Session 1: How Should We Read the Bible | Covenant Documents: Reading The Bible Again For The First Time

Ever felt like the Bible is a collage of quotes rather than a coherent story? We open a fresh path through Scripture by tackling two big questions: what lens are you using to read, and where does the Bible say its own writing begins? Instead of snacking on isolated verses, we lay out a plan to read in big, connected sections so themes, promises, and tensions can breathe.

We name the three macro worldviews that quietly steer interpretation: a universe without God, a living system with an immanent life-force, and a creator God who intentionally forms and engages humanity. Owning your “glasses” doesn’t weaken faith; it clarifies why intelligent readers can use the same words and mean very different things. We also explore how some Christians treat the Bible as if every word functions like a standalone recitation, and we explain why honoring context, genre, and literary flow leads to wiser, richer reading without surrendering authority.

Then we make a bold claim: start with Exodus. The Bible’s own storyline points to Sinai as the moment Scripture becomes writing—covenant words binding a people to God. Read Genesis as the historical prologue that explains how creation, fall, and promise set the stage for covenant, and Exodus as the heartbeat where rescue, law, and presence shape a community. We map Exodus in three movements—1–19 as the rescue and arrival, 20–24 as covenant core, 25–40 as presence and practice—and sketch how this structure guides a historical reading across the Old and New Testaments.

Join us as we trade verse-snacking for a guided feast and learn to read with clarity, humility, and hope. If this approach helps you see the big picture, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review telling us where you think the Bible’s story truly begins.

Transcript

A Journey To Read The Whole Bible

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the journey. We're going to read the Bible together in the next weeks, trying to understand it as a whole. The Bible is probably one of the most widely read books on planet Earth, both now and in the past. But one of the things that we know about reading the Bible is that we often read it in bits and pieces, quotes from the Bible, or just a short passage during a Bible study, or even just a lectionary reading during a worship service. As a whole, the Bible still remains somewhat mystifying to most of us. We don't know what it's about all the way through. We know there are parts in Genesis that talk about beginnings, and we have sometimes our scary thoughts about the book of Revelation at the end, where we're not quite certain how all of these symbols and numbers are supposed to come together. And we may read a psalm or stories about Jesus, maybe even a letter of Paul. But the Bible as a whole contains much more than that. And what we're planning to do in these weeks ahead is to meet together with others who are doing the same thing so that we can sit at table, we can talk together about these things, we can compare our own readings, we can compare our questions and our comments, and hopefully grow together in our understanding of the Bible as a whole. What I hope to bring to these sessions is an overview, how things got started, why the Bible exists, where we should go in terms of reading it and reading it with understanding and interest, and then how the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense. Now, in order

Why Bits And Pieces Fail Us

SPEAKER_00 1:40

to do that, I need you to think a little bit about how you think about the Bible. We often think about the Bible as the Word of God, and rightly so. I certainly hold that the Bible is the Word of God, but it is not always clear to us what exactly it means that the Bible is the Word of God. Does it mean that any sentence anywhere in the Bible tells us something new or truthful that only God can tell us? Can we take one section? Can we take one paragraph and out of that gain a sense of who God is and what God wants us to do even for this day or for the rest of our lives? How do we read the Bible? I do think that our reading of the Bible has been influenced by two things. First of all, our reading of the Bible has been influenced by the fact that we tend to break up the big book into many tiny, tiny parts. This idea of having a Bible study in which we read a verse or two and then ask one another, well, what does this verse mean to you, or what do you think God wants of you in this? That's all good. It helps us to think about important questions of life and how we should even read the Bible, but sometimes it breaks the big book up into such small parts that the whole thing doesn't have any lasting impact for us, doesn't have any larger message. And so what I want us to do is first of all think about reading big sections. Now I'm going to ask you in the weeks ahead to read entire books of the Bible.

Read In Big Chunks, Not Verses

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Obviously, that will be easier for some of us than it'll be for others. We don't all have the same time in order to give to this kind of thing, but I'm going to encourage you as much as is possible to read the big sections that I'm asking you to think about. At least skim them, but try to read them as a whole. So I want you first of all to read the Bible in big chunks. That will be important for our look at the Bible. There's a second thing that has sometimes hindered us from thinking about how we can hear God through the Bible, and that's things like other religious books. Now, there are many of them. I have all of them in my library at one place or another. There are the sayings of the Buddha, there are the sayings of Confucius, there are the dialogues of Socrates, there are the teachings of the Upanishads,

Comparing Scriptures And The Quran Lens

SPEAKER_00 4:16

which inform Hindu religion. There are a variety of religious books that are connected with various religious traditions. And sometimes as we read those, we try to see how they might impact other religious communities, and then maybe try to take something of the same into our Jewish or Christian faith. While that's important, and I love the study of comparing religions and understanding how the different religions use their symbols and rites and scriptures, one of the things to remember is that the Bible of the Jewish Christian tradition has a very specific history, and understanding that history is very important. One other thing about all of this is that in our world today, there's really only one significant post-Christian religion. We can talk about a post-Christian world in which Christianity doesn't have much impact anymore, and we see that happening in various ways. But what I'm talking about is one truly post-Christian religion. And that religion is Islam. And I'm not saying anything negative about Islam here, but I am saying this: that Islam has a very specific way of understanding scripture. And since it emerged out of Judaism and Christianity, it has tended to encourage people to read the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity in much the same way as in Islam, its adherents are taught to read the Quran. Now, the Quran for Islam is the very word of Allah. These words can only be heard in the Hebrew in the Arabic language because they were originally communicated to Muhammad in the Arabic language. So even though the Quran is translated into other languages, in effect, the only true voice of Allah is heard through the Arabic recitations of the initial manuscripts. And because of that, there is within Islam this idea that each text is the very speech of God. Each word is actually voiced by God in a particular way. I'm not

Caution Against Word-By-Word Certainty

SPEAKER_00 6:39

going to take away from Islam's understanding of its scriptures, but what I want to suggest to you is the possibility that some of that idea about the scriptures, about the way in which God communicates, may have come over into Christianity as well. So that sometimes we take a kind of Islamic understanding of the Bible and say, what does God say in this verse? Or what is God trying to speak to us in this word? And how, if we track this word up and down through the pages of the Bible, will it always mean the same thing because it's the very word of God? I don't want to undermine the authority of the Bible, but I want to caution us against too quickly adopting that view of how we should read the Bible. I want us to pay great attention to the words, to the phrases, to the sentences, to the paragraphs, to the books of the Bible. But I want us to push back a little bit with the idea that we can find a specific meaning from God in a specific word or phrase or even verse. There are some great verses that we all love and we want to recite them, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Wow, that's a great verse, and it speaks a lot. But not all of the verses of the Bible are exactly like that in containing so much meaning encapsulated in just a few words. What I'm going to encourage us to do is to keep in mind context and larger

Context Over Quotes

SPEAKER_00 8:22

books. There are passages in Leviticus and even in Proverbs, where if you just take a particular verse or you take a particular sentence, it may not have the impact that it might if we see it in the context of the larger work or the book. Again, that's why I'm asking you to read large sections of the Bible at once, so that you can get a feel for how the different words and verses are located within larger connections.

The Lenses We All Wear

SPEAKER_00 8:52

A second thing that I want us to think about, not only how do we read the Bible, but what glasses do we wear when we read the Bible? We all wear glasses of interpretation. We wear glasses, some of us, on our noses and over our ears in order to see more clearly, because our lenses don't communicate to us fully what is out there in front of us. And so we need corrective lenses. So we take a look at the world through lenses that don't distract from the world out there, but help sharpen the focus of the world out there, because sometimes our own eyes don't see things with the clearness that they used to have or that God intended for them to have. So we see the need for lenses, glasses that help us see more clearly. Now, this is something in sort of a metaphorical way that we all do in life generally. We all use glasses of interpretation. We all try to make sense of the bits and pieces that we see in the world around us, the way in which people function, the manner in which joy and sorrow enter our lives, the meaning of life itself. There are all sorts of things that we all receive through our senses that we experience as we walk through life, but we don't all interpret those things in exactly the same ways. This is the reason why we have so many philosophies, sometimes isms, consumerism or communism or capitalism, ways in which we try to make sense of the data of our world. It's also why we have many religions, because religions are themselves ways of organizing values and understanding the world in which we live so that we can better put the pieces and parts together and have them make some sense. Why do we exist? Why does the world exist at all? How did humans happen to be here? Why do I come into the picture? Is my life more significant than other lives? How would I know? What's the nature of community or society? What's my part in that? Or am I more an individual over against that? Who is God? How do I know who God is? These are the questions that we try to answer. What happens when I get sick? Is there something or someone troubling me? Or did I do something bad with my diet or something like that? Where do I place blame? What happens in relationships that break down? How do we seek to remedy situations that are seemingly not in sync or in tune? How do we get to some point of resolution? These are all the questions and the issues we all face in various ways as part of our interpretation of the life we have. These are the glasses that we wear, the glasses that help us put the pieces and parts together in a meaningful and more articulate or in-focus manner.

Three Macro Worldviews

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Now it seems to me, after thinking about this for many, many years, that there are really only three major worldviews, sets of glasses. Let's call a set of glasses a worldview. There are certainly more religions, more philosophies, more social perspectives in our world, yes indeed. But it seems to me that all of these religions and philosophies and social perspectives really arise out of one of three different macro worldviews, sets of glasses that each of us wears either knowingly or not knowingly. It's something that we don't even always talk about. And it's why sometimes we can be using the same words as someone else is using, and yet we mean something very different by them. When we say something and when that other person says it, they don't always sound the same, or they don't always express the same ideas. So what are the three worldviews? In my own thinking about these things, I think they are number one, the possibility that this world exists as self-generating and self-preserving, self-processing. There is no God. There is nothing but the world we experience and can explore through our scientific investigations and our space travels. The world, the universe, is very big and it's expanding. It seems to have an origin point, a big bang way back when some even say that it continually expands and then collapses and then has the Big Bang once again and it goes through cycles like this. I'm not judging it in one way or another, but I am saying that is a pair of glasses that we use to interpret our world. It's an assumption some of us make about how the world exists and then derive from that the values that we have. For instance, if in fact there is no God, if the world is self-generating and self-perpetuating, then you and I exist merely as accidents of history. It's not that we had purpose or significance, but this is the way the stuff lined up, the genetic materials, the proteins and the electrical impulses, and suddenly we arrived on the scene. And once we're no longer here, whatever is left of us will be recycled into the rest of what continues on from that point. It is a way of thinking about life. There is a second possibility, and that's the possibility, the second worldview. The second worldview is that the universe is a living system, that there are no gods outside the system, there are no powers outside the system, but the system itself is a very living entity. Sometimes I think about it this way, I think

Worldview One: No God

SPEAKER_00 15:12

about my own body. My own body has contour and limits. I can only stretch my hands so far, I can only rise to a certain height. There's a rather specific amount of mass that my body has, a number of cells, yes, some get sloughed off every day, but new cells are regenerated. But there's a kind of static point of my own body. What's interesting, as this body, this living system that I am, continues to function in life, it is also host to a variety of other critters, you might say. Bacteria, parasites, germs, things that live in my body and on my body. In fact, according to scientists, there are more bacteria living in and on my body than the number of cells that make up my very body itself. Kind of fascinating, a little bit weird and maybe a little bit scary. But we need much of that, don't we? Because the bacteria and the other living organisms that kind of attach themselves to our body, they help us in digestion, they keep our skin clean. There's a variety of ways in which there's a symbiotic relationship between our bodies and these things. Now, in this second worldview, I'm talking about thinking about the universe as a singular living system. The system itself of the universe is a living entity with some kind of intelligence, some kind of value system, some way of operating that makes sense. There is a meaning to the universe, a kind of understanding which is inherent in what the universe is about. And if that's the case, then we are in some ways, as individuals, as human persons, as well as everything else, kind of like the bacteria that ride on the universal system. We're kind of like those that go along for the ride. The universe has a life in and of itself. It might be helpful to us, and it usually is. But we're not necessarily helpful to the universe. The universe could

Worldview Two: Living Universe

SPEAKER_00 18:01

probably carry on without us. But this way of thinking about the universe also has implications for how we live, what we think about, and even who we believe we are or how we relate to other things. This is largely the worldview that comes to us through Hinduism, other Eastern religions or philosophies, as we sometimes call them, Taoism, Buddhism. The idea is that the world is alive, the universe is alive. Life exists, and we as individuals participate in that life, but we are individuated from that life, and so what we do needs to in some way resonate with the living force of the system. If we go against the life force of the world, we do so to our own detriment. We harm the world or others or ourselves. But if we go in harmony with, in tune with the universe itself, then we experience blessing and the universe kind of with life and goodness. Now, in that perspective, we as individuals do not necessarily matter significantly. We happen to matter because we are living. We have something of the life force of the universe within ourselves. And it's better to go with the flow for our own health and well-being than to go against the flow. But when the time comes for this expression or this vessel that contains something of the life force of the universe to pass on, this dies and is no longer significant. I am then the molecules which are recycled to enhance other critters on earth. But life itself cannot be created or killed and it will flow on. And this is why, for instance, in Buddhism or Hinduism, the idea of the transmigration of the soul or reincarnation is talked about, because the life force that lives within a person will not die even when the person dies, and the life force may transmigrate into another living entity. Now, again, I'm not trying to make judgments about any of this. I'm just trying to get at the glasses. Glasses pair one was the idea that the world is self generating, self sustaining, without any gods or powers, angels or demons, and we happen to be here. And so we interpret life in terms of. Of, so what do we do? Maybe stay alive as long as we can? Survival of the fittest? What would you say? What's the purpose? And what's the purpose

Worldview Three: Creator And Creature

SPEAKER_00 20:48

of another person's life over against mine? You see, there are things, there are judgments we make about that. Glasses to perspective number two is that the world is a living system, and we play a part in that, and the life force that is part of our identity will go on and on and on and on, but we will not. And then there's a third possibility, a third worldview, or a third set of glasses. And here the idea is that there is a God. There is a God who initiated all that we experience, created the heavens and the earth, brought the world as we know it into being, the universe, the galaxies, and that God also created intentionally humankind. Now, when I talk about that, this gets us to the perspective of the Bible. Now, I talk about these things saying these are worldviews, and worldviews cannot be proven or disproven. It's not that they're logical or illogical, it's not that they're true or false, but they are the glasses we wear to interpret reality, and we believe. We believe either that this universe exists without any gods or powers, or we believe that this world exists as a living entity, and it's better to go with the flow of the system than against the flow of the system. Or if we're starting to look at the Bible, we believe that there is a creator God who made things in some way that made sense, that the highest expression of identity and life in the system is human life, and that this has implications for the manner in which we exist day by day, the manner in which we consider or view ourselves, the manner in which we think about reality and values and all of that. The reason that I bring these three worldviews up is that obviously I live in this third worldview. I believe there is a God. I believe God is vitally, intentionally involved in

Owning Your Glasses As You Read

SPEAKER_00 22:58

this world because God made this world, and humans are the crowning feature of this world, and God desires, intends for humans to have a vital relationship with their creator. But I can't prove it. I can't prove that there's a God, just as no one else can prove to me that there is not a God. And so I ask you again to keep in mind what glasses are you wearing as you read the Bible? There are things in the Bible that we wouldn't state on our own in the way that they're stated. The question is, do we understand that there is a possible way to read these words, understand these words, interpret these words out of a set of glasses, out of a framework, out of a worldview that has a particular understanding of reality. There is within the Bible a consistent worldview. Now that worldview is interpreted variously within different biblical tradition religions, for instance, Judaism and Christianity and Islam, as I talked about earlier. Each of these takes that singular worldview and then understands it somewhat differently. Right now I'm coming to this from the point of view of wearing the glasses of a creator and creature interactive universe. And I come to this from the point of view of the Christian religion. And I believe what we're going to look at during the next weeks will be an expression of the biblical framework which helps us see through those glasses. But we do have choices. And a Buddhist can read the Bible for various pieces of interest or information. And an atheist can read the Bible and take away from it various ideas. I'm saying that none of us can approach the Bible without glasses. We need those glasses in order to understand life and even understand the Bible itself. Now there's one more thing that I want to talk about as we think about reading the Bible, and that's the

Where Does The Bible Begin

SPEAKER_00 25:13

idea of where does the Bible itself begin? It makes perfect sense to see that the Bible begins in Genesis, right? I mean, after all, all of our Bibles are published that way. You open the front cover, and right there, what do you see? Genesis, the story of beginnings. Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. But I'd like you to back off from that just for a moment. Again, keep your glasses in place, but think again how we might understand what's going on. If we read, as we will, the book of Genesis, what we will find there are many interesting things. We're going to find out about the way in which the world was made, or at least hints at that. We're going to read about an understanding of how sin or evil entered this world. We're going to read about wonderful people and horrible people, some who have great testimonies and experiences, and others who did some pretty bad things. But no matter who or what we read about, one of the things we will not read about in the book of Genesis is the idea of a Bible. Scripture, something written down. We're so used to having scripture, even Genesis. Look, let's read in Genesis, read these verses, read this passage. And so we quickly go to that passage. We quickly open it up to that passage. And we say, there's Genesis, it's in the Bible. But I want to take us back to before there was a Bible, how did the Bible get started? And while there are many theories about this, we can go to universities, seminaries, we can read all sorts of literature about this. Where does the Bible get its start and why is it there? And where should we begin reading it? What I want to suggest for our sessions together is this: that we need to start with the book of Exodus.

Why Start With Exodus, Not Genesis

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Why is that? All the way through the book of Genesis, which does go back in time earlier than the book of Exodus, all the way to the beginning of things. Never once in the book of Genesis do we read of somebody having a scroll or a parchment or a book or a Bible. Many people have relationships with God. Adam and Eve in the story of Genesis 2 and 3. Walk and talk with God in the Garden of Eden. Noah hears the voice of God. Abram has relationships with God, events in his life where God comes and visits him and talks with him. Jacob sees visions. Joseph dreams dreams, and the dreams are the messages from God. Yes. But none of the people in the book of Genesis actually has a Bible or anything written that will become the book of Genesis or any other part of the Bible. And for that reason, we have to begin where the Bible talks about the beginning of itself. And that won't happen until into Exodus in chapter 24. Moses writes down the things that God tells him. Moses writes it down and it becomes something called the Book of the Covenant. Now, that in itself is quite a thing. We will have to explore what is a covenant and why does that involve writing? But what we'll find is that the Bible itself, by its inner testimony, considers the events at Mount Sinai in Exodus 20 through 24 be the very beginning of what the Bible is about. Covenant documents. Documents that

Sinai And The Birth Of Writing

SPEAKER_00 29:06

initially were written down because they were part of a covenant-making ceremony. We're going to take a deep look at that next time when we take a look at the book of Exodus. But for now, I want you to think about what that means. It means that even Genesis, with all of its good stories about beginnings, was not written down according to the Bible's inner testimony until there was a covenant between God and it mediated through Moses at Mount Sinai. That's when the writing begins. And in the context of that writing, that's also where we begin to think about Genesis. Why does Genesis exist? If we just enter the book of Genesis first, we begin to argue about a lot of things. Why is there light on the first day of creation, but no sun, moon, and stars until the fourth day of creation? Kind of an interesting thing. Where did sin come from? What are the sons of God and the daughters of humans? How extensive was the flood? I mean, there's all kinds of things we can sit down and say, wow, we got to argue that. And we won't get any answers because the stories are told and the events are given to us within the framework of the Bible's own words, but at the same time, there is no context in which to put these things, so we just keep arguing back and forth about it. If, however, as we're going to take a look at next time, the Bible begins actually with the Sinai Covenant, then there's a part of a covenant that calls for an historical prologue, a background, a backstory. This is what's taking place, but how did we get here? And Genesis becomes part of that. But that's all stuff we're going to get

Genesis As Covenant Backstory

SPEAKER_00 30:54

into next time and the time after that. We'll look at Exodus next time and we'll look at Genesis the time after that. And I think this will become clear to you. Now, one of the things that I want you to think about as we move ahead and start reading the book of Exodus, one of the things that I want you to think about with all of this is how should we read the Bible? I've suggested here that we should read it at least at times in big chunks, so that we get all of the stuff together rather than bits and pieces. Secondly, I suggested that we need to read it, being at least cognizant of, recognizing the glasses that we wear. And thirdly, I think it's important to read the Bible in the way in which historically it has come to us. So we're going to try to take a lot of the pieces and parts of the Bible in kind of a historical method, moving through history the way that the Bible itself got its own start. Now, there are different kinds of literature in the Bible, and some of those will jump out of chronological sequence in order to talk about for a while. But for the most part, we're going to look at the Bible chronologically, and then we're going to see that there are two major sections to the Bible. Most of us know this already, but some of us may not. And we're going to see that there's an Old Testament and there's a New Testament in the Bible. We're going to have to think about what's the relationship between these two. And we're going to have to think about what's the key message that kind of bridges the whole or forms sort of a glue that holds the rest of these things all together. Now, these are the many questions that we're going to probe and experience

How We’ll Read: Big, Aware, Historical

SPEAKER_00 32:38

along the way. But for now, I want you to think about reading the book of Exodus for next time. Just seeing the various pieces and parts of it. I think there are three major pieces. I'm going to suggest that Exodus 20 through 24 is really the heartbeat of it all. And Genesis or Exodus 1 through 19 is sort of the backstory to that heartbeat. And then from there, chapters 25 through 40 are all about how the story will take shape in history. And that will be the rest of the Old Testament. I look forward to sharing these sessions with you, and I look forward to you having conversations with one another around tables, perhaps, following some of the discussion materials that hopefully are being provided for you, reengaging these things even through my book Covenant Documents, and talking with these things, talking about these things with other people that you know and maybe getting a richer feel for what the Bible is about. Until next time, see you then, and we'll look at the book of Exodus.