How Should I Read the Bible?

What’s the Plan?

As we wrap up the final week of our study on the Bible, I want to take some less severe but also prevalent questions into consideration when it comes to our own personal time in God’s Word. One of the most common questions people have asked when beginning to read the Bible is ‘How should I read it?’ Maybe this is even a question that you have asked yourself lately. Throughout this blog, we’re going to break down some of the best ways to read through your Bible, but before I mention any particular plan, I want to say the most important part is making sure that we’re actually reading through it. The best Bible plan isn’t the one that just focuses on the books we like or covers the passages that bring us joy and skip over all the rest. The best reading plan is the one that covers all of God’s Word because all of God’s Word is important, not just some of it. As Chris Larson of Ligonier Ministries beautifully puts it, “If people don’t know the Bible, they cannot know God.” We have already acknowledged this month that the whole Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, so any plan that would cut out specific sections of scripture is unjust and simply flat-out wrong. With all of that in mind, let’s look at some of the most solid plans for reading through the entirety of scripture. 

Cover to Cover

First off, reading it cover to cover is probably the most common and also the most practical way to read through God’s Word. It may seem ironic, but one of the best ways to read this holy book is simply to read it like a book. This method of reading scripture is not just common, but it is extremely helpful from a historical standpoint. Remember that the Bible is not just a religious book, it’s a historical book, and reading cover to cover will help the reader keep things in perspective as they read things in the order in which they occurred. Now I will say, not all of the books of the Bible are exactly in order, and you can look up which ones come a bit before others, but by in large, the cover-to-cover method is the most historically accurate approach. As a quick side note, I was going to put the historical reading plan as it’s own separate plan, but since it is so similar to the cover-to-cover plan, I decided to put them together as the same plan. Nevertheless, my personal favorite and most common reading strategy is the cover-to-cover/historical method because this is a historical book and it makes the most sense to read it historically. By no means am I looking down on those who read this book out of historical order, it is just simply easier to understand when we read it in the order it was written. On the other hand, however, I understand (especially for those who have not read through the Bible before), why some people would want to avoid the historical method at first glance. Reading through the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Bible) or even the major and minor prophets back-to-back can get tiresome and in all honesty, just straight-up confusing. That’s why we have these other plans to take into consideration as well. 

New/Old Testament

The next best reading plan I would personally recommend would be the New/Old Testament method. This plan starts off your reading by going through the New Testament and then closes by reading through the Old. This is a method that I definitely recommend to beginners because you start right off the bat, reading about the gospels of Christ, and then learn about the new covenant that you are a part of as opposed to the old one that no longer applies to you. Not only is this a valid option for beginners to start reading and applying what they read, but once they reach the Old Testament, the reader will begin to gain more and more reverence and gratitude for Christ and His finished work on the cross. Looking into the Old Testament should make any reader grateful that we are no longer under the old covenant between God and His people, but furthermore, it should leave us giving all honor and glory to God as we realize that there was no amount of rule-following that we could ever accomplish that would achieve our own personal salvation. If that’s not enough for the new reader, this way of reading will often leave the person in awe of the amount prophecies made about Christ, hundreds of years before His birth that He managed to fulfill in the second half of the Bible that they’ve already read through. Indeed, the New/Old Testament method may seem backward, but working backward can sometimes show us the character of God in a way that we missed early on. 

Thematically

The final plan I would like to go over as a valid option for any reader would be the Thematic Reading Plan. The Thematic Reading Plan takes all of the themes of God’s Word and weaves them together in a pattern where the reader will go from theme to theme as they finish one book and go on to the next. This is a fresh way to view God’s Word and avoids grouping all themes and historical points into one large section and helps avoid confusion. This method takes the themes of The Law, History, Poetry, Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, Gospels, Church History, Letters to the Church, and Prophecy, and makes them interwoven as we go from book to book. While this isn’t the best way to understand all circumstances from a historical standpoint, it is still a reasonable method to read scripture to see God’s character on display in multiple different facets rather than just going through one theme at a time. This method is one that I would recommend to the reader who is in between the first two options. I wouldn’t recommend this as the first way to read through Sciprute, but you also don’t need to be super advanced in the knowledge of God’s Word to understand everything that is going on in this method either. This is a typical plan where if you’ve read through the Bible once or twice before, I think could add some fresh views of God’s deity and see His sovereignty in a new light. 

The End Goal

Regardless of what plan you choose to move forward with, I hope I made it crystal clear that the most important aspect of reading God’s Word is that we actually read through it and not just parts of it. Each of these plans, and many more like them do exactly that, and I hope that whichever one you pick, you will grow in your knowledge of the Lord and be made more like Christ as you read His word. As Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians in chapter 3 verse 4, “4 By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ”. This is our ultimate goal of reading God’s Word, to know and understand the mysteries of Christ. As we do just that and grow in the knowledge of Him through His word, may we come to honor and glorify His name more than we ever thought possible.

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Sources

[1] “Access Your Bible from Anywhere.” BibleGateway.Com: A Searchable Online Bible in over 150 Versions and 50 Languages., www.biblegateway.com/. Accessed 2023.

[2] “If People Do Not Know the Bible, They Cannot Know God.” Ligonier Ministries, www.ligonier.org/posts/if-people-do-not-know-bible-they-cannot-know-god. Accessed 19 July 2023.