I stand in awe of His weaving of all things together for His plan and for His own, in exactly the manner He promised, so much so that every single rebellion of His people ultimately accomplished all the things their obedience would have.

Two weeks ago, I published an essay called “I Just Read the Entire Bible in 45 Days. You Should Too.” As you might imagine, it generated a good bit of attention.

I encourage you to read it (and act on it). The link is here: I Just Read the Entire Bible in 45 Days. You Should Too.

SPOILER ALERT: the important thing is reading the Bible straight through, like a book not a dictionary. You should do that at least once every 365 days (and you can do that in 15 minutes a day). There are also reasons to go faster, as I explain, though that’s certainly not necessary.

In response, one reader, a dear friend, asked the following:

I very much appreciate the posts encouraging frequent and consistent Bible reading. Curious-Given your strong encouragement to read straight through, how has reading in this manner caused you to love Christ more/grow in Christ’s likeness more than reading chronologically?

What an outstanding question!

God’s Word is, first and foremost, *God’s* Word. It is His absolutely unique and unparalleled testimony to Himself. The very rocks might well cry out, and men might attest to that which they’ve seen, but no matter how faithful a witness a rainbow may be, it can and is routinely twisted: only the Bible can infallibly give us its meaning.

That meaning has a context. That context is larger than the immediate story. That greater story—that metanarrative—is HIS story, not merely the story of Him (for no number of books could contain that) but His *story*, in the same sense that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s story, to be told as he alone sees fit.

We may certainly read passages from All The King’s Men out of order. We may study them intently and gain from that. But doing so is not experiencing Warren’s story. And Warren’s story is not merely a masterpiece but an *experience*, unlike any other. What we learn from it goes far beyond the outline of the text, or the details of the characters, or the history of Louisiana; and I dare say, one might learn more about all of those things from experiencing Warren’s prose than from memorizing every fact in a related textbook. And not just the writing, but the order: it matters that we learn of the Upright Judge’s fall, and the Great Twitch, and Jackie Bird’s love for Anne, and of her “purchase” from Willie, and Adam’s discovery of it, in precisely the order that we do. It would mean little, it would be anticlimactic, and we would not value it.

The same is true in music. Beethoven did not sit down to write the Ninth Symphony straight through ex nihilo, and we honor the composer’s order, because the Symphony is a story and the master’s order is correct.

If this is true for human creations—if we understand rightly that a chronological re-ordering of The Godfather, Part Two improves nothing, but actually creates two separate, vastly inferior pieces, shorn of their artistry, robbed of their meaning, and entertaining no one—how much more so is this true of God’s flawlessly woven story?

Indeed, this is one of the first violences we do to the text in our casual approaches to it: we separate a perfect seamless whole into two inferior standalone parts that countless readers mistake as mutually incomprehensible. In fact, the New Testament depends on the Old for nearly everything it wants us to see, painstakingly laboriously intricately bringing us to the climax of the Cross. The story can no more begin with Matthew than Julius Caesar can begin at Antony’s oration. And this leaps off the page at the reader when we treat this Book, and above all its Author, with the dignity we readily accord a comic book.

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