How to Start Reading the Bible When You Do Not Know Where

It is 9:40 on a Saturday night.

The lamp is on. The reading glasses are on. The Bible is open on your knee to Leviticus, and the ribbon has been in this spot since February, because you started at Genesis in January, the way you would start any book, and somewhere between the tabernacle curtains and the laws about mildew the plan ran out.

You read the page anyway. Something about the fat of the kidneys. You close the book and set it on the end table, and you feel what you felt at fourteen with algebra, that other people have a key to this and you were out that day.

Here is what I want to show you. The Bible was never meant to be read like a novel from page one. The wall you hit was a map problem, not a verdict on you.

The short answer: To start reading the Bible, open a Gospel, John or Mark, and read one chapter a day. Read before you study, and ask the page one question: what does this say about God? The Word is food, not a test: “as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). Start with Jesus.

Start With a Gospel

Four books tell what Jesus did and said, and they are called Gospels. Open one first. Mark is the shortest and moves fast; Jesus is healing people before chapter one ends. John goes deeper, and says why he wrote: “but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.” (John 20:31)

You said yes to a Person. Before anything else, watch Him. Watch what He does with a leper, a tax collector, a woman everybody else crossed the street to avoid. The rest of the Bible is about Him, and makes far more sense once you know Him.

Genesis is not wrong. It is just not first. You would not get to know a man from his family’s property records before you had met him.

One Chapter, Read Before You Study

One chapter a day, read slowly, sitting down, with nothing else open. Not a plan that has you behind by Thursday.

And read it before you study it. A new reader who studies first ends up knowing the footnotes and never hearing the page. Read it the way you would read a letter from somebody who loves you. If a verse means nothing, keep going; it will be there next year.

A lamp lights the next step, not the whole road: “Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105) One chapter is a step.

Ask the Page One Question

What does this say about God?

Not what should I do. That question comes, but asked first it turns every chapter into a list of rules and you into a person who fails them. Ask instead who He is. In John 4 He sits down tired at a well with a woman who has had five husbands. What does that say about Him?

The answers add up to a Person. Paul says Scripture is “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), and doctrine is simply what is true about God.

This is the second of the four plain things in the week after saying yes. The third, finding a few people, has its own guide; a page read alone is only half of it.

God-Breathed, and Muttered Under the Breath

Two words tell you what you are holding.

The first is Paul’s. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” is, in Greek, one word: theopneustos. Theos, God. Pneō, to breathe. God-breathed. The lexicons give inspired by God; the picture under it is breath. This writing came out of God the way your words ride out on your breath. Scholars have debated whether the word means breathed out by God or breathing God out; most hold the first. The page on your knee came from Him.

The second word is Hebrew. God told Joshua, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night” (Joshua 1:8). Meditate is hāgâ. It is not sitting still, eyes closed. The same word is used of a lion growling low over its prey (Isaiah 31:4) and of a dove’s moan (Isaiah 38:14). To hāgâ Scripture is to mutter it under your breath until it is in you, which is why Joshua is told it must not depart from his mouth. Psalm 1 uses it of the man planted like a tree by water: “And in His law he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:2)

So read the chapter, then say one verse out loud, to the kitchen, to nobody. That is meditation in the Bible’s own language.

When It Is Only Eleven Minutes

I don’t have time for this. He is a bus driver. He finishes the route at 2:10 and has eleven minutes before the next, and he spends them in the driver’s seat, doors shut, a paperback Gospel of John open on the wheel. He is on chapter nine, the man born blind. He gets to the one thing the man knows, that he was blind and now he sees, and says it to the windshield, twice, under his breath.

A passenger knocks on the glass. He folds the corner of the page and opens the doors.

Scripture to Read Before You Study

Keep these on the first page.

• “Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105)
• “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16)
• “as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2)
• “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” (Joshua 1:8)
• “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

A Prayer Before You Open It

You may be the one with the ribbon in Leviticus. Move it to Mark 1 tonight, pray this, and read one chapter. That is the shape of every day in What Now?, the fifteen-day companion to God, What’s Next?: ten minutes, one thing, nothing to keep up with.

Lord, I have been trying to read Your Word the way I would read any book, and I got lost and felt stupid and quit. I am starting again, where You are. Open my eyes to see You in the page. I am asking to meet the One it is about, one chapter at a time. You said Your Word is a lamp to my feet, so light the next step and I will take it. Give me the appetite of a newborn for the milk of it. Put Your words in my mouth until they stay. In Jesus’ name, amen.

And listen for what He has been saying over every page you did not understand:

I was never grading you, child. I wrote this so you could find Me. Open it to where I am, and read.

Start where He is. The rest will make sense once you know Him.