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Hey, Bible nerds.
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This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the.
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Entire Bible in a year.
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You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan.
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And join the Journey family. Welcome to the Bible department. I'm so excited.
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I'm a Bible nerd.
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You are soon to become a Bible nerd. My name is Dr. Manny Arango, and we are going to walk through the the entire Bible this year together. This entire podcast is actually built around this Bible plan right here. We made this Bible plan a couple of years ago. We've been tweaking it every single year. And I've got some kind of interesting takes on Bible reading plans. The first thing I want to say is we've all started one, right? Like, everyone has started a Bible reading plan at some point in their life. And here's what happens every January, like going to the gym, you decide, I'm going to get in shape. I'm going to get a Bob reading plan. I'm going to get a gym membership. And you start, and then you get to Leviticus. We've all been through the valley of Leviticus where you start strong in Genesis, you start strong in Exodus, and then you get to Leviticus. And the same thing that happens to your Bible reading plan last year happens this year and you don't finish. And so we wanted to design a Bible reading plan that you could actually finish. And so I want to describe, I just kind of want to detail a couple of changes. You may grab our Bible reading plan from any of our platforms, whether that's digital or printing it out. I actually like printing out our Bible reading plan. And you're going to notice some changes right out of the gate. And so I wanted to take this introductory episode to just explain the method behind the madness. There's actually a reason that we designed the Bible reading plan the way that we designed it. So instead of starting with the most difficult books of the Bible, instead of starting with Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which are literally the hardest books of the Bible, we've started with the New Testament. Why? Well, because they're easier. And I remember playing basketball in high school and our coach would intentionally schedule easier teams at the beginning of the calendar. So our first, like, five, six games weren't the hardest games of the schedule. And what would begin to happen is that as you get to the new Testament, you start to go, I am a Bible nerd. I can read the Bible, I can finish books. And you use those wins, and those wins give you momentum. And so we're going to start with the New Testament. Also. The reason that we're going to start with the New Testament is because we are New Testament believers. We believe in Jesus, we follow Jesus. And if I had to pick a Testament that you're going to know, that you're going to understand, I pick the New Testament. Like you're a New Testament Christian, you should understand the covenant that God has made with you. I'm not saying that the Old Testament is not important. Oh God, it is very, very, very important. The whole Bible is to be revered and studied. And this Bible reading plan covers the whole Bible. But I really, really believe that every New Testament Christian should really understand the New Testament. So let's get into why our New Testament is structured the way that it is. Okay. Another reason that people typically don't finish Bible plans is because you try to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John one after the other. And most people find Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to be repetitive. It's like, didn't Jesus just do that miracle a book ago? Well, yeah, so we've taken Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We've actually split those four books up. The other thing that if you just go into your table of contents that doesn't make a lot of sense is that John interrupts the flow of Luke and Acts. What most people don't realize is that Luke and Acts is a two volume work, that Luke wrote both books. He wrote Luke and then he wrote Acts. And so sticking John right in the middle of Luke and Acts doesn't really make a lot of sense. And so here's the way that our Bible reading plan is structured. You're going to start in the book of Luke, you're going to start with Luke. And then we're going to go through Acts. And who do we meet in Acts? We meet the apostle Paul. And so from Acts, we're going to go through Paul's letters in chronological order. So we're going to start with Luke because everyone needs an introduction to Jesus. And then we're going to flow straight Into Luke Part 2, which is the book of Acts. And in the book of Acts, we meet Paul because Luke was a traveling companion to Paul. Then naturally, out of Acts, we're going to actually go through Paul's letters, but we're not going to go through the letters the way that they're listed in your table. Of contents in your English translation. We're actually going to go through Paul's letters in chronological order because Paul, like every human, grows, he matures, he develops what Paul says when he's in, in his early days of ministry, whereas what Paul says at the end of his ministry aren't the same. And so we want to track the narrative arc. We want to track the theological growth that Paul experiences. And then comes to section two of the New Testament, which is going to be Mark and Peter. For those of you who don't know this, Mark actually got his gospel from Peter. And so Mark's account is not a firsthand account, but a secondhand account. And so since Mark got his gospel from Peter, we're going to put together all of Mark's writings and all of Peter's writings. The third section of our New Testament is going to be Matthew, Hebrews, and James. Why would we put those books together? Well, because Matthew is the most Jewish book of the New Testament. It's the most Jewish of the four gospels. And so we're putting Hebrews right after it because we want to orient you to a Judaic thought pattern. And then James, James is a very, very thoroughly Jewish book in terms of its outlook, in terms of its theology. And then the fourth section of our New Testament is everything that John wrote. Oh, John's Gospel is my favorite gospel. So we have put together John, first, second, third John and Revelation. So that's the way the New Testament is structured.
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What if I told you that what you're learning in this video was just the tip of the iceberg? The Bible department is actually powered by arma. What is arma? I'm so glad you asked. ARMA is an online subscription based platform that we designed to help people, everyday people, learn the Bible for themselves. We started ARMA so that anybody, anywhere could have access to trustworthy and entertaining Bible and theology content. In addition to this podcast, we have over 60 courses on individual books of the Bible, on theology topics, and on some hot topics like homosexuality, tithing and women in ministry. But really, ARMA is a community. A community of people that I've gotten to know. A community where thousands of people are currently finding family, asking questions and nerding.
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Out on the Bible together.
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If you want a community to read the Bible with you this year, or if you want to dive into some deeper theological content, or if you want.
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More exclusive access to me and the entire armor team, how about you go to thebibledepartment.com I'll be sure to post the Link in the description of this video.
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Let's make this your year to become a Bible newsletter.
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Now, onto the Old Testament. Once you get through with the New Testament, we're going to start the Old Testament. I'm going to introduce a word to you. It's called Tanakh. It's actually how the Hebrew Bible is structured. If you were to go to any synagogue and find, like, the Old Testament, Jews don't call it the Old Testament. For them, it's the only testament. They just call it the Hebrew Bible. If you were to find a Hebrew Bible and you would compare it to an English translation of the Old Testament, you would realize that the books are ordered very, very differently. And we have chosen at the Bible department to actually structure the books the way that they are ordered in the Hebrew Bible. So Tanakh is an acronym. It stands for Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim. Tanakh, Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim. The Torah, the first five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Nevi'im are the prophets. And what you'll realize is that books that we call historical or the Jews call prophets, they actually call books like First Samuel, Second Samuel, Kings. They call those the former prophets, and then they call the traditional prophetic books the latter prophets. And then we're going to get to the ketuvim, which is kind of like that drawer in every kitchen where it's just kind of like random stuff. You got duct tape, you got batteries, you got a smoke detector. You got all kinds of stuff in that one drawer. Every kitchen has it. The ketuvim is the writings. The Jewish people would call this the writings. And some of it's, you know, wisdom literature. Some of it's books like Esther, Some of it's stuff that we would call history. Some of it's stuff that we would call prophecy. Some of it's just kind of a random collection, but it's not random. And actually the reason that we structured the Old Testament to flow the same way that the Hebrew Bible flowed is because Jesus actually did not have our English translations. When Jesus picked up the Bible, he actually picked up the Hebrew Bible. And so when he says from there's a moment in the road to Emmaus where he's talking to some disciples and he actually tells them all the scriptures testify about him. And he says, starting in the beginning, all the way to second Chronicles, the Scriptures testify about me. Well, why in the world would Jesus say from the beginning to second Chronicles? Well, it's because in the Hebrew Bible, second Chronicles is the end. Not Malachi, but second Chronicles. So we are actually going to study the Hebrew Bible the way that Jesus would have studied it. And I think that that's really, really important. Buckle up. We're going to be on a year long journey through the Bible. I think you are going to barely recognize yourself at the end of this year. We got 365 episodes. Sometimes I'll break up those episodes to give you an introduction to a section of the Bible. I can't wait until a year from today when you look up and you have finally finished a Bible reading plan. So if you're intimidated, it's okay. You don't need to be nervous, you don't need to be scared. This is a Bible reading plan that you can actually complete. Because a lot of thought and a lot of prayer and a lot of intentionality from our team has gone into this Bible reading plan. Here's a secret, and I'm so glad we were able to keep this a secret for a whole year. We had a vision for this a year ago and so we rolled this entire thing out for our online community called ARMA about a year ago. And so there have been people who have been watching these podcast episodes and they've been engaging with the content and they've read through their entire Bibles and their lives have been changed. And we've been doing that with that community for an entire year. And we decided, you know what, we can't just keep this stuff to ourselves. We wanna share this with the body of Christ. And so we're so excited that you get to experience something that the ARMA community has been experiencing for over a year. Maybe you're someone who wants to know more about the Bible. Well, on the ARMA platform, we don't just do this Bible reading plan. We actually create courses to help people to become biblically literate and to adopt a Christian worldview that obviously starts with understanding the Bible for yourself. And that is what we have dedicated our lives to for the last couple of years. And if you want a community to actually do this with you, then go over to Armacourses.com and you can become an ARMA subscriber and don't just consume the content, but actually join a community that's going through this content as well. If you need this Bible reading plan, and you do, you do need this Bible reading plan, you can get it digitally, you can print it out, because awesome people print things out. You can get that@thebibledepartment.com we've prepared this for you. It's a free resource. You need to take advantage of it. This is the Bible Department. Let's read our Bibles this year. It's going to be great.
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Thank you so much for joining me on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, it would mean the world to me if you'd give us a follow rate and review the show. And don't forget to share. You can learn more about the show@thebible department.com and find us on Instagram at the Bible Department if you want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.