. For example, if you wanted to look up John 3:16, first you would turn to the book of John. You would then turn to the 3rd chapter (the number before the colon is the chapter.). You would then find the 16th verse. Verses are usually arranged with small numbers within the text. Some Bibles are formed into paragraphs and only have the number of the verse that begins each paragraph. The first part of the Bible is called the Old Testament (Tanakh -- Jewish) Bible of the "books of Moses" and other ancient prophets' writings and second the New Testament of Christian books starting with the four Gospels of Christ written by Christian Jews -- and as many as fourteen (or as few as seven, some say) books all ascribed to one Greek Jew, the Apostle [Saint] Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), more on his contributions to the Bible Christianity in the "Tips" section.

Look in the back of your Bible; it may have a Bible concordance (index) which will direct you to a few verses that contain each word that you find in the concordance.

Study with a much larger, separate concordance including a dictionary of Bible and Holy Land atlas of maps, all in one volume, spanning various times in the history of the eastern Mediterranean Sea region, Middle East -- or find a set of Bible commentary books -- all available at bookstores (especially Christian, Jewish and Western-commercial booksellers).

See whether or not there is a cross reference in your Bible--which is usually setup in two text columns, and then the cross reference may be found in the middle of the page in a very narrow column. It serves as a kind of footnote section to list other places you find the same, a similar/related topic in the Bible.

Inspect the bottoms of most pages or above the beginning of each chapter, or in subtopic headings between groups of verses to see if your Bible has selected comments about the subject, meaning and/or history of the material in that chapter.

Bible Research on the Internet

Search for a Bible subject/verses on the Internet that refer to your topic. Bible subject:marriage or try Bible verses:marriage for example to find several websites that may contain your reference. Some will be sermons, others commentary and some will be arguing or discussion pages.

Find a Bible quotation on the Internet like Bible quote:for God so loved the world. If you have several of the words from a verse but want its chapter and verse location in the Bible, this is used like a concordance.

Find many language translations of the entire Bible with various, different versions (older or more modern language usage, etc.) on the Internet.