You’d be hard-pressed to find a more intimidating book for the average person than the Bible.
I have two sitting next to me right now. The first is an English Standard Version (ESV), single column edition containing 1,488 pages, in something like 7 or 8-point font. The second is a New International (NIV), double column edition containing 1,302 pages, in something like 8 or 9-point font. What’s more, they both have textual footnotes on every page with even smaller font pointing to different places between their covers. If that wasn’t enough, the table of contents for these two Bibles each show an astonishing list of 66-books with odd names like Deuteronomy, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Colossians, Nahum, Philemon, and Habakkuk.
It’s a lot to take in.
The problem is, it’s so much to take in that a lot of regular folks—people like you and me—find that the Bible is not worth the trouble—so we just don’t read it. It’s difficult enough to find a regular book that’s understandable and entertaining to read, let alone one that’s almost 1,500 pages long.
I remember being a little kid and getting the motivation a few times to read the Bible for myself. I would grab the one given as a gift, flip open the cover, pass through the several introductory pages about translation philosophy and notes about that particular edition (those pages didn’t make sense to me at that age anyways), find my way to some book called Genesis and start reading, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gn 1:1)
I don’t think I ever made it past the fifth page.
I would be reading along, wonder where this story was going, flip through some pages and be totally lost, because the Bible didn’t read like any other book I had read before. Some of that was due to me being a little kid. It wasn’t the Bible’s fault that the me at age 9 couldn’t make heads or tails of a book that wasn’t written like the “Goosebumps” books I would fly through. The Bible was written thousands of years ago, over at least a thousand-year period of time. There’s no way it could compare with the hot-off-the-presses R. L. Stine books I couldn’t wait to make my way through.
So what do we do with this intimidating book? Is just a lost book to most us? A book that if it was only written differently we could find time to read, understand, and respond to what it was saying?
It doesn’t have to be a lost book. In fact, I think with a little re-presentation of what the Bible is, and what’s in it, it can become not only a book that’s possible for us to read, understand, and respond to, but a book that we would find indispensable in our effort to live the kind of lives God has called us to live.
Most of the time when the Bible is talked about, it’s described as a self-contained, one-volume book. Some will point out that there’s a division within the book itself, which break it up into two main collections called the Old Testament and the New Testament. That’s helpful, but there’s more help to be found as there are further collections within those collections that aren’t identified as clearly.
The Old Testament
The Pentateuch
Within the collection called the Old Testament, which is about the first two-thirds of any Bible you’d pick up, there are natural (albeit somewhat hidden) smaller collections making up those first 39-books. The first smaller collection has come to be called the Pentateuch, which (I know) is another weird word associated with the Bible. What the word Pentateuchmeans, though, is pretty straightforward. It means basically, the five scrolls. This Pentateuch collection contains the first five books called Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
And, with that, we’ve gone from a daunting 39-books to five—a much more manageable collection of books within the larger book of the Bible.
For someone who has never read anything out of the Old Testament, and making their way through the entirety of the 39-book collection is too much to get into, it might make sense to work through just the Pentateuch. After someone has read starting in Genesis through Deuteronomy, they will have both gotten their feet wet in the biblical text, and made their way through a considerable collection of the overall collected biblical texts.
The Historical Books
After that smaller five-book collection is a little larger collection commonly referred to as the historical books. In this collection you’ll find the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
Here’s something really interesting about this collection: the books of 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, and Ezra and Nehemiah, are really smaller collections all on their own. Originally the two books we’re used to, such as 1 & 2 Kings, were just one story. We find them divided in our Bibles, but they don’t have to be read like that. Also, the individual books of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one. So you could set yourself the task of reading Ezra and Nehemiah and you will have read one of those ancient collections within a collection—you would be reading the Bible.
The Wisdom Books
The next collection within the larger collection of the Bible is what’s commonly referred to as the wisdom books(sometimes called the poetic books). These books include a couple books that even those who’ve never read anything from the Bible would be familiar. Those books are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon).
Within this collection we can further group a few of the books into a three-part relationship. Those are Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. For someone who has never read anything out the Old Testament, reading this smaller collection within the wisdom books might prove helpful, encouraging, and exciting as you see how different books within the Bible could be in conversation with one another.
The Prophetic Books
The last main collection of Old Testament books contains the prophets. In this collection you’ll find the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—a lot of these books being the main ones Jesus refers to in his teachings. And, just as with the historical books, we can further break up this collection into two smaller collections of the major and minor prophets.
The major prophets are not those prophetic books that are more important than the others, but those books that are longer. In that collection you’ll find the books of Isaiah, through Daniel, which leaves the books of Hosea through Malachi as the minor prophets. Choosing to read through either the major or minor prophets would definitely make you a Bible reader.
After those four smaller collections within the larger Old Testament collection, we come to the New Testament collection, which is where you might be more familiar—it might even be where you started reading the Bible, if you’ve read some of it before. Similar to the Old Testament collection, we have smaller collections of books within this larger collection.
The New Testament
The Gospels and Acts
The first smaller collection within the New Testament is called the Gospels and Acts. In this collection of books we have (you guessed it) the four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—followed up by the book of Acts. As we were able to do before, we can find an even smaller collection within this one.
Within the Gospels and Acts we have three gospels that are pretty similar to one another and an outlier one that, although still tells the same overall story about Jesus, goes about it in a unique way. This first smaller collection is commonly called the Synoptic Gospels, which includes of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. One of the cool things in this Gospels and Acts collection is that it’s pretty clear that the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts was the same person. You can see this for yourself by how Acts references the beginning of Gospel of Luke. So, if you wanted to, you could begin reading the Bible not by trying to take it all in at once, but by starting with the much smaller collection of the Gospel of Luke and Acts.
The Letters
The second main collection of books within the New Testament is the letters (or, epistles, if you’re more familiar with that word). Within this collection of letters you’ll find (you guessed it, again) a collection of letters written by several different people (Paul, Peter—whoever wrote Hebrews—John, and Jude). These letters are Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude.
This smaller collection within the New Testament is where the Christian church has spent a lot of its time—and for good reason. It’s been found to be particularly helpful to us in our day-to-day lives. In this collection you’ll find people like Paul and Peter writing to churches and individual folks they know to address issues ranging from personal relationships, theological realities, and church-life, among many, many others. It might be the place you’d like to begin reading the Bible.
The Revelation
The last collection of collections within the Bible is just one book—the Revelation. It’s with this smallest collection where many movies have been made and many books have been written. This might be the most intimidating book within the entire biblical collection, but it doesn’t have to be. At its core, it’s a book about worship. In particular, it’s a book about those who choose to worship the beast and the implications and consequences that come from that decision, and those who choose to worship God and the implications and consequences that come from that decision. If you were to pick one book out of the entire Bible to read in one sitting, Revelation might be the book for you.
One of the things any runner learns early on in distance running is that when they get ready to hit the pavement for their first 15-mile run, they shouldn’t be thinking about the entire run when they start. It’s too much. They can’t get to the end of the entire 15-miles without running the first 14. So, when they start, their only focus is on the mile in front of them, because they know they can’t get to mile 2 without running the first one.
This is the same practice I would suggest for reading the Bible, especially if it’s felt for too long like an impossible task. You might start by picking just one of the books out of the prophetic collection. You might even pick the shortest of the collection. Or maybe you’d rather jump all the way to the New Testament and start with a book like 1 John.
Perhaps, though, you’d like to read one of the smaller collections in its entirety before moving onto another one. The Gospels and Acts might be the right place for you. Once you get them read—no matter how long it takes—you can celebrate in the satisfaction of completing that section, just like a runner does when they pass the four-mile mark on their way to completing the next 11 of them.
The point is, there’s no reason you have to feel intimidated by the fact that you picked up a 1,500-page book to read. It’s 1,500 pages but, as we’ve seen, it’s really just a large collection of much smaller collections, of which are 50 to 100-pages. And those are much more manageable.