As I've shared in some previous posts (here and here), I'm reading the entire Bible during this Lenten season. It's certainly not an impossible task, although some days are easier than others. Yesterday, I finished the Hebrew Scriptures (aka the Old Testament), and today I read the Gospel of Matthew. Which means I'm actually ahead of schedule by a full day! Several years ago I read the whole Bible for Lent, and I seem to remember it being a much more difficult task. This time around, I'm really enjoying myself the vast majority of the time. For example, I remember Psalm 119 (the longest chapter in Scripture) being a real chore. This time, I really enjoyed it, and it didn't seem as long as I thought it would. Jeremiah was a bit tedious, to my way of thinking, but Ezekiel was awesome (except for some of the stuff at the very end of the book about the new temple measurements).
Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I read through the Hebrew Scriptures:

• There's a lot more grace than Christians usually think. A lot of Christians (not all, but a lot) talk as if the God of the Old Testament is mostly concerned with the Law...and smiting. While there is a pretty fair amount of smiting in the OT, there are some stunning passages of grace. Read through the book of Hosea some time, and you'll see what I mean. Or some of the passages of hope towards the end of Ezekiel. Actually, throughout the prophets, the theme of God's sorrow at how his people have rejected him is a common theme. And does he smite them? Well, yes...for awhile. But he also tells the prophets of his plans to replace his people's heart of stone with a heart of flesh. A beautiful image, if there ever was one.
• That being said, there are some pretty bloody passages, as well as some language that you probably wouldn't use in front of your grandma. Take a look at Ezekiel 23 some time, if you want an idea of what I'm talking about. That is some pretty explicit imagery. One thing is for sure, those prophets weren't prudes. This leads me to my next point...
• The Bible is not just a bunch of nice little stories for Sunday School. Way too often, I think we try to distill much of the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Scriptures, down to some easily digestible stories with a nice little moral. David and Goliath becomes a charming story of the little guy defeating the big giant with his plucky can-do attitude.  Job becomes a story about a really patient guy who keeps on believing in God through the tough times. And so on. I get it, we aren't going to teach Ezekiel 23 to a bunch of six-year-olds. But the problem is, I have the feeling that many (perhaps most) adults still see the Bible as a collection of heartwarming tales, or little life lessons. I see people online all the time, talking/writing about how reading the Bible boosts their spirits or gives them comfort. And there is some of that in there: Psalm 23 is a beautiful passage of comfort, for example. But there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that is, and should be, very unsettling. Scary, even. We do the Scriptures a great disservice when we try to turn it into a storybook or an instruction manual. (I'm thinking of that idiotic "B.I.B.L.E. = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" slogan.) Honestly, the Bible challenges us at every turn.
• When you really read the Bible, there is a lot of stuff that simply doesn't make sense. Oh sure, if you have a Study Bible, it may explain some of the really complex stuff. But you have to watch out there, too. I was reading Ezekiel from the HCSB Study Bible, and there was a lot of stuff in the notes that was straight out of dispensationalist theology, with which I heartily disagree. The thing is, there is a great cultural divide between us and the writers of Scripture, a fact that we often forget, due to our familiarity with some of the Bible. I'm not saying that the cultural divide is impassable, or that the Bible doesn't apply to us in many useful, edifying ways. But we often forget that it wasn't exactly written to us. That fact becomes a bit clearer when you read the whole thing cover-to-cover. That being said...
• I'm not sure reading the Bible cover-to-cover is all that useful an enterprise. What? Why would I spend my time doing just that during Lent, if I thought that? Let me explain. My Lenten discipline this year is just that: a self-imposed discipline. It's about making myself do something I wouldn't normally do, and to look at the Bible in a slightly different way than I usually would. And yes, for me there's a bit of the concept of choosing a task that can be...exhausting. In general, though, I don't see the point of reading the Bible all the way through every single year, which I know some people actually do. One thing that becomes very clear to me when I read it straight through is how the exercise departs from the Bible's nature as a collection of writings: it's not a novel, it's a library. You don't try to read through your entire library at home, do you? You don't read through an encyclopedia, hoping do discover a unified story. (And no, I'm not saying the Bible is the same kind of collection as an encyclopedia.) For everyday reading, I'm more inclined to look up things that apply to a situation or theme that is meaningful to me, or following a lectionary, that takes into account the ebb and flow of the Church Year.
• One thing I've been doing differently this time through is that I've been reading from a lot of different translations of the Bible. Among the versions I've read from: King James Version, New Revised Standard Version, New King James Version, Christian Standard Bible, Modern English Version, Lexham English Bible, Revised Standard Version, JPS Tanakh, JPS Holy Scriptures (1917), New International Version, Holman Christian Standard Bible, Jerusalem Bible, and Bibliotheca (a multi-volume reader's version based on the ASV). I've also read several lengthy passages aloud (usually when no one else is in the house). I can tell you, because of the reading aloud, I can attest to a new appreciation of the King James Version. The language, as archaic as it may be from time to time, is really spectacular. But there is a lot of good in several of those other versions, too. (I actually never really appreciated the NKJV, for example, but it's quite good.)

So I'm scheduled to finish the whole Bible on Easter Sunday, but I may finish a day or so earlier than that. It certainly has been a wild ride thus far. I expect the New Testament will go fairly quickly, due in no small part to my greater familiarity with much of the material. I will probably share some thoughts on the NT when i get towards the end, or when I'm done with the whole thing. Thanks for reading...

We're just under a month away from Easter at this point, and I am nearing the midpoint of the Bible. I am halfway through the book of 2 Chronicles, so I'm basically in the middle of a big recap..."Previously on...THE BIBLE!" It's not the easiest read: there are lots of long stretches of genealogies that make it slow going. And I can't help thinking, "I just read about all these people...why do I have to go through the whole thing all over again?" It actually gives me greater appreciation for the traditional Jewish order of the Hebrew Scriptures, where Chronicles comes at the very end.

Still, now that I've finished the whole saga of the kings of Israel and Judah, as told in 1 Samuel-2 Kings, I do feel a sense of accomplishment. Sure, it's an almost endless saga of good king/bad king, but it ends with the very dramatic event of the Babylonian Captivity, so there is a payoff at the end of the sequence. Meanwhile, 2 Kings has one of my favorite odd stories in it: the little paragraph at the end of the second chapter, where the boys mock Elisha the prophet, with disastrous consequences. I'll let the Bible tell it...

Pretty weird, no? It's one of those weird little, oddly detailed stories that you come across in Scripture from time to time. They often don't advance the larger story at all, but they are interesting.

But back to Chronicles for a second. It's also interesting to me that the Chronicles version of King David's story completely skips the embarrassing tale of Bathsheba, and David's murder of Uriah the Hittite (Bathsheba's husband). If you were to read only the Chronicler's depiction of David, you would come away with a picture of him as the greatest king ever, with no evidence to the contrary. Oh, and another thing: the story of King Saul almost completely disappears in Chronicles. It's a really big deal in the earlier version of the story: Saul trying to kill David, and David always outwitting him. Saul only rates a brief paragraph in 1 Chronicles, almost an afterthought. The Chronicler just wants to move the story along to the hero--King David.

Well, after Chronicles, it's just a few relatively short books before I come to the Writings (as they're often called in Jewish Bibles): Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon. That's good stuff, and I'm looking forward to reading it all again.  Thanks for reading!