Now that you have a better picture of the Bible as a collection of books, you can be intentional about how you approach it. Instead of walking into what is essentially a library and trying to read your way through the books indiscriminately, you can read them strategically. Genre: Gospel Chapters: 16 Total verses: For the Christian, the Bible is ultimately about redemption through Jesus Christ.
Running the length of a longer magazine article, it should take less than two hours to read in a single sitting. Genre: Gospel Chapters: 21 Total verses: Where Mark focuses on what Jesus did , John looks closely at what Jesus said about himself. Genre: History Chapters: 50 Total verses: 1, Genesis sets up many essential biblical themes. Key verses: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
Genre: Wisdom literature Chapters: 31 Total verses: Following these principles will help you live a life of integrity and virtue. Remember that the wisdom that the Proverbs offers is wide-ranging and more general in nature.
Key verse: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Genre: Epistle Chapters: 5 Total verses: Since the beginning of the Christian church, authorship for this letter has been attributed to John the apostle.
In and , David Plotz blogged the Bible for Slate , starting with "In the beginning …" and reading right through to the end. You can buy Good Book here. The following is adapted from the book. Should you read the Bible? You probably haven't. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I've ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus.
Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself.
Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively. Maybe it doesn't make sense for most of us to read the whole Bible. After all, there are so many difficult, repellent, confusing, and boring passages. Why not skip them and cherry-pick the best bits? After spending a year with the good book, I've become a full-on Bible thumper. Everyone should read it—all of it! In fact, the less you believe, the more you should read. Let me explain why, in part by telling how reading the whole Bible has changed me.
When I was reading Judges one day , I came to a complicated digression about a civil war between two groups of Israelites, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites.
According to the story, the Gileadites hold the Jordan River, and whenever anyone comes to cross, the guards ask them to say the password, shibboleth. The Ephraimites, for some unexplained reason, can't pronounce the sh in shibboleth and say "sibboleth" instead.
From the cereal box on the table at breakfast to the vulgar scrawlings on the bathroom stall at the gas station, everything you read influences your thinking about things. This may be true consciously, but studies have shown the mind absorbs a lot more than we may realize. You might as well intentionally feed your mind some inspirational and challenging content. We really have no idea how inspiring the stories of the Bible really are until we read them.
The Bible is filled with romance, kings, conquests, beauty, war, goodness, evil villains, comedy, poetry, tragedy, hope, love, despair, murder, treachery, miracles, and otherworldly beings. Many of our quotations, philosophies, and ethics have been derived from the Bible.
Did you know the Bill of Rights the first ten amendments to the constitution was derived from the biblical principle of individual soul liberty as articulated by the Rhode Island Baptists? Now we are starting to scratch the surface a little. The Bible is filled with principles for gaining and maintaining wealth, avoiding poverty, enriching and sustaining your marriage, raising your children, avoiding troubles caused by vice, gaining and employing wisdom, exacting justice, finding redemption, and just being a better citizen.
Try it and see. One of the interesting, and most controversial, aspects of the Bible is its high moral standard. Reading the Bible and contemplating its moral standards offers a unique perspective into our own moral compass and how we deal with our failures. In other words, it really is the ultimate revelation of the human experience ever offered in any genre of literature.
But one thing is certain, regardless. Some were Christians, some were deists, some were agnostics, but their tracts and letters are filled with references to Scripture and the Providence that gave them success. The Bible deserves a good read on that foundation alone. I once heard my college professor say something to the effect that literature is not literature unless it, in some way or another, references or interacts with the Bible.
Nearly every renowned writer, from Stephen King to Shakespeare, interacts with or conceptualizes biblical themes, characters, or principles in their writing in some fashion or another. Read Article. What can God teach you What can God teach you? How can He change you?
Download this day reading plan and find out. I had been going for weeks with no break — unless you include the four hours a night I crashed in my bed.
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