This is John from the Bible Project, and today on the podcast is the first and a new series

on how to read the Bible.

If you're like me, reading the Bible is difficult.

It usually involves sitting alone at a desk or on a couch, opening up to some random

passage and hoping it makes sense.

So today, Tim and I are going to talk about a different, more ancient way to read the

Bible.

The purpose of the Bible is to be read aloud to God's assembled people, to both tell the

story that reminds them who they are, and also to invite those assembled people into this

covenant relationship with God, not just so that they know God, but so that they are transformed

by this relationship and then become God's representatives to the nations.

How is the Bible read originally, and what is the primary purpose of reading the Bible?

Here we go.

This is kind of a new type of project we're going to do because normally we'll take a

book of the Bible, it's literary structure and themes and design, or we'll take one specific

theme of motif that goes through all of scripture.

Those have been the subjects that we talk about.

But we want to talk about this idea of why it's important to read scripture out loud

together, and that's not a theme of the Bible per se, but it's something we're interested

in.

I think we should talk a little bit why we're interested in it, but that's what we're

going to talk about.

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