Full disclosure: I work for a Bible software company, Logos Bible Software. Here’s another disclosure: I used Bible software before I began to work for Logos. I’d recommend that you buy (and use) Bible software no matter what my circumstances were. Unless you’d rather have a rotary phone, like to wash dishes and clothes by hand, or yearn for the days of the Ford Model T, you want Bible software. I realize there might be some people out there in the world that have enough time to experience the thrill of spending weeks or months on a Bible study task that my software can do in less than a second, but I’m not that guy. We still have monks and monasteries, but the monastic age is history.
There’s nothing like having Bible software when it comes to Bible study. It isn’t an issue of laziness or wanting to do Bible study as fast as possible to move on to the rest of your day. No way. Bible study still takes discipline; it isn’t a ritual act. That really isn’t what lightning speed for processing searches in the Bible is about. The speed allows you to get more done, not pave the way to do less. This is what technology is all about: how to do something with greater accuracy, efficiency, and frequency. Bible software is a boon in all those respects.
In the old days (forty years ago, not the days of the apostles), scholars had a few reference works that would enable them to do tasks like look up all the occurrences of a word in the Bible. But they would have to manually navigate to each passage to make sure that the hand work responsible for that reference work was accurate. And even then, the tools to search for anything beyond a single word, or for words in books besides the Bible, just didn’t exist.
All of that is a reality today. This is particularly true because of Bible software companies’ massive biblical studies libraries. You can find discussions of anything you’re looking for in thousands of books all at the same time, even in books that have no indexes of their own. Bible software also enables Bible students who don’t read Hebrew and Greek to search in those languages. There’s literally nothing like it on the planet.