Day 1 Bible Study

I messed up. I thought my new 2024 Bible Study was starting on January 4, but it started on January 3. The plan I am following is not a chronological reading of the Bible but consists of daily readings from the Old and New Testament and then switches back between Proverbs and Psalms. I like this way of reading the Bible because you start to see the prophecy of Christ in the Old Testament.

The Day 1 Bible Reading consists for Genesis 1-2, Mathew 1, and Psalms 1.  

Genesis 1: 3-5 (ESV)

“And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

This passage from Genesis 1 stood out for me because God in the Old Testament created the world in terms of duality. For example, light versus darkness, night versus day, and morning and evening. The newly created world is a world of opposites or good versus bad. It isn’t until the birth of Jesus in Mathew 1 that God adds a third part to his created world. With the birth of Christ, God newly recreates the world changing it from a duality to a trinity with the birth of Jesus. Jesus is balance point between the two opposites in the world, or the person that stops us from going into the darkness since he is in the middle. No longer is there this duality of life and then death. With Christ, we have the world as a trinity. You are born, you die, but with Christ you are born again and will live with him in heaven after you die. This idea of the Trinity strikes me as revolutionary and evolutionary. Instead of us living in a dualistic world of opposites with no chance of escaping the darkness, with Christ we now have the neutral point between the two opposites. We have the point of neutrality where we are allowed to choose which side to follow. We have Christ standing in the way so we don’t go into the darkness of death.

No Bible Reading for today. My third year of reading the Bible in a year starts tomorrow. This year I bought the ESV Study Bible to supplement my daily Bible readings. It will be interesting to hear what the “experts” have to say compared to my own interpretation. I’m also thinking about getting a Bible atlas, although with internet search I think may be able to just do a search on a region to learn about it. I was watching a documentary called Aerial Britian and I had no idea that the King Arthur stories took place in Wales. They even showed the lake where the sword was thrown into. I think I may have to plan a trip to Wales to check that lake out. I loved the King Arthur stories when I discovered them in high school. I even have a hankering to read the Canterbury Tales, which I think we read in freshman or sophomore year of high school. I remember liking them back then, which makes me wonder if I would like them now as an adult.

Maybe a fun project for me in 2024 will be read books I still remember from junior high / high school that I loved. I loved Eugene O’Neil’s Long Days Journey into Night, Flowers for Algernon, Greek and Roman mythology, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Those are the books off the top of my head. Then there’s Catch-22, Homer’s Odyssey, The Scarlett Letter, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Animal Farm.

Other new things I want to try doing for Bible reading in 2024 is highlighting. m going to highlight the passages I like in my Bible. I don’t like marking up my books, but I’m going to try it with my new Study Bible. I think it will be fun to look back a few years later to see if the Bible passage I highlighted still has meaning for me.

Another fun project would be to read a Samuel Beckett play and find the Bible refences. I really don’t remember the play we were studying when my college theatre arts professor went on that rant about how no one in the class could figure out the Biblical references or allusions. I love Waiting for Godot so it will probably be that play. 

Day 365 Bible Reading

Revelation 22: 13 (ESV)

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Today is the last day of my 2022 Bible in a year reading plan. When I read this line from Revelation 22, I found it a fitting way to bring this year of Bible Reading to a close. When I started my journey to deepen my relationship with Christ in 2021, I received a message that I needed to read the Bible daily so I could reflect on the word of God. My first thought was cool. It has been a goal of mine since college to know the Bible inside out and out, when my Theatre Arts professor screamed in my Becket class that most of great Western Literature references the Bible in some way, and we were missing out on the references if we didn’t know the Bible. In today’s world, this would the equivalent of watching Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and not getting all the Kung Fu movie homages. In my senior level class of 12 students who were studying the great playwright Samuel Becket that semester, none of us had much knowledge of the Bible.

So after two years of reading the Bible in a Year, I can honestly say I still don’t know if I’ll ever get all the Bible references in a Samuel Becket play. But I’m going to keep trying to read the Bible every year in a year, because if the great writers of Western Literature loved the Bible enough to put Biblical references in their works of art then it’s worth it to me so I can deepen my understanding of my favorite Western Literature writers.

And I love that I start my day and end my day immersed in activities that deepen my faith in God. God is my Alpha and Omega, my first and last, and my beginning and my end.  

 Day 364 Bible Reading

Proverbs 31: 30 (ESV)

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

I love this line from Proverbs 31. I’ve met the most charming people who turned out to be total snakes and liars. These folks have so much charisma, and they hide their deceitfulness with their charm. Beauty is a complicated subject. True beauty is so fleeting and is in the eye of the beholder. It is rare for a woman not to be vain about her looks, but that beauty can be a trap. The women I know who are obsessed with their beauty pursue it more than they do their relationship with God. Most of these women are so insecure about their looks, even though they’ve been called beautiful their whole life. As a woman, I do want to be thought of as charming and of course beautiful. Who doesn’t? But for me the most important thing at this point in my life is that I want to be thought of as a devout Christian woman, who loves and obeys God.