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How I Read the Bible Daily

Introduction

Up until about 25 days ago, I never read the Bible daily. I would occasionally read things being studied at church or if I was interested in a specific topic for some kind of theological debate. After finishing Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis in December of 2020, a book I had intended to read for a long time, I had figured it is probably in my best interest to begin daily reading of Scripture❶. Not knowing exactly how to go about reading daily, I decided to search Reddit (as expected) for a daily Bible plan. It was there I discovered a bizarre sounding plan titled “Professor Grant Horner’s Bible-Reading System”❷, which I’ll refer to as “Horner’s System”.

The System

The system works by keeping ten predefined lists❸ of books from the Bible in which you will read one chapter from each list a day, in the order specified by the list. When you finish a list, you just repeat it. It is not meant for in depth study, but more so to familiarize yourself with the Bible and gain more insight into the context of the whole Bible.

Now, there are three reasons why I think this system is cool:

If you haven’t yet looked at the lists, each list is a different length in terms of number of chapters. This means that you will start repeating certain lists much sooner than others, which by design will cause you to never❹ read the same ten chapters of the Bible at one time again.
This asynchronous repeating mentioned in the first point along with the diversity of the books in each list, cultivate a unique reading experience that although takes around 30-45 minutes of reading, will typically keep you from being bored❺.
You also will begin to see different aspects of the Bible relating to each other. You may find yourself reading a reference to the passage you just read! It is amazing how quickly you notice this happening and how connected the entire Bible is, despite spanning possibly thousands of years.

Conclusion

I am only twenty-four days into this system and have already began finding connections, reading things I have never read, and learning things I never knew. I urge anyone who is interested in reading the Bible in its entirety to try this system. You’ll finish in 250 days and have a new understanding in the way the Bible explains itself. The creator of this system recommends a physical Bible (as do I), but if you love reading on the “small internet”, Tomasino has the entire ESV Bible on his phlog❻.

Footnotes

❶ I didn’t really “figure” I should read more, but in fact, I believe something changed in me spiritually while reading Mere Christianity that provoked me to desire to read more daily. I may share more about this in another gemlog.

❷ Horner’s System

❸ The ten lists

❹ I’m not 100% certain if this is true. I am intending on writing a program to loop through iterations of this plan to see if it ever repeats itself back to day one, at least within the life time of a human (~100 years). Might write a gemolog on the results!

❺ For those who haven’t read the Bible, there are Old Testament books that will say things like “And they had for their inheritance Beersheba, Sheba, Moladah, Hazar-shual, Balah, Ezem, Eltolad, Bethul, Hormah, Ziklag, Beth-marcaboth, Hazar-susah, Beth-lebaoth, and Sharuhen—thirteen cities with their villages;” and span for multiple chapters. Reading 100+ verses of that consecutively can definitely cause boredom and desire to NOT read the Bible.

❻ ESV Bible hosted by Tomasino