I was recently invited to lead a small college bible where I was asked to answer the question, “how do you read the Bible?” It’s a simple question that can be very difficult to answer. “What version should I read?” “What book should I read?” “What is the point of Leviticus?”
The field of biblical hermeneutics (the philosophy and methodology of interpretation) is a wide area of scholarship that tries to answer the question, “how do I correctly read (and interpret) the Bible?”. So my answers were neither original, nor exhaustive. My aim was to be concise and practical to our college group.
I had four main points, that we should read the Bible consistently, contextually, prayerfully, and devotionally. In this post, I want to focus on the first point of consistency.
Being Consistent
Sometimes we Christians can define consistency in very flexible terms. After all, if I celebrate my wife’s birthday every year, I am being consistent, aren’t I? And we can sometimes approach the Bible the same way. For some, reading the Bible is an annual event, often spurred on by crisis. It’s that “apple a day keeps the crisis away” mentality, only our apple is the Bible and we are certainly not taking a daily dose.
The Bible speaks about a different kind of consistency. In Joshua 1:8, God commissions Joshua and tells him that he must meditate on the Book of the Law day and night. Day and night. God required that Joshua do more than give the Scriptures his distracted attention- Joshua was to meditate. And meditation, the deliberate processing of information takes time, and really it takes consistency.
Psalm 1 describes a person that is stable and strong, like a tree planted by a stream of water. The tree is sustained by a steady flow of water and bears fruit. The psalmist uses this picture of the tree to describe a person who delights in the word of God and who meditates on it day and night. There it is again, this idea of not just reading the Bible when it is convenient, but consistently reading and processing it all day, both day and night.
Reading the Bible consistently is a discipline we all must develop to grow in our intimacy with God.