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Establishing a Daily Bible Reading Plan

The new year brings with it a renewed opportunity to set goals and do things we’ve always wanted to do but have failed to accomplish in the past. For many people, this also means renewed attempts to practice spiritual disciplines such as Bible reading and prayer. I will leave prayer for another discussion,  but I have found a particular way to read the Bible far more helpful than any other. In this post, I’d like to recommend this method: reading the Bible in chronological order.

If you’ve sat down and attempted to read a Bible from beginning to end, you can certainly get a lot of it. But you are likely to also be confused and frustrated because it does not always flow in a chronological or historical sequence. The Bible, if read straight through, actually skips around quite a bit historically. The problem is that it doesn’t really tell you it’s skipping around. You just have to know, or read the introductory article if you’re using a study Bible, to get the historical background and catch these historical nuances.

The Bible is not organized so that it flows chronologically. It is organized a different way, in a sequence that looks like this:

Old Testament

  • Books of Moses (Genesis-Deuteronomy)
  • Historical Books (Joshua-Esther)
  • Poetry Books (Job-Song of Songs)
  • Major Prophets (Isaiah-Daniel)
  • Minor Prophets (Hosea-Malachi)

New Testament

  • Synoptic Gospels (Matthew-John)
  • Acts 
  • Epistles (Romans-Jude)
  • The Revelation

In other words, the Bible is organized by the type of literature--the Bible being a collection of "books with the Book"--rather than the chronology of the events it covers. It does have a general flow moving from the older testament to the new (i.e., creation and Moses to Jesus and the future), but there is still plenty of skipping around within it that makes it hard to follow. To address this, I recommend using a chronological Bible reading plan to get the most out of reading the Bible.

A one-year plan will require you to read about three or four chapters a day on average to cover the entire Bible. The plan will guide you through the year, giving you readings that follow the biblical events in chronological order. What does that mean? You will stop in Genesis while reading about Abraham and read Job because Job was likely a contemporary of Abraham in the Ancient Near East. You will read certain psalms at the time of the event that inspired them. You will read a historical book's section that provides the setting for a particular prophet's ministry, and then read the prophet's writings. You will read certain New Testament epistles immediately following the passage in Acts that describes Paul's ministry in the city named in the epistle. And while you are doing this, you will start making connections among the biblical texts and events that will enrich your understanding  of the unfolding of God's plan for the world.

How do you get started? I do not think it is necessary to get a Chronological Bible that organizes the texts in chronological order for you. I prefer to use the same Bible I use at other times so I can get more familiar with where things are located in my everyday Bible. So use the Bible you would normally read and get a chronological Bible reading plan, whether it is an online document you can print and keep in your Bible or an app that you can download to your phone, tablet, or e-reader. There may be slight variations among the different plans, but the overall goal is the same: to grasp the unfolding of God's plan of redemption in history. So get a plan, start plugging away with daily readings, and experience Psalm 119:30: The unfolding of your words gives light . . ."

Chronological Bible Reading Plan (PDF Version at ESV.org)
This is a simple two-page plan that can be printed and kept in your Bible. Take a look--it is an excellent example of a chronological plan.

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Comments

  1. HidejiDecember 31, 2014 at 8:29 AM

    Thanks for the ultimate New Years celebration. Studying by the method you stressed will be the structure and encouragement, I had been needing to continue my walk with the Lord. It will help me through many days and nights of when there's only me and the Lord.

    ReplyDelete
  2. HidejiDecember 31, 2014 at 8:31 AM

    Thanks for your dedication as an instructor. You are the greatest!

    ReplyDelete

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