June Reading Plan
Ravens! Golden Calves! Halves of Babies! Circumcision! Long-Distance Relationships!
This really has been a lot of fun.
For somebody who grew up in church and has spent a lifetime in ministry, I’ve never read the Bible this way before. The Old Testament, New Testament and Psalms together every day. Nor have I really read the Old Testament straight through to fully comprehend the story.
And wow, have I been missing out. It is WILD.
When I see Christians trying to ban books from school libraries to protect kids from sexual or violent content, while also trying to get the Bible in every classroom? At this point I just assume they’ve never actually read the Bible, because Quentin Tarantino never made a movie as bloody or exploitative as what we just read in May in 1 and 2 Kings.
It has reminded me again of the realization I had way too late in my Christian life. The Bible might be the living Word of God, but that doesn’t mean that every sentence in it is from His point of view.
More on that in another post.
For now I want to explain a few things about this month’s readings.
First of all, I realized over the course of May that 1 and 2 Corinthians needed more room to breathe. It’s just so dense. So I’ve reworked the schedule and that means we now have a few days to either re-read some New Testament, catch up, or take a little breather. Then we’ll hop into Paul’s mid-length letters—Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians.
These are some of my favorite non-Gospel writings in the New Testament. They’re less heady than Romans or 1 & 2 Corinthians. You don’t have to do quite as much math to get to the heart of the message.
Now, in the Old Testament, this is where I’m both excited and a bit nervous to see what you think. This month we finally start getting in to some of the madness of this plan.
Here’s the idea:
There are portions of 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles that are almost word-for-word the exact same, sometimes for an entire chapter at a time. These are different accounts of one big story from two unique vantage point.
God’s people are split in two. The Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. 1 Kings is coming from a prophetic point of view, looking at all of God’s children across both nations. 2 Chronicles focuses almost completely on just Judah and Jerusalem.
Reading them one after another can get very confusing, because the timelines overlap, the stories are sometimes told in different order or from other perspectives, and there are those repeated passages. That’s my fault, not the writers, I just haven’t known enough to understand which viewpoint I’ve been trying to follow at any given moment.
Then a hundred or so pages later we come back to the same time period, but this time from many other points of view, when we get to the prophets. Over and over, each in their own way, they tell their own story inside of the greater story.
So what I’ve tried to do here is compile all of these in one cohesive timeline. You might read two days in 1 Kings, then a day in 2 Chronicles, then back to 1 Kings, then three days in Isaiah, then back to 2 Chronicles, etc…
While this might be pretty disorienting for your bookmark, my hope is that it gives us all a clearer understanding of what was actually going on at that time. How was God moving and how were his people responding (or not)? How are those same things still happening today?
Eventually, when this comes out in a book form and you just pick it up and read that morning’s Scripture lesson, you won’t notice as much how much we’re hopping around. Hopefully, you’ll be swept up in the story. For now, though, thank you for being willing to keep reading through with me, and now for doing the extra work of hopping around the Old Testament like a frog on a hot road this Summer.
God has a lot to teach us as David’s reign ends, Solomon and his ultimate wisdom takes over and still is not enough, and then we meet Rehoboam, Asa, Elijah and Elisha. Like everyone of us, they have good days and bad and it is quite a journey.
Here we go…
Happy Summer.
