The Bible is a big book, and it does not tell you where to start. If you were sitting across from me and asked me how to begin, this is what I would say.

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1. Start with a Gospel, not with Genesis

Most people open to page one and stall somewhere in Leviticus. Begin instead with one of the four accounts of the life of Jesus. John is the gentlest place to start — it was written so that someone who knew nothing would come to know Jesus. If you would rather walk the events in order, Luke is the historian, and The Life of Jesus will take you through it.

The older part of the story explains a great deal, and you will want it eventually. You do not need it to begin.

📖 Open John chapter 1 and start reading →
Opens in a new tab — the GOD’S WORD Translation, free online. If you do not own a Bible, start here tonight.

2. Read a little, and read it slowly

A chapter is plenty. Ten minutes is plenty. Reading a small amount and thinking about it will do more for you than racing through sixty-six books in a year, which is how most reading plans quietly end.

Do not expect to understand everything at once, and do not be discouraged. Consider the normal process of learning: we expect at least twelve years of formal schooling for the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Here you are meeting ancient history and culture, creation and revelation, and God’s dealings with humanity across the whole of it. These documents have been studied for millennia and found inexhaustible. Be patient with yourself.

3. Write your questions down

You will hit things that puzzle you, and things that bother you. Keep a list. Do not stop reading to solve each one, and do not pretend the difficulty is not there — the story does not avoid human failure, and it does not hide the consequences of it. Most questions answer themselves as you read further. The ones that do not are worth asking someone.

4. Use a translation you can actually read

A great many people stall out because they are reading English that is four hundred years old. That is not devotion, it is friction. For a first reading I recommend the GOD’S WORD Translation. See Languages & Translations for my suggestions, and Translations for why Bibles differ from one another.

5. Ask before you read

Since it is God’s story, ask Him to help you discover it, and to help you understand what it means for you specifically. This is the account of God’s interaction with humanity, and He has invited each of us into it. Ultimately, it is your story as well.

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One thing worth knowing before you start

This is not a “holy book” that fell from the sky. It is the record of God revealing Himself to real people, in real places, over a long stretch of time. That means Scripture has a context — a culture, a language, a moment in history — and knowing something about that context will open passages that otherwise stay closed. You do not need any of that on your first evening. It is simply the direction the road goes.

Words you will meet

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Every subject has its vocabulary, and most of these are ordinary words doing a particular job. Words You Will Meet sets out the ones this study leans on — tabernacle, atonement, clean and unclean, remnant, covenant and the rest — in plain terms. You do not need them in advance. It is there when a word stops you.

One more thing about these pages. Verse references in the body text are links — click them or ignore them; the page reads either way. They open in a new tab at the GOD’S WORD Translation, free online.

When you are ready for the whole story

God’s Story walks the Bible in chronological order, from Genesis to the letters, and each page carries you on to the next. It is the long way round, and it is worth it.

If you want the method behind that study — how the parts fit together, and how to work a passage carefully — that is on For Serious Study.

Relax, and begin to explore.

What the older books are doing here

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This study reads the Old Testament as the book Jesus was reading. Not a warm-up, and not a set of clues to be decoded — the language He spoke in, argued in, and was understood in. When He says “the Son of Man,” or “the bridegroom,” or quotes a psalm from a cross, He is not introducing an idea. He is finishing a sentence somebody else started centuries earlier.

That is why the story is told in order here. You will find the second half harder to follow if you skip the first, in the same way you would find the last act of anything harder to follow.

One thing to watch for. You will see people, objects and events in the older books treated as pictures of Jesus — the lamb, the rock, the high priest. Sometimes the New Testament says so outright, and I will point at the verse where it does. Sometimes it is a reading — mine, or one the church has held for a long time — and I will tell you which. You are allowed to hold that second kind loosely and still get everything the page is offering.

The New Testament has a word for this, and it is worth having. Hebrews calls the older things a shadow. Stand in bright sunlight and you cast a shadow. Nobody would mistake the shadow for you — it has no face, no weight, you cannot shake its hand. But it is evidence enough that you are standing there. That is the argument Hebrews makes over and over about the tabernacle, the priesthood and the sacrifices: not that they were fakes, but that they were shadows, and that the one casting them has now walked into the room.

And I will try never to let the picture swallow the event. These things happened to real people in real places, and what happened to them matters on its own, whether or not you can see anything else in it. A shadow is cast by something real, but it also falls on real ground.

What this study is not arguing

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A few arguments run hot among Christians, and you will not find me running them here.

This study is about an ancient nation and the covenant God made with it. The modern state that carries the same name has its own history, and I am not treating it as the sequel to this one. That is a different subject, and it deserves people who have studied it properly.

I am not running an end-times timetable either. And where Christians have divided into denominations over how a thing should be done, I have tried to stay with what the text says and leave the sorting to them.

None of that means I have no views. Where I hold one, I will tell you it is mine and show you the line I am reading it from — that is the whole method here. It means I would rather not spend your attention on arguments the church is having with itself, when the story is what you came for.