Our family has been using Journey Homeschool Academy an online video-based science curriculum for a while now and we love it!
But what I actually want to share today is my favorite course—and surprisingly, it’s not even about science.
It’s their high school New Testament Bible course called Equipped… and it’s been one of the best Bible studies I’ve ever seen.
Equipped is literature based, and your student can actually get a Bible, literature, or elective credit after completing it.
What stands out about this course is that it actually teaches you how to read the Bible by focusing on the literary design of Scripture of all 27 New Testament books.
You’ll learn about literary devices such as chiasms, parallelism, repetition, inclusios… and various patterns the biblical authors intentionally used. And once you start seeing those, it changes how you read the Bible. Because so much meaning is actually embedded in the structure—not just the words themselves.
Jesus performed many miracles and had countless encounters during His ministry, but each Gospel writer carefully selected the events they included—and arranged them in a specific order—for a reason. They weren’t simply recording everything chronologically; they were intentionally highlighting recurring themes they wanted to communicate through the stories they chose and how they structured them.
A really good example of this is in Mark 6 through 8. You’ve got two huge feeding miracles that kind of frame the whole section—the feeding of the 5,000 in Jewish territory, and then later the feeding of the 4,000 in a more Gentile region.
And right in the middle of those two stories is this moment where the Pharisees question Jesus about His disciples not following the traditional handwashing rules.
And Jesus uses that moment to challenge them. He basically says it’s not what goes into a person that defiles them, but what comes out of the heart.
And when you step back and look at the whole section, you start to see what Mark is doing with the story. Jesus is breaking down these tradition concepts of what is clean and unclean. Even the way the Gospel moves outward—from Jewish territory toward Gentile regions—you start seeing this bigger picture of how through Jesus unclean distinctions are falling away.
So it’s not just a list of miracles—it’s carefully structured to show what Jesus is revealing about the kingdom of God.
This study also connects historical and cultural context, genre, and even how each Gospel has its own unique literary style in telling the story of Jesus. What I really appreciate is that it helps students understand Scripture with confidence—not just familiarity. So instead of just ‘I’ve read this before,’ it becomes ‘I actually see what the author is doing here.’
This is a very well-crafted resource if you’re homeschooling and want something that really grounds your children in how to study the Bible for themselves. And honestly, even if you’re not homeschooling or don’t have kids, it’s still absolutely worth it for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of Scripture.
