Five days into my attempt to read the Bible in one year, 360 to go. So far so good but only time will tell if I will be able to keep up. It’s going to be hard work, but knowing there are lots of other people taking on this challenge makes it all the more exciting.

Each day, I have been presented with readings from both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Unsurprisingly, the Old Testament readings have been from the beginning – Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth”. What an opener to the beginning of God’s story! The beginning of HIStory. No matter how many times I’ve read these words, they still generate a sense of excitement. They make me want to read on, and I always do read on. However, if I’m completely honest, I struggle with Genesis. My problem is that I always take the biblical account of Creation and The Fall far too literally. I spend too long getting het up over the logistics of minor details that I forget the bigger picture. I need to be reminded that I’m not God and I never will be, therefore I will never know exactly how it all happened. I shouldn’t worry about how God’s created the Universe, the most important thing is that he did.

I also struggle with the harshness of God in the Old Testament. I used to actually find it quite uncomfortable to read about a God (my God) ‘cursing’ and ‘banishing’ people. God is meant to be all-loving isn’t he? The readings over the last few days have taught me that I have been misunderstanding God. I have been trying to understand Him from a human perspective, therefore I’ve been assuming that any anger he displays is like our human anger, full of hatred, fury, and violence. But I’ve learnt that God’s anger is divine anger NOT human anger. He only ever gets angry about things which are harmful to us – this makes sense and certainly is a quality of an all-loving God.

Most people probably know that parts of the Bible are very hard going. I have always found some of the most tedious passages to be the genealogical lists of Jesus’ ancestors (Matthew 1:1-16), and Adam (Genesis 5:1-32) and Noah’s (Genesis 10:1-32) descendants. They consist of endless, repetitive lists of names which are impossible to pronounce (and which sound ridiculous to 21st century, Western ears)! I used to find this boring and pointless until I read it from a fresh perspective last week. On the one hand, yes, it is just a list of names. But these are names of real people who existed in Old Testament times. Real people who created the link between Adam and Noah, and Abraham and Jesus. These lists of names show that Jesus was always part of God’s plan. Reading “Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah” (Matthew 1:16) actually sent a shiver down my spine and made these previously boring parts of the Bible more real to me than ever before.

I didn’t expect that such familiar Bible verses would teach me so much about my faith in such a short space of time. My aim is to post about my ‘Bible in One Year’ progress weekly on a Sunday afternoon. This is going to be an amazing year!