5 Days Per Week Bible Reading Program for 2024
Written by O. Palmer Robertson |
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
Many people find that first thing in the morning is their best time for reading God’s Word. But that doesn’t work for everyone, or for every season of life. The more important thing is not when you read but that you read. Use lunchtime, break time or bedtime depending on what works best for you. In any case, develop a consistent habit of reading God’s holy, inspired, infallible and inerrant Word, so that it becomes part of the rhythm of your life, for the rest of your life.
5 Days per week Bible Reading Program
Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Psalm 1:2
Most Christians would agree that it would be a great blessing and very desirable to read the whole Bible through every year. But saying is easier than doing. How many of us have begun on January 1 full of good intentions, and by January 18 we have given up? There are many reasons why we fail, but we should not forget that we are all involved in high stakes spiritual warfare. Satan does not want believers to regularly be listening to, and being transformed by, the living word of the living God. The Bible reading plan that follows is offered to you as an encouragement not to give up, but to try again.
- 5 days per week
Unlike many Bible-in-a-year reading plans, this one schedules only five days per week rather than seven. So, although each day’s readings are a little longer, it provides a way of catching up for those who fall behind in their readings. Or if you get ahead, you can take time out for a deeper study of some part of scripture without getting behind.
- A Redemptive-historical approach.
Instead of reading the Old Testament from beginning to end in the order in which the books appear in our Bibles, these readings are arranged in such a way that the reader can follow the unfolding story of God’s redemption of his people.
- Chronological order
The readings are arranged as much as possible in chronological order. For example, parallel readings in Kings and Chronicles are read alongside one another. The prophets are slotted into the reading of the historical books according to the time in history when the prophet was ministering (as far as we can determine). Some of the chapters in Jeremiah and Daniel are read out of biblical order so that they follow a more chronological order.
- One Gospel each quarter
Instead of reading all four gospels one after the other, each quarter includes one of the gospels, in the order they were most likely written: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.
- New Testament phases of revelation
The New Testament readings are arranged in the following order:
Quarter 1: Mark and early apostolic witnesses: Acts 1-12, James, Hebrews, 1 Peter, Acts 13-28. These books record the actions and writings of the apostles as the early church was first being established, initially with Jewish converts and then increasingly with believers from all the other nations. In coordination with Acts 1-12, James appears to have been written early in the life of the church, while Hebrews seems to have been written while the temple in Jerusalem was still standing (i.e. before AD 70 when the temple was destroyed). According to tradition, 1 Peter was written from Rome before his martyrdom in the AD 60s. Acts 13-28 provides the background for Paul’s early letters.
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What Canada’s Bill C-4 Can & Can’t Do
Attempts by men and nations to prevent God’s sovereign purposes, not the least of which are conversion, are so pathetically impotent that God laughs at them. No nation ever has, and no nation ever will, hinder God from accomplishing his sovereign purposes.
Much attention has been given to Canada’s recently passed, “Bill C-4.” Reportedly, some 4000 pastors expressed their willingness to protest the bill from pulpits last Sunday. If you are not familiar, among other things, it criminalizes “conversion therapy” of people in homosexuality and transgenderism. I spoke with a long-time Canadian citizen last week who said that the Bill is intended to forbid things like actual physical harm, torture, kidnapping, and assault on children under the guise of “conversion therapy.” Obviously forbidding those things is necessary.
However, the wording of the Bill is not only ominously broad, but seems to target God’s definition of gender and sexuality. For example, the Bill’s Preamble declares that it is a “myth” to believe that “heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.” Thus, according to Canadian law, God’s good and loving design for marriage sexuality, and gender (Gen 1:26-27, 2:24), is a myth. The Bill goes on to define conversion therapy as, “a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual; change a person’s gender identity to cisgender; change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth.”
With the passing of Bill C-4, Canada has criminalized the evangelism, counseling, and shepherding of people in homosexuality and transgenderism. According to the Bill, it is a criminal offense, punishable with up to five years in prison, to be used of God in bringing the incredibly loving news of Christ crucified in our place and risen from the dead to such individuals. Let’s be clear what Canada has done. In passing this Bill, Canada announced, and sanctioned, its hatred for people involved in homosexuality and transgenderism. Conversion to faith in Jesus Christ meets the greatest need of the human race; it is the zenith of God’s love extended to a person. So, to forbid this from individuals is to hate them.
Before getting into what the Bill can and cannot do, let’s consider the unspeakable deluge of God’s love in conversion; how loving God’s conversion is. In converting the sinner, God sets his unshakable love on us though we had not loved him (Rom 5:8). Then, God imputes all of our sin to the perfect, sinless, glorious Person of Christ in his death at the cross (1 Pet 2:24). He also imputes the righteousness of Jesus Christ to us, the sinners, though we have only lived in sin (2 Cor 5:21). As if that was not enough, we are then made spiritually alive by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5), thereby having the power to be transformed out of previously enslaving sins (Rom 6:6-7). What a blessing that is! To finally have the ruthless shackles of sin shattered from our souls; to be rescued from Satan’s brutal lordship over us; to be converted from our sprint into hell’s ruin! There is nothing better than being converted to Christ! Nothing better, absolutely nothing! What a blessed God he is to love us enough and care about us enough to convert us to faith in Jesus Christ! Glory to God for his grace and mercy and kindness in conversion. But there is more: consequent of conversion to Christ, we are at peace with God (Rom 5:1). We thereupon have hope; real hope that hinges, not on us, but on the Person and finished work of Christ (Rom 8:25). Instead of a terrifying doom and inescapable finality, death becomes a door to greater blessing whereafter we will live in the bliss, joy, peace, and happiness forever with Christ and God’s glorified people (2 Cor 5:8; Phil 1:21, 23; 1 Thess 4:16-17; 1 John 3:1-2; Rev 21:3-4). And this whole package of salvation; this consequence of conversion; all of this is permanent, irreversible (though we will still sin), and instantly gifted to us simply on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ (Eph 2:8-9). Blessed be God for his love of conversion. This conversion cannot be accomplished through any kind of physical force or coercion. It is only by the power of God (1 Cor 1:30-31).
Now, as we think about this, it behooves us to consider, what can and can this Bill actually do?
What Bill C-4 Can Do
This Bill can effectually bring about the imprisonment of anyone (Christian or not) who would counsel, speak, teach, preach, or communicate, in such a way as to encourage those in homosexuality and transgenderism to embrace heterosexuality and/or their actual gender. The wording of the Bill is general enough to open the door for that. So, Christians, and others, will almost certainly face imprisonment at some point.
Consequently, the Bill can, in effect, separate parents from their kids, husbands from wives, pastors and teachers from churches, counselors from hurting people, and friends from one another. In doing so, the Bill can cause tremendous and unnecessary hurt and suffering.
The Bill can, and has, declared its hatred for God and his word. Canada’s government has, in effect, slapped God in the face and trampled underfoot the Person and work of Christ by criminalizing Christian conversion.
The Bill can, and will, store up God’s wrath for the governing officials responsible for the Bill, should they refuse to repent and turn to Christ for forgiveness. Canada’s governing officials responsible for this are under God’s judgment and will stand before him one day for a reckoning (Rev 20:11-15).
What Bill C-4 Cannot Do
As much harm as this Bill can do, there are things that it cannot do.
This Bill, and any like it, cannot and will not stop a single individual in homosexuality and transgenderism in Canada from converting to faith in Jesus Christ. Not one person, not a single one, will be stopped from repenting of sin and embracing Christ as Lord and Savior. How do we know that?
“All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (John 6:37). -
Lex Talionis and the Old Testament
We do not have too many OT passages telling us that the death penalty in particular and these ‘eye for eye’ penalties in general were carried out. And it seems monetary compensation may have been a more usual way to proceed, and not tit for tat corporal punishment.
Most folks have heard of the phrase under question, and one need not know Latin to understand that it refers to the law of retaliation. It involves the principle of retributive justice in which the punishment of the criminal should match or correspond to his crime.
While I here deal with this in the context of the Bible, other cultures besides ancient Israel ran with it. It was a basic principle of ancient Babylonian law as well as Roman law for example. In the Old Testament we have at least three clear passages on this:
-Exodus 21:22-25 When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
-Leviticus 24:17-22 Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.
-Deuteronomy 19:21 Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
Here I can only give a few short remarks about all this. First, commentators are divided as to how literally one was to have taken the words about “fracture for fracture” and so on. Some, like Kenneth Mathews, argue that we should not take this literally:
Verses 17-22 establish two important principles governing the community’s policy of capital punishment. First, there was a difference between the murder of a human being and the killing of an animal. Although the killing of an animal was important, the killing of a human being was far more egregious….
The second principle to be followed regarding the death sentence was just as important. It must be practiced with evenhanded justice by matching the severity of the punishment with the severity of the crime. When the Bible calls for “fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (v. 20; cf. Exodus 21:23-27), the passage is not to be taken literally. It is not calling for the maiming of a person. Rather, it removes personal vendettas (Leviticus 19:18), which inevitably escalate into excessive acts of revenge. The Law was actually designed to restrict the extent and severity of the penalty. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19; cf. Deuteronomy 32:35). It was calling for impartial judges to an equitable penalty that fit the crime, the principle of law known as lex talionis, a Latin phrase meaning “law of retaliation.”
As other commentators have noted, while today we might be able to cleanly and surgically remove a person’s eye or tooth, if it was attempted back then it could have resulted in more than a removed body part – it could have resulted in the person’s death.
Thus something equivalent but not exact may have been used as the punishment, as the tit for tat punishment might have too easily violated the principle of proportionality and fair recompense.
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A Children’s Crusade
In the year Anno Domini 2022 Stephen (of “Wolfeshire,” his bio says) has launched a manifesto sparking the imagination and enthusiasm of a large cohort of energetic, young, American men. There is a Holy Land to liberate from infidels and their enablers—the anemic and compromised relics of the post-war generation. That Holy Land is the United States of America. His manifesto is a theological train wreck and a political mishmash of dangerous and historically deadly ideas. I hope that many will turn away in disillusionment before they get to wherever they are headed, because the waters are not going to part.
Stephen Wolfe’s The Case For Christian Nationalism (Moscow: Canon Press, 2022) is a manifesto that has garnered a great deal of online publicity. Scoring as the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s “Nationalism” category, the book has enjoyed a large boomlet of popularity across a wide and diverse conservative Christian audience. More noteworthy is the sheer intensity of reaction the book seems to get out of its readers—both its lovers and its haters. “I am not exaggerating,” writes one Twitter fan in possession of an advance copy: “this book is the most comprehensive work of Christian political theory written in the modern age.”
That certainly raised my eyebrows. In a modern age that boasts, say, Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations, something has arrived to take us to even greater heights of understanding about Christianity, Christendom, pluralism, the state, the church, and nations? Alas, the hype is unwarranted. The book has an initially impressive veneer, but it is exceedingly thin. I evaluate this book as a serious work of scholarship not because it is, but because I know that unsuspecting readers might believe that it is. And I care a great deal about unsuspecting readers.
Let me begin at the end of the book, which in my view occurs on page 118:
One of the conclusions from the previous chapter is that neither the fall nor grace destroyed or abrogated human natural relations. The fall did not introduce the natural instinct to love one’s own, and grace does not ‘critique’ or subvert our natural inclinations to love and prefer those nearest and most bound to us. The fall introduced the abuse of social relations and malice towards ethnic difference. Grace corrects this abuse and malice, but it does not introduce new principles of human relations. The instinct to love the familiar more than the foreign is good and remains operative in all spiritual states of man. (117-18, emphasis added)
You might ask why I would describe this paragraph on page 118 as the “end” of a 475-page book? Because the sentence that follows begins, “Having established these conclusions…” Since, as I will explain at length, Wolfe has in no way “established” these conclusions, everything that follows from page 118 to page 475 is essentially superfluous. There may be some material of interest—and some of it will elicit comment—but none of it reaches the heart of the matter.
As for that admirably distilled paragraph, I observe that one of the most obvious and central concerns of the New Testament is precisely a “new principle of human relations.” It is a principle that brought no small amount of controversy, completely occupied the agenda at the very first church council, and continued to find stubborn resistance in the churches of Asia Minor, particularly in Ephesus and Galatia. Jews and Gentiles, separated for all previous ages, are now brought together into one household. One family. One body. One man. Those who continued to act on their “natural instincts” to love the familiar more than the foreign, who thought that grace does not “critique” or “subvert” their natural inclinations to love and prefer those nearest and most bound to them, were, Paul clearly says, opposed to “the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14). So strong were these “natural” inclinations and so strong was the tribal peer pressure involved that even the Apostle Peter succumbed to it.
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. (Gal. 2:11-13).
Paul is not talking about mere ecclesiastical fellowship. Those with a dualistic cast of mind, as Wolfe most certainly has, might be tempted to think that this controversy was over “spiritual” or “heavenly” matters rather than the “earthly” or mundane—plenty more on that later. But this controversy is as mundane as it gets: Peter will not eat with the Gentiles, and certain Jews followed his example and together they formed a little clique full of familiar faces. A scene from an average high school cafeteria on any given day. And this “natural” inclination was contrary to the truth of the gospel.
This episode, recounted for us in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, does not appear in Stephen Wolfe’s book. Nor does Pentecost. Nor does the Jerusalem council. Not even the Tower of Babel warrants a mention. Key biblical texts dealing with questions of ethnicity and nations do not exist within the covers of The Case For Christian Nationalism. Stephen Wolfe has written a conclusory paragraph that appears to flatly contradict one of the central gospel themes of the New Testament directly related to his topic, and this raises at least two questions: how did we get here? And, more important, how might we avoid getting here? It will be useful and perhaps illuminating to back up.
Preliminary MattersBe that as it may, Wolfe invokes a right to simply assume the “Reformed theological tradition,” and it is certainly true that we all must start somewhere and assume something. And so the book is filled with quotations from what seems an impressive collection of Reformed luminaries. There are two problems.
First, the Reformed tradition is not monolithic; not only has it experienced an age of robust theological development and refinement, there have been centuries of intramural debate all along the way over a host of issues, some of which rather importantly impinge upon Wolfe’s case—the extent of the fall and its noetic effects; the “wider” and “narrower” senses of the image of God; the relation of revelation and reason, and more. Wolfe himself sometimes acknowledges these internal debates in his lengthier footnotes. Page 44 reveals that “Thomas Goodwin disagreed with this view, taking what I estimate to be a minority view […].” In the footnote on the following page Wolfe claims that while “many in the Reformed tradition” believed that Adam was under a probationary period, “this position is imposed on the text of Genesis and is theologically unsound.”
And right there is the second problem, and it is called being caught on the horns of a dilemma. Now that Wolfe is, by his own admission, estimating and evaluating and picking and choosing which views to embrace within the variegated, broad stream of Reformed thought, and even making bold claims about the exegesis of Genesis and what is or is not theologically sound, he can no longer avail himself of the excuse that he is “not a theologian nor biblical scholar.” After all, on what grounds does he decide that Turretin is right and Goodwin is wrong? How is he discriminating between the two? Mere preference? Whomever happens to be most helpful to him in the moment? (The answers are likely yes, and yes.) Wolfe wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Either one is competent in biblical exegesis and systematic theology or not. If one wishes to confess ignorance of such things so as to avoid the hard work of attending to the Bible, so be it. But one may not then try to sneak competence in on the cheap through the back door.
So it is sleight of hand for Wolfe to claim that he is merely “assuming” some kind of settled Reformed tradition, when in fact he is actively piecing together a collection of selected witnesses and quotations to support a project few of them, if any, would actually support. Wolfe recognizes his work might give this appearance, so he attempts to blunt the criticism:
To my knowledge, my theological premises throughout this work are consistent with, if not mostly taken directly from, the common affirmations and denials of the Reformed tradition. To be sure, some of my conclusions are expressed differently than this tradition. After all, Christian nationalism was not used in the 16th through the 18th centuries. But none of my conclusions are, in substance, outside or inconsistent with the broad Reformed tradition” (17).
This is untrue, as we shall shortly see. But for now I wish to simply observe that Wolfe is, in fact, actively generating a theological jigsaw puzzle, and he draws his lines just squiggly enough to keep inconvenient facts from view. In later chapters, for one example, he enthusiastically appeals to Samuel Rutherford on whether a people may resist and depose a civil magistrate. But on the very first page of Rutherford’s Lex Rex, indeed the very first question, Rutherford argues that while “civil society” (family, tribes, voluntary associations, customs, mores, etc.) is “natural,” (meaning part of the created design), the state, or what he calls “magistracy,” is not natural, but rather a contingent reality. Readers would never know that Rutherford opposes one of Wolfe’s central claims. Likewise, readers may think that his frequent appeals to Herman Bavinck indicate some kind of sympathy for Wolfe’s proposals. But on that score, too, Bavinck will have none of it: “The church no more belongs to the original institutions of the human race than the state” (Bavinck, RD IV:391).
From my point of view, since Wolfe does, after all, seem to believe himself biblically and theologically competent, readers ought to hold his paltry recourse to scripture against him. His habit—I’m sorry, it is impossible to call it that. What I mean is that when he does get around to actually quoting the Bible, which occurs by my count 16 times in a 475-page volume, he habitually quotes a single phrase or a few words in an incidental or purely illustrative fashion. There is zero exegesis of scripture or biblical interpretation of any kind in The Case For Christian Nationalism.
One might think this judgment pedantic or unfair. What does it matter, so long as the concepts are true and his argumentative logic holds? But how would we know if the concepts are true? How are we to evaluate them? Consider, by way of illustration: when O’Donovan wrote Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, he self-consciously set out to write a Christian account of nations. For him that meant carefully attending to and interrogating the text of the Bible. He sought to learn from scripture what the concepts are and ought to be; what a “nation” is and what “nationhood” ought to entail, and what is God’s plan for the nature and role of nations in redemptive history. Wolfe’s approach is the opposite: “I proceed from the meaning or denotation of the words involved, particularly nation and nationalism, and I then consider nationalism modified by the term Christian” (9). And again: “Christian nationalism is nationalism modified by Christianity. My definition of Christian nationalism is a Christianized form of nationalism or, put differently, a species of nationalism” (10).
So Wolfe begins with a ready-made definition of “nation” and “nationalism” that comes from who-knows-where and only later considers how the Christian faith “modifies” it—the answer being, as it strangely turns out, that it doesn’t modify it at all. Indeed, on his terms Christianity by definition cannot modify it, because “grace does not destroy, abrogate, supersede, or undermine nature” (23). Since he has projected his construal of “nationhood” right back into the prelapsarian Garden of Eden (really, that is the entire thesis in a nutshell), it is therefore invulnerable to any alteration or modification by redemptive grace. That is what that exceptionally lovely and helpful theological phrase, “grace restores nature,” now comes to mean in the hands of Stephen Wolfe—but I am getting well ahead of myself. Wolfe’s “Christian nationalism” is just garden-variety nationalism taken from his own intuitions with an obvious assist from the first few chapters of Aristotle’s On Politics, involving a “Great Man” (31, 290), the “Christian Prince” (277), who is the “nation’s god”(287) and the “vicar of God” (290), and who is in charge of “ordering” everybody and everything to the “national good” (31). I half-expected him to announce that he’s volunteering for the job.
Kicking God Upstairs
Wolfe’s ambivalence toward the Bible has deeper roots, however, than mere feigned ignorance about how to do biblical interpretation. The fact is rather that he doesn’t think he needs to do any biblical interpretation in the first place. The irrelevance of the Bible to the task at hand—political theory—is deeply embedded in his own understanding of reason and revelation, nature and grace. He says it rather straightforwardly:
The primary reason that this work is political theory is that I proceed from a foundation of natural principles. While Christian theology assumes natural theology as an ancillary component, Christian political theory treats natural principles as the foundation, origin, and source of political life, even Christian political life […] Whereas Christian theology considers the Christian mainly in relation to supernatural grace and eternal life, Christian political theory treats man as an earthly being (though bound to a heavenly state) whose political life is fundamentally natural. (18)
Thus begins a work that relentlessly assumes and invokes a divided reality between two realms: supernatural and natural, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, grace and nature. And politics and political theory belongs squarely in the latter category; divine special revelation is not its norm, but reason and natural law are its guides. Wolfe is upfront as to the source of this dichotomy: Thomas Aquinas, whom he believes “heavily influenced” Reformed theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries (17).
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