HOW TO READ · 2026-10-20
The day's guides
Method
Read the Verse That Answers the Question Before It's Asked
Many of the Bible's hardest-looking sentences are replies, and the question they answer is sitting a few lines away.
Some verses sound strange because we meet them alone. Printed on a card or quoted in a sermon, a sentence loses the thing that gave it shape: the question someone had just asked. Put the question back and a hard saying often turns into an ordinary answer.
Here is a small example. In Luke 10, Jesus says, 'Go, and do likewise.' On its own it is a bare command. Read upward and you find a lawyer asking, 'And who is my neighbor?' The whole parable of the Samaritan is the reply, and the command only makes sense once you know what was being asked. Notice, too, that Jesus turns the question around. The lawyer asked who counts as a neighbor; Jesus answers by asking who acted like one.
The method is simple. Choose a verse, then walk backward. Look for a question mark, a 'why,' a request, a dispute, or a complaint. In the Gospels it is usually within a few verses. In Job and the Psalms it may be a whole chapter back. In the letters, it is often a problem the writer has heard about, such as the Corinthians' quarrels over food or marriage.
Once you find it, write it in the margin in plain words. 'Is it all right to eat this meat?' 'Why is God silent?' 'Who gets the best seat?' Your own phrasing matters, because it forces you to understand the question rather than copy it.
Then read the verse again as a reply. Ask what it actually answers, and what it leaves alone. People in scripture are often answered more narrowly, or more sideways, than we expect. Jesus frequently declines the question as posed. That is information too, and you only see it once the question is written down.
Do this with three or four verses over a week and the habit sticks. You begin to read every sentence as part of an exchange. Some of the verses you thought you understood will shift a little, and a few you found harsh will turn out to be tender replies to someone who was frightened or proud or simply curious. The page was never meant to hold isolated lines. It records people talking, and a good reader listens for who spoke first.
- Pick a verse that puzzles you or seems too blunt.
- Read backward until you find a question, a complaint, or a request.
- Write that question in the margin in your own words.
- Reread the verse as the reply, and note what it does not say.
10 MIN
Tools
A Pocket Notebook Beats a Study Bible for the First Year
Before you buy the heavy edition with the notes, try writing your own.
Study Bibles are useful, and nothing here says otherwise. But a new reader often buys one and then reads the notes more than the text, because the notes are confident and the text is strange. The notes begin to do the thinking, and the reader never learns how it feels to be puzzled and keep going.
A pocket notebook costs very little and asks for very little. After each reading, write a single line: the reference, and what happened. 'Genesis 22. Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain; a ram caught in a thicket.' That is all. Do not interpret, and do not apply. You are making a plain record of what the passage said, which is harder than it sounds, because we tend to summarize what we expected rather than what was there.
If a question rises, add it beneath in a few words. 'Why does Isaac not ask more?' Only write the questions you really have. Forced ones turn into homework, and homework is how most reading plans die.
The value shows up later. After a month, read the lines without opening the Bible. You will find that you remember some stories well and others not at all, and that tells you where to slow down. You will also notice questions that were answered three weeks later in another book, which is a quiet kind of delight. A question you recorded and then watched resolve teaches more than any footnote.
Carry the notebook, and the Bible becomes something you take part in rather than consult. You can jot a line on a train or at a kitchen table. Over a year it becomes a small, honest history of your own reading, including the weeks you missed.
When the year ends, buy the study Bible if you still want it. You will read the notes differently, as a person with questions of your own, able to say where you agree and where you do not.
- Get a small notebook that fits in a coat pocket.
- After each reading, write one line: the reference and what happened.
- Add one question per entry, only if you have one.
- Every month, reread the lines without opening the Bible.
5 MIN
Getting started
Read Genesis 1 as Though Someone Were Telling It to You
The first chapter of the Bible is structured like a spoken account, and it opens up when you hear the refrains.
Many people approach the opening chapter of Genesis as a problem to be settled before anything else, or as a set of claims to defend. Before any of that, it helps to treat it as what it plainly is: a piece of writing built to be heard, with a rhythm you can follow like a refrain in a song.
Read it aloud, slowly, from the first verse to the end of chapter 2, verse 3. You do not need to perform it. Just give each sentence the time it asks for. Within a few verses, the repetitions become audible. 'And God said.' 'And it was so.' 'And God saw that it was good.' 'And there was evening and there was morning.' These are not accidents or padding. They are the framework, and they tell you how the author wants the story held.
Take a pencil and mark each returning phrase in the margin. When you have done so for the first three days, you will feel a pattern settle. Then watch for the places where the pattern shifts. On day three something is said twice. On day six the language slows, and for the first time God speaks as though deliberating: 'Let us make man in our image.' The 'good' becomes 'very good.' A reader who has marked the pattern feels the change without needing it explained.
Notice also what the text does with the seventh day. There is no 'evening and morning' to close it, and nothing is made. The account ends by resting. That quiet ending does as much work as any of the days before it.
Afterward, read it a second time and stop wherever the pattern breaks. Ask only what the break might be doing. You do not have to settle it. Some questions are best carried for a while.
This is a modest way to begin a long book. You have not defended or dismissed anything. You have simply listened to the first thing the Bible says, in the manner it was probably first received, and that is a sound place for any reader to start.
- Read Genesis 1 aloud at an unhurried pace.
- Mark each phrase that returns: 'And God said,' 'it was good,' 'evening and morning.'
- Notice what changes in the pattern on day six.
- Read it once more, and pause where the pattern breaks.
Back to today's paper →