by Keith Bassham
I am a reader. I love reading. I can even enjoy reading a good dictionary. And while some might think that is a sad commentary and may account for a very inactive social life in adolescence, it set me up perfectly for my vocation.
I accept that there was a time I did not read, but I have to take it on faith, because I have no memory of that time. What I do remember is entering the first grade (I was still five years old, and there was no kindergarten in Luther, OK, in 1959) with some rudimentary reading skills. What I did know I had picked up from my uncle’s hot rod and car magazines, and so I thought carburetor was pronounced carb-a-tooter, and my pronunciation of transmission sounded more like we needed to search for a missing train, but the smaller words I saw in class, like Dick, Jane, cat, dog, blue, and red were little challenge.
So reading is no chore. It’s more a habit. That said, I must confess I have never actually read through the Bible beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. I have read the entire Bible, you understand, and I do have a grasp of the whole narrative, and many parts of the Bible I have read many, many times over, but I have not read the Bible through in the way we generally think of reading it through.
It is embarrassing a bit when a preacher asks a congregation, “Who here has read the entire Bible from start to finish,” and I have to keep my hand at my side. I could fudge, I suppose, since I have read it all, but I know what the preacher means, and generally the question also has the one-year time limit attached. And so I have to pretend I didn’t understand the question.
I don’t discourage others from reading the Bible this way, but because of the arrangement of the books of the Bible (and I emphasize here the word books), it would be a little like walking to your bookshelf, pulling out the first volume, reading it, and then going for the second, and so on, without taking note of the subject matter or the author or the genre of literature. Again, I am not critical of reading the Bible this way, but the method does have drawbacks.
And I will say this — no passage of the Bible is unimportant. But, I must also say not all passages, chapters, and books are equally important for learning about God and His will for our lives.
However, in no case should a believer not read the Bible, or avoid reading the Bible. And if reading the Bible from start to finish is working for you (and you are not just dutifully getting it over with), then keep doing it. For a list of passages and chapters I consider particularly important for understanding what God has been up to, take a look at this month’s “AfterWords.”