How Four Tips to Reading the Bible Made it Come Alive in the Best and the Worst Ways

Since moving into our new house, I’ve been waking up between 5:30-6:15am each morning. Maddening, right? At first, I would have agreed. But it dawned on me... no kids, a quiet house, and an unrushed morning. It’s like the Magic Hour at Disneyland before the gates open to the throngs of impatient, anxious people! I turn off the alarm system, brew the coffee, turn on the living room lamp, open my Bible, and settle into my chair with my mug. 

But this morning felt anything but magic.

I closed my Bible in disgust. What I read was just too much.

I’ve read through the Bible before, sometime in my 20’s. I remember taking it on a backpacking trip through Europe with my friend Kristen and reading sections of the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) along the way. One night in particular, I remember reading on my bed in an apartment we rented overlooking the cobblestone town square of Vernazza - a small town in the Cinque Terre region of Italy – while hearing the faint chatting of old men smoking pipes below. A week later, when most of our possessions got stolen in the Milan train station (long story), I was relieved to see that, for some reason, I had packed my Bible in my big bag instead of the now-missing carrying pack.

Although by no means would I award myself with a badge of Biblical Literacy, the Bible has felt familiar. It’s ‘characters’ too.  I’ve taken Bible classes, read through biblical scholarly commentaries, and studied some great Bible resources (like this one) to understand the history of God’s relationship with His people. It’s not an easy collection of ancient texts to stomach. Some parts were downright hard to read. But even the messy, heavy parts I could reconcile.

Until this morning.

It has been brewing for a week now. Reading through Joshua and Judges last week was a pure test of endurance. I did just fine with Leviticus (a documentation of the many rules God imposed on His people to keep them holy). But what almost did me in were the endless massacres in Joshua and the moral failures in Judges. Then today I got to the story of Rizpah in 2 Samuel. Game over.

Long story short, there was a famine when David was king. He asked God why and God said it was punishment for when the previous king, Saul (long dead), attacked a group of people (the Gibeonites) that he originally promised not to attack. (I have lots of angsty feelings here about God using devastation to inflict punishment for past sins but I digress). So David asked the remnant of the Gibeonites how he could reconcile with them. They said to deliver seven of Saul’s male descendants to them so they could kill them. (Ugh). So David went out, found seven male descendants of Saul, and the Gibeonites killed them, exposing their bodies on a hill for everyone to see (double ugh). Sure enough, the crops started growing back. Famine over.

But Rizpah.

Rizpah was a concubine of King Saul (so many ugh’s). She bore his children, two sons of whom David offered up to the Gibeonites. When her sons were put to death and left to hang by the crops, she laid on a nearby rock and ‘from the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heaves on the bodies, she did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night’. David heard about her and had pity. He had the bodies removed and buried along with Saul’s remains. End of story.

You have to develop thick skin to stomach all the bloodshed and vengeance documented in the Bible. And the fact that God seemingly used human life as the currency to pay the debt of dishonoring Him. But today I couldn’t do it. I read Rizpah’s story, shut my Bible, and cried.

“God, no. Seriously. Why? It wasn’t her debt to pay. Saul was long dead. Her sons didn’t do anything wrong. Why the famine? How is more death part of your plan for justice?” I imagined Rizpah not as a character in a long, messy book but as a woman like me. A mom. I imagined her shivering through the long nights as rain soaked her thin linen shawl and ran down her spine. Shivering, starving, and alone. I imagined the sounds of hungry animals crouching nearby as she thrashed her arms around, making loud obnoxious desperate noises to ward them off, all the while weeping. Fear and grief and reckless abandon. A mother’s love trying to protect whatever was left of her sons – their bodies.

The reality of this woman did me in this morning. I couldn’t reconcile it. I couldn’t stomach it. Too awful to reconcile with a good God and yet a knowing - a deep, tested, personal knowing - that God is indeed sovereign. A painstaking tug-of-war. This is the Bible for me lately.

It’s become alive in the best and worst ways.

It started in May 2019 when I was asked to be the main speaker at a women’s church conference. Speaking is my thing but this was entirely different. Instead of being paid by corporations to teach on speaking presence, I was teaching from holy ancient texts. The fear of teaching it wrong was stifling. I had no desire to make TED-Talk-like sermons, using a reference of scripture here or there to prop up the point I wanted to make, a point that would surely feel digestible, relevant, inspiring, and immediately applicable. Nope. Instead, I was committed to teaching truth, even if it was messy and hard.

In the four months of studying the book of Job in preparation for the women’s conference, something beautiful happened. Slowly, four personal commitments evolved about how I would approach the Bible.  They changed everything. These four commitments made reading The Word so much more powerful, beautiful, compelling, and relevant. But they also caused problems. They wore down that ‘thick skin’ needed to stomach the hard parts. They softened me. They became a blessing and curse. Here they are.

1. Read unhurried

I always feel rushed. It’s probably self-imposed because I love the thrill of busy! But I found that the other three commitments were dependent on getting this first one right. I couldn’t rush reading the Bible. If I treated it like a task to check off, or only gave myself five minutes of ‘devotion time’, I wasn’t approaching the Word of God with the reverence, respect, and space it deserved. I’d find myself scanning a paragraph, realizing my mind had wandered, jumping back up to the top, only to rescan the paragraph again because I was distracted by the nagging dishwasher that needed unloading or that clever post I should publish on Instagram. Rinse and repeat, on and off, for years. But in the spring of 2019,  when I resolved to sit down with my Bible unhurried, things started changing. No Bible reading plan. No goal for the day. Just sitting down, showing up and soaking it in. Wise Bible scholars suggest reading in chunks, not just a verse or two at a time. If we don’t, we miss context. If we miss context, we’ll miss the beautiful, rich details that reveal what God was truly teaching. Reading wisely is reading unhurried.

2. Read with curiosity

Reading unhurried gave me space to react to scripture. Which is a blessing and a curse. Reading it with curiosity made it come alive. In the book of Job, how could Satan approach God in heaven? Isn’t that against the rules? Why didn’t God tell Job his suffering was from Satan, not God Himself? Why were Job’s friends so insensitive to his suffering!? These weren’t just characters in an ancient spiritual screenplay. They were real people from a moment in history. Real humans with real feelings experiencing real tension in real friendships in the midst of real suffering. Over the years I’ve read countless times about Job’s children dying in a freak wind storm. But this time I wept.

Biblical scholars Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart implore readers to be curious! In their book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, they teach “that a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to it’s author or his or her readers.” Basically, stop making it mean what you want it to mean. If we do that, we’re not really seeking God. To understand the author’s original intent (exegesis in biblical study terms), curiosity is critical! Who wrote it? Who were they writing to? Why were they writing it? What was the historical context? Cultural context? (Questions I never considered when frantically trying to catch up after falling two weeks behind in a Read-The-Bible-In-A-Year reading plan.)  Only after trying to interpret the scripture correctly (exegesis), can we move onto the task of hermeneutics (finding the accurate relevance for our lives today).

But this commitment to curiosity cursed me this morning while reading about Rizpah. A real woman in real suffering experiencing real desperation to honor real deceased sons. And it became too much. “Oh God, I don’t get it. I don’t like it. I can’t accept that this was part of your justice. It just seems too awful and too gruesome and too irrational and too costly. She didn’t deserve it. Are we just pawns in a big spiritual chess game? You seem to easily take life, thousands at a time in Joshua and Judges, to carry out your plan. Why the bloodshed? I don’t get it.”

And then I exhaled out the angst. “But deep down, I know you are wholly good. I believe you are Sovereign on your throne, over every generation past and all generations to come. I won’t get it why you did what you did. I certainly don’t like it. But you don’t owe me anything - not explanations or justifications. You are God. You can do as you please, but I don’t get it.”

Curiosity isn’t for the faint-of-heart.

3. Read without agenda

Which means I don’t read the Word to feel good. For most of my life I came to the Bible looking for answers. Maybe I’ll find a hint at whom I should date, what job I should take, or how I should handle the fall-out with my best friend. I came with expectations. I came wanting clarity. I came wanting peace and a warm fuzzy feeling. I came for me.

Fee and Stuart warn about this. They suggest three main reasons why we so grossly misunderstand the Bible: we are desperate, we are impatient, or we ‘wrongly expect that everything in the Bible applies directly as instruction’ for our own lives. When we approach the scripture these ways, we make the common errors of allegorizing, decontextualizing, selectivity, moralizing, and personalizing.

I’ve learned not to approach the Bible to fill a hole, find an answer, or reaffirm what I want to believe about God. I don’t come for peace, but sometimes I find peace anyway. I don’t come to be inspired, but sometimes I’m inspired anyway. I’ve committed to simply showing up. That’s it. I can’t tell you how freeing this has been. No more eeking out a mini heartwarming lesson from Ezekiel’s visions. No more wringing out something I can apply to my life from the genealogies in Matthew (“oh look! An added detail about so-and-so. There must be a teachable lesson in this detail!”). No more temptations to simplify the poems in Proverbs and Psalms to be hard-and-fast rules for living.  No more creative interpretations on how the falling of Jericho is about me conquering that big interview coming up.

How exhausting. And totally self-serving.

4. Embrace the mystery

It’s startling how much historical detail is documented in the Bible. And yet, there’s so much that isn’t said. Quick tangent, but I resist teachings based on unspoken parts of God’s Word. “Did you notice this passage doesn’t say XYZ?” Or “Did you notice that so-and-so didn’t do this-or-that?” Could it be possible they did do that thing but no one cared to write it down?!?! Maybe the words documented in this passage aren’t the only words God spoke that day to those people. This teaching from the ‘unspoken’ feels like eeking, wringing, simplifying, and creatively interpreting the Scripture to prop up a novel idea. No need. The Bible is full of counter-cultural, thought-provoking, awe-inspiring stories that hint at the character of God. I say hint because on my journey, I’ve learned to embrace the mystery of God.

Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk, wrote in New Seeds of Contemplation, “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” Merton’s writings sobered my faith, a process of unlearning that I’ve written about before. When I accept that God reveals Himself and conceals Himself, there’s permission to approach the Word in the same way. It’s not a “Basic Instruction Book before Leaving Earth” (let’s ban this clever acronym from all Sunday School lessons!).  It is not simple instructions for how to do life. It’s a complex, mystifying, collection of dark visions, dramatic narratives, lengthy genealogies, erotic poetry, heart-felt lyrics, confusing prophecies, passionate letters, and confronting sermons spanning across countless generations by dozens of authors throughout different regions of the world.

What an incredible and yet complicated way for the God of the universe to reveal Himself to His creation. When I embrace the mystery of God, I stop trying to oversimplify scripture. And when I stop trying to oversimplify scripture, it’ becomes more holy. Nuance seeps from the black and white spaces on the page. The Word becomes alive – an invitation to be curious, enchanted, confused, resilient, and honest.

Ages ago I was sharing with my friend Mandee how I was struggling to read the Bible like a good Christian should. “I just have a discipline problem!” She forwarded me a blog about how we often blame our lack of reading on a lack of discipline when, in reality, we don’t have a discipline problem, we have a desire problem. If we sincerely want to discover and encounter more of God, then we’d have no problem opening up the Good Book – generally disciplined or not. That stuck with me. These commitments to read unhurried, with curiosity, without agenda and embracing the mystery, has stirred up my desire to discover God in holy ancient writings. I look forward to my morning ritual. I still catch myself scanning paragraphs or my mind wandering, but instead of guilt or hurry, I feel invitation to come back. To lay down the tasks, lay down the agenda and just show up. Again and again and again.

These last few weeks of reading have felt brutal. But deep in my soul there’s a subtle but constant hopeful throb. Because, unlike these people in ancient times, I know what’s coming. I know Jesus breaks through soon. I know that eventually all the massacres to keep God’s remnant people holy, all the failures of God-appointed people who couldn’t resist the lure of power and greed, all the seemingly impossible rules to honor God, is trumped by a marvelous, irrational display of love by God Himself through Jesus.

Jesus took our punishment.
His broken body was put on display for all to see.
He paid a debt that wasn’t His.

Much like Rizpah, but so much more.