66/40 didn't exactly leave me seeing 20/20...Day 10

Why hadn't I read my Bible from cover to cover? How is it that I had been a Christian for all my life and yet never read the whole Bible? Better question might be why hadn't I had any interest in it throughout all those years? Well the simple answer is that it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But that was changing. My interest was being piqued and it was by the teaching style of J. Vernon McGee. Like I said previously I had never heard anyone teach the Bible like he did. That is that we were living in the last days spoken of in scripture. That there was going to be a rapture of the Church. That there was going to be a future 7 year tribulation here on earth headed up by someone known as the Anti-Christ that would ultimately culminate in Jesus coming back to Earth and putting an end to this time of tribulation. Which would be followed by a 1000 year time on earth where Jesus is sitting on a throne in Jerusalem while Satan is bound, etc... Basically a pretty close approximation to what is taught in the Left Behind series. More info on that system can be found here if you would like to research it more.

And so I began searching for more of this kind of teaching. I could hardly get enough of it. And the best part was Southern California has a radio station that broadcasts hour after hour of this kind of teaching that was tickling my ears. 8) Teachers like Chuck Smith, Jon Courson, David Hocking and Chuck Missler all made this kind of teaching seem very plausible. They would quite masterfully take recent history of Israel becoming a nation again in 1948, after almost 2000 years of having been scattered throughout the world. Of battles fought against many nations against what should have been insurmountable odds. And then they would have you open up your Bible and flip to one Old Testament prophet after another to show how these events have been fulfilling prophecies about the end times and that we should be expecting the rapture at any moment. And my favorite of these teachers was Chuck Missler and his radio program 66/40.

And then...I had arrived technologically. I got my first mp3 player. Which meant that I could carry around all the teaching my little heart desired in the pocket of my pants. And thanks to Firefighters for Christ I was in mp3 heaven. This site had almost every single audio teaching of Chuck Missler's that he had ever made...And it was free...Yessssssss!!!

All that to say that by the time I started the Calvary Chapel School of Ministry, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what was going on in the Bible and how it lined up with what was going on in the world around us. I had probably listened to well over 1000 hours of Bible teaching from the futurist point of view and was ready to begin my theological training to become a Calvary Chapel pastor so that I could teach the same thing.

And yet...I had still never read through the Bible from cover to cover, on my own.