I'm Just Saying...Maybe We’ve Been Reading the Bible Wrong.
For a long time I have been thinking about how we read the Bible. Not just what we read in it, but how we approach it in the first place.
Every one of us carries something with us when we open the text. Assumptions. Frameworks we inherited from pastors or teachers. Cultural influences. Religious baggage we did not even realize we picked up along the way. All of that shapes how we read.
I notice this especially when people say they want to be “biblical.” Usually what that means is that whatever interpretation they hold must therefore be the biblical one. But that raises an important question. What does it actually mean to read the Bible “biblically”?
Most people do not realize that the way many of us read the Bible today is relatively new. The approach that encourages a face value reading of the text, often called inductive Bible study, developed out of a movement known as common sense realism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This approach also popularized something we hardly think about anymore. Cross referencing notes inside our Bibles. Those little center column references that send you to another verse somewhere else in scripture that supposedly connects with the one you are reading.
We take that for granted now, but that way of interacting with the Bible was once an innovation. Readers began moving through the text looking for meaning by connecting verses scattered throughout the scriptures.
Long before that, another major change had already reshaped how people read the Bible. Chapters and verses were added in the medieval and early modern periods. They were never part of the original writings. Once those divisions were introduced, they changed the way readers approached the text.
A story that once flowed as a continuous narrative suddenly became broken into numbered sections. That makes it easier to reference, but it also changes how we think about what we are reading.
When those structural changes combined with the habit of cross referencing verses, something else began to happen. The Bible slowly shifted in the minds of many readers from a story into a kind of reference manual.
Instead of seeing people, histories, and real lives shaped by encounters with a living God, the text began to function more like a system for finding answers to whatever question we happen to have in the moment.
You can see the impact of this in movements that became obsessed with decoding the future. Dispensationalism and certain forms of premillennial thinking built elaborate systems by linking verses together across the Bible in an attempt to map out timelines or predict global events.
But when you actually listen to Jesus, he does not spend much time pulling people into speculation about the future. Again and again he draws people back to the present. To the reality of the Kingdom of God breaking into the world right now.
And that matters, especially when the world feels uncertain. Every generation experiences conflict, instability, and fear. That is not new in human history. When those moments come, many people instinctively run to the Bible looking for hidden meanings or coded explanations.
Maybe the better move is to step back.
Step back from the instinct to chase cross referenced rabbit trails that promise secret insights about what might happen next. Step back from reading the Bible like a puzzle book.
Instead, read it as the unfolding revelation of a God who is working to bring his good creation under his rule.
From the opening pages of Genesis through the life of Jesus and beyond, the story is about a Creator who chooses to work through humans. People who learn to partner with him. People who surrender to the way of life revealed through Jesus.
When you read the Bible through that lens, something shifts. The text stops feeling like a collection of isolated verses and starts looking like what it actually is.
A story.
The story of God reclaiming his world through people who are learning to live under his Kingdom here and now.
Maybe reading the Bible “biblically” starts there.
I’m Just Saying is a weekly email where I share a thought I’m wrestling with in real time. It is an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconsider the way we think about faith, the Bible, Jesus, and the Church. No pressure. Just an honest thought, once a week.
