There is a traditional one-year reading plan that includes the following each day:
- An Old-Testament reading
- A New-Testament reading
- A reading from Psalm
- A reading from Proverbs
I have done this plan myself. It is very hard to criticize any plan, device, or resource that in any way enables, encourages, facilitates, or assists people to read the Bible on a daily basis. For this reason, I am glad for the existence of this plan, and for the many people who use it regularly.
I rarely find reading the Bible to be a bad investment of my time, and when I do, it invariably has more to do with my choice of time to allocate, or my frame of mind or lack of focus while reading.
Still, I have devised my own plan for reading through the Bible in a year, based on the following ways in which I found the One Year Bible plan to be non-optimal. In particular, I found the following things non-ideal:
- I got Gospel Fatigue from starting the year Matthew-Mark-Luke-John. By the end of John, the incredible message of Jesus to sound almost formulaic: yes, he healed X people, he fed Y people with Z baskets left over, he went to town A, town B, town C, good news, yaddah yaddah, death, resurrection, ascension. Isn’t that horrible? I realize this may be partly my failing. Still, as I spent months on the odyssey through the Pauline epistles, I found myself longing to go back and take a fresh look at a Gospel. Which brings me to point 2:
- I got Pharisee Fatigue from being bludgeoned with the stilted logic of Paul for months on end. Isn’t that also horrible? You have to read Paul; he spells out the precious doctrines of grace that make discipleship of Jesus a truly unique and liberating experience. Still, Paul, like many things in life, is best in limited doses.
- The story of the people of Israel – told in a fairly linear fashion from Genesis through Chronicles, and including Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther for good measure – ends in the middle of the year. It would feel more natural, in my mind, to end this story arc at the end of the year.
- The Proverbs get decimated. Here, let me be frank. The Proverbs are wonderful words of wisdom. There is a structure by which whole chapters form cohesive units. Chopping off one or two verses a day interrupts this flow and cohesion and makes the Proverbs reading feel like a parting fortune cookie. It is so much more.
With these issues in mind, I have created a one year reading plan consisting each day of:
- An Old Testament history/story reading (Genesis-Esther in order)
- An Old Testament reading of poetry/prophecy (Job-Malachi in order)
- A New Testament reading (the entire New Testament, in a non-conventional order to prevent Gospel Fatigue and Paulitis, and to move Revelation away from the end of the year, because it’s such a strange way to enter the Christmas season).
