Last year, when I gave my testimony to the Seek cohort, I noted that reading the Bible from cover to cover, over and over again, was a spiritual discipline that I learned from a young age. This caught Charlotte’s attention and she decided that she was old enough to read the entire Bible. So most nights since then she’s been reading through the Bible from the beginning through to the end. Genesis and Exodus went well. Leviticus and Numbers were more challenging. Now she’s almost through Deuteronomy.

The other night she asked me about some of the troubling passages in Deuteronomy. As we read and talked together about them my attention was drawn to something else… A refrain repeated again and again in the law. The Fatherless. The Widow. The Foreigner.

Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. 
Deuteronomy 24:17, NIV

Again and again and again, Old Testament law makes it abundantly clear that Israel must care for the Fatherless, the Widow, and the Foreigner. When I was reading on my own later I looked for the refrain outside of the Torah and came to the following passage in Zechariah. This scripture is found on the far side of the Old Testament from Deuteronomy. This is after Lamentations, after the Exile, after the return. Here the word of the Lord is reflecting back on what had has happened.

And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’

“But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and covered their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the Lord Almighty was very angry.

“ ‘When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations, where they were strangers. The land they left behind them was so desolate that no one traveled through it. This is how they made the pleasant land desolate.’ ”
Zechariah 7:8-15, NIV

There’s a temptation to only read the scripture that’s comforting, that affirms with our worldview, that’s engaging to read. I think it’s important to cultivate the spiritual discipline of reading the entire Bible. Even the hard, disturbing, and boring parts. It does take discipline.

In the Seek program, we reinforce this with weekly reflections where the participants met in small groups to discuss the scripture that they’ve been reading independently.

When we read the Bible in its entirety I think we can begin to see the full narrative that leads up to Jesus and begin to understand what Jesus means when he says that he fulfills the Law and the Prophets.