For a long time, I loved the Bible… but I didn’t really know how to read it.
And I don’t say that to be self-deprecating or cynical. I say it because I think it’s where a lot of American evangelicals, especially those of us raised in the church, find ourselves.
We’re given the Bible early. We’re taught that it’s important, that it’s true, that it’s God’s Word… but most of the ways we’re taught to interact with it are built around milk, not meat (to use a Biblical cliche.)
Our devotions often center on flipping to a random page, finding a story about David or Joshua, and then trying to decode what it means for our career path or dating life.
David fought Goliath… so I can fight my finals!
Joshua marched around Jericho… so I can march around my job interview!
It wasn’t bad, exactly. It just wasn’t quite right.
Even when I became a youth pastor — a job I loved — I felt it.
I spent hours preparing sermons, pouring my heart into helping middle schoolers glimpse the beauty of God. But quietly, privately, my own devotional life still felt… thin… disconnected. Like I was living off crumbs, while trying to feed others a feast.
I didn’t have the tools I needed to really feast on Scripture for myself.
Then one day, I stumbled across a term that cracked something open inside me:
Biblical Literacy.
It felt like someone had just handed me a map to a place I had always heard about but never actually explored.
And the gateway God used to lead me there was a double-blessing… arriving just as I was stepping into a new role as a high school pastor—a moment when I desperately needed to grow, not just as a preacher, but as a Christian and a follower of Jesus.
In 2014, I watched the Bible Project’s very first video: Heaven and Earth.
It was like nothing I had ever seen.
High-level biblical theology, but presented with such beautiful clarity that even someone like me (who sometimes needs cartoons to understand cosmic mysteries) could grasp it.
It wasn’t just about isolated verses anymore… It was about seeing.
Truly seeing the Bible as a unified story, leading somewhere… leading to Someone.
Then, in 2016, I discovered the Year of Biblical Literacy series from Bridgetown Church.
Growing up in Calvary Chapel (a movement I still treasure and owe so much to) I was familiar with the steady rhythm of “verse-by-verse through the Bible.” And that foundation was a gift.
But this… this was different. It wasn’t just about moving through chapters. It was about tracing the whole story, book after book, thread after thread, watching how it all pointed to Jesus.
For the first time, the Bible didn’t feel like a loose anthology of moral lessons.
It felt like one breathtaking, intricate, Spirit-breathed epic.
And it absolutely blew me away.
Those years changed the trajectory of my faith forever.
It moved me from milk to meat.
From isolated devotionals to holistic discipleship.
From scavenger hunts to story immersion.
From seeing the Bible as a series of puzzles about my life, to seeing it as the unfolding revelation of God’s eternal life given for the world.
Biblical literacy didn’t just make me a better preacher.
It made me a better follower of Jesus.
Let’s explore some of the reasons Biblical Literacy is important.
Biblical Literacy ≠ Biblical Literalism
First, let’s be clear: if you lean toward biblical literalism, I get it. I really do.
People who take the Bible extremely literally are usually doing it for the best reasons — they believe it’s God’s Word, and they want to honor it. They’re trying to be faithful. They don’t want to explain it away, edit it down, or make it more palatable for modern tastes. They love Scripture enough to take it seriously.
And that’s something to admire, not mock.
But here’s the thing: taking the Bible seriously means doing the hard work of understanding how it speaks, not just what it says on the surface. It’s not about taking every word at face value like you’re reading IKEA instructions. It’s about learning to read with the grain of the text, not against it.
The Bible is packed with poetry, hyperbole, metaphor, parable, prophecy, apocalyptic visions, and real historical accounts — often braided together in the same book.
Rigid literalism flattens all of that into something it was never meant to be.
It tries to press Ezekiel’s cosmic dream-visions into a police report. It tries to turn Jesus’ “gouge your eye out” warning about sin into an ophthalmologist’s nightmare.
Literalism without literacy is like listening to your favorite song but refusing to believe in things like “choruses” or “key changes.”
You miss the goal of the songwriter.
The goal is not to throw out reverence for Scripture… the goal is to deepen it. To love the Bible enough to learn its language… not force it into ours.
Biblical literacy invites us into a faith that is not simplistic, but rich. Not fragile, but resilient.
Not built on a brittle surface reading, but on a deep, living encounter with God’s story.
The Bible Is a Library,
Not a Random Twitter Thread
Before I learned about biblical literacy, I honestly saw large chunks of the Bible like one sees a the manual you find in your car’s glove compartment: dry, confusing, and… probably full of things I was supposed to know but didn’t want to read.
Duetoronomy? Dry history and laws.
Ezekiel? Weird dreams from a guy who maybe needed a nap.
Leviticus? …I don’t even want to talk about Leviticus.
It felt random. Disconnected. Bizarre.
I treated the Bible like a series of disconnected posts, like ancient Twitter threads God had left behind for us to squint at.
I knew it was “true,” but it rarely came alive.
Then I learned the shocking secret:
The Bible is not a Twitter thread… it’s a library.
A divinely curated, multi-genre, Spirit-breathed, interconnected library… all telling one great, sweeping story about Jesus!
Suddenly Deuteronomy wasn’t just Moses giving a long, tired speech before he died. It was a heartbroken prophet pleading with Israel to see that rules would never be enough… that what they truly needed was a new heart, the kind of heart only Jesus could one day breathe into stone-cold souls!
Suddenly Ezekiel’s bizarre visions — spinning wheels, skeleton armies, rivers flowing from impossible places — weren’t random fever dreams. They were cracks in the sky, glimpses of the cosmic battle Jesus would fight and win, the signs of a coming Kingdom that would flood the dry valleys with living water.
Suddenly Jonah wasn’t just a fish story. It was a scandalous preview of enemy love… a God who would rather chase down a rebellious prophet and forgive a violent empire than let bitterness and vengeance have the last word. It was a hint of the kind of shocking, world-reversing mercy that would pour from Christ on the Cross.
Suddenly Leviticus — yes, even Leviticus — wasn’t a graveyard of ancient goat rituals. It was a neon sign flashing the holiness of God… and the radical grace that would be needed to draw unclean people close again.
It was an ache for a better sacrifice, one final priest, one true mediator… the one who would not just cover sin for a year, but wipe it away forever.
Every page I had once skimmed…
every chapter I had once shrugged off…
every law, every lament, every prophecy…
It was all humming.
It was all alive.
It was all reaching forward, whispering, shouting, aching for Jesus.
Understanding the Bible as a library… full of genres and different human voices, all harmonizing around the Word made flesh…. was like stepping into Narnia for the first time.
Everything glowed with new meaning.
It made the Bible feel less like a chore and more like an adventure.
Less like an obligation and more like an invitation.
Less like an ancient list of weird rules, and more like the map that leads you to the Treasure Himself.
Literacy Leads to Orthodoxy
Here’s the wild thing about real biblical literacy: it doesn’t make your faith weaker or wishy-washy… it actually makes it stronger, deeper, and way more orthodox.
I know some people worry that nuance is just a gateway drug to compromise. But in reality, nuance is what keeps you from building a weird theology empire based on a verse about wearing mixed fabrics. It keeps you anchored in the heart of the faith.
The Bible was written for us, but not to us… well, let me clarify… technically, in God’s divine foreknowledge, it was intended for all believers across time. He knew every single generation would sit at the feet of these words. That’s no accident. But still, practically speaking, as Tim Mackie (of BibleProject fame) often says, we’re reading someone else’s mail. Ancient letters written to ancient people, full of ancient assumptions about the world that are very different from ours.
That’s why literacy matters. That’s why nuance matters. If you don’t do the hard, joyful work of understanding the original meaning, you’ll end up treating the Bible like a divine horoscope — pulling random verses out of context and taping them to your fridge without realizing you’re missing the richness, the texture, the depth of what God is actually doing.
I’ll never forget a lunch I had in San Diego with one of my mentors, Evan Wickham. We were eating burritos and talking about Scripture (as one does), and he said something that hit me like a thunderclap:
“Aaron, a lot of people read the Bible like a divine devotional fortune cookie.”
They crack it open, pull out a tiny slip of meaning, and go, “Oh good, this verse says I’m gonna have a great day.” Or, “This verse says I’ll prosper and get a new car.”
But that’s not how Scripture works. It’s not mystical paper slips of vague encouragement. It’s a grand narrative. A crafted, deliberate, Spirit-breathed story pointing to Jesus.
Evan taught me:
We have to stop starting with,
“What does this say about MY life?”
Instead, we must start with,
“What did God — and the original authors — actually mean to say?”
First meaning, then application.
Learning that changed my life.
It gave my faith a second wind… a third wind… honestly, like twelve winds.
It moved me from a faith based on scattered quotes to a faith rooted in the sweeping, staggering story of God’s redemption.
Instead of finding little crumbs for my day, I found myself feasting on the Bread of Life Himself.
Biblical Literacy Is Survival
I’m not being dramatic: biblical literacy is life or death for the next generation.
I teach theology and discipleship classes to Gen Z — the most connected, overwhelmed, deconstructed, over-marketed generation we’ve ever seen. They have unlimited access to Scripture, podcasts, sermons, TikTok theology… but not enough mentors showing them to know how to actually read the Bible for themselves.
Without biblical literacy, faith becomes fragile.
It becomes a house of cards, easy to knock over with a TikTok hot take or a freshman-year philosophy class.
It becomes a vibe… not a covenant.
But when young believers actually learn how to step inside the text — how to sit at the feet of Moses, David, Isaiah, John, Paul — and trace the golden thread of Jesus running through it all…
They become resilient.
They become wise.
They become real.
Biblical literacy isn’t a luxury for the ultra-committed or the theology nerds.
It’s survival.
It’s oxygen.
Because the Bible is not a self-help book.
It’s not a vague inspirational fortune cookie.
It’s not a weapon for political fistfights.
It’s the story.
The story of a King who didn’t just shout commands from heaven… but came down into the dirt, wore our skin, bore our sin, and bled our redemption into the earth.
And if we don’t teach the next generation to see that story…to trace the thread, to breathe the air of it, to build their lives inside of it…we might as well be handing them a house made of sand.
Biblical literacy is how we stop the collapse before it starts.
It’s how we hand them not just verses to quote… but a Kingdom to live in.
It’s not about making smarter Christians.
It’s about making stronger, truer, grittier ones.
Ones who know what story they’re in.
Ones who know who the Author is.
Ones who know how it ends.
