How to Understand the Bible: Step 8

[Darris McNeely] Have you ever stood on a high hill or mountain and – even a large building in the city – and looked out over the landscape and seen where your house is, or roads you travel and are familiar with as you go back and forth every day, but from a higher perspective? Gives you a sense of place and perspective on the environment that you’re familiar with from a whole different point of view. It’s enlightening, and it’s very useful, and it helps get us into key number eight of our series that we’ve been talking about on how to understand the Bible. And that is to read the whole Bible. Read it from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation, on a regular basis – maybe once a year with the use of an annual Bible reading program, which you might find in the back pages of your Bible or certainly are readily available out on the internet, that can help you read a short passage every day, and within one year, have taken you through the entire Bible.

Reading through the entire Bible like that can be very, very useful, again, to get a perspective. I’ve done that, my wife does it every year, and it’s amazing – no matter how well-versed you are in the Bible, and what a good Bible scholar you think you might be, just to read it through on a regular basis can give you another view that opens up relationships of various books to each other, characters, situations, even passages that in your normal course of study, you don’t normally read, and may not have read for years, and they almost become new to you.

Read the whole Bible. A lot of people have done that. I was reading about President Harry Truman, US President Harry Truman, who, while he was president, read the Bible through every year. Now, you would think a man as busy as the president of the United States – in his case, ending World War II,  dealing with Russia, the Cold War, and the events of rebuilding Europe occupied him – he had the time to read the Bible. You and I might, as well. And we should. It can really make us smarter about things, give us a perspective that is fresh and unique and useful in helping to put together all the sections of the Bible. Make it a practice. Make it a regular, annual even, practice to read the Bible through. It’s going to help your understanding.

That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.