The Bible in 90 Days?

Ok, so my church has challenged it’s members to embark on a plan to read the entire Bible in the first 90 Days of 2018. When I first heard of this scheme, I was skeptical of how the membership of Hope would respond to such a thing. Don’t take this the wrong way, but my impression of the congregants at my new church is that they wouldn’t necessarily be a group that would be all that eager for the Word of God. Writing that thought out makes it sound like a gratuitous insult, now that I read it, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just that Hope is a rather affluent, comfortable group of people, not a demographic which I associate with spiritual hunger and discipline. Boy, was I wrong! At last count, Hope had sold over 1400 special read the Bible in 90 Days bibles, the cost of which was subsidized by a couple of members. So, apparently, I have misjudged my new congregation. After two days of this project, I have made it through the first 28 chapters of Genesis. A few observations:

Having been a Christian for most of my adult life, I am quite familiar with the Bible, having read it with various levels of consistency and seriousness over the years, even having read it through once before, years ago, albeit over 12 months instead of 3. However, I must here confess that it has been quite awhile since I’ve spent very much time in the book of Genesis. I know every story. I’ve read them all before. But, going through 28 chapters in two days brings into sharper focus...some truly bizarre stuff.  

So far, it occurs to me that the book of Genesis probably should be banned from the public schools, or at the very least, one should have to provide an ID before being  allowed to read it, much like we must prove our age to consume adult beverages. Holy Cow, every where you look there’s somebody sleeping with somebody else’s wife, or even worse, somebody else’s slave girl! There’s rampant nakedness, mass circumcising, and even deliberate, premeditated incest. There’s drunkenness, lying, stealing and entire cities dedicated to decadence. Let’s just say that God’s chosen people cannot be accused of producing an account that makes them look very noble. The Bible is not a whitewashed, airbrushed, purified account of the Jewish people. So far, they are presented as quite a duplicitous, conniving, cutthroat bunch. But, to tell the truth, this is the thing that has always drawn me to this book. The biggest hero of the Old Testament, King David, is presented to us completely unvarnished. We see him at his admirable best and his scandalous worst. If it was only glorification and propaganda, why would the story of his despicable behavior with regards to Bathsheba be included in the narrative? For someone like me, this full picture of the heroic and the horrific give the Bible it’s credibility, and it also gives me hope. If a man about whom it was said, He was a man after God’s own heart, could suffer such monumental failures, then the fact of my own failures places me in good company.

Anyway, I’m only two days in, so who knows how long I’ll keep up the pace. So far, so good.

On a side note...I’ve enjoyed reading all the punditry over the past couple of days about how far the SEC has fallen in the college football ranks, of how the other conferences have caught up and, wow, how about the Big Ten going undefeated?!! So, the fact that the national title game will feature Georgia vs Alabama is truly hilarious to me. Listen up people...put away the shovels. Apparently, the stories of the death of the SEC were greatly exaggerated!