Twice this week somebody asked me the same question, and it might be the most important question anybody asks in this house: how do I actually start reading the Bible? Not admire it on the shelf, not collect verses off Instagram, actually read it, understand it, and meet God in it. Here is the honest truth nobody tells beginners: most people fail at reading the Bible not because they lack discipline but because nobody handed them a map. They start at page one like it's a novel, hit the book of Leviticus like a wall at full speed, and quietly give up somewhere around the burnt offering instructions, convinced the problem is them. It was never them. It was the map. So this is that map: what the Bible actually is, the two covenants that hold it together, the arc the whole story rides, exactly which book to open first, seven steps that unlock any passage, and what to do when you hit the hard parts. Pour the coffee. By the end of this page you will know exactly where to start tonight.
The Bible is not a book. It is a library: sixty-six books written across roughly fifteen centuries by dozens of authors, kings and fishermen and prophets and prisoners, in three languages, on two continents, in half a dozen different genres. There is law and history, poetry and proverb, prophecy and apocalyptic vision, four biographies of Jesus, and a stack of personal letters. Nobody walks into the Deer Park library, starts at the first shelf, and reads straight across the building, and nobody should read the Bible that way either. Yet that is exactly what most beginners try, because the books are bound in one cover and numbered in order, so it feels like cheating to do anything but start at Genesis 1:1. Then the genealogies come, then the tabernacle measurements, then Leviticus, and the reading plan dies in the wilderness with Israel. If that has ever been you, take a breath: you did not fail the Bible. You were handed a library and told it was a novel. How that library came together over three thousand years is a story in itself, and we walk the whole road in how we got the Bible, but for tonight you only need the one takeaway: different books, different genres, different reading rules, one story.
And it really is one story. That surprises people, because the library feels like it has two very different halves, and the difference is not your imagination. The key that unlocks everything, the key this whole guide hangs on, is understanding what those two halves actually are and how they relate. They are not two religions stapled together. They are not a bad God followed by a nice one. They are two covenants inside one arc of redemption, an arc that starts in a garden, runs through one family chosen to bless every family on earth, and lands on a person. Get the covenants and the arc straight, and passages that used to bounce off your forehead start opening like doors. So before you read a single chapter, give me ten minutes on each.
A covenant is a binding relationship agreement, and the Bible is organized around two of them; that is literally what "Old Testament" and "New Testament" mean. The old covenant was made at Mount Sinai between God and the nation of Israel after He carried them out of Egypt. It came with the law, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the temple, the feasts, and the land: a whole covenant world, given to one nation for a season, to carry the promise of blessing forward until it arrived. It was real, it was God-given, and it was never the destination. The prophets inside the old covenant said so themselves. Jeremiah, standing in the wreckage of Israel's covenant failures, announced that God would one day cut a new covenant, not like the Sinai one, with the law written on hearts instead of stone and every sin remembered no more. That promise hung in the air for six centuries until a Thursday night in Jerusalem when Jesus lifted a cup and said the words every Jewish person at that table would have recognized instantly: this cup is the new covenant in my blood.
"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel... Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers... But this shall be the covenant... I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people... for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
JEREMIAH 31:31-34 · THE OLD COVENANT'S OWN PROPHET ANNOUNCES ITS SUCCESSORThe book of Hebrews then says the quiet part out loud: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." Written while the temple still stood, Hebrews describes an old covenant in its final days, and within that generation the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrifices were gone, exactly as Jesus had said they would be, and the covenant transition was complete. That is why the two halves of your Bible feel so different: they are documenting life under two different covenants, before and after the arrival of the promise. Here is what that means practically for a reader. When you open the Old Testament, you are reading the family scrapbook of the covenant that carried the promise. When you open the New Testament, you are reading the announcement that the promise arrived, and the covenant you now live in if you are in Christ. Every command, every ceremony, every story needs that one question asked of it first: which covenant is talking, and where am I standing? You are not under Sinai. You are in the new covenant, where the law is written on hearts. Read from there.
Now put the covenants inside the bigger shape, the one we call the arc of redemption. The Bible is not a flat collection of equally weighted quotes, where a verse from Leviticus and a sentence from Jesus sit side by side at the same voltage. It is a story that rises. God did not dump the full revelation of Himself on humanity in chapter one; He entered a real relationship with real people inside real ancient cultures and patiently walked them forward, "at sundry times and in divers manners," as Hebrews puts it, in fragments and portions, through prophets who saw truly but partially. The story opens with God and humanity walking together in a garden in the cool of the day, relationship before religion, and when sin entered, it was humanity that hid, not God who left; He came for the walk anyway, calling for them, and before there was a temple, a law, or a covenant, there was a promise that her seed would crush the serpent's head. From there the trajectory climbs like a staircase of covenants, preservation with Noah, promise with Abraham, structure with Moses, kingdom with David, each one building on the one before it, and it rises the entire time toward a single point: a person, in whom, Colossians says, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Every page before Him leans toward Him. Every page after Him looks back at Him. He is not a character in the story. He is what the story was always about, which is exactly how He read it Himself. And the story does not just start in Eden; it ends there. Paul calls Jesus the last Adam, succeeding where the first one failed, and when Revelation describes the finish line it reaches for garden language: the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them. From Eden to Eden, one arc, and the bridge between the gardens is Christ. Which means something staggering for the person holding the Book today: in Christ, you are not fighting your way back to the garden. You are living at the end of the arc, veil torn, access restored, the walk resumed.
The Old Testament is the view of God through the eyes of man. The New Testament is the view of God through the eyes of God, because Jesus came to show us exactly who the Father is.
THE ONE-SENTENCE VERSION WE TEACH AT SOUND OF HEAVENSit with that sentence, because it is the single most useful reading tool this guide will hand you. The Old Testament is inspired, honest, and God-breathed, and it is written from the ground looking up: real people describing their encounters with God through the categories, assumptions, and limitations of their eras, sometimes hearing Him truly, sometimes filling the gaps with the only frameworks they had. That is not a flaw in the Book; it is the honesty of the Book, and the Old Testament itself flags it, like when God rebukes Job's friends for describing Him wrongly, or tells Jeremiah that the atrocities being committed in His name never entered His heart. Then the New Testament opens and the direction of sight reverses: no longer man looking up at God through a fog, but God looking back at us through human eyes. "No man hath seen God at any time," John writes; "the only begotten Son... he hath declared him." Jesus put it as plainly as it can be put: "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." So when the portrait of God in an older passage looks different from the face of Jesus, the reader's rule is settled: Jesus is not one opinion among many. He is the exact image of the Father, and everything else in the library gets read in His light. We built an entire study walking through ten places where Jesus personally set the record straight, and it is the natural companion to this guide: Is everything in the Bible really God?
"And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself."
LUKE 24:27 · JESUS TEACHES THE FIRST BIBLE STUDY OF THE NEW COVENANT, AND THE SUBJECT IS HIMSELFHere is the counterintuitive move that changes everything: do not start at the beginning. Start at the center. If Jesus is the clearest picture of God in the whole library, then the reading order that serves you best is the one that puts His face in front of you first, and then sends you into the rest of the Bible with that face already in view. This is the exact on-ramp I hand people across the diner table, and I have watched it turn "I could never get into the Bible" people into readers. One rule before the route: read at the pace of understanding, not achievement. Fifteen honest minutes a day beats a two-hour guilt marathon every time.
Sixteen chapters, the shortest Gospel, written fast and urgent, and you can read the whole thing in about ninety minutes. Mark drops you straight into who Jesus is and what He does, no genealogies, no slow build. Read it once for the story. Then immediately read it again, slower, and watch what Jesus is like: who He touches, who He defends, what makes Him angry, what He says about the Father. You are not just reading a book; you are calibrating your instrument. If you want a free companion as you go, the discussion guide at JesusWalk's Gospel of Mark study is a solid table mate.
Where Mark runs, John sits down and looks you in the eye. This is the Gospel of who Jesus is: the Word made flesh, the exact revelation of the Father, the I AM statements, the long night conversations. John is where the arc of redemption becomes unmistakable, because John tells you on page one that the One you met in Mark was God Himself moving into the neighborhood.
Luke wrote a two-volume set: his Gospel, then the book of Acts, the story of what Jesus kept doing through His people after the resurrection. Reading them back to back shows you something no single book can: the life of Jesus flowing directly into the life of His church, same Spirit, same power, same mission. This is where you find out the Kingdom did not pause when Jesus ascended. It went to work.
Now read one letter slowly: Ephesians, six chapters, written to real people learning to live inside the new covenant. The first half tells you who you are in Christ, and it will rearrange how you see yourself; the second half tells you how that identity walks around in a marriage, a family, a workplace, a fight. If that first half lights something up in you, we went deep on it in your true identity in Christ.
Here is the payoff of doing it in this order: now you go back to Genesis and read the Old Testament the way the Emmaus road disciples learned to, watching the whole story lean toward the Jesus you already know. Keep a psalm a day going alongside whatever you read; the Psalms are the prayer book, and they will teach you to talk to God with your whole chest. When the hard chapters come, and they will come, you will be carrying the one thing the front-to-back reader never had: the face of Christ, already in view.
Two pieces of gear before you start. First, read a translation you can actually understand; the goal is comprehension, not decoration, and we wrote a whole guide on choosing between Bible translations if you want help picking. Second, get a notebook or use your phone, and write one sentence after every sitting: what you saw, what you questioned, what you want to ask God about. Readers who write remember. And if you can, read with somebody; the Bible was written to communities and it opens differently at a table than it does alone.
The on-ramp gets you moving. These seven steps keep you from crashing, and they work on any passage in the library, from Genesis to Revelation. They are not seminary tricks; they are the same questions you would naturally ask about any old letter you found in your grandmother's attic. You just have to remember to ask them of the Bible too.
Every book of the Bible is a real document written by a real person to a real audience for a real reason, and none of those people were you. That is not bad news; it is the first key. Before you ask what a passage means for your life, ask what it meant in theirs. Who wrote this? To whom? What was going on? A letter to a persecuted house church in Rome reads differently than a coronation psalm, and both read differently than a law code for Bronze Age Israel.
Jeremiah 29:11, "thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end," was written to Jewish exiles in Babylon who had just been told they would be there seventy years. Most who heard it would die before the promise landed. Does context ruin the coffee mug verse? The opposite: it proves God keeps promises across generations, through the worst circumstances His people ever faced. The verse gets bigger, not smaller.
You already read this way everywhere else. You do not read a text from your wife the way you read a lease, and you do not read either one the way you read a poem. The Bible's library includes law, narrative, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, letters, and apocalyptic vision, and each genre has its own rules. Poetry speaks in images; narrative reports what happened without endorsing it; prophecy speaks in the thunder-and-symbol language of its day; apocalyptic literature paints in deliberately wild pictures its first readers knew how to decode.
When the prophets describe God "coming on the clouds," that is a stock Old Testament image for divine judgment in history, used of Babylon and Egypt centuries before Jesus borrowed it. Read it as poetry-charged prophecy language and passages snap into focus; read it as a weather report and you will spend your life misreading the sky. We traced that whole idiom in Jesus coming in the clouds.
Verse numbers were added to the Bible in the 1550s for reference, not for reading, and they have trained us to consume Scripture in fortune-cookie fragments. But Paul's letters were written to be read aloud, start to finish, in one sitting to a gathered church; the psalms are whole songs; the prophets build whole arguments. A sentence ripped from its paragraph can be made to say nearly anything, which is exactly how the Bible gets weaponized. So read the whole chapter minimum, the whole letter when you can, and let every verse keep its neighbors.
Philippians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ," sits inside a paragraph about contentment in hunger and abundance, written from a prison cell. It is not a slogan for winning; it is a testimony about surviving anything. The context does not shrink the verse. It gives it a spine.
This is the discipline scholars call audience relevance, and it is just basic honesty: the original readers were not reading over our shoulders; we are reading over theirs. When Jesus told His disciples "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled," the first question is not what that means for the twenty-first century; it is what it meant to the men on the Mount of Olives who asked Him the question. Answer it for them first, and a passage that has confused centuries of readers becomes plain speech.
Read Matthew 24 and circle every "you" Jesus says: when YE therefore shall see, let THEM in Judaea flee, THIS generation. He is answering the four fishermen who asked. We walked the entire chapter verse by verse with the history beside it in Matthew 24 explained, and it is the single best workout for this step.
Every passage has a covenant address: it speaks from inside either the old covenant or the new, and you are reading it from inside the new. This is why you can eat bacon and skip the temple sacrifices without being a hypocrite about "obeying the Bible." Sinai's commands were the covenant terms for national Israel in her season; they are Scripture, they teach you the story and the holiness of God, but they are not your terms. Your terms were sealed in a cup at the Last Supper. Asking "which covenant is talking?" will resolve more Bible confusion than any other single question.
Next time someone quotes an Old Testament command at you, or you trip over one yourself, do not panic and do not shrug. Just ask the address question: is this Sinai speaking to covenant Israel, or the new covenant speaking to those in Christ? Then find what the New Testament does with that theme. The pattern that emerges is the arc itself.
Now the master step, the one the whole arc has been building toward: whatever picture of God a passage gives you, hold it up against the face of Jesus, the express image of the Father's person. Where the portrait matches Him, you are seeing the Father. Where it does not, you are seeing the era, the assumption, or the concession that the full revelation came to correct, exactly as Jesus demonstrated when He measured Elijah's fire, Moses' divorce provision, and the tradition's enemy-hatred against His own character. This is not editing the Bible; it is reading it the way its central character insisted it be read.
Take any hard passage that has ever bothered you and run it through one question: does this look like the One who touched lepers, refused to call down fire, and forgave His executioners? Write down what the passage looks like in His light. That single exercise is the whole Sound of Heaven hermeneutic in one move.
Reading in context is not the finish line; meeting God is. So end every sitting with two questions. First: what does this show me about the Father, as revealed in Jesus? Second: what does it ask of me, today, in my actual life on my actual street? The Bible was never meant to make you merely informed. James says the reader who hears and does not do is like a man who studies his face in a mirror and walks away forgetting what he looks like. Read to be changed, and pray before you close the book, even one sentence. The same Spirit who breathed the library reads it with you.
Tonight, after Mark chapter one, write one sentence for each question: what did I see about God, and what is mine to do? Two sentences a day, and in a year you will have a notebook that tells the story of God changing you. That notebook is worth more than a shelf of commentaries, because the whole point of the library is the Author, and the Author's headline is the gospel.
You will hit them. Wars and plagues, laws that make you wince, commands that do not sound like the Jesus you met in Mark. Every honest reader in history has stood at those chapters, and most were handed only two options: force yourself to pretend it is all fine, or quietly close the Book. Both options are unnecessary. At Sound of Heaven we hand everybody the same field protocol, built on three questions and one final check, and the engine underneath it is what we call the Better Than Yesterday principle: God meets people where they are, moves them forward, and breathes on better, blessing progress on the way to the destination. God did not approve of everything He regulated; He entered a broken world and started moving it. So when a passage stuns you, do not only ask how God could allow this. Ask how bad things were that this was progress. Then run the questions.
An honest, God-breathed record of real people encountering God from the ground up, through the eyes and eras of men. The Bible reports the whole journey, including the assumptions and misattributions, without airbrushing. Honesty in the record is not error in the record.
What was the cultural baseline before God stepped in? Which covenant is speaking, what genre is this, and what was normal in that ancient world? You cannot measure progress without knowing the starting point, and half the hardness in hard passages is measuring Bronze Age chapters by suburban standards instead of by where humanity actually stood.
Find God's intervention in the passage. What new standard is He introducing, and how is it mercy compared to what came before? A law regulating a broken practice is often God restraining and reforming it, revolutionary for its time, without being His final word or His heart's desire. That is God breathing on better: blessing the step forward while the destination is still ahead.
Follow the theme forward and watch it rise: every trajectory in the Book bends toward Jesus and lands at a table where there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female. Then run the final check: hold the portrait up to the face of Christ, the exact image of the Father, who personally corrected the fire, the stones, and the sword. Whatever remains difficult, the destination is not in doubt, and the case files are all in one place in our study on what Jesus set straight, linked above.
Reading about the method is one thing; running it is another. Below are three real passages, easy to heavyweight. For each one, read the verse, answer the three questions out loud or in your notebook first, and only then tap reveal to compare. Do not skip the thinking part; the reps are the point.
"For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end."
JEREMIAH 29:11 (KJV)Jewish exiles in Babylon, freshly conquered, temple-less, and just told in this same letter to settle in for seventy years, which meant most adults hearing it would die before it came true. This is not a graduation card; it is a promise mailed into a catastrophe.
God is overruling the exiles' despair and the false prophets promising a quick fix. Against both, He commits Himself to a future on the other side of the seventy years: a plan of peace running underneath the worst circumstances His people had ever faced.
Toward a God who keeps promises across generations and through exile, which lands on Christ, in whom every promise of God is yes. The verse survives context and comes out bigger: not a guarantee of an easy semester, but proof that God's faithfulness outlasts Babylon.
Context did not shrink the coffee mug verse; it gave it a spine. If God's peace-plans held through seventy years of Babylon, they hold through your season too. That is better news than the mug ever promised.
"When thou goest forth to war... and seest among the captives a beautiful woman... she shall bewail her father and her mother a full month... And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money."
DEUTERONOMY 21:10-14 (KJV, CONDENSED)The ancient world's warfare was brutal beyond imagining, and across that world captive women were property: violated without consequence, sold, enslaved, discarded. No rights, no protection, no dignity. That was the baseline everywhere before this law said a word.
God steps into that world and slams on brakes nobody else had: a full month to grieve her family before anything else, full wife status with legal rights if married, mandatory freedom if not wanted, and an absolute ban on selling her. Perfect by our standards? No. Revolutionary against the baseline? Completely. That is God breathing on better.
Toward Galatians 3:28, where in Christ there is neither male nor female, neither bond nor free: full equality, both bearing God's image. The regulation was never the destination; it was a step on a staircase that was always climbing toward that table.
God did not approve of everything He regulated. He entered a broken world and started moving it. The right question was never how God could allow this; it is how bad things were that this was progress, and where the arc was taking it.
"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not..."
1 SAMUEL 15:3 (KJV)A war-saturated ancient world where total destruction warfare was standard practice among every nation, and where war-age men heard God through the only military categories their world had. Amalek was Israel's generational raider-enemy, and the whole account is written from inside that world, through the eyes of men in it.
Even inside the Old Testament, the pushback begins: God through Jeremiah denies atrocities done in His name, saying they never entered His heart, and the prophets keep insisting He desires mercy, not sacrifice. The record preserves the war chapters honestly while the arc is already bending away from the sword.
Straight to a garden at night where God incarnate, with legions available, says put up thy sword, tells Pilate His kingdom does not fight, and declares that the Son of Man came to save lives, not destroy them. The exact image of God has scars, not a sword, and total war in His name did not survive contact with His face.
We did not pretend this one was easy, and we did not close the Book. Where were they, what is changing, where is it heading, and the face of Christ at the end: the heavyweight passages become workable the moment you stop reading them flat.
Four quick questions. Tap an answer and see how you did.
1. Where should a brand-new Bible reader start?
Start at the center, not the beginning. Mark is sixteen fast chapters that put the face of Jesus, the clearest picture of God, in front of you first, so you read the whole library in His light.
2. Verse numbers in your Bible were...
The chapter and verse system came more than a thousand years after the books were written, as a reference tool. Helpful for finding things, terrible as a reading unit: read whole chapters and whole letters, never lone verses.
3. When a Torah law regulates a broken ancient practice, it means...
God did not approve of everything He regulated. He met people where they were and breathed on better, blessing progress while the arc kept climbing toward the destination revealed in Jesus.
4. When a portrait of God in a passage does not look like Jesus, the reader should...
Not scissors, and not two Gods. Jesus is the express image of the Father's person, and He personally modeled measuring texts against Himself. Where a portrait matches Him, you see the Father; where it does not, you are seeing the era or the assumption the full revelation came to correct.
The Bible is a library of sixty-six books telling one rising story: the arc of redemption, carried by two covenants and landing on Jesus, the exact image of the Father. The Old Testament is the view of God through the eyes of man; the New Testament is the view of God through the eyes of God, because Jesus came to show us who the Father truly is. So do not start at Genesis; start at the center. Read Mark twice, then John, then Luke and Acts, then Ephesians, and then the whole library with the lens installed. On every passage run the seven steps: identify the author and audience, name the genre, read the whole unit, ask what it meant to them first, locate the covenant address, hold the portrait up to Jesus, and ask what it shows you of the Father and asks of you. When the hard parts come, run the three questions, where were they, what is changing, where is it heading, and hold the result to the face of Christ. The Bible does not contradict itself; it progresses, from Eden to Eden, and in Christ you are living at the end of the arc. Fifteen honest minutes a day, a notebook, and the face of Christ in view: that is how you read the Bible.
Some people cannot open this Book without hearing the voice of somebody who swung it at them: a verse quoted to control them, condemn them, or keep them small. If that is you, we are genuinely sorry, and we want you to know that weaponized reading is precisely what Jesus confronted in the Bible experts of His own day. The Book that was used against you, read the way its Author intended, turns out to be the best news you have ever heard. If you want help learning to read it without flinching, that is quite literally what we are here for. The form below reaches real people at Sound of Heaven, and there is a seat at the table with your name on it.
Start with the Gospel of Mark, and read it twice. It is the shortest Gospel, sixteen chapters, readable in about ninety minutes, and it drops you straight into who Jesus is and what He does. Since Jesus is the clearest picture of God in the whole Bible, meeting Him first calibrates everything else you will ever read. From Mark, go to John for the deeper look at who Jesus is, then Luke and Acts to watch His life flow into His church, then one letter, Ephesians, to learn who you are in Christ. Only then head back to Genesis and the Old Testament, carrying the face of Christ with you. Alongside all of it, a psalm a day teaches you to pray.
No, and for most people you should not. The Bible is a library of sixty-six books in multiple genres, not a novel, and the books are arranged roughly by type and era, not as a single front-to-back reading plan. Starting at Genesis and pushing straight through is the number one reason beginners quit, usually somewhere in Leviticus. There is nothing unspiritual about reading the library in the order that serves understanding: Gospels first, then letters, then the Old Testament with the lens of Christ installed. Jesus Himself taught His disciples to read Moses and the prophets as a story about Him, so reading Him first is not skipping ahead. It is starting at the point of the whole story.
Use a translation you can actually understand, because comprehension is the entire point. Translations sit on a range from word-for-word precision to thought-for-thought readability, and there are excellent, trustworthy options across that range. Many readers do well starting with a readable modern translation for their daily reading and keeping a more literal one nearby for study; comparing two translations of the same passage is one of the fastest ways to catch nuance. What matters is not owning the most impressive-sounding Bible; it is reading the one in your hands. Pick one, start in Mark, and adjust as you grow.
Aim for fifteen honest minutes a day rather than heroic marathons. Consistency beats volume every time, because the goal is not finishing a reading plan; it is meeting God and being changed. Read at the pace of understanding: a chapter you actually absorbed is worth more than five you skimmed to check a box. End each sitting by writing one or two sentences, what you saw about God and what it asks of you, and pray even one sentence before you close the book. Fifteen minutes, a notebook, and a prayer, sustained for a year, will do more in you than any crash program, and if you miss a day, you have not failed anything. Just open it again tomorrow.
Do not panic, do not skip it, and do not force yourself to pretend it is simple. Run the three questions we teach at Sound of Heaven. Where were they: what was the cultural baseline, which covenant is speaking, and what was normal in that ancient world before God stepped in? What is changing: what new standard is God introducing, and how is it mercy compared to what came before, because God breathes on better and blesses progress on the way to the destination? Where is it heading: follow the theme forward and watch it bend toward Jesus. Then run the final check: hold the portrait up to Christ, the exact image of the Father, who personally corrected fire-calling, stone-throwing, and the sword. The question is not only how God could allow something; it is how bad things were that this was progress.
Because the direction of sight changes. The Old Testament is the view of God through the eyes of man: inspired, honest accounts written from the ground up, by real people perceiving God through the categories and limits of their cultures, sometimes truly, sometimes filling gaps with their era's assumptions, all faithfully recorded. The New Testament is the view of God through the eyes of God, because in Jesus, God Himself stepped into the frame. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son... he hath declared him." God did not change between the testaments; the clarity did. What God has always been like is what Jesus is like, which is why every page of the library gets read in His light.
Maybe you want a reading partner, a translation recommendation, or a place to bring the questions your first month of reading stirs up. Our team at Sound of Heaven reads every message and answers personally, usually within the week.