Hi Greg
Welcome to the family of God. Now starts the journey. I have been a Christian for over fifty years and am still learning each day. The Bible is it's own best commentary. We are to build our theology on the whole word of God not on a few chosen verses that seem to support our views. In other words, do not take verses out of context.
I found the following comment a while back and am not sure who wrote it but it does state the case well.
The text is supreme
When we speak of the text of Scripture, we do not mean an isolated verse from the Bible, but the body of material before us as we read, whether the whole Bible, a whole book or part of a book. Because we respect the Bible’s authority, we usually like to quote a chapter and verse to support our beliefs. The desire to have biblical authority is commendable, but we must be careful that it does not cause us to distort the meaning of the text.
Sometimes we study what is called systematic theology. This is a kind of study that links verses from all over the Bible to give us teaching on biblical subjects. We should be careful, however, not to engage extensively in this kind of study till we have first understood the verses in their original setting. In general, we should carry out a proper study of a Bible book before we quote isolated verses from it.
The text of Scripture in the form God gave it is supreme. It is this text that is the Word of God, not our reorganization of it. We must be careful not to force the text to fit any scheme of theological interpretation, no matter how useful we may consider that scheme to be.
Bottom line we are not to base our theology on a few well chosen verses but on the whole word of God. I like to use this as an illustration when doing Alpha courses. Lookup the quote “there is no God” you will find it 14 times in the NASB bible. So the question is “is there no God?” well this is where context comes in, Psa 14:1 “The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God.". Context matters.
When you come across verses, like Mar 16:18, that you do not understand and you will then look for verses on that subject that are clear and compare them. If you still do not understand then set them aside and continue studying and as your knowledge increases you will be better able to understand the difficult verses.
First of Hello from Thorold ON. Thanks for that information I sure appreciate it. The more I Have been reading the Bible and using the different versions available the more certain verses are becoming clearer. Will continue to keep reading and praying for guidance.
Greg