How Are You Planning To Read the Bible in 2023? (1)

  

May I please ask, “How are you planning to read the Bible this coming year?”

 

I suppose I should also ask: “How has your Bible reading been this year? Have you enjoyed it? What have you seen? What has the Bible meant to you? How has Jesus revealed Himself to you through His Word? How have you been challenged? What have you valued about the Bible this past year?”

 

What other questions might we ask?

 

I am not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I am big on planning. Of course, planning is like a gameplan in football, it is subject to change, for isn’t that life? Yet, some things ought not to be subject to change, such as faithfulness to our spouse, love for our neighbor, devotion to God, telling the truth, and consistent meditation and learning and assimilation of Scripture – the Bible, God’s Holy Word…and by God’s grace learning to obey what we read.

 

I’ve been reading the Bible for almost 57 years, as I write these words it is almost too much to believe. Sometimes I have misread the Bible, often I have tried to make the Bible say what I want it to say, many times I have disobeyed the Bible, the worst times have been when I thought I was an exception to what I was reading…that was, and always will be, stupid and dangerous and close to demonic…if not demonic.

 

We ought not to think that knowing the Bible, knowing the “data” of the Bible, knowing the Bible as information, is the same as knowing Jesus Christ or the same as spiritual maturity; after all, it was the religious leaders who persecuted Jesus Christ and pressured Pilate to crucify Him. Let’s recall what Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me” (John 5:39). We can most certainly know the Bible and not know Jesus, we can know the Bible and not know God.

 

And yet, the resurrected Jesus Christ reveals Himself through the Bible (Luke 24:27, 44 – 45), and it is through the promises of God, the Word of God, that we become “partakers of the Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:2 – 4).

 

After all these years of pondering and meditating in the Scriptures, I see more of Jesus Christ than ever before, and I see more mystery than ever before. You might say that there are more things I know and also more things I don’t know…and frankly some of the things I know are pretty painful, for the Holy Spirit opens my eyes to see myself, whether the self of the past or the self of the present, in some pretty selfish and heartbreaking ways. I do not think He could do this were it not for the fact that He assures me of God’s love and care for me (Romans 8:31 – 39), the glory and mercy and assurance of Christ’s forgiveness in my life (Romans 4:1 – 5:11), and of the reality of Christ in me and me in Christ (Colossians 1:25 – 28; 2:9 – 10; 1 John 3:1 – 3).

 

Reading books about the Bible is not the same as reading the Bible. Reading devotional books, such as Our Daily Bread, The Upper Room, My Utmost for His Highest, is not the same as reading the Bible. Devotional books have their place, I have read My Utmost for His Highest many times, as well as other devotional books, but they are not the Bible.

 

And while we may have different gameplans for reading the Bible during the year (I’ll touch on Bible-reading plans), one thing should be common to them all – we should read the Bible as it was written, first as individual books and then as a whole. This means that we should not read a passage in Exodus and then a passage in Matthew today, and a passage in Nehemiah and a passage in Titus tomorrow, and then the third day read a passage in Revelation and a passage in Malachi, etc. That is, we should not read the Bible piecemeal because if we do we will not develop an integrated picture of either the Biblical books nor of the Bible as a whole – and let’s recall, that the Bible portrays Jesus Christ, it communicates the Gospel from Genesis to Revelation…do we really want to miss and misinterpret what God is saying to us?

 

Imagine what it would be like to have sixty-six movie DVDs in your home; one day you watch five minutes of DVD 1 and five minutes of DVD 53. The next day you watch five minutes of DVD 48 and five minutes of DVD 27. The third day you watch five minutes of DVD 14 and five minutes of DVD 19, etc. At the end of the year what will you be able to tell someone about the sixty-six movies? Will you be able to share the storyline of each movie? Will you be able to share memorable quotes? High points? Low points? Lessons to be learned? How well do you think you will really know the movies?

 

I am making a big deal of this because, when we do read the Bible, we tend to read it piecemeal. We do this because of our nanosecond culture, which has invaded our Bible teaching and study, and which has also reduced our attention spans to less than that of a goldfish – which I am told is 20 seconds. I’ll come back to this.

 

In the meantime, what are your answers to the questions with which we began this reflection?

 

To be continued…