Some thoughts about the Bible

(written in May 2024 and not published until May 2025!) The Bible is my favorite book. I read a lot, I always have, and I love many books. As I've grown older (and mostly wiser), I've lost my tolerance for bad books - this is subjective, as our opinions always are, but for me "bad books" can be badly-written books, simply mediocre books, or books that I find poisonous in their outlook and subject matter. I don't waste my time reading bad books - life is too short and there are too many wonderful books waiting to be read (or re-read).

I recognize that, for some people at least, the Bible would fall into their "bad books" category, although I expect most of them have never read the entire Bible and many of them are responding to a mental stereotype of what the Bible is.

It brings us to that interesting question: how do we know what we know?

The Bible wasn't always my favorite book-- I grew up in a Methodist church in Los Feliz (east Hollywood) because my parents were Methodists from Iowa and it never occurred to them that a post-WWII California Methodist church was appreciably different than their Depression-era midwest rural Methodist church. My father observed, decades later, that when he heard our pastor saying non-normative things (e.g., questioning the virgin birth, questioning the physical resurrection of Jesus) he thought the pastor was simply trying to be provocative, to cause the parishioners to think. So I assumed I was a Christian - after all, I attended Sunday School and church every week, unless I was running a fever (this is the equivalent of believing yourself to be a car because you live in the garage), and as a child I would try to read the Bible ...and it was like eating sawdust.

When I actually became a Christian at the age of 18 (the intentional transaction of giving my life to Jesus and accepting His death on the cross in my place), the experience of reading the Bible changed: it started to come alive, it was no longer sawdust. But there were other factors in my life that interfered with and slowed the process of maturing as a Christian that went on for decades (I don't want to derail this post with that stuff); it wasn't until I was blindsided by my ex-husband's abandonment that the Bible became my essential lifeline

So, for about 30 years now, the Bible has been my favorite book and stands head-and-shoulders above any other in terms of importance and significance. I've approached daily reading in a variety of ways: one of the fun things was reading all of Psalms and Proverbs every month (this is easily done; Proverbs has 31 chapters so you read the chapter which corresponds to the day of the month and chapter 31 simply isn't read every month. The book of Psalms has 150 chapters (the Coptic church includes Psalm 151, as do most Catholic Bibles) so my preferred method is to read the psalm which corresponds to the day of the month, plus 30, 60, 90, and 120. So on the first, I read Psalm 1, Psalm 31, Psalm 61, Psalm 91, and Psalm 121. I save Psalm 119 (all 176 verses!) for the 31st of the month.) - I did that for about 6 or 7 years but it tends to trigger a kind of 'legalism' in me and if I missed a day or two, I felt compelled to read ALL the chapters I'd missed. That was my "devotional" reading, and my "study" reading would be working through a specific book, often from the Hebrew scriptures.

A better approach for me has turned out to be listening to the Bible (first thing most mornings); this started as my eyes developed cataracts and reading a physical Bible became a challenge for me. I start with Genesis 1 and continue through the end of Revelation and then I start over again. I listen to the Bible, "cover to cover," about three times each year, and have done for more than a decade now. I've used various recorded versions, including once a chronological Bible (scriptures ordered by historic age, so various prophets are interwoven with the history books - this wasn't entirely satisfying for me), but I'm just starting another trip through the Bible and I find I'm excited as I think about what's coming up ("this is when THAT happens!").

I'm not advocating this approach for everyone, although I do think it's worthwhile at least once to read the whole Bible, cover-to-cover, quickly, as if you were reading a novel - the benefit is that you can see the arc of the story God is presenting, and we miss that arc when we read it slowly and in small pieces.

Mostly I want to share some essential elements about the Bible that I think most people miss - sometimes for lack of exposure, sometimes because they've never thought it through, sometimes because they've been given bad information.

1. A LOT of the Bible is reportage: it's telling us what happened and it doesn't editorialize. We're now so used to biased news that we don't recognize straightforward reporting. So when we start reading the Bible, we come across horrific stuff and the Bible doesn't always say, "and this was BAD"... for me, an essential point of growth was asking the LORD to show me His heart - and it's there, in the Bible, a generally consistent presentation with a few points of real tension. The Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels are the most explicit presentations of the heart of God. The history books are less explicit and fall into the largest sections of reportage.

2. The Bible is NOT exhaustive. It doesn't tell us everything and it doesn't try to tell us everything. I've had a few scientist friends dismiss the Bible because it's not a science text - right, it's not a science text and it's not meant to be.

3. It's much easier to see and understand the prophetic from the post-fulfillment position. It's pretty easy to see Jesus fulfilling assorted old testament prophecies, now that He's come (...for the first time!); it's important to remember that the Jews were actively looking for the Messiah at the time of His coming and most of them missed Him. There remains a great deal of Messianic prophecy yet to be fulfilled in the Hebrew scriptures, as well as statements made by Jesus about the coming end of the age, and prophecies within the new testament epistles, not to mention Revelation, so....

4. Don't try to nail down future fulfillment of prophecy; instead hold it with an open hand. As you weave together the fabric of "what is yet to come" in your mind, drawing from all over the Bible, there are certain positions that have become quite fixed among various streams of Christianity. I can almost guarantee that nobody has got it completely right and we're all going to be surprised by something!