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I'm reading through the Bible in a year using this plan. I'll be putting some personal notes and thoughts here, journal style...
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Today's readings:
These are thinking aloud notes about making sense of Bible stories, following up on this note about how I'm working out how to read the Bible.
Trying to match up the story of Noah with physical evidence about the world we live in is hard. It makes me go back to the basics of how and why to take the Bible seriously at all. My aim is not to sit in judgement over God and His words, but allow myself to be shaped by them. This doesn't mean switching off my brain, though. One of God's promises in the Bible, which must be self-consistent if we have to take it seriously, is that we will grow to worship God "in Spirit and in truth." In other words, spiritual ideas don't replace honest, truthful analysis of the world. There is a place where they meet and support each other. God doesn't want us to live in a fantasy world when we think about Him.
Being moved by art
I was once blown away by a sculpture called "Spiky Thing" by Tim Noble and Sue Webster. On entering the display room at Sydney's MCA, it looked like a pile of scrap, dense and meaningless. The viewer has to walk around it to make any more sense of it. Only two things can make it look better than random. A light source in the right place will shine through the sculpture and make a recognisable shadow on the wall. The viewer can see this image in the sculpture itself, but only if they move themselves, so that they see in the direction that the light is pointing.
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Today's readings:
Paul's letter to the Romans has pretty much everything you need to know about who God is, who we are, and what we need to do about it. The form is sometimes difficult and abstract, there isn't much story and the illustration looks unusual to us, but the structure of Paul's case is so strong that this letter is used by at least one major legal training university today as an example of how to put a great case together.
The case is that God made us, loves us, wants us to know and live with Him, and has made it possible to do so through Jesus.
I am struck by the idea that all the clues are there in creation already. We could, if we were smart enough, work out that there is a God and understand what He is about. Paul suggests that anyone could do this - so it's not dependent on the ideas we were brought up with. In fact, changing our ideas about faith when we increase our understanding is something Paul did himself - his life turned around pretty dramatically after meeting Jesus.
So why do so many people resist the idea of change and growth in faith? Why does it seem so respectable to some to reject the idea of God - as if we have outgrown such a thing - or to make a commitment to agnosticism, perhaps believing we can never know about the reality of God?
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Today's readings:
Big picture stuff today. Genesis is one of the world's best known and controversial books. How do we make sense of the creation of the world and our role in it? Are there any bigger questions?
The "was the world made in seven days or not?" debate always strikes me as tedious and pointless, distracting from the point of the passage. When we look at what Genesis meant to its original readers, we have to remember that they were not stupid. Just because it was a long time ago, they had lives and families, and the idea of someone living to the age of 900 would have sounded just as odd to them as it does to us.
The point isn't to fuss over those details, but appreciate that God did something remarkable, amazing, in making the world and our role in it. There isn't just diversity in God's creation, there is personality, and we can learn about God from it. Most remarkable, God made it good. When God made us and looked at all of the world with us in it, "it was very good."
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Reading the Bible in a year |
About these notes
I'm using this space as a personal journal while I go through a plan to read the Bible in a year. I'm sharing the notes online because I'd like to be open about what comes up as I do this, and if there is anything which catches your interest, it would be great to hear from you. I'm not trying to write a decent Bible commentary, however - writing short thoughts every day on big topics will be much too patchy for that.
If you're looking for good study aids for Bible reading, the ones I use most often are the NIV Study Bible (good for general background on the meaning of Bible texts), the Life Application Bible (does what it says on the cover - it's good for thoughts on how to apply the Bible to real life), the Classic Bible Commentary (for perspectives from different times in history) and the IVP New Testament Commentary series (the "big guns" for when you really need something in depth - I've heard decent preachers lift entire passages from these books for their talks. I'd try not to do that myself, but there's always something worth thinking about and sharing in there...)
By the way, in case you think I have the world's biggest bookshelf for these, I don't - they all fit neatly onto my iPhone using Pocket Bible from Laridian. I've not used paper for regular study for nearly ten years.
Why read the Bible?
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