In one way reading the Bible is like reading any other great piece of literature-your understanding of it deepens and is enriched the longer you live, the more you see and learn and feel. . . the years layer your schema ever more densely, drawing connections from everything to everything else. When you read the Bible through for the first time, you are just surveying the land.You get your bearings, figure out which way is East, which mountains are next to which lakes, where are the hot springs, where is the soil rich and where is it lying fallow. But every time you read it again you bring more to the text before you from the text of your own life, the text that you and God have been writing together, your own story. The Bible is The Story and yours will become a part of the The Story of God and His glorious works. So your life creates this enormous resource for understanding scripture, but scripture itself is another enormous resource for understanding each part. The more you read of the whole, the more you understand each part. You begin to recognize images and ideas from other books and chapters that shed light on the one you are currently viewing.
On your second reading you may notice, for example, that the Gospel of John begins by echoing the beginning of Genesis. In the beginning, God. . . In the beginning,was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Very purposefully the author draws your attention back to the bedrock of Judean dogma. John is telling you that his writing is a continuation, a cohesive part of the whole, not a breaking away, not a totally new "religion." You will find glorious patterns woven all the way through the old testament and the new, like an other worldly tapestry of staggering beauty. I always think it is like looking at one of those three dimensional pictures. You have to study it for a bit before you can "see" the image, and when you see it, it is glorious--it's so obvious now, and so beautiful, but it would not be seen if you gave it only a glance to 'prove' itself to you.
Genesis is a great place to start since it is the beginning of the Bible and describes the beginning of Earth and mankind. It's amazing how many of the central and celebrated OT narratives are all compressed in the book of Genesis. 1) Creation 2) The Fall 3) Cain & Abel 4) Noah and the Ark 5) The Tower of Babel 6) Abraham-Called out of a foreign land to become father of nations, Sharing his lot with Lot (actually giving Lot a lot more), Lying about his wife being his sister in the early days when his faith was small Trusting God for a child well past his and Sarah's fertile years, Having a son with a concubine, trying to "help God out", Angels appearing and announcing the birth of a son in his old age, Naming him Isaac, which means Laughter, both because his mother laughed at the angels' announcement and because he brought so much laughter into their lives, he was the promise of God made manifest, Being asked by God to sacrifice his son to prove that he loved God more than he loved God's gift to him, and God, seeing his love and obedience and faith, stepping in to provide a sacrificial substitute, a foreshadowing of God sacrificing His own son so that Abraham and the rest of humanity would not have to sacrifice theirs, or themselves.
Finding Isaac a wife from the "old country", Isaac's twins, Jacob and Esau, and God's choice of Jacob though he was the younger by a few minutes, and though he was a devious self-interested schemer. God chose Jacob like he chose us, not because WE are good, but because HE is good. And yet the poetic justice that Jacob the cunning is out-deceived by his father-in-law into marrying a woman he did not love before he could marry the one he did. Rachel and Leah and all the strife between women who want both children and the love of their husband, and whose birth quotes encapsulate each woman's new stage of thinking and trusting and loving with the birth of each new child. All kinds of escapades with Jacob and his 12 sons and 1 daughter (including her rape and her brothers avenging it, literally overkill) Benjamin is born and Rachel dies, and the jealous brothers (sons of the rejected wife) throwing Joseph in a well and then selling him into slavery, The roller coaster of Joseph's life, lifted up, cast down, lifted up, cast down, lifted up, cast down. . . (reminds me of my own!) probably because God wants to make the point that we do not make ourselves successful, He allows it, or not, should he choose to remind us that we are nothing without Him, The salvation of Abraham's tribe through Joseph's rise in Egypt. . . what Satan had meant for evil God turned to glorious good. Ok, I lost count. (:
One of my study Bibles mentions that Genesis spans a larger period of time than the rest of the Bible combined. I prefer and highly recommend reading each book of the Bible in ONE sitting. Don't forget that the entire Bible can be read aloud at a normal speaking pace in fewer than 80 hours! It is not daunting that it is "long," it is daunting that we must think so clearly and reflectively, that we must ask Him for illumination in a way we need not ask in order to read a modern day novel, that we must study to understand the context. That we must read it again and again to understand the rhythm of the whole majestic symphony. It is daunting because it is not the word of man, it is the Word of God.
When I made the journal entry that I am typing from in 2002, it took me four hours that day to get through Genesis, but mainly because I got so excited seeing the patterns in the birth quotes of Jacob's wives and having to color code and lay it all out in an elaborate chart so I could look at the patterns more closely (there are a lot of other stories packed in between births). This was the first time I think I noticed that this custom of recording (orally or in writing) a quote from the mother at the birth of a child (male children only?) is a pattern which pervades the Bible and has meaning in itself; I will present that story in my next entry. (:
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