90 Days Through The Bible

Karen and I, along with several people from church, have embarked on a quest to read through the entire Bible in 90 days. Think the intensity of those ubiquitous P90X workout infomercials, only taking that intensity to scripture reading instead of a body workout.

We'll call it B90X.
[Yes, this book really exists. I don't own it. Just saw it online. Gotta love those Christian marketers!]

It's a fascinating journey, and we're a little over halfway through the Old Testament. When you're reading 12 pages of the Bible a day, everyday, you don't have time to stop and dwell on a passage and try to apply it to your life; you can't decide to camp out in a chapter and dissect the sentence structure, or cross reference the other occurrences of a specific word, or look up the meaning of an obscure phrase in the Hebrew text.

What you can do is try to absorb a massive narrative that spans thousands of years, consume large amounts of poetic writing, and look at a book, or even books, in context to each other, not just look at the context of a verse to the surrounding verses.

It's caused me to look at God differently (yet another paradigm shift in my relationship with Him) and especially to think of His Word differently. I have a greater sense of the arc of God's involvement through history, both within and without Israel. I've noticed the difference in writing styles between books, the different leadership styles of various figures, even the varied focus of sections of the Psalms.

And simply consuming this much scripture daily means that I think about the Bible, and about God, both more and in new ways than I have before.

It's a daunting task. So daunting that I almost didn't commit to doing it. I mean, really, 12 pages with little print every day? You know that there will be a period when all we're reading is the prophets for days on end? You really want to sign up for that?

But I did. And some days are harder than others. I am convinced that God never intended anyone to read through the book of Proverbs in two days. Mind-numbing. There's great stuff there, in small doses. In one big chunk, at times it's like Confucious threw up on me. "Please, someone just clean me up so I can move on..."

Even with that, I highly recommend that you try this exercise. I'm sure it will change the way you think of God (and not always in comforting, precious-moment kinds of ways) and will inspire you unexpectedly.

I'd also recommend you read one chapter of Proverbs a day for the first 31 days after your other pages.

If not, at the very least, drink a LOT of coffee on your two day Proverbs binge.