Reading the Book

It is easy to get sloppy in our vocabulary as Christians. Sometimes that sloppiness can lead to less-than-the-best ways of talking about our faith. For example, it is easy to hear believers describe the Bible as “our authority” as Christians. Yet Jesus says, in some of his last words before his ascension, “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18-20) And Paul declares “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:11) Jesus himself, in a terse conversation with some of his Jewish critics, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.” (John 5:39)

The Scriptures point to the foundation, which is Jesus, who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. When we forget that, we might find ourselves worshipping the book instead of the one to whom the book points! That’s bibliolatry, not good Christian theology!

What if we learned to read Scripture with this question in the back of our minds, constantly floating around in our conscious thought: “How does this story/text/psalm/prophecy/etc. point me to Jesus?” Of course, not every verse in the Bible teaches me something about Jesus – but every verse is a part of a grand narrative which climaxes in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the one who fulfills God’s promise to Abraham and who is, by the obedience of our faith (Romans 1:5), our Savior and Redeemer.

Please don’t read any of the above as some sort of denigration of Holy Scripture. You may not know anyone who treasures what I prefer to call “the trustworthy Word of God” more than I do. But its greatest gift is that it is the testimony of Holy Spirit-inspired writers about who Jesus is and what difference He makes. 

Some of the Challenges

There are lots of challenges to becoming faithful readers of Scripture. One of them is time – you must invest a little time, for example, to read through the Bible in a year. Another is that we are generally not quite into reading as we once might have been. We most often – unless you attend a more liturgical church – won’t hear a lot of Scripture read in public worship. That, by the way, is despite the fact that Paul encourages Timothy, “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.” (1 Timothy 4:13) If you’re on Facebook, you probably have friends who post “the verse of the day,” and we can read that and quickly think, “I’m a daily Bible reader!” 

If you Google “plans for reading through the Bible in a year,” you will find many plans for doing just that. One of my favorites was developed by an early 19th-century Scottish preacher named Robert M’Cheyne. He believed there were “four great beginnings” in Scripture: Genesis, Ezra, Matthew, and Acts. From that idea, he developed a reading plan that, when followed, will take you through the Old Testament once and the Psalms and New Testament twice in a year. He only lived to be 29 years old, but well over 200 years later, many believers are being blessed by his plan. 

Another challenge is when we do the same thing year after year, we could be tempted to get in a rut. Everything becomes predictable. So, finding ways to change up our reading of Scripture habits can be helpful. It could be that we read in a different order from year to year. It could be moving from Old Testament to New Testament regularly. It could be (and probably should be) reading in different translations. But whatever we do – don’t let the Bible become predictable and boring. 

Personally, I try and read a minimum of four chapters a day, sometimes more. For example, if I’m reading epistles, many of which have five or six chapters, I read the entire epistle. When I’m reading Psalms, I most often do five Psalms and one chapter of Proverbs daily – you can read both books in a month that way. I try to not let my personal reading of Scripture become my “professional reading” of Scripture, and vise versa. While reading, I try and isolate one idea that I want to think about for the rest of the day. I create my own “reading plan,” most often trying to associate what I’m reading in Scripture with the Christian calendar, not the civic calendar. A little “civil disobedience” on my part.

I’m not suggesting that my plan should become your plan. But I do want to say, that plan has been working for me for a long time!

Two Quick Change-Ups

The Old Testament. Several years ago, a good friend gave me a three-volume set of an Old Testament translation by a Hebrew scholar named Robert Alter titled The Hebrew Bible and follows the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible, not English translations. Most importantly, Alter is a world-recognized Hebrew scholar who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley for more than 50 years. The subtitle of the three volumes describes them as “a translation with commentary.” But it isn’t the typical “study Bible,” where someone has written commentary from his or her theological point of view. Rather, it is more like commentary on what the translation options were in getting from Hebrew to English and why he chose the translation he did. It has been a long time since I took Hebrew in graduate school, and I must say that I found his “translation commentary” to be more than merely helpful.

Beginning in mid-June of last year and finishing up on 18 December, I read through the entire Old Testament, starting with Genesis and finishing with Chronicles (the Hebrew Bible order), and I read through the translation notes each day. I think that was the most interesting approach to reading through the Old Testament I’ve ever taken. I’ll do it again one day. I had often, when teaching or preaching from an Old Testament text, looked to see what Alter had in his translation notes. But reading through it daily, with easy access to translation explanations for some of the less-than-normal (for me) ways of talking as the Hebrew Bible does, was a wonderful experience. 

The New Testament. When I finished the Old Testament, I immediately started reading the gospels. After all, it was a week from Christmas, and, no offense intended, Chronicles is not a “let’s think about the birth of Jesus” kind of book. I decided to use Scot McKnight’s The Second Testament as my translation. The “theory of translation” McKnight uses is that he wants the English version to sound to an English-speaking person like the original Greek text would have sounded to a first-century, Greek-speaking person. So, for example, he doesn’t use the English forms of proper nouns, but simply transliterates the Greek spelling into English. That means that Jesus is “Jesous” and Peter is “Petros.” He tries to translate a given Greek word with the same English word every time it occurs. He calls Pharisees the “Observants” and Sadducees the “Elites.” The Hebrew Bible is “the Covenant Code.” Baptism is “dip” and John the Baptist is “John the Dipper.” (There is a glossary in the back!) Sentence structure is often very different. This will be the fourth time, since it was published in 2023, that I will have read through this translation. I encourage you to give it a try. 

Perhaps providentially, N.T. Wright just published, in late 2024, a new book titled The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is. It is not so much a “commentary” on Acts as it is a collection of essays focusing on the big story Luke is telling. I grew up reading Acts as a book where every story, if not every verse, was teaching some vital biblical doctrine. I’m not suggesting there isn’t a lot of “doctrine” for the church to learn in Acts, but I am suggesting we shouldn’t overlook the big story – an exciting story of how eleven scared, confused, and unsure apostles went from that status to the book ending with kingdom outposts all over the world as they knew it – and the leading missionary in jail in Rome, but still preaching and converting people!

As it happens, Wright’s book (with two exceptions, one chapter on Acts 1 and another chapter on Paul’s sermon in Athens) takes the book in four-chapter sections. That perfectly matches my reading plan! So for the past week, I’ve read four chapters of Acts, and then the corresponding chapter from Wright. It was amazing – and I will do that again, sooner than later. And the chapter on Paul’s sermon in Athens is more than worth the price of the book!

I don’t want reading Scripture to ever become boring to me. Today, having been ordained into ministry nearly 52 years ago, in the second semester of my 49th year of teaching at Point, having preached at the same church for just over 20 years, and still preaching regularly, teaching Bible study on Wednesday nights, etc., I am more intrigued by the mystery of Holy Scripture than I’ve ever been. 

I’m convinced that is the outcome of a commitment to faithfully reading that sacred Word. 

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