how did Jesus read the Bible?

As tends to happen in October, I’ve been deep in thought for the past couple of weeks about the upcoming round of Bible180 in the new year. It seems I find something to tweak either in the actual reading plan or in the creation and delivery of reading resources on an annual basis—and this year is shaping up to be no different.

What lights me up about Bible180 is, always, showing people the way to whole-Bible literacy. We don’t skip a single verse. We read it all, from the heartwarming quotes that make their way onto coffee mugs and home decor to the hideous revelations of the depravity of the godless human soul that we’d all like to pretend aren’t even in there. It is a journey not for the faint of heart.

In past years, we have always followed a loosely chronological reading plan, with the goal of tracing the history of humanity from Creation in Genesis 1 through God’s selection of Abraham in Genesis 12, and then following that storyline across all the ups and downs of the nation of Israel as they prove over and over again how desperately we need a Savior. I have enjoyed reading it this way because a linear chronology is an easy throughline to grasp, particularly when very little about the rest of the challenge is easy.

But something has been bugging me to reconsider this approach for awhile now. Conversations with a longtime spiritual mentor whose Biblical knowledge I deeply value, as well as the contents of the BibleProject’s “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course that I’ve been taking, have inspired me to ask a simple question:

How would Jesus have read the Hebrew Scriptures?

I don’t mean this in a cheesy “What would Jesus do?” way. I mean to ask: When Jesus was living on earth, what Bible was He reading, memorizing, quoting? Not a chronological one. And it’s not because those who canonized the Hebrew Bible were too dumb to figure out the concept of chronology.

It’s because the chronology is not the point.

He is the point.

Our Christian Bibles are arranged with a 39-book Old Testament that begins with the books of history (Genesis through Esther), followed by the books of poetry/wisdom (Job through Song of Songs), and finally, the books of prophecy (Isaiah through Malachi). The history books are arranged, sensibly, in what we would consider the closest to chronological order. When this is how we’ve consumed the Bible for our entire lives, it’s not hard to see why we tend to think of the Old Testament as the history of Israel—handy background information on the origins of the Christian faith, divinely inspired, but really not that important now that we live on the other side of the page denoted “New Testament.”

The reality is that our Bibles look nothing like the Word of God that Jesus knew inside and out—nor like the Scriptures that Messiah-seeking Bible nerds like Simeon or John the Baptist would have pored over in search of the Anointed One. Have you ever wondered, as I have every single year, what happened between the closing of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew that inspired John to start preaching a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” well before Jesus ever began to reveal Himself as the Savior of the world? Was John the Baptist just a little eccentric and a lot Spirit-filled, or was he basing his ministry on knowable truth that could be found in the tapestry of the Holy Scriptures?

The collection of sacred writings that John and Simeon and Jesus would have recognized didn’t convey a timeline of the important characters and events of Israel’s history, accented with poetry and prophecy. Instead, the arrangement of the scrolls that made up what we now call the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament focused on the sweeping central theme that first begins in Genesis 3:

The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle. and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life; and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.”

- Genesis 3:14-15

Genesis, the first book in the first section of the Hebrew Bible, raises a question that the rest of the Scriptures will continually seek to answer: Who is He who can deliver the death-blow to the enemy of humanity? Who is He who can restore the Kingdom of God on earth, as it was before the fall in Eden?

This is not a book meant to detail Israel’s history. Rather, it’s a carefully designed quilt made of select fabrics and shapes from Israel’s history, in order to present the perfect backdrop for the moment when Jesus of Nazareth appears on the stage. Those who were paying attention—people like John the Baptist, Anna, Simeon—would have had a very good idea what they were looking for.

And we say it all the time: the Old Testament exists to point us to Jesus. But can we actually see the foreshadowings of Him when we read it, or do we throw up our hands and say “Well, it shows us that we need Jesus, anyway!”?

Even after many times reading through the Bible, and many hours in study, that’s what I often end up doing. Which tells me that maybe I’m doing something wrong.

So for Bible180 2023, I’m going to try to read the Hebrew Bible in a way that’s a bit closer to how we know Jesus and His contemporaries would have read it. It looks like this:

It’s going to be a big change. In previous challenges, we’ve always read a Psalm a day; this time, in order to respect the structure of the Tanakh, I’ll be reading the entire book of Psalms in just five days—an average of 30 chapters a day. But I am excited about two things: 1) no longer having to jump back and forth between the books of the Kings and the minor prophets, and 2) waiting to read Job until the Ketuvim portion, instead of starting that overwhelming book on day 3!

Will reading it this way lead me to all the epiphanies I feel I’ve been missing over the years? I can’t say. But I have a hunch that reading according to the Messianic Hope—as the Tanakh’s designers intended—will get me closer to those epiphanies than merely reading according to the chronology has.

five experiences that have helped me understand the Bible better

Though I haven’t been in a formal Bible classroom for seven years, I will always call myself a Bible student. As a disciple of Christ, I am learning that His teaching can happen through anything and anyone, at any time, and anywhere; while I feel immensely blessed to have had the short year of intensive Bible scholarship that I did, the greater challenge at times has been to remain in that seated position at His feet no matter where I am in life. To, like Mary in Luke 10, find space to listen to His Word even as regular life goes on buzzing around me.

Reflecting on this recently, I’ve been amazed by how so many of my life experiences have lent a richness to my study of the Bible and knowledge of God that I couldn’t have gained in a classroom. God’s work is constant, and often goes unnoticed in the moment, but I’m amazed by how He has worked through some of my most mundane or seemingly-unrelated experiences to build me into the disciple He wants me to be. I wanted to share some of the experiences that I think have impacted me the most, in hopes of encouraging you to reflect on your own.

1 / GROWING UP ON A FARM

I didn’t know, while I was living the first eighteen years of my life on a farm in eastern Washington, that God was teaching me some valuable things I’d take with me in learning how to study the Bible and understand His character—but now I can hardly imagine how different my perspective on God’s Word would be without this background. The Bible was written largely about an ancient, agricultural, hill-country people. Their lives were a struggle of survival, dependent on weather and crops and harvests and animals; in particular, they had to depend on one another, because it took each member of the family doing his or her part to keep them all alive. By comparison, my farm life was downright cushy, but I did get to taste what it is to be mutually dependent on each other, on creatures, and on the earth; I can understand fairly easily the countless agricultural metaphors the Bible uses to describe God, His work, and His wrath. Although there is still a huge chasm in understanding to overcome between my own culture and that of the ancient Biblical author, I think it would be that much wider if I had grown up on a postage stamp yard in the American suburbs instead.

2 / MY YEARS RAISING SHEEP

For about a decade when we were still living at home, my sister and I raised a small flock of Suffolk-Hampshire sheep together as 4-H projects. Nothing has informed my understanding of human nature and God’s relationship with His people quite as colorfully as my experience with sheep, which are, of course, one of the most-used illustrations in the Bible—from the ancient sacrificial system to Psalm 23 to Christ Himself, the “Lamb who was Slain.” When I read the passages in Scripture that compare God’s people with sheep, I know exactly which traits inspire them: chiefly, helplessness and fear. Humans and sheep have in common a total lack of meaningful ability to control their circumstances and protect themselves, which leads to a constant baseline instinct of fear, and frequently inspires them to make very unwise choices.

This has helped me to understand that God doesn’t look on me with contempt for my sinfulness and distrust, but with compassion for it. He knows that, deep down, my lack of faith has its roots in fear, and as the Good Shepherd, He wants to rescue me from the dire consequences of the sinful choices I’ve made out of fear and call me gently into the safety of His fold. If I know anything about dealing with sheep, it’s that responding with aggression and anger to their already-precarious state of mind will inevitably cause them to scatter in panic and flee. It breaks their trust and makes me, the one who was supposed to shepherd and protect them, into a predator and a threat. Thankfully, God’s shepherding of my own fearful heart is patient and perfect.

3 / ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASS

When I was a junior in high school, I enrolled in a college-level literature class that was taught by Mrs. Kruse, locally famous for her quality teaching and standard of excellence. I read short stories and books from a range of literary greats, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, Jack London, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Herman Hesse—and then was expected to write analytical persuasive essays on various aspects of each work in under an hour. Far more than learning the content of a handful of famous stories, this class taught me how to think critically and quickly, how to ask the right questions, and how to search carefully for and articulate the answers. I learned how to read the invisible concepts behind the visible words on the page, how to connect ideas from one person’s story to a larger universal truth, and how to see a work as both a whole and its parts at the same time. I find I am constantly called on to use these same skills when I study the Bible, which is a literary masterpiece all its own, a highly complex work that is anchored in a far different context from my own and yet speaks to truth that remains absolute regardless of what changes in the world around it.

4 / SEEING THE HOLY LAND

Before I went to Israel the first time, others who had already been there told me how standing in the very places it all happened would bring to life my experience of the Bible. I believed them, but I couldn’t fully grasp how right they were. Seven years and two tours of Israel later, it’s hard to clearly recall what it was like to read the Bible before I could see and smell and taste and touch it in my memory. I have seen the Valley of Elah where David slew Goliath. I remember the caves above Ein Gedi where he hid from Saul. I’ve stood on the ground where Paul departed Israel for Rome, never to return, and I’ve touched the bedrock of Calvary. When I read about Jesus calming the storm, I can smell the wind over the Sea of Galilee, and when He preaches the Beatitudes I can envision the crowd on the hillside. Traveling in Israel made the Bible more than words and stories and characters—it is familiar and colorful and alive.

5 / MARRIAGE

I knew, in theory, all about the “mystery” of marriage as a reflection of Christ and the Church long before I ever got married. Actually being married, however, has pretty much exploded everything I “knew” in theory—in hard but necessary ways. Nothing else has shown me so clearly how insidiously sin has distorted all of God’s good gifts. Woven into my entire understanding of Ephesians 5 was a fallen worldview straight from the curse of Genesis 3, tainting God’s beautiful picture of selfless love and submission working together to bring Him glory with ugly hidden undercurrents of oppression, self-protection, and distrust. But as my husband and I both do the work to unlearn these patterns, I am rediscovering the beauty in God’s original design for humanity in Genesis 1 and 2. He created incredible goodness, and He is in the midst of an incredible redemption plan for all that goodness—which He has invited you and me to be part of, married or not! The story of the Bible isn’t just something to read and study, it’s also something we have active roles in as God’s children, looking ahead to when all that has been defiled by sin is made new and glorious.

Marriage has also given me a special appreciation for the relentlessness of God’s love for His people, even and especially when they have repeatedly failed or betrayed Him. I’ve lived the reality of being failed by and then forgiving the very person who vowed his commitment to me; I have also been the one to fail him and be forgiven. Through it all, the marriage covenant stands firm, a stalwart reminder that so, too, does God’s covenant love for us—regardless of how poorly we treat Him sometimes.

BONUS / HAVING A BABY (TBD)

So, I have not actually had a baby yet, but I have spent the last 5+ months carrying one, so I am currently very aware of all the birth and parent-child language God uses in the Bible! Stay tuned—I have a feeling this one is going to rock my world. (Baby girl is expected September 2020!)

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Your turn—what are some of the unexpected or everyday things you’ve experienced that God might be using (or want to use) to help you know Him more? Your list will likely look a lot different from mine, but at the same time, it’s probably exactly the list He knows you need. God is teaching us constantly if we have the heart to learn, whether we ever step into a Bible classroom or not.

bedrock

Two years ago I began to write, at long last, the book that had been waiting patiently inside my head since Bible school. Forty-five thousand words, dozens of rewrites, two cover designs, and three different formats later, it is finally complete.

Bedrock: A Foundation for Independent Biblical Study is now available on Amazon.

What is it? It’s a textbook and a workbook wrapped into one. It’s a journey through each of the seven types of Biblical literature using both concrete steps and Spirit-led study. It’s dense with practical instruction, but brightened with color and peppered with activities. It is a book for those who want to unearth the bedrock truth of who God is, because who God is changes everything about who we know ourselves to be and how we see our circumstances.

Bedrock is comprised of eight modules:

• Module One: What is the Bible?

• Module Two: The Study of Narrative

• Module Three: The Study of Law

• Module Four: The Study of Wisdom

• Module Five: The Study of Poetry

• Module Six: The Study of Lament

• Module Seven: The Study of Prophecy

• Module Eight: The Study of Epistle

The first module is designed to address some of the common preconceptions and blind spots of a would-be Bible student living in the postmodern Western world. From there, each of the seven remaining modules acts as a guide through a particular passage, with the goal of teaching a replicable study process that can be taken to any other passage of Scripture within that genre. In Module Two, for example, the student will thoroughly understand and break down the story of Gideon in Judges 6-8, but the same steps can be used to explore any other passage of narrative literature.

I wrote this book to be a little bit like Bible school for those who have never been to Bible school. To help you, no matter who you are or how much background you have with Scripture, independently discover and understand the timeless truths of the Bible as the Word of God. Bedrock is an opportunity to step back from the theological minutiae and academic semantics that can so easily distract us from truly knowing God’s heart and instead, take in the whole, sweeping vista of the Bible as a panoramic view of who God is and what He has done across human history.

This book is not an exhaustive work on the topic of the Bible or its interpretation—it’s just one of many resources that exist to help you understand what the Bible is and how to approach it for personal study. It is not a technical or academic book: In fact, it was purposely written to be the opposite, and to welcome believers of all backgrounds into a deeper knowledge of God’s Word. None of the terms or definitions in this book should be taken as scholarly or absolute; they are simply the best way I know how to use the everyday English language to communicate the vital concepts of independent Biblical study.

All that being said, it is a hefty course of study. It is thorough and detailed and will reward those who can give it the time and thought it demands. The beauty of it is that you can take it at whatever pace you wish; you can do it on your own or in a group; you can supplement it with other resources or just use it on its own.

Ultimately, I wrote this book because God put it on my heart, and because I believe He has a vision for how it can be used to help His people know Him more. If you’d like to see it for yourself, click here.