Ditch Your Bible Reading Plan (It's Bad)

You know how this one goes, don't you?

Christian Finds a Reading Plan

January begins and, convicted about his lack of knowledge about Scripture, Christian decides this year he will read the whole Bible straight through. As a first step he goes online to find the right reading plan. After sorting through chronological plans that put all the readings in historical order, basic plans that go through each book of the Bible one after the other, and nifty devotional plans that mix up the Old and New Testaments, Christian makes his pick and confidently sets out on his year long journey through the Word of God. The first few weeks go alright until Christian gets past the beloved (and often made into film) accounts of Genesis and Exodus 1-14, which he enjoys and learns from.

After this point he lands himself in a distinctly depressing account of Israel ungratefully complaining against God in the wilderness. This account will last for roughly the next 120 chapters, spanning 3 ½ books. Helping further, this account will be broken up only by difficult-to-process building instructions, groups of laws which strike Christian as confusing to offensive, how and why to participate in a series of animal sacrifices, and puzzling endorsements for genocide and war. Should he press on further (he likely won't), he'll find a history of the nation of Israel which describes some historical events well but does not really prescribe for him, at first glance, a way to understand God much better or to live a remarkably better life. The prophets who follow will be a scattered bunch who mostly convey God's displeasure at the growing dysfunction of his ancient people while giving assurances about his plan for the future. Included in all of this will be oblique but important references to a coming Saviour who will rescue God's people from their sin and Christian from needing to read Biblical accounts denouncing it. On his way from the Biblical accounts of history to prophecy, Christian will also discover the books of Psalms and Proverbs which at last provide some material for him to make sense of and feel confident in putting to use. 

Finally comes the New Testament and its multiple accounts of Jesus which, numbering at four, are great right away but quickly get to feel very repetitive. The rest of the New Testament feels like a breath of fresh air. If Christian has beaten the odds and actually gotten this far, the rest of his reading feels like either a home stretch or a brief reprieve, depending on whether he has decided to do it all again next year. He has prevailed. (Actually, he probably quit all the way back in Leviticus.) Does all of this sound like a great way to instill understanding and a love for Scripture?

The Problem With Reading Plans

All of Scripture is God-breathed, and all of it is profitable to the one who reads it. Those funny laws and instructions for animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, and those accounts of Israel complaining in the desert, are all worth reading and praying over carefully. But not all of it is equally clear. And almost none of it works particularly well as part of a scheduled reading plan. Reading plans might even be considered a particularly awful way to read Scripture -- and I know because I've been working for most of the summer to put something better together for my students without much luck. 

Here are the problems as I see them:

#1 - The Bible is Meant to be Studied, Not Skimmed.

First, many parts of Scripture can only be studied in order to make sense of them. Those strange Old Testament laws? The genealogies, building instructions, sacrificial directions, and the historical accounts whose importance their narrators do not always explain? They can reveal a lot about God's heart for us, and our spiritual condition, but you'll need to spend some time with them first. Without taking the time to study these things, and to keep up with a reading plan, Christians can spend most of their time reading Scripture stuck with questions they can't resolve, bored, and confused.

#2 - Reading the Whole Bible Can Take a Long Time.

Reading plans also last the whole year, or for a shorter 90 days require you to give a couple hours of hovering over small print and difficult to process subject matter every day for a few months. Many people find this incredibly demotivating -- so they stop early on in the year and don't read anything. It would be one thing if you could just power through the whole Bible in a couple of weeks and then spend the rest of the year studying in more depth. (Technically you can. But I would recommend you wait until you are already familiar with Scripture to do that as a challenge.) For most of us though, the time demand is so long that it really keeps us from reading the Bible in ways that would actually be more helpful. It's a big challenge, and an obstacle to other ways we could be engaging with Scripture, and for that reason should probably only be done in a 90 day or less version by someone who is already up for a demanding and difficult task.

#3 - The Bible Doesn't Condense Well

And last, if you were to get a plan with the "highlights" of the Bible, and just read that, it would probably still skip a lot of important things and defeat the purpose a little bit. But even after systematically reducing the 1189 chapters of the Bible down to 305 for a Bible reading plan that I will likely never get my youth kids to use, I've found that a lot of chapters still have mixes of vitally important narrative that you can't do without existing right alongside long complicated instructions for sacrifices, and old covenant laws which require existing knowledge in order to understand. I could make a plan which skips around them, but it would have so many commas and semicolons and qualifications - "read these six verses, then skip those three, then only the middle 35 verses of the next chapter..." - that it would be impossible to use. (I tried.) So even getting a plan which took you through the whole Bible but gave you 'just the basics' would be hard to make work.

What We Could Do Instead, for Starters

If you wanted to start reading Scripture, I don't think I would give you a scheduled reading plan. I would give you a place to start, and an order of what to read next, and encourage you to go from there.

1. Start with Mark, the shortest and most tightly-packed of the Gospels, to get to know Jesus.

2. Then go to Genesis 1-11 to learn about the background story of creation and sin.

3. From there, go back to Acts and read about the history of the church.

4. For a good explanation of the message of Christianity, continue on to Romans.

5. See Revelation 1-3 and Revelation 21-22 to find out how it all ends.

6. Check out Proverbs and Psalms for some good food for thought.

From there, you can go in almost any direction in your journey with the Word of God. Pick any book of the Bible and study it in depth -- pick a section, journal on it, pray about it, read further on questions that come up, until you get to the end of that book. Try a short book of the Bible to start. As you keep going you can start doing more complicated topical studies about issues you are interested in or biographical studies of Bible people whose lives stuck out to you. You can use resources like The Bible Project to help you understand things. The whole Bible is open to you from here.

It's not just that I want to push careful study of the Bible that I'm encouraging you to ditch your Bible reading plan. It's also that I think this is a much more engaging and beneficial way to read it. I think it's more enjoyable. And eventually, if you start on this path, I think you can actually dig in to something like Leviticus and enjoy it, because you see it as a challenge and you'll already know some things that help make sense of it. But you don't start there, in February, in the Bible readers' grave yard. You get there when it's time and you feel confident about taking on the challenge, and you enjoy the journey without having to move on for the sake of your plan before you're ready.

Go forth and read! :)

Sola Scriptura,

-Sean