Why should one read the Bible all the way through? One reason is that we often get fixated with favorite passages. As a result, what God wants us to learn is overlooked simply because we are never exposed to the “volume of the book.” There is a treasure in there, waiting to be discovered and enjoyed. If one has never read “Obadiah” then how would she know that God is near in “the day of calamity”? How would one know it from the perspective of a downtrodden people, devastated by their own kin? And how then would the Holy Spirit bring it to mind when you are distraught? How would you be fortified?
Great swathes of the Book should be enjoyed so that God may teach us what he will instead of of simply looking for what one wants to know. Frederick C. Grant said it well:
We are frequently advised to read the Bible with our own personal needs in mind, and to look for answers to our own private questions. That is good, as far as it goes. But better still is the advice to study the Bible objectively…without regard, first of all, to our own subjective needs. Let the great passages fix themselves in our memory. Let them stay there permanently, like bright beacons, launching their powerful shafts of light upon life’s problems—our own and everyone’s—as they illumine, now one, now another dark area of human life. Following such a method, we discover that the Bible does “speak to our condition” and meet our needs, not just occasionally or when some emergency arises, but continually.
And so, I look forward to using my new ESV Literary Study Bible to read through the entire Book in the first 90 days of 2008. It should take less than an hour a day (longer still because I’ll want to read all of the notes…and even longer because I will post here some thoughts on each day’s reading).
Here is the reading plan in PDF format. I tried to break it up in fairly equal portions but at logical stopping points.
5 Comments
I did the year-long routine two years ago and it actually took me until mid-January to finish… Though I still think that is a success story because you’re right about the stamina dilemma. It also started to blur together for me so I shall try this 90-day path this year. But not right away in the New Year because NY’s resolutions stress me out and I don’t enjoy them.
You’re right; that is a success. The goal is reading the entire Bible. How fast you do it isn’t the main point. In 90 days, one year, or 13 months…whatever. I plan to read the volume in 90 days but if it takes me four months, well….fine. There is, however, a fine point in this plan. Reading such large sections each day should reveal overarching themes and help connect stories in ways I might have missed before when I focused on one pericope or worse, just a verse or three.
That’s a good point too. I was also happy to see that “A Child’s Book of Grace” you guys gave me for Xmas seems to have Bible stories in story-form which is muuuuuch easier for me to understand. A kids’ version of that “The Story” book you lent me. Maybe I returned it. Maybe I still have it…. ?
I’m not sure which book you are referring to.
We started a library this evening of books we plan to read over and over to grandchildren. We got the book Susan Jeffers illustrated of the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
I don’t know that book but there are tons of good ones in yours and our collection.