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Podcast: 15 Questions about Reading and Understanding the Bible (Greg Gilbert)

August 08, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Quick Questions to Help with Your Bible Reading

In today's episode, Greg Gilbert answers common questions about reading the Bible such as: How do I get started with a consistent habit of Bible reading? When should I read it? How long? And what if I don’t understand something?

The Epic Story of the Bible

The Epic Story of the Bible

Greg Gilbert

Adapted from the ESV Story of Redemption Bible, The Epic Story of the Bible teaches believers and nonbelievers alike how to read the word of God as a grand storyline that points to the saving work of Jesus Christ.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:55 - I’ve never read the Bible consistently before. How do I get started?

Matt Tully
Greg, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Greg Gilbert
Great to be with you, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Tully
As Christians we know that God’s word should play a central role in our lives, and yet I know I’ve found for myself, for those that I know and love, and I’m sure for you at times, we still have lots of questions about the Bible—what it is and how to engage with it rightly. I want to spend some time today asking you some of those questions—15 of them, to be precise. Does that sound good?

Greg Gilbert
Let’s go for it. It’s a big book, right? That’s why it can be daunting.

Matt Tully
Let’s jump right in here. Question number one: I’ve never read the Bible consistently before. How do I get started?

Greg Gilbert
It’s a hard thing to do to read the Bible consistently. I think part of the reason that it’s hard to do it is because we tend to gravitate to the parts of it that we’re familiar with because they are familiar. But the downside of that is that because they’re familiar they can feel boring to us. You start to wonder, Why should I read my favorite Bible story for the seventeenth time again? It’s just really hard to be consistent with that. The other problem that’s related to it is that the stuff we’re not so familiar with, the reason that we’re not familiar with it is because it can be difficult. It’s hard to understand exactly where you are in the story, exactly what’s going on, exactly why this thing is happening. For example, I’m supposed to preach 1 Kings 13 this coming Sunday. Prior to this week, if you had asked me what was in 1 Kings 13 I never would have known. But what’s in it is this wild story about this prophet who gets mauled by a lion because another prophet lies to him and tells him he can disobey God without any consequences. It’s just plopped right in the middle of all these stories about the kings of Israel, and by the end of it there’s not a whole lot of help from the author of 1 Kings about exactly why that’s in there. Unless you have somebody helping you and leading you through the story—almost like a guide, as if you’re making a trek through the mountains—it can be really hard to engage. I think probably the best way to do it is to understand that the Bible is one big, epic story. It’s not just a series of unrelated stories; it’s one gigantic, epic story. For instance, The Lord of the Rings. The best way to engage it and keep yourself interested in it is to catch the storyline that’s running through it and have somebody help you through it—somebody who has a lot more experience and knowledge about the Bible telling you what to look out for, telling you what to keep your eye on, and all the rest.

03:51 - What if it feels hard to be motivated to read the Bible? What do I do?

Matt Tully
That’s a good segue into question number two: What if it feels hard to be motivated to read the Bible? What do I do?

Greg Gilbert
That’s a highly related question to the first one—How do I be consistent with it? If we were highly motivated, we would be consistent with it. Those are very tightly related questions. I think you would be helped by somebody leading you through the Bible and helping you to understand what’s happening. But sometimes reading the Bible, just like anything else, is just a matter of you just need to do the thing and do it consistently. So there is a little bit of that, but I also think once you catch the story, the Bible is just endlessly fascinating. Just like you don’t have to be super motivated to watch your favorite movie over and over and over again and it’s just something you kind of default to, once you understand the story of the Bible you can get to that place with it because it is so rich and layered.

05:06 - What role should an audio recording of the Bible play in my devotional life?

Matt Tully
That’s an exciting thought for many listening who maybe haven’t tasted that before. It’s appealing to get to that point. Question number three: What role should an audio recording of the Bible play in my devotional life?

Greg Gilbert
It can be an important part or it can have no relevance to your devotional life at all. Some people are helped by being able to just listen to the Bible being read in the car. Some people like to have it read to them as they read along. Other people don’t like it at all. It’s just kind of a personal preference thing.

Matt Tully
Would you say that if someone only listens to the Bible that would be totally fine? Is there an important primacy to reading a physical Bible, or not really?

Greg Gilbert
That’s a good question. I don’t think so. There’s something special about being able to just read a paragraph again without having to rewind it and find out exactly where to stop the recording, but through most of Christian history most Christians when they engaged the Bible it was through the hearing of the word. The letters were read in the churches. I think there are benefits to reading just because you can sort of pause without even really thinking about it to mull something over. In the Psalms there’s a Selah where you just want to pause for a second and consider something. So I think there are benefits to reading it, but I think listening to the word of God is sort of what it was designed for in the first place.

06:37 - What’s the best time of day to read the Bible?

Matt Tully
Question number four: What’s the best time of day to read the Bible, in your opinion?

Greg Gilbert
In my opinion, it is not early in the morning, but that doesn’t mean that that’s not the best time objectively. I’m just not a morning person, so my mind is slow in the morning and I don’t engage things as well in the morning. For me, some time in the early or mid-afternoon is the best time for me to engage with the Bible. But that’s going to be different for all kinds of people. King David said that he made his prayers to the Lord in the morning, so there’s something to starting the day with that. But for me, it’s really close to sort of a waste of time because my mind is just not rolling very good early in the morning.

Matt Tully
My sense is that is probably a pretty freeing statement from you—a pastor who has written many books about the Bible—to hear you say that you don’t love to read your Bible early in the morning. It feels to me that people usually acknowledge there is truly no right way to do that, and yet there’s a certain kind of esteem given to those who get up early and read their Bibles first thing.

Greg Gilbert
Oh yeah. You’ll hear the stories of Jonathan Edwards or John Wesley. They woke up at three o’ clock in the morning and read the Bible for three hours. I just can’t do that. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. It’s not profitable for me to do that. It would be far more profitable for me to be asleep at three o’ clock in the morning and have my mind be sharp at a different time of the day to engage the Bible.

08:20 - What do you think about journaling alongside your Bible reading?

Matt Tully
Question number five: What do you think about journaling alongside your Bible reading? Do you do that?

Greg Gilbert
That’s a funny question. I’m sort of forced into doing that by sermon prep. I end up with journals. If I weren’t preaching, I don’t know that I would do that because when I’m just reading the Bible for fun and for devotional reasons, I don’t journal. But I think it’s a good thing to do. It’s good to be able to go back and see the insights that you’ve seen before. I’ll often do that with sermon notes. I’ll see what I saw again in the text, and that’s a very good thing to do. It’s often encouraging to me. But again, it’s a matter of freedom. You don’t have to do that. I don’t think you’re more spiritual if you do or don’t. For some people, the pressure of having to write something down takes away from being able to just enjoy what’s happening in the word of God. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate thing.

09:25 - I often feel confused by the Bible. What should I do?

Matt Tully
Question number six: I often feel confused by the Bible. What should I do?

Greg Gilbert
You should get The Story of Redemption Bible from Crossway. It’s literally a Bible with a bunch of notes in it. It’s not quite a study Bible, but more like just having a tour guide through the thing that will step in at various points and point out points of interest: Keep this in mind. Here’s where the story is going. Here’s what just happened. Here’s why this is important. Having somebody to kind of hold your hand through the whole thing like that is immensely helpful in just understanding what’s going on at any given point.

10:04 - Should I be carefully studying the Bible verse by verse and passage by passage, or just simply reading it?

Matt Tully
Question seven: Should I be carefully studying the Bible verse by verse and passage by passage, or just simply reading it?

Greg Gilbert
It just depends. I think the basis of any knowledge of the Bible is just going to be to read it, read it, read it in big chunks. Just get familiar with the story. There’s a story that runs from creation to new creation through Jesus the Messiah. It’s just an endlessly fascinating, epic story. It’s got kings rising and falling, cities being built and destroyed. It’s just an amazing story of this kingdom of Israel that God is working through to bring one great king who’s going to be exalted over the entire world. It’s just an amazing story! The more familiar you are with that epic storyline, the more you’ll be able to pull out of the Bible when you do zero in and study something very particularly. You’ll know where you are in the story, you’ll understand where all those themes are headed and where they’re going to end (which is always on Jesus); but you’ll understand how that happens. The whole thing will just become a thousand times richer. So, sometimes you do want to study a particular passage deeply, but I think one of the best things you can do, especially if you don’t feel super familiar with the Bible, is read it in huge chunks in the order of the story itself—which is not always canonical order, by the way. The story order is slightly different than canonical order.

Matt Tully
My next question will relate to that idea of the story and seeing how it all hangs together. But before we get there, I have one drill-down question: Do you think there’s value in changing things up a little bit and for a season intentionally really going deep with a certain book of the Bible and just unpacking it with a great resource like a study Bible? And if you’ve been doing that for a while, would you recommend to then jump out from that and read the whole New Testament over the course of a month and kind of broaden things out?

Greg Gilbert
Oh yeah, absolutely. I do that in preaching too. Sometimes a series through a book will be a hundred sermons. I don’t preach them all at once, but as a whole it will be a hundred sermons. Other times I’ll preach 1 Kings in nine sermons, so we’re moving really fast through that. But I think those varying levels of studying and looking at the Bible are really helpful. I find that what most people are lacking, and the reason there is some lack of fascination with the Bible is, again, just back to that they just don’t have a good understanding of what the whole story is. They may have the highlights of it, but how it all fits together and the way the various themes develop and the foreshadowings take form later on, I just think most Christians are fairly anemic in that area. I think getting your head around that story is huge.

13:15 - How does the New Testament relate to the Old Testament?

Matt Tully
Question number eight relates to that: How does the New Testament relate to the Old Testament?

Greg Gilbert
The New Testament is the fulfillment of the entire Old Testament. The Old Testament is massive foreshadowing and a hundred different themes. You see those themes develop and they swirl around each other. The covenants are made, and then they’re broken, and you have all of these different themes like kingship, temple, the presence of God, and sacrifice. They all kind of swirl around each other, and they all come into question at one point: Is God really going to keep his promises that he made? Then, in the New Testament, what happens is that all of those themes land on the head of this guy from Nazareth who is declared to be the long-awaited king of Israel, even though he doesn’t look anything like what you would have expected, unless you were reading the Prophets very, very carefully. And then the whole rest of the New Testament is sort of the fireworks display of how all those themes of the Old Testament finally came to their intended end. Once you get that, it’s just mind-blowingly beautiful and huge. That’s the word that I can’t get away from. It’s just a huge story, and yet every little piece of it holds together perfectly.

14:45 - What are the three most important themes that we should be watching for when we read our Bibles?

Matt Tully
The next question: If you had to pick—and this might be like making you choose between your children—what are the three most important themes (if you had to pick) that we should be watching for when we read our Bibles?

Greg Gilbert
You’re going to make me get into fights with my friends here! Let’s see. I would say kingship, sacrifice (which would also be the suffering servant theme in Isaiah), and maybe the presence of God with his people. There are six others that are coming to mind even as I say that.

Matt Tully
Why don’t you drill into each of those themes. Give us a quick summary of the trajectory of each of those themes throughout the whole Bible.

Greg Gilbert
Take for example the theme of kingship. Everybody knows that Jesus is the King—Prophet, Priest, and King. We’re happy to say that, but the theme of kingship actually shows up in the very first instance in Genesis 1 because human beings—Adam and Eve—were supposed to be a little king and queen underneath the high King God. They were supposed to rule the cosmos as his vice regents. Obviously, instead of doing that, by Genesis 3 Adam and Eve have joined the rebellion of the serpent, they’ve declared war against God and independence from God, they don’t like the fact that their authority is limited, so they try to throw off God’s authority and take rule of the earth for themselves. They join the serpent’s rebellion. In the wake of the curse that comes, you have God promising in Genesis 3:15, Alright, you guys have failed, but I’m going to send another human being—another offspring of the woman—who will act as king in the way Adam should have but didn’t. He’s going to destroy the serpent. He’s going to set everything right. And then the whole rest of the Old Testament is kind of a question: Who is this King going to be? Noah’s father thinks that it’s going to be Noah, basically everybody things it’s going to be David, every king of Israel proves himself not to be that great king. And in the meantime, you have the covenants being made, David being promised that this king is going to come and sit on his throne particularly, you have the prophets talking about who this king is going to be, and there are some amazing surprises there because the theme of sacrifice shows up to be woven together with the theme of kingship because the king is going to be a sacrifice. And not only that, but the theme of the presence of God shows up there too because the king is going to be God, who is a sacrifice. You can see those getting woven together. And then Matthew 1 shows up and that genealogy is basically Matthew screaming at the top of his lungs, This guy is the promised king! And then, of course, you have all the kingly imagery surrounding the crucifixion. We normally associate the crucifixion with the priestly work of Christ, and that’s correct; but all the imagery around the crucifixion is kingly imagery: the crown of thorns, the reed for a scepter, the purple robe, the sign on the cross that says This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. It’s all kingly imagery, and what that’s doing is it’s saying this work of sacrifice is in fact the work of the king of Israel, as it was revealed in the Old Testament in the Prophets. I could talk about the others, but since they all weave together at the end, you end up kind of following the same trajectory.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the most amazing things about the study of these themes—another word for this would just be biblical theology—is how often these distinct concepts do tend to come together in interesting ways. I think that makes it fascinating and exciting, but also can be part of what makes it challenging to always trace those lines throughout Scripture. Do you find that that’s the case for you sometimes?

Greg Gilbert
Oh, sure. It takes study to understand the story, but the thing about studying something deeply, especially an epic like that, is that the more you dig down into it, the more you see just how beautiful and well-crafted and perfect it is. You start to see more and more layers of, Oh, wow! There’s that theme again. I didn’t even see it the first ten times I read that passage. Let me just back up and talk about the Bible first as a work of great literature. It’s way more than that, but when you just talk about it as a great work of literature, any great work of literature can stand up to multiple readings. You’ll start to see things in it that you never saw before. That’s just infinitely more true of the Bible because it’s the inspired word of God. I assume I can spend 10,000 years studying the Bible and find depths of meaning in it and in its themes that I had never seen before.

20:04 - How should prayer fit together with our Bible reading?

Matt Tully
Question number ten: How should prayer fit together with our Bible reading?

Greg Gilbert
It’s the Holy Spirit who is going to illuminate your heart to see these things and to love them. Any time you’re going to approach the word of God to read it for fun or anything else, you’re appealing to the Lord and his Spirit to show you the meaning of it and then help you to love the meaning of it. Praying to that end is a critical thing.

20:34 - What do you think of Bible-reading plans?

Matt Tully
Question eleven: What do you think of Bible-reading plans?

Greg Gilbert
I think they’re great. I have to have a plan for just about everything in my life. If I don’t, I don’t tend to stick with things that I don’t have a plan for. I think they’re great. They can be artificial sometimes. Like, we’re just going to do two chapters a day or whatever, and you’ll sometimes break the story at the wrong spot. But that’s okay if you’re going to pick it up again the next day. The Bible-reading plan that we did for The Story of Redemption Bible doesn’t take you through the Bible canonically. You do in fact do Genesis–Ruth in order, but it’s when we get to 1 or 2 Kings that we break the canonical order. At various points, even in 2 Kings, we’ll tell you to stop reading 2 Kings and go read Amos, because that’s when Amos was in fact preaching. And once you’re done with Amos, you come back to 2 Kings, read a couple more chapters, then go read Joel or whoever it is, come back and keep reading. You end up reading those prophets at the time in the story when they were actually prophesying, so their books take on this 3D character because you realize, Oh, wow! I understand why Amos is talking about that because I was just reading in 2 Kings about how this king was doing that. It takes on a whole new meaning.

Matt Tully
That’s cool.

Greg Gilbert
The same thing happens, by the way, for Paul’s letters in the New Testament. Paul’s letters are in the canon by a rough order of length, so it really has nothing to do with chronology or anything like that. It goes from longest to shortest, roughly. If you’ve got somebody to say, as you’re reading through Acts, Okay, at this point in Acts, this is what Paul would have written Ephesians or 1 Corinthians. You can pause in Acts, go read Ephesians, and the thing will just take on this 3D just like the minor prophets because you see, Oh, that’s why he tells the Ephesians that, because this was going on. It’s just a whole different way of seeing them.

Matt Tully
I think one of the concerns or hesitations that some people might have about the idea of a reading plan is the form these plans often take is a piece of paper that has a bunch of days and little check boxes. I think the fear can be that it becomes a mere checklist. You feel like you’ve got to keep up with it, and you either do it in a rote kind of way or you fall behind and then feel guilty that you’ve fallen behind in your plan. How would you respond to those kinds of concerns?

Greg Gilbert
Yes, that’s a possibility. But there are dangers at every turn. There is literally nothing that we human beings can do that doesn’t have dangers in it. If you take the opposite side and say, Hey, you know what? Because I don’t want to just approach the word of God as a duty or as a rote thing or as a check box, I’m only going to read the Bible on days when I really feel like it and want to. The danger with that, of course, is that you’ll end up going six months without every feeling like it. In fact, one of the means by which the Lord makes you desire his word is his word. It’s actually a really good thing to have something that is going to exert even just a little bit of pressure on you to do it. For the person who feels guilty about missing a day, I would just say don’t. There’s literally no law that says you have to read the Bible every single day. It’s a good thing to do, but if you miss a day, fine! Just pick it up the next day! Christians beating themselves up to death on missing some spiritual discipline is just counter productive. That can actually become one of Satan’s greatest strategies for locking a Christian up in guilt and making them useless: Let’s use the Bible and a missed day of Bible reading to lock this guy up in his own guilt for a week as he beats himself up. It would be much healthier to just say, Okay, I missed a day. There’s no law that says I had to read it today. I’ll read it tomorrow. But there’s this plan that’s exerting a little bit of pressure.

Matt Tully
You would say that if a Christian gets to bed late and then misses their alarm, or just doesn’t want to get up and just rolls over and goes back to sleep in the morning and then doesn’t read the Bible one day, you would say don’t assume that God is upset at you or disappointed in you for that?

Greg Gilbert
Absolutely. Sleep in. It’s fine. If you look back and find that you haven’t read the Bible in a month or something, then you might want to rethink that. But there is no point in a Christian beating themselves up for a missed spiritual discipline. There’s just not, unless it goes for a long time, and then you might want to rethink it.

25:54 - What is one of the biggest mistakes that Christians make when reading the Bible?

Matt Tully
Question number twelve: What is one of the biggest mistakes that Christians make when reading the Bible, in your experience? I’m thinking especially as a pastor who I’m sure is teaching people about the Bible, encouraging them, discipling people to read the Bible. What’s one of the most common mistakes that you see Christians making?

Greg Gilbert
There are a couple of levels to this. One of the biggest mistakes they make is never reading it, which is not helpful. If you move into hermeneutical, interpretive mistakes, it’s generally a desire to apply a text one to one to your life. You go to some Old Testament thing and you see God saying something to David or to Abraham and you say, I’m taking that as mine. You can’t do that. It’s in a story. You have to run what’s being said to Abraham or David through the story, through the prism of the cross because that’s where you’re standing. Can that be a difficult thing to do? Sometimes at first, but once you’ve read through the Bible with help—with The Story of Redemption Bible or something like that—it gets easier. You just learn what happens to those things that the Lord says or those laws or whatever, and it gets much easier to trace out the story. But you generally can’t go to the Old Testament, grab something that the Lord says, and apply it one to one to yourself. It just doesn’t work like that. For the most part, that’s all Christians know to do, on a broad scale with the Old Testament, is that kind of thing.

27:38 - What are you currently reading in the Bible?

Matt Tully
Alright, getting down to the end here. Question number thirteen: What are you currently reading in the Bible?

Greg Gilbert
I’m reading 1 Kings a little bit ahead of where I’m preaching it. So, this week I’m preaching 1 Kings 12–13, so this morning I was in 1 Kings 16–17.

Matt Tully
Is there anything new that you feel like you’ve seen in the text of Scripture recently in that study and in that reading?

Greg Gilbert
Oh, yeah. It’s incredible. There’s always something. 1 Kings 1–11 is about the life of Solomon, and I think the thing that was kind of new to me. People generally try to divide Solomon’s life up into the good half and the bad half. He was really good, he asked for wisdom, he built the temple; and then you have bad Solomon at the end. But it’s really not that way. From chapter 1 and 2, the author of 1 Kings is just throwing all kinds of savage side-eye at the decisions that Solomon is making. And David too! There’s all this stuff about the throne being established, but the way they do it is basically dying David calls Solomon over and whispers basically, Kill everybody! It’s so bloody, the decisions are questionable, and the author of 1 Kings is really just throwing some shade at Solomon right from the very beginning.

Matt Tully
Hearing you describe that along with earlier points you were making, it makes you want to get into it and see what was going on there and read these stories afresh.

Greg Gilbert
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

29:28 - What book of the Bible feels particularly difficult to you right now?

Matt Tully
Question fourteen: What book of the Bible feels particularly difficult to you right now?

Greg Gilbert
That’s a good question. I would say there are a couple. I think Proverbs is always both really relevant and practical but also extremely difficult to deal with because it’s just so many different topics just thrown in together (in those middle chapters, not so much at the beginning). So that one is difficult. I think Ecclesiastes is a hard book. You really do need some help getting through that one for it not to feel Nihilistic until the last verse. That’s a hard book to deal with. So maybe it’s just wisdom literature in general that I have a hard time with.

30:28 - What’s your favorite book of the Bible?

Matt Tully
I’m sure many people are resonating with that answer right now. Final question: What’s your favorite book of the Bible? Again, forcing you to pick something. Why would you say it’s one of your favorites, if not your favorite book?

Greg Gilbert
I just get one? That’s it? I get one book?

Matt Tully
That’s it. Just one.

Greg Gilbert
Well, I’ll do it like this: I think the most fun I’ve ever had preaching a book, and the most I’ve learned from it, was Matthew. Matthew is so deliberate in saying that all these themes that you Jewish people know so well from your Old Testament have come to rest in Jesus. Matthew gives you a prism for seeing the entire Bible, and so I love the way he does that.

Matt Tully
Why is it that that was so appealing to you? Is there something about the way that you viewed the Bible, or viewed Matthew’s Gospel in particular, before you preached through it that kind of shifted?

Greg Gilbert
I preached Matthew about ten years ago, or maybe even twelve years ago. It wasn’t like biblical theology or the story of the Bible was brand new to me, but it was still just exploding in my mind how beautiful the Old Testament is in its telling of the story and how it all aims at Jesus. Matthew kind of acts like a guide to all of that: Here’s how you should read this. If you see all of that and don’t just focus on our favorite verses from Matthew, but really dive into what he’s saying about what the Old Testament was saying, it just illuminates that story so much. You see the end game of all of those themes from the Old Testament, which is just super helpful.

Matt Tully
Greg, thanks so much for going through these fifteen quick questions about the Bible and about reading the Bible. We appreciate it.

Greg Gilbert
It’s awesome to be with you. Thanks, Matt.

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