Writing for the blog of Southern Seminary, Joseph C. Harrod describes one common approach to Bible reading plans: reading one chapter at a time from different parts of the Bible. One famous reading plan does one chapter a day from Genesis, one from Ezra, one from Matthew, and one from Acts—then moving on from there each day through the Bible.
I have followed such a reading plan from a lectionary, for many years. I use this in addition to my annual read-through, as well as ongoing voluminous reading of whatever book I’m studying at the time (currently Isaiah). One benefit of the “various chapters” reading plan is that it keeps the whole of Scripture in the forefront.
But I’ve also seen a drawback to such reading plans: They train you to think only in chapter-long chunks, where you can easily miss the context of whole books. And Harrod identifies another drawback I hadn’t thought of: Such plans train you to think it takes a very long time to read through books. So, for example, Genesis takes almost 2 months (50 days) to get through, when, in fact, if you read only Genesis, you could finish it in 3.5 hours.
Harrod shows how even the longest books of the Bible can be read in about the same amount of time we’d take to watch an epic film or a sporting event. It’s worth devouring these books in one or two sittings. Harrod has some helpful insights in this first article on the problem with most Bible reading plans, and in a second article, he shows how you can read half the Bible in 30 minutes!
