We all know that the Bible is important.  What gives us pause is the difficulty we have reading it.  Some find it hard to understand.  Some find it uninteresting.  Some find it overwhelming.  Unless we enjoy reading the Bible, we will be torn between the pressure to ‘read the Bible like we should’ and the resistance we all to have to doing something we don’t enjoy.

Is the Bible hard to understand?  Let’s start with the premise that the Bible is easy to understand.  I mean, easy for regular people like you and me; not just the theology school grads.  God didn’t have to give us a Bible.  He didn’t have to create us at all.  Because He did create us and give us a Bible, I assume he meant for us(any of us) to understand the Bible when we read it.  In any conversation between God and Man, it’s up to God(the superior person) to make Himself understood.  I have found that we need professional help to be confused about the Bible.  Left to our own devices, we’ll find it easy to understand.

Now let’s talk about ‘uninteresting’.  Obviously, the book God wrote is about Him.  What could be more interesting?   In my experience, the Bible gets dull when I try to shoehorn religious ideas into scriptures that seem to say something else.  I was raised in a church-going home and I’ve been a devout Christian all my life, so religious ideas are second nature to me.   But when I let a scripture say what it says, whether it agrees with my religious ideas or not, it’s not so hard to keep reading.

What about overwhelming?  The Bible is a collection of writings called ‘books’.  The entire Bible can be read in 80 hours or less.  Who wouldn’t give 80 hours to find out about the most important person in(or out of) the Universe?  Some of these books are very short.  They are more like articles or essays.  The 27 shortest Bible books are no more than 6 chapters each.  Each one can be read in twenty minutes or less.  Each one deals with a particular subject.  These books are too short to get complicated.  (Throw in Ezra, Esther and Micah to make it an even thirty.)  Together they cover most, if not all, of the major Bible themes.  We can read one a day and gain a quick overview of these major Bible themes.  Then we’ll have the ‘big picture’ and the rest of the Bible will make more sense.

A personal note;  In school I studied Boolean algebra, but I could not understand it.  Later on, my work with computers led me to the study of logic gates.  Logic gates use Boolean logic to process data.  When I found that Boolean algebra had a practical application, it was easy for me to understand it.  The Bible is like that for me.  When I can see a practical application, I can understand it.  The scripture says, “Scripture is God-breathed and is useful…”

Thanks for reading.  I hope it helps.