In this excellent article from thegospelcoalition.org by Erik Lundeen we are reminded that we must persevere in our redaing of God's Holy Words even if we do not immediately understand.
Keep Reading Your Bible, Even If You Don’t Understand It by Erik Lundeen
"We’re now two months into the new year. If you’re like many attempting to read through the Bible this year, you’re at a crossroads. You may falter, burning out (as the story often goes) in a difficult section of Scripture like Leviticus and failing to establish a Bible-reading habit. Or you may make it over that initial hump, and regular Bible reading moves from being a checked box to a customary part of life.
I want to help you have the latter experience. I want to offer advice based on years of reading the Bible cover to cover and processing such experiences with others who’ve attempted the same. My advice boils down to this: As you read, keep going and don’t worry too much about understanding. That will come.
At first, such advice can feel blunt and, frankly, even unspiritual. But it’s a key part of succeeding in Bible-in-a-year reading plans and increasingly knowing Scripture in order to increasingly know God.
Reading Habits
From a young age, we’re trained not only to read but also to comprehend what we’re reading. Reading pedagogy focuses on decoding texts, and we’ve developed tools to help us do so. In decades past, we used to stop to look up words we didn’t know in physical dictionaries. Nowadays, we pause to google words, references, or concepts we don’t understand. We’re frustrated when we don’t comprehend our text and can be tempted to quit altogether.
God wants us to grasp the meaning of his Word. Yet an expectation that we’ll always comprehend what we’re reading can be perilous.
Bible study methods common among evangelicals often reinforce these reading habits. We’re taught to stop and ask questions when we don’t understand a verse or passage. One of the most common questions small group leaders in inductive Bible studies ask is “What questions did you have about the passage?”
This is a good impulse. The Bible is meant to be understood (Ps. 119:105; 2 Tim. 2:7). God wants us to grasp the meaning of his Word. Yet an expectation that we’ll always comprehend what we’re reading can be perilous when attempting to read the Bible in the space of a year. Left unchecked, this expectation keeps us from the understanding we’re diligently seeking. How so?
Parts and the Whole
Grasping the meaning of a long, unified book like the Bible requires two types of mutually reinforcing understanding. To understand the parts (individual verses or passages), we must understand the whole. Yet to understand the whole, we must understand the parts. This forms a sort of interpretive spiral we must constantly negotiate.
The great strength of Bible-in-a-year reading plans is that they help us, as disciples, begin to grasp the whole of God’s Word. David Mathis tells us plans help us read for breadth, not necessarily for immediate depth. Whole-Bible reading plans aid us in seeing the unified narrative of redemption that ties 1 Chronicles to 1 Corinthians, that links Job, Jonah, and John. Yet such plans become difficult, cumbersome, and often incompletable when we try to use them to do something they aren’t well suited for—to understand all the individual parts of Scripture as we go.
I’ve often seen something like this happen: We begin a Bible reading plan that assigns to us three or four chapters per day and continue well enough in it until we come to a part of Scripture we don’t understand. What, we wonder, is the edifying value of Judah’s troubling sexual encounter with his daughter-in-law Tamar (Gen. 38)? Or what do long lists of Levitical laws about impurity and the cleansing of skin diseases have to do with following Jesus today (Lev. 14)?
These are good questions, and we should ask them. Yet they derail Bible reading plans when we allow them to constantly interrupt our reading. Perhaps we pull out our phone to run a quick google search, or we turn to read the notes at the bottom of the page in our study Bible. When we do so repeatedly, our reading experience becomes interrupted and choppy, reading three to four chapters at a time becomes a time-consuming and exhausting task, and our pace slows to a crawl. Not infrequently, we soon fall behind on our plans and then abandon them altogether.
Understanding Will Come
Consider a different approach. What if, on coming to Leviticus 14 or any other potentially confusing passage, we kept reading instead of stopping to ask (and search out answers to) our interpretive questions? What if we didn’t worry right then and there about the degree to which we understand what we’re reading? What if we trusted that through faithful, diligent, prayerful, year-after-year Scripture reading, God would gradually grow our understanding in fruitful ways?
Such an impulse to simply press on can often feel like borderline unspiritual neglect. Is it good to read when we’re not grasping what the text says? Isn’t it better to stop and attempt to clarify a passage’s meaning?
We must remember the interpretive spiral: The parts of Scripture help us to understand the whole, and the whole helps us to understand the parts. Evangelical culture rightly values Bible study, but I suspect we need to value Bible reading more. We should allow proper space for uninterrupted, extensive reading.
The parts of Scripture help us to understand the whole, and the whole helps us to understand the parts.
There’s good news: Bible study will only be enriched by increased Bible reading. As I read the Bible cover to cover from year to year, something exciting happens. A passage that one year left me befuddled begins to make more sense the next year. As I’ve gotten a greater grasp on Hebrews one year, I more easily understand Leviticus the next. The more times I’ve read about Abraham’s life in Genesis, the more Paul’s argument about justification in Romans 4 clicks for me.
If I only ever attempted Bible study for depth, without complementing that with Bible reading for breadth, my study would become impoverished, narrowly focused, and almost inevitably less rewarding. The opposite, of course, is also true: If I only ever read (without worrying too much about understanding), I’d also greatly benefit by devoting time to in-depth study.
The lesson here isn’t an either-or but a both-and. Study the Bible, by all means. But also simply read the Bible. If you’re trying to read the Bible cover to cover this year, don’t allow your interpretive questions to too regularly interrupt the reading process. Understanding will come over time. For now, just keep reading." from the article: Keep Reading Your Bible, Even If You Don’t Understand It by Erik Lundeen
Erik Lundeen (PhD, Baylor University) is the adult-discipleship pastor at Village Church of Gurnee in Gurnee, Illinois. He is the author of The Reformation of the Literal and is an ecclesial theologian fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians. He is married to Bethany, and they have three children.
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