Support Material for Reading the Bible I will start by describing some methods (and what I dislike about them) for studying the Bible.

Then, I will describe the method I would like to use to study the Bible.

Lastly, I will ask for supporting material for my idealized Bible study method.

What I have tried:


reading a fixed # of pages per day:

This worked well for a while (and read through the Bible a few times) based on this method -- but I ran into the problem of:


Old Testament was too slow
New Testament was too fast
did not get as much "theology" out of it

reading books / articles by reformed theologists


got a lot of theology out of it (yay)
did not like the fact that I was constantly jumping through verses in the Bible
feels "digested"



What I would like to try:


read a variable # of the pages of the Bible per day, and have supporting commentary that explains the main interesting theological points I should get out of the book/chapter/verse
this is something that is "like a concordance" but at a higher level. What I mean is as follows:


from a concordance, I get things likes: in this particular verse, the world foo means abc in the context ; in this particular verse, in the time/culture of when it was written, bar means def in the context
what I want is something like: this book contributes to developing the doctrine of predestination, verses XYZ relate to this, chapter ABC makes this point, etc ...

so I'm looking for something that is "systematic theology"-ish -- but I don't want to jump through verses of the Bible, I want something that develops systematic theology based on the order of the Bible
so I want something that is like:


in the Book of Genesis, we develop the following theological points


point 1 is developed in chapters A, B, C
point 2 is developed in chapters D, E, F

then, I go off and read the book of Genesis, and reference this supplementary material for the theological points



What is the closest thing that exists?

EDIT: This may be what I want :-)
From an Evangelical perspective, I suggest googling "inductive bible study" and having a browse. The reality is that any tool you choose will be 'digested' in some way. The book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Gordon D. Fee &amp; Douglas Stuart looks at this issue at a meta level - there's a fair bit of useful stuff in there, but it basically in a nutshell, boils the process down to reading whole books multiple times until you can understand the micro (each verse/passage) in terms of the macro (the whole book) bearing in mind that each book itself should be considered in the light of the whole of scripture.  

Some study bibles have extensive introductions and section plans for each book that outline the structure, themes, key terms and salient background details that are very helpful in coming to terms with the meaning of the book. A further step is using bible commentaries to help you understand the text at deeper level, but the theological perspective of the author will almost always come into play in a commentary. It wouldn't be my cup of tea personally, but according to your 'yay' for Reformed Theology, I draw your attention to the Reformation Study Bible ESV Version (there is also a a NKJV version and NIV Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible).