Bible Reading for the Soul

Well, I passed something of a milestone this morning and on the same day as my wife's birthday. I cannot remember how many years ago it was, I would guess five or six, maybe more, that I went looking for a new Bible to study. I had recently received training in the inductive method of Bible study and was very excited about the results as I applied these concepts to my personal study time. So to enhance that experience I wanted to find a Bible that had wide empty margins so I could make notes and cross-references of my own. As I searched from store to store I was surprised that I could not find such a Bible. I was getting somewhat frustrated and didn't know what to do until I ran across a New American Standard Bible that was titled The New Inductive Study Bible. It not only had open margins big enough for me to use but it had many suggestions inside on how to study inductively. I also very much liked the fact that it was a NASB because I have heard for years that it is one of the most respected translations for its accuracy by most language experts on the Bible. So I purchased it and began a systematic inductive study of the whole Bible.

Several years before that I had also started compiling my own outline of reading the Bible chronologically and have been trying to fine-tune it ever since. So when I started this reading I decided to follow my own sequence that I had written out while at the same time updating it when I found problems. I also decided to have parallel studies, reading through the Old Testament in one study and the New Testament in the other study so I wouldn't get bogged down and discouraged when the material might seem dry in the OT like I have run into before.

Another factor came into play that fed into my interest in this project was my emerging understanding of the truth about hell-fire and the nature of God in relation to that. As I continued to study inductively through both the Old and New Testaments I was discovering amazing insights about this subject that were radically challenging and dispelling from my mind many of the myths circulating about God in religion today. So I soon decided to begin compiling as many texts as I could discover that shed fresh light on this most important subject so I could better understand and present it to others. I decided that before I tried to put all the pieces together I would like to completely finish at least one full study of the whole Bible so I could uncover as much as possible from the first round.

What I began to uncover began to amaze me even more than I expected. As I read through some of the Old Testament prophets that before I had forced myself to endure and seemed so dry and depressing, this time viewing these passages with new glasses, a new paradigm, I started seeing intense, passionate messages from God that began making me realize that His primary focus of attention, His overpowering obsession, was on the final day of revealing after the millenium. This was a bit of a surprise growing up as I have in a culture that puts almost exclusive emphasis on the Second Coming and the rest of the story almost as an addendum. I began to realize, as I read through books that before were depressing and dry, that God is repeatedly pointing us to the final day when everything will be finished, resolved, and most importantly He can be fully reunited with His children that He has been separated from for so many millenia. These “dry, depressing, boring” prophets of the Old Testament now came alive for me as for the first time I began to glimpse the intense passion of God shining through them in messages that I have never heard anyone talk about before.

Many times I felt the Spirit pointing out things to me that challenged the beliefs I had been raised with. I had to make decisions time after time to lay aside my presuppositions and denominational training to receive what was becoming more and more plain directly from the Word of God. But as I did I began to see such a beautiful consistency that I could never see before. The hard questions that so many people have about God I now realized were almost always produced by false presentations of His character and dealings with us from religious authorities claiming to represent Him.

As I continued to study I would often have brought to my mind other things I had read elsewhere in the Bible that shed significant understanding on what I was reading and I would cross-reference them whenever I could. I began to notice there were certain issues that seem very important to God because the cross-references were beginning to overflow the capacity of my margins to contain them in certain spots. Interestingly, these were often not the “doctrines” that I had always been instructed as being the most important in typical religion. I am not saying they are not important, but what I am discovering is that God seems to often have different priorities on what is important to Him than what typically people have claimed.

So what was the milestone that I reached today? Well, I just reached the end of my first complete study of the Old Testament. I have been through the New Testament several times during the process, but obviously it took much longer to conclude my first reading of the Old Testament. One reason is has taken me so many years to finish this project is that I determinedly resisted the temptation to just “cover territory” in my reading. My Dad used that method for many years and I felt, while it may have had some benefits, that it became more of an end in itself instead of an opportunity to hear the voice of God to the soul. For more years than I was alive he read the whole Bible through every year nearly without fail. Many of those years I was involved in this marathon process, and it certainly made us well acquainted with the Bible very early on. It also had the distinct benefit of making me a very proficient reader very early in grade school. Since we were usually required to participate in this reading every day in family worship, I very early on had to grapple with words well beyond what most others my age were familiar with. And that, all in the ancient, confusing dialect of the King James Version.

Now that I have finished my first pass through the whole Bible, what am I going to do next? Well, I'm really sure yet – its only been a few minutes since I finished. I have a number of partial topic studies that have emerged in the process but I don't know if I will finish them or not. I will likely start over at the beginning and do another pass, as this time I have no doubt I will discover far more that I did the first time. As my “glasses” improve I am able to see so much more in almost every passage than I ever thought possible before. Of course, none of this can take place by my own skill and wisdom. I believe none of these wonderful revelations came to me because of my smartness or personal wisdom. I have daily been careful to ask God to use His Spirit to reveal the truth about Himself to me in what I read and He has been faithful to do it.

These past years of study have changed much of my life, my core beliefs, and certainly my relationship with God. I am so appreciative that so many times God has revealed important concepts to me before I learned from other people similar insights that confirmed what I had recently discovered. If I had read their books first, it could be insinuated that I was just a follower of that person and his devised ideas about religion. But because I discovered them myself, then when I read other books, even when I didn't realize they were on the same subject, these writings only served to deepen my convictions and broaden the base of my understanding.

One project that I do want to work on now is to finish compiling all the texts that I noted during my study on the subject of hell, the fire of God, wrath, etc. and begin to analyze them, organize them and try to help others make better sense of them. A number of people during this time have urged me to write on this subject. I have written a number of pieces on it which are now on my blog, most of them under the label of “hell” and “wrath”. However, I fear there are still big chunks missing that need to be filled in and a more systematic organization needs to be developed to make it easier for others who are open-minded searchers to discover for themselves what I have been learning.

Another very enriching experience for me has been getting into some of the stories of the Bible and experiencing the emotions of the people involved. I have done a great deal of underlining as I read as well as cross-referencing and notation. Some of the stories seemed to just explode off the pages and I would find myself scrambling to write down the pictures, emotions and details that I saw emerging from the text. I found that if I watched for “emotion-relative” words in the text and allowed myself to enter into those emotions as I read the context that I would see so much more in the story than I had ever done before. Often I would grab a legal pad and began writing what I was seeing and experiencing and ended up with quite a number of pads full of notes. Some of them were lost when we moved from Michigan to Illinois but I hope that someday they will show up again so I can copy them into my computer. I have been transcribing all the the pads that I do have and have been slowly adding them to my blog as I have time. In the past few days I have been sick, but I have also been copying the story of Peter just after the resurrection of Jesus. There was so much there that I could relate to. I wrote these stories back in the end of 2005 and as I put them on my blog I enter them under the approximate dates that they were written and then label them according to their general content. Even the process of copying these stories off the pads into digital format has been a real blessing to me, reminding me of lessons and important things that I need to remember myself. I pray that God will simply use them to maybe inspire others to look at Him differently and maybe even to began recording their own thoughts and insights as the Spirit reveals God to them as well.

One important thing I learned and observed when we were being trained and were experiencing inductive Bible study was the crucial element of self-discovery under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Time after time during those studies people would be overwhelmed by the depth and beauty of seemingly insignificant words and phrases when the insight and conviction suddenly broke into their heart. I have experienced this many times in my own study as well. But it is only the presence of God that creates the environment for this to happen and stay in truth. If God's Spirit of truth is not invited and encouraged to be present by maintaining a humble, teachable spirit on our part, we will inevitably arrive at conclusions that will distort the truth about God and perpetuate the enemy's lies while we will not realize what is happening.

But God has a vested interest in revealing the truth about Himself to every one of us. He does not play favorites. He has promised to personally tutor absolutely anyone who is willing to entertain a hunger to know Him intimately and challenge the lies about Him that have ruined our lives for so long. I continue to want to choose that place. I want my capacity to greatly increase. As I look inside and see how frighteningly small my capacity is to love even my own immediate family, I cringe in horror and regret. But I believe that my only hope is to continue to connect at a heart level to the One who has infinite capacity for love and has the power to progressively create more capacity and more love of the real kind inside me that I so desperately need.