On Sunday, December 28, 2014, I was sitting in San Saba’s First Baptist Church when Sam Crosby started something with me. He suggested a good, worthy, attainable New Year’s resolution would be to read the entire Bible in a year. At that point, I had spent fifty-three years around the Bible and people of faith, but it had never crossed my mind to systematically read the Bible from front to back in a relatively short period of time. I thought “challenge accepted,” came home, found a reading plan online, and commenced that very day. Let me be honest and say I did not finish in a year. I started December 28, 2014 and finished April 23, 2018, which is three years, three months, and twenty-six days. As of today, I am one week from finishing my second reading, which will skate in at just under one year. This time I used a “chronological” plan which arranges readings according to how they fall on a timeline.
Let me first say that this is a worthy pursuit for the atheist, the agnostic, the person of faith (Christian, Jew, Wiccan, Buddhist, Shinto, Baha’i, etc.)—pretty much anyone who is curious or otherwise looking to exercise their brain. For most people—the Bible is NOT what you think it is. It certainly is not what I thought it was, and I had every reason to be fairly well informed.
Here is one reason to read it as a book, from start to finish: It is an enduring work of literature and history. So many other works of literature have sprung from or been informed or influenced by the Bible, so much so that I am pretty sure you cannot consider yourself to be well-read if you have not read the Bible. On the history portion, there are different opinions about whether some portions of the Bible are figurative or literal. But many portions are literal and factual as supported by archaeologists and other scientists. Even still, the emphasis in the Bible is not on conveying cut and dried facts, but is on the humanity and the relationships between humanity and the divine. Because of this, the Bible brings history to life, and helps the reader to understand why things happened and what the experiences were of the people who lived in another time. Also, so much of Western and Middle-Eastern history is interwoven with the Bible that you really cannot reach a complete understanding of it without reading the Bible.
Here is another reason: It improves your life to know your stuff, AKA Knowledge is Power. If you are a Christian, it should be abundantly obvious why you should be intimately acquainted with the contents of the Bible. If you are of any other religion, including Atheism and Agnosticism, it helps to be thoroughly acquainted with what you are rejecting. I have had a lot of atheists, agnostics, and other “non-religious” folks give me their reasons for their beliefs, and they have all been based on ignorant assumptions about what we “religious” people believe. Along that same line of thought, I would like to eventually read the texts of some of the other major religions, just so I will be armed with even more knowledge.
I can think of hundreds more reasons, but I will throw out one more—it is a good way to stay on a positive and productive path in life to read, learn, and think at least a little every day. My Bible reading habit this last year has smoothed over lots of rough spots and has kept me from getting bogged down into worries, anger, sadness, and all of the other negativity that has been waiting around every bend this past year.
I plan to start this chronological plan again very soon, maybe even the very next day after I finish the last chapter of Revelations. If you would like to give it a try, I strongly recommend finding a translation that is easy for you to read and understand. If you have a smart phone or tablet, you can download the entire book to your phone for free. This time, I read the first six months on a Kindle tablet, then moved back to my hard copy NIV Study Bible for the rest of the year. If you would like to give it a whirl, send me an email, and I will send you a link to the plan I use and do whatever I can to help you get started. It is well worth the 10 to 20 minutes a day that it takes. <SpringCreek-ArtsGuild@gmail.com>