The Bible. God’s Word. Holy Writ. The Big Man’s big book. The B-I-B-L-E. Perhaps, the greatest book God ever wrote. What the hell does it mean?
I won’t bore you with overwhelming statistics that prove what you should already know. It’s kind of a big deal. Billions of people have read it or at least lied and said they did. Many of those people have built their lives on what they think is written inside. But it has not been read by so many people because ‘gosh it’s just so easy and fun to read’ – rather, it often seems incomprehensible to the novice and lifelong reader alike. Why is this?
I don’t know exactly, but I’m positive I understand much more of the problem now than I used to. This post is the first of several where I’ll explain some of the problems that readers either create or perpetuate when we take a crack at the God-darned thing.
The meaning of much of the Bible is plain if you know what you’re looking at, and you can understand it better than you do now. These posts are primarily for people who are interested in this book, and it doesn’t really matter if you ‘believe’ it or not. I think it’s worth knowing better either way.
Now on to Part One…
Stop reading the Bible in small chunks, spread out over your whole life.
This is a perfectly decent way for believers to practice spiritual reflection. This may be the only way you’ve had Bible reading modeled for you. It’s manageable. You can focus on a small enough number of verses that you don’t forget what you read two minutes ago. You’ve got better things to do with your life. Maybe more than a small chunk would make your brain hurt. I know mine does. I hope I’m not alone in that.
If this is the only way you’ve ever read the thing, though, you are missing most of it. Yes, most of it. Even if eventually all of those chunks lead up to having read 100% of the verses, you will likely have missed a lot of what the book is actually trying to say. Reference books are often best used in this way. A dictionary is probably more helpful to the average person in small bites. An encyclopedia would be really useful in small chunks. I’d rather look up something in the afternoon rather than look up everything. Something is much more doable.
For the sake of spiritual devotion, focus on a small passage when you pray this morning. Preach from one passage in a sermon. Sure. But this does not necessarily lead to understanding the whole book. Or even the few verses that you’re reflecting on.
Imagine your favorite novel or series of novels. I would bet money (if I had any) that you did not enjoy it a few sentences at a time. It took me months to read the Harry Potter books in high school using most of my free time. I’m not the fastest reader, and I had other things to do. But imagine if I’d read, not chapters every time, but a few sentences. Maybe a few each day, maybe it’s several times a week. Months would no longer be the simplest unit of time to measure how long it would take me. Major plot points from chapter one would be a distant memory at that pace before I’d gotten halfway through the book.
On the other hand, don’t be too quick to dive in at the deep end.
You could impress me and say “Well, that’s why I read the entire Bible from cover to cover once a year”. It might seem like a solution to the Nibble Reader’s problem, but it’s not. If the Bible were more simplistic in terms of genre, grammatical difficulty, familiarity of phrases, concepts, people, places, etc…maybe. But it’s not. When an American teenager reads a John Green novel, they’re wading through familiar territory. When an American adult reads God’s debut novel, whether they realize it or not, they’re wading through a peanut butter sea on Mars.
Think of how difficult it would be to take The Fault in our Stars back in time and share it with a young King David. There are a multitude of reasons why he would struggle to ‘get’ the book – especially because he didn’t speak English. But even if you got that part figured out, the world you call home would be a foreign planet to him. He would need some help understanding much of the plot, dialogue, cultural background, implied beliefs and assumptions of the characters (and those of John Green the author who made them).
You are not exempt from the difficulties that David would face, even if you grew up reading the Bible, memorizing it, sharing it with others. It was born and raised in another world.
All of that to say, people who don’t know what’s going on already with this book really shouldn’t shoot the Old Testament and chase it with the New. That’s too much. It’d be like trying to get hydrated by getting a few sips of water from an industrial pressure washer. Technically some of the water will hydrate you, but uh…I think there’s a better way.
How then should I read?
As long as you don’t have any major issues with the basic process of reading, taking things book by book in the Bible would likely be your best path to understanding it better. Some of its books are incredibly short and would only take maybe 20-30 minutes to read all the way through, like Paul’s shorter letters. Other slightly longer books may take a couple hours for an average reader (one of the gospels maybe?). Even if you broke a gospel up into 2-3 days of reading, you’re more likely to understand the book than if you digested 365 days of one-liners from Jesus.
What about really long books in the Bible? I would suggest taking one book and breaking it apart into a few medium size pieces. Genesis for example is a relatively long book. It may take several hours or more for the average reader to get through all 50 chapters. I would not suggest breaking it in half – 25 chapters one week, 25 the next for example. Why? It doesn’t break cleanly that way, and most biblical books won’t. In Genesis, chapters 1-11 talk about creation and what seems like far distant cities and beings and people. The other 39 chapters give lengthier narratives of the life and times of Israel’s most important figures: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. Read Ch. 1-11 one week, and the rest the next week. Or if that portion is still too large, read all about Abraham and Isaac one week, then all about Jacob and Joseph the next.
Also don’t split those first 11 chapters into equal portions (“I’ll read 1.5 chapters every day for a week”). That makes it more difficult to hold the book together in a meaningful way.
It wouldn’t hurt to do a basic online search for an “outline” of a longer biblical book you’re going to read, and plan how you’re going to break it up that way.
The Bible is a massive book. Modern printings use tiny print, and membrane-thin pages to make it feel more…everyday? Accessible? Possible to read? But that sort of hides the fact that on normal pages and with normal size print, the page count multiplies very quickly. And because of that-
Relax. Don’t rush.
Don’t daintily nibble here and there if you want to understand the whole thing. But don’t bite off more than you can chew either. You probably won’t even be able to see that you are not understanding what you are reading, or why you might not be getting it, when your goal is just to get it through your eyeballs, into your brain, and into your heart as soon as possible. Cut yourself some slack. It’s not easy. You’re more likely to give up or be clueless if you overdo it.
This tip alone will not make individual words and phrases or ideas crystal clear to you. But it makes it much more possible. Kind of like wearing cleats in the mud doesn’t make you an athletic tour-de-force, but it’s much more possible to sprint with them than without them.
If I had to put this advice in a numbered list that makes you think I actually had a plan for this post it would look like this:
- Reading a few verses here and there year after year will keep you from understanding the Bible.
- Blazing through the entire Bible with no context simply for the sake of having read it will not lead to better understanding of it.
- You wouldn’t understand most books by reading them the way people often read the Bible.
- So focus on one book at a time – sure, aspire to more, but focus on a book at a time.
- Break up your reading in a way that makes sense for the book you’re reading, ex. – read Genesis 1-11 as a unit, next day read about Abraham, next day read about Isaac and Jacob, next day read about Joseph. Or read the few chapters of Philippians in one sitting.
- Read what you’re interested in. Don’t slog through the entire Old Testament hoping that one day you can read about Jesus.
- Understand that this first post will not help you make sense of specific verses or books that you are confused about, but this way of reading makes that understanding much more possible than simply reading a few verses here and there for devotional reasons.
Be looking out for part 2 – It Takes a Village: Why it matters that the Bible is a collection, and not one book.
The Artless Ramble 