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.

on coping with the Bible

I’ve just started the “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course from the BibleProject (it’s completely free, and extremely high quality in both content and production, if you are interested in taking it!), and I decided that as a verbal/written processor, my best bet for retaining what I learn in the course will be to write something about it as often as I can. So here’s a scribbling of thoughts from Session 1, titled, “What on earth is the Hebrew Bible?”

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I’ve been talking to an old friend and longtime spiritual mentor about various theological and Biblical questions lately, and one idea that he raised—and I keep thinking about—is that so much of pastoral ministry can often be spent “undoing” what adults were taught about God, Jesus, and/or the Bible as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were not the case? What would it look like to teach children who God is and how to handle His Word in a way that wouldn’t need to be deconstructed later?

Tim Mackie echoed the sentiment in Session 1 of the class and I liked the way he put it: Christian children’s media is often the clearest revelation of the “coping strategies” we use to deal with our discomfort around the hard parts of the Bible. We rewrite Old Testament narratives as hero-villain stories or moralistic tales, or we turn the Bible into a theological encyclopedia, or we use it to proof-text doctrines we’ve already decided are correct, or we cherrypick the inspirational bits to put on calendars and coffee mugs—all to avoid dealing with the actual text as a whole.

Why? Because the text as a whole is incredibly complex, uncomfortable, difficult, and often not safe for work. Why would God choose to reveal Himself through a Bible like that?

But He does. And when we don’t accept that—and Him—on His terms, we inadvertently produce a lot of Christians who know Bible stories, understand morality, and can bend any passage into a personal application, but who don’t know God or understand His purpose for humanity.

Let me speak for myself: By all the typical metrics, I had the ideal upbringing to produce a Biblically-literate, faithful Christian adult. My parents are both born again, our family attended church very regularly and was extensively involved in church ministry, I went to Sunday school and AWANA every week from toddlerhood on, and I even chose to go to Bible school for a year after high school. I do not remember a time before I started following Jesus. And for all of this, I am so grateful (though still probably not half as grateful as I should be, since we all tend to take our upbringings for granted as “normal,” having known no different).

At the same time, I can look back and admit, with some embarrassment, that there were/are still some enormous gaps in my true knowledge of who God is and what He has done. Being able to pass the test isn’t always the same as understanding the material.

For example, four or five years ago I went through a dark and difficult period of time involving a lot of fear, loss, and grief. In that shadowy valley, I discovered for the first time that I had been leaning on the heresy of “prosperity theology”—and I didn’t even realize it until it gave way! I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t subscribe to any kind of prosperity doctrine, but the truth was, I had internalized years of learning Bible stories as moral tales, ultimately leading me to subconsciously believe that if I was a good enough Christian, God would protect me from pain.

The catastrophic loss of that core belief, even though it was one I had never formally acknowledged, utterly rocked my relationship with God for a time.

The good news is, I do see strides being made toward the creation of better Bible resources for children. Clara has a book that attempts to encompass the story of the Bible in a short, easy-to-grasp form, which is something I don’t remember having at her age—although it skips straight from the exodus to Bethlehem, which leaves out a whole lot of material that it would seem God considers important. Kevin DeYoung’s “The Biggest Story” Bible Storybook is thorough, beautifully illustrated, and fun to read, if a bit episodic in nature. I haven’t yet read his other book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden, but I’m hoping to give that one a try soon.

And as I contemplate the Herculean task of trying to teach my own child about God and the Bible, I can see why it’s so difficult. Kids are rather black-and-white thinkers, and it’s hard to imagine trying to teach them nuanced concepts that even adults struggle with. Even with all the caveats and disclaimers and shades of gray in the world, we tend to categorize information in pretty simple mental boxes—agree/disagree, safe/unsafe, good/bad, right/wrong.

The longer I study the Bible, the more inadequate those dichotomies seem. A mammoth collection of ancient, divinely-inspired texts that reveals a peephole view of God’s incomprehensible nature and His plan to rescue Creation just doesn’t fit into something as banal as “good/bad.”

And maybe that’s what it takes: Time, and repetitive, fearless exposure to the whole Bible. A ruthless rejection of the coping strategies we use to keep ourselves comfortable with (and protected from) the Word of God.

We all have to face the hard parts eventually. What if, instead of trying to turn the Bible into a safe book, we made our homes and churches into places that are safe to confront potentially threatening questions?

reflections on another journey through the Bible

It’s naptime on June 29, 2022—which means it’s the first afternoon in six months that I have not had a mental checklist running of everything I need to do for Bible180 today, and a mental timer going so I can prioritize each task within the amount of time I estimate Clara will sleep. Some days, something else came first and all this had to wait until bedtime, but even then, the mental checklist was always there.

I made a commitment this year not only to read through the Bible in 180 days—which is something I’ve done several times already and no longer daunts me as it once did—but also to create a brief overview of all 66 Biblical books, to post the reading schedule weekly, to post the day’s passages daily, and to share some of my thoughts and/or favorite resources every day, too. It was a ton of work (you can find it all over on the official Bible180 Instagram page), and I am really proud of myself for staying (mostly) on top of it, even through several sicknesses and travel and all the other random mishaps of life.

To mark the end of this first Bible180 Challenge of 2022 (yes, I’m going to be starting over again on July 1, and it’s not too late to join), I decided to spend this naptime reflecting on the things I’ve learned (or re-learned) over the last 6 months:

Reading through the Bible — especially reading through it quickly — is an enormously powerful way to appreciate God’s whole story.

This is one of those things I “re-learned” this year. I KNOW how amazing it is to read the whole Bible as a unified story, but every time I do it, that story comes alive for me in a new and unique way. This time, I kept seeing both the sweeping big-picture view in which God crowned His Son King over a Creation that had been chasing after the deceitful attractions of Babylon AND the incredibly personal approach God took to make it all happen—advancing the plan through one flawed human at at time, until the only Perfect Man came to set things right.

It was fascinating to notice how much of God’s plan centered around whole nations, not necessarily individuals; it made me rethink the emphasis we place on the idea of a “personal relationship with God,” as if each of our faith-walks exists as something separate and self-contained from the universal story. At the same time, to see how He chose and worked through individuals—Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, to name a few of the big ones—and furthermore, to see how He cared for those that history has left forgotten and nameless by inviting the “least” of every tribe and tongue and people and nation into His glorious kingdom, left me breathless that He could be both infinite and immanent at the same time.

Somehow, the Bible captures the truth of who God is at both a cosmic and a microcosmic level. He is the King of my heart and the King of the universe simultaneously. He demands the allegiance of nations as well as the allegiance of secret souls.

Without the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), the Christian Scriptures (New Testament) are meaningless.

Once we got into the New Testament several weeks ago, it became clearer than ever to me that we do a HUGE disservice to the Bible when we do not prioritize the teachings of the Old Testament. As the apostles, and Jesus Himself, clearly understood, the Old Testament is the foundation the entire Christian faith stands on; without it, we have only the story of a prophet and the claim that he was raised from the dead. The Hebrew Scriptures are what give credence to every bit of Jesus’ history, teachings, and miracles; they are the corroboration of His identity as the Messiah and what that means for the Jewish people and the rest of the world.

And yet, very often, we spend a good 80% of our time (if not more) studying the books of the New Testament, without establishing the proper background knowledge offered by the Old Testament. No wonder so many people find the Bible incredibly confusing—they’re reading it backwards!

One of the verses that really struck me in this regard was Hebrews 1:3:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Purification from sins? What is that, without Genesis to tell us about sin, or Leviticus to tell us about purity? In fact, what meaning does the “radiance of God’s glory” shining through the Son really have, if we can’t call to mind the Bible’s stunning word-pictures of the original Garden Paradise, the descriptions of God’s glory filling Solomon’s temple, or the prophetic promises of a New Creation to come?

I’m not saying that people can’t be redeemed and transformed by the Gospel unless they understand these things first, but I am saying there are a lot of baby Christians who have been stunted in their growth for too long because they haven’t been eating enough meat.

The Christian life should be unmistakably marked by joy, peace, love, and worship.

One thing that really disturbs me after spending so much time in the Bible over the last 6 months is how attitudes of fear, despair, and avarice pervade the American Church. So many Christians seem to be lost in the wilderness, creating golden calves as God’s stand-in because they can’t see that He is enthroned on the mountain right in front of their faces. When they should be dancing in triumph because their God has won, when they should be showering His abundant love on everyone they encounter because they’ve been so richly blessed by it, they are instead wallowing in the loss of cultural favor and shutting out those who might have needs — or they’re still standing in the prison cell of sin because no one told them Christ’s salvation is for NOW as much as it is for eternity.

Perhaps these weak Christians (of which I have often been one) are the product of a weak Gospel—one that only has power over the life to come, leaving this life as something we just have to “get through.” That is not the Gospel of Scripture! Look what Yahweh said about the objective of the Messiah on earth, according to the prophet Isaiah:

“I am the Lord. I have called you
for a righteous purpose,
and I will hold you by your hand.
I will watch over you, and I will appoint you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light to the nations,
in order to open blind eyes,
to bring out prisoners from the dungeon,
and those sitting in darkness from the prison house.”

Isaiah 42:6-7

The four Gospels bring this vision to life through the activities of Jesus Christ during His ministry. The apostles’ letters preach that it can be the enduring reality of a Church that chooses to live according to the upside-down ideals of the kingdom of heaven. The Gospel is for NOW. The King has been crowned. Our God wins.

So why are we still looking for another savior—the next president, perhaps, or a better political party? Why are we still living as slaves to sin—excusing our lusts and addictions as something biological or innate, when the blood of Jesus Christ was shed to make us NEW? Why are we just enduring this life, as if the victory has not yet been won, when it has?

I wonder what might happen in this country, and indeed the world, if we really took up the charge of Paul and the vision of Jesus by living peaceably and submissively despite what’s happening in politics; by loving one another without reservation or fear of the cost; by truly worshiping our crowned, enthroned, living King—yes, the One who resembles a slaughtered lamb more than He does a Lion.

What about you?

If you’ve EVER read through the Bible, I would love to hear what you learned and how it impacted your walk with God. Leave me a comment below!

If you read with us during Bible180 (even if you didn’t finish), I would love to hear how this challenge specifically went for you. Fill out the anonymous survey here!

And if you want to read through the Bible with me over the next 6 months—let’s do it! You can sign up to get all the resources here, follow along on Instagram here, and find the master schedule here! Meanwhile, naptime is just about over, so I’m going to take a break for the next couple days and I’ll be back in Genesis 1 with you on Friday!