How to Read the Bible (and why it matters)
I remember my first real adult Bible. My mom gave it to me, it had my name engraved on the front cover and everything. I read that bible every night. It became a habit early in my life to read the Bible daily. There were many times during my teen years that I would come home drunk from a night of hanging out with my friends, doing stupid stuff, but by golly I read at least a verse or two from my Bible. I didn’t always understand it but I knew this was a very special book that would help me in life.
And it has.
Shaping and moulding
The Bible offers words of comfort and challenge. The words of the Bible, if taken into your soul will begin to work on you in a shaping way. We see the scripture as the very word of God which is “living and active…” and it works like a sharp knife to cut away the things that are not good in your life.
There are three different ways that I have come to read the Bible.
Literal
The first is what some Bible scholars call literal, which is not like it sounds. The literal reading has to do with reading it within its historical context, it is an attempt to get into the mind of those who were hearing it for the first time. It is helpful to make application to your life to know not just what the scripture means, but what it meant to those who were writing it.
Christological
The second way is to read it Christologically. In fact, the term, “word of God” literally refers not just to words on paper, but to the person of Jesus Christ. The incarnation is the very word of God made flesh. When we read scripture christologically, we read it, all of it, in the context of Jesus. Benedictine monk, Michael Casey describes this way of reading the Bible like when we read a mystery novel for the second time. We know “who did it” but now we read it noticing all the details we missed the first time.
God’s work in salvation history
Finally, and this kind of goes with the christological reading, we read it as a whole. The Bible is one beautiful story of salvation history. NT Wright calls it a five act drama.
1 Creation- the world and humans made by God and it was all good
2 Fall- all this goodness was destroyed by sin
3 Israel- God chooses one specific nation to represent him in the world
4 Jesus- the culmination of Israel in one person who fulfills all that the Law and the Prophets began. Jesus comes to bring salvation to the whole world; it all culminates in the cross and resurrection.
5 New Creation- the Church. Believers are empowered by the Holy Spirit to be God’s agents of change; this is a foretaste of heaven. Heaven and earth united.
Read it all the way through
Often we get little out of context snippets of the scriptures in Mass. It is a good idea to read it all the way through at least once in life so that you can get a sense of how it all fits together into a beautiful picture of what God has been, and still is, up to in this world.
I know it’s hard. There’s lots of places that really don’t make sense and there are parts that just seem really boring, but just try it. Muddle through the hard parts, don’t try to figure everything out before moving on. If don’t understand it at first, don’t worry about it. Invite the Holy Spirit to read it with you. The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to you to lead and guide into all truth. He is the one who enabled the scriptures to come about after all. The thing you need to know at this particular time in your life will be made manifest to you by the Spirit as you read.
Since God’s word is living and active, there may be something you read today and don’t understand it, but you may read it again later, or hear it in a homily at a later time in your life and suddenly it becomes clear to you.