Are you opening your Bible and reading? Any insights, or questions? Any sense of what God is saying to you? or asking of you? Anything strange? I’d love to hear – and I urge you to keep reading. The more you read, the more insightfully you read, the more you hear, the more you discern God’s asks.

There’s a curious paradox in how to read. I’m right to suggest that you read slowly, lingering over a few verses, pondering, re-reading. But then you run the risk of overthinking a little passage, or deducing way too much about God or your life from one snippet.

There are countless examples. Exodus 4:24 says “The Lord was trying to kill Moses.” Does God kill people? Could God “try,” but fail? Remember: the Bible is a human book written by humans about their profound, troubling, and confusing experiences of God. Moses at some point probably felt God was after him – which God was! But not to kill him. We know God neither kills, nor tries and fails at killing, from the vast weight of the rest of Scripture, which portrays a very different God, who gives life, who keeps and fulfills promises.

In the Louvre, if you enter the Red Rooms, immediately on your right is Jacques-Louis David’s “The Coronation of Napoleon.” But since the painting is huge (33 feet wide, 20 feet tall!), your first glimpse is the lower side corner – which is dark and bleak. If that was all you saw, you’d think David painted something drab. But back away and look at the whole thing: it’s bright, resplendent with glory, the dark corners providing the foil to offset the radiance. One small, dark corner of the Bible is only a fraction of its larger, glorious vision of God’s redemptive purpose.

What slow and focused reading, eventuating in long, broad reading results in is what I’ll call “thinking biblically.” If you know some Bible, but still think and react to the world in the same old ways, what good is it? Longtime readers of the Bible gradually stop perceiving the world, and reflecting on life and what’s going on from our culture’s perspective! Bit by bit, you see the world and yourself differently, you discern an alternate plot unfolding. You react not in kneejerk, worldly ways, but in divine ways. You respond and talk in spiritually attentive ways.

I’ll unfold some of what I believe “thinking biblically” looks and feels like over the next couple of emails. For starters though, Rabbi Abraham Heschel keeps it simple: “God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance. All deeds, thoughts, feelings, and events are His concern.” The Bible is the chronicle of people who sensed God in the kitchen, at their workplaces, in politics, the weather, eking out a living and coping with difficult neighbors. That same Bible then becomes for us the lens, and – gosh! – maybe the computer screen in which we see things from their perspective, even from God’s perspective.

If you did choose to read the Bible cover to cover, you’d find in the very beginning that God made people, and in God’s image. Thinking biblically includes the habit of looking at every person in every place in every circumstance from that perspective. There are no garbage people, no purely evil people; biblical thinkers manage to perceive the beauty and glorious destiny in each person, no matter how harshly judged by the world (or by your pre-thinking-biblically self).

And there’s much more. Keep reading – not just my emails but the Bible itself. Click reply with things you’re noticing, or whatever puzzles you.

   {Bonus episode: Prof. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary in Kentucky and I had a great conversation on How to Read the Bible in this YouTube!}