The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - The Key to Reading the Bible

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Have you ever started reading the Bible only to get lost somewhere between Genesis and Leviticus? You're not alone. Jeff Cavins shares the simple but transformative approach that has helped millions of Catholics understand Scripture as one unified story of salvation. Email us with comments or questions at [e-mail]. Text “jeffcavins” to 33-777 to subscribe and get Jeff’s shownotes delivered straight to your email! Or visit https://media.ascensionpress.com/?s=&page=2&category%5B0%5D=Ascension%20Podcasts&category%5B1%5D=The%20Jeff%20Cavins%20Show for full shownotes!

This podcast is brought to you by Ascension. To discover even more free Catholic podcasts, videos, and resources, to help you live your faith every day, visit ascensionpress.com. Welcome to the Jeff Kaven Show, where we talk about the Bible, discipleship, and evangelization, putting it all together in living as activated disciples. This is show 486, the key to reading the Bible. Welcome to the show again this week. I have prepared something very special for you, something I've been wanting to do for quite some time and probably should do it more often or aspects of it,

and that is to just tell you how to read the Bible, how to go ahead and get the most out of the Bible. And what I'm going to be sharing with you today is doable. We have tested this and brought it around the world, and it has yielded a lot of fruit. So I want to share it with you today. I know that a lot of people get frustrated in reading the Bible or trying to read the Bible. And you know the classic example of that is that people look at that Bible on the coffee table and say, man, I want to know that thing.

I want to know that story. And so they typically start January 1st because that is the way we do it, right? At least in our culture. And you start reading in Genesis in January. and then you're in Exodus in February right around March, you naturally quit. Because, well, you hit that book where everything got scrambled. You have no idea what the story is. That's the book of Leviticus.

And people kind of give up at that point. And they go on to read other types of things. And a couple years later, they give it another shot and run into the same barrier. The system that I created back in the mid-1980s was the system that is the great adventure. Bible study. And as you know, Ascension has a great adventure Bible in a number of formats. And I'll explain a little of this to you today. And we also have a new children's Bible that we are talking about now. And I think you'll be interested in that because that's the number one question that people have asked me for the last 30 years is, what are you going to do this for children? Well, we did.

and we're going to continue. And you can look to Ascension Press for that because they did a marvelous job with it. So that's what I want to do for you today. And I'm hoping that your heart is already going in the direction of, I want to do this. I need to do this. And let me just say a couple of reasons why you really do need to get your mind

and your heart around the Bible in the story of salvation history. Number one is that this is the principal revelation of who God is. And not only who God is, what he has done and what he continues to do, his character, if you will, the personality of God. What is the overarching story of the Bible? What's the climax of the Bible? And what is for the future, you know, beyond this life on earth? The Bible has it all. I listened to a very interesting interview with John Lennox today from Oxford, mathematician, and Christian.

And he was talking about how when they look at cosmology and the beginnings of the universe and how big the universe is and earth and how unique Earth is, the mathematical probability of all of this coming together by mere chance is just, well, it's infinite. You really can't even get your mind around that. But if you listen to the science today about the creation of this universe and where it's going and the unique aspect of the earth, there is only one story out there as you look at all the religions that make sense out of this, a complete sense. And that is the story of the Bible. It starts in the beginning, God created. And that's what scientists and physicists and astronomers are coming up with now, is that there was a beginning in that we can actually, through red rays, even go and look at how far the universe has expanded and then reverse that. And we can determine how old it is.

And it's over 15 billion years old. It's close to 17, 18 billion years old. That's science. And everyone seems to be agreeing on this. Now, so this story of the Bible fits perfectly with everything that we are seeing today. And I think you're going to see an uptick in people coming to Christ, coming to Christianity, by the science even. And the Bible is not a scientific book, but it certainly has scientific explanations. It has explanations, I should say, for scientific research.

And I find that very compelling today. John Lennox is one of many academics that are going down this lane. Pretty fascinating. Maybe I'll talk about that at another time. And so the question is, well, how do you go about reading the Bible? Because it can be, to most people, a very complex book. So many places, so many names, so many eras, and customs, manners, you know, and language. And how does a modern person really make sense of this?

well one thing for sure the church helps us do it you know and the church gives us guidelines on how to read the Bible to get the most out of it kind of like squeezing a lemon right and you are an orange you want to get as much juice out of it as possible well that's what I want to do in helping you today and uh my hope is that you will get into a great adventure Bible or use the one you have and begin to squeeze and get all you can out of it. Let me go back by just telling you a little bit of how that began for me. You know, I was raised Catholic, and I still remember the night that I was confirmed in 1971, I believe it was.

And that day, my confirmation sponsor gave me a Bible, and my parents gave me a Bible. And I had a beautiful leather-bound St. Joseph edition of the Bible, and I remember specifically that night, picking it up from my bedstand and beginning to page through it, and something happened to me. Something happened to me. I was only like 13 years old. And I was so attracted to it, just the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, knowing the chapters and the book titles, Paul's letter to the Ephesians. And I'd heard that growing up, but to see it now was transformative in my life. And I've never lost that in my life. And I wanted to read the whole thing. So, you know, as big as it was, and I was a voracious reader at the time and other genres,

I came up with a plan. And that was I'd read so many verses a night before I went to bed. And then by the time that I was old, you know, say 30, I would have read the whole thing. And that was my juvenile approach to it at that point, you know. And I just thought, I'll do that. Well, that probably lasted, I think, two or three weeks, and I stopped and I started reading other things. Probably, I don't remember exactly, but probably lost some interest. I didn't know exactly what was going on, but that's how I began. Years later, I had a powerful conversion experience when I was 18 years old, and the first thing I did is I went to a bookstore and bought a Bible. And I still have that. I'm looking at it right now on my desk. And I started reading that Bible,

and at that point with all the zeal I had, I didn't really care that it was out of order. As far as a narrative, a story, I just kept reading. And I read and read, I think I read through it three or four times. And I couldn't get enough of it. And I determined that on one particular day, I remembered very, very clearly. I was driving home from my girlfriend's house, now my wife, Emily. And I pulled over on the side of the road and I made a conscious decision to give my life to Christ. and I knew at that point at 18 that I would be spending the rest of my life studying scripture and teaching it.

I just knew. And that has proven to be true now because I'm in about year 50 of soaking and marinating in the Bible and teaching other people how to do it, how to read it. But I went off to Bible college and I took a lot of courses and the courses were typically like the Book of Acts, the theology of Paul. ecclesiology, apologetics, all these different kinds of classes. They were all categorized by different topics. But nobody, even the Bible College, walked me through the entire story. And so I left Bible College not understanding how to really grasp the big picture. In fact, I don't even know if I was thinking about the big picture as much as the minute detail of the books and the characters and the stories.

and the lessons that we can learn from it. Well, it was in my first year as a pastor back up. I left the Catholic Church, went back to school and was ordained a Protestant pastor, and I was 25 years old, and I was responsible for preaching every Sunday, every Wednesday, and at 25 years of age, you don't have a big well to draw from. You don't have a lot of experience.

You don't have a lot of depth in your understanding of salvation history, and so you tend to be a little bit more surface and choose stories and verses that really inspire you. And of course, that's what I preached on. Well, inside my heart, I looked at the Bible and I thought to myself, man, I really, really want to know the whole thing. You see, well, you were in Bible college. Yeah? And I did know a lot.

I knew a lot of the stories and I could preach from them. but I wanted to know the overarching story of salvation history. And everything changed for me. When I was 25 years old, I was taking a Hebrew class at the University of Minnesota to supplement my Bible studies. And I wanted to get into the languages. And I wanted to remove the veil of language and kiss the word of God in Hebrew. And so I was studying Hebrew, and one day I was parked at Claibor Hall parking lot at the University of Minnesota in a little area called Dinky Town. I was sitting there in my car, and I had two cassette tapes, and I have those in my hand right here.

And I began to listen to a man by the name of William Sanford-Lessor, Dr. Lassour, and he was going through the history of archaeology. Now, my wife's an archaeologist. I'm not. And it wasn't that interested in archaeology to be truthful. But I was fascinated with how he could walk from the Copper Age through the Bronze Age through the Iron Age as a story of archaeology. I never heard anybody do that before. And the content was not that gripping for me. But what got a hold of my heart was he told a story.

And I thought to myself, you know, I wish I could do that with the Bible. I wish I could do that with the Bible. Now, I also was inspired by a guitar player by the name of Phil Kegi. And Phil Kegi, he actually was not too long ago, Nashville, guitarist of the year. And when I went to his concerts, his Christian concerts, this guy would perform as if he were one with the guitar. His eyes closed, his hands on that fretboard. he was flawlessly with great ease moving up and down the frets.

And I thought, he's one with that thing. I want to be one with the Bible. I want to be able to start at any fret in the Bible. And I want to be able to play every string, every chord that I can possibly play. And so that was an inspiration for me as well. Well, that day when I was listening to that tape, I suddenly had this vision in my mind of a Bible timeline chart that I could put together and I could see the story. You see, that's what I was missing. I had heard the story. But as my mother would have told you, Jeff doesn't always learn by hearing.

As evidenced by how many times my parents said, didn't you listen to me? Didn't you hear me? Well, my ears were working. I think I did, but I know what they meant. Why didn't you do it? You know? And so I got this idea sitting there in the parking lot, and I was so excited. I was so spiritually jacked. I wanted to create that chart.

And so on that day, I didn't go to class. I put the car in reverse. I went to a meat market and got a great big piece of white paper for a quarter. I went to a arts and craft store and got a I got a bunch of markers and paste and scissors and rulers and colors and all kinds of things and basically put together my favorite gift that I ever received from Christmas when I was seven years old and that was my mother gave me a box of arts and crafts material. I didn't know that until she died just a year and a half ago and at her eulogy I shared that and I realized that. what my mother contributed to my life. Well, I bought these things and I went straight home to my mother-in-law's house where Emily and I were living in the basement because I was making $400 a month as a pastor.

I didn't have the money to even get an apartment or anything. And I got down there. I cleared the table, put the piece of paper down, and I got my theology books out, my history books out, and I began to construct the Bible timeline. I stayed up for 48 hours with no sleep, didn't need it, didn't want it. I was on fire. And after 48 hours, I had that Bible timeline created. Today's timeline looks probably 80, 90% of the same as what I had originally put down on that great big piece of paper.

It was big. How are you going to carry it around? I don't know, but I got to see the story. Now, listen, if you are in that boat and you're feeling like, you know, Jeff, I need to see that story. Then I'm going to share on the other side of the break. I'm going to share with you how I put it together and why it works and why it was the basis of the Bible in a year podcast with Father Mike Schmitz and myself, which went on to be the number one podcast in the world. And part of that was the methodology of how we taught the Bible and read the Bible promising people, you can understand.

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com slash invited. Welcome back. We're talking today about the key to reading the Bible. In the first part right before the break there, I gave you a little lowdown on the history of this and what my frustration was in trying to understand the Bible. And then now I want to share with you how I ended up putting that together on that giant piece of paper. Okay, I was like a kid.

I had the white piece of paper on an old table downstairs. I had all my markers and everything. And the first thing I did on the giant piece of paper is I measured out, it was probably four feet, something like that. And I put Genesis at the beginning in pencil at first, and then Revelation at the end on the far right of the paper. Then I looked at the paper and the first thing I did was I divided the entire story of salvation history into 12 convenient compartments, I guess.

you could say. I divided up that entire history from creation, which is a long, long time ago. And I went all the way to Revelation, which is after Jesus. And I divided it up proportionately by each period. So I had the early world patriarchs. I had Egypt and the Exodus. I had the desert wanderings, the conquest and judges, the United Kingdom, the Royal Kingdom, we call it the divided kingdom, the exile, the return, the Maccabee and revolt. And then we have in the New Testament, we have the king in his kingdom, Jesus, and then also the book of Acts and all the early church. So I had 12 periods. And so I'm looking at the blank piece of paper of the 12 periods, and I labeled each one with a title that you can find in most history books and theology books. I didn't make up new titles or anything.

I just took titles of periods that were common to theological studies. So then I decided that what I would do is I would color code each period. In other words, I would give a unique color to every period, and then I would tie that color to some phrase that would help me, and at that point only me, memorize those periods. So the first thing I did is I just simply memorize the 12 periods of salvation history with a color code. So, for example, the early world was turquoise,

the color of the earth viewed from space. That reminds me of creation. The patriarchs. We have Genesis, and we have the covenant with Abraham. It's God's blood covenant with Abraham. So that's that burgundy, dark, red color. Egypt and the Exodus was red because of the Red Sea. So I was using a mnemonic device to try to remember all of these things.

and lo and behold, I did it. You know, I remember going years later, and I'll get back to that, but years later when I was teaching this at Franciscan University, the first day of class, I told my students that the first test will be tomorrow. And they looked at me like, you know, they're petrified. And I remember one young lady raised her hand. She says, Mr. Kaven's, we're Catholic. We don't really know the Bible that well.

And I said, I understand. You'll all get an A tomorrow. you'll be fine. And my first test was those 12 periods. I just wanted them to know what the periods were. They got A's. They found out that they could do it. So after I divided the Bible up into 12 periods, and you know why 12, right, that's a number in the old and the new, I wrote down the titles of each period, color-coded each period, and wrote down underneath that the part of the Bible that you have to read to get through that. period. So, for example, the early world. Turquoise, Genesis 1 through 11, Patriarchs, Burgundy, Genesis 12 through 50. Egypt and Exodus, red for the Red Sea. It's the book of Exodus. Now, before we go any further,

you have to understand the Bible's not written in chronological order. In fact, the Bible's not a book. as that is a standard book, a book that you're used to, you know, like Moby Dick or Paul Bunyan or any other book, any great epic. It is a library of 73 books, and not all of them are storytellers. There is a few that keep the story going, and I call those narrative books. And so that's what I'm laying out on the Bible timeline chart, is I'm going. giving you the narrative books to read to go through every period with the hope that you get your mind around the entire story. People always ask me, I want to read the Bible, where should I begin? And I know what they mean. They want me to choose a book. But I don't. I tell them, if you want to get

to know the Bible, they say, well, should I start with John? You can read John if you want to, but in terms of understanding the whole story, starting with one late book is not typically the way you'd learn that story. And so I introduce them to the Bible timeline, the study. And there's two versions of it at Ascension. One is unlocking the mystery of the Bible, which is eight sessions through the entire thing. But then the granddaddy, the big one, the one you probably have heard of more, is the great adventure study.

It is the Bible timeline study. It's 24 one-hour talks through the entire story. In the latest version, I'm actually on location in a good part of it. If we're talking about the Exodus, I'm on Mount Sinai in that video. If we're talking about Paul, we're in Greece, we're at Mars Hill, we're there in that 24-week study. I hope that the word of that study gets out far and wide. I really, really do. Okay, so the next thing I did, going back to when it's 25, and I'm looking at it.

at this piece of paper. I've got the 12 periods. I color-coded each period. It's got a title. It has a portion of the narrative book that you should read to get through that. Now, I say narrative book. Out of the 73, I chose 14. 14 of the books basically walk you through the entire story. And those are right on the chart. You've got Genesis. You have Exodus. You have numbers, Joshua, judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah, you have First Maccabees, and you have Luke and Acts. If you will read those books, you'll get the story, the basic story. You don't necessarily understand the whole thing the first time through, but, hey, the Bible

isn't a one-time-through type of document. It's God's Word that's meant to be lived in, meditated, on acted out. You live in it. That's why I tell people, get a good Bible. This is a lifer. And the new great adventure leather edition, goat skin one, I affectionately call it the goat, but that'll last you a lifetime.

A lifetime of reading, studying, meditating, writing in it, while your grandkids are going to inherit it. I have on my desk right now, my grandpa's Bible, my mother-in-law's Bible, two of my real old Bibles, and I know who they're going to already, once I'm pushing daisies. And that is building a legacy.

Okay, so let's go back to the chart. What I did then is on the chart, I started to divide up the rest of the chart into sections. We have the 12 periods. We've got the titles. We've got the color. We've got a portion of one of those 14 narrative books on the top for you to read through. But then I also divided this timeline chart not only into that,

heading, which gives you the basic period. But I divided it also into two other areas. And one area is the geography. By the geography, I've divided that into three areas. What's happening in the North, that's Mesopotamia, Syria, Europe, and also what's happening down south of Israel. That's Egypt. And so what's happening in Israel is the main focus. And Israel is a very small playing field of 50 miles wide, 150 miles long. And what I did then is I began to lay out on the center of the timeline. All of the main characters put a dot right where they belong and all the main events of salvation history.

I laid them out on the timeline so that you can look at the thing as a whole and say, wow, that's where Moses belongs. Woo, that is where Jacob goes. Oh, look at there's the 12 spies sent out, the golden calf. There's Isaiah prophesying. Most people would say, I had no idea where these people were prophesying or to whom. But you can if you get a visual look at it. Okay.

So in the midst of the Bible timeline chart, I have all the characters, I have all of the events, and then I put the genealogy of Jesus by connecting with a red line, everyone from Adam, all the way to Jesus. It is a scarlet cord. It is amazing. And so that's what's in the middle of the Bible timeline chart. And then if the event in Salvation History happens north of Israel, it's in the top part of that geographic location in the middle of the chart. If it's in Israel, we have it in the center. If it's down in Egypt, we move the entire narrative down into Egypt so that you get a sense of movement. And then what I do at the very bottom is I give you what I would call world history, secular history. And so I put things in there like the coat of Hamarabi or the great pyramids began.

I put in there the Greek language first written, and that's during the Exodus period. And also the building projects of Pharaoh, I could go on and on. I'm going to save some for you to discover, but I give you a sense of what's happening in the rest of the world. I also add one other thing to the timeline chart, and that is the covenantal progress. of God's family, from creation with one holy couple, to Noah, one holy family, to Abraham, one holy tribe, and then on to one holy nation with Moses, and then one holy kingdom with David and one holy Catholic and apostolic church with Jesus. There's also on the left-hand side of the chart a key, so it'll help you follow it. That's the timeline chart. That's the timeline chart.

that's the visual look at salvation history. Now, I say all that to really to inspire you that not only is this understandable very quickly. In fact, in my seminars that I give around the world, my very first talk is showing them how it's put together. So literally in one hour, I can show you, as we've been doing a bit of it today, how to read the Bible in chronological. order. Now, I mentioned to you 14 narrative books, and I show you those 14 narrative books, but you might be asking, but Jeff, aren't there 59 others? You're right. I show you exactly on the chart where to read all those books that I call supplemental books. They're supplemental to the narrative. Let me just give you an example here that it might be inspiring to you as I am

holding in my hands this chart. The Royal Kingdom is purple. That's the Royal Kingdom. You've got Saul, David, and Solomon. Well, did you know that inside of that period you have three narrative books, 1 Samuel 9 through 31, 2nd Samuel, and 1st Kings 1 through 11? But did you also know that in that period the Psalms were written, the Proverbs were written? Ecclesiastes is given to us the Song of Solomon? Yeah. Or the divided kingdom, the black period. It's Israel's darkest period. You've got two narrative books, First Kings 12 through 22 and Second Kings 1 through 16. That's a whole period. And did you know that Amos, Jonah, Josea, Isaiah and Micah all speak during that period? It's all evident on the chart. And so we now have taken this methodology.

and we applied it to Bible in a year, and we went through the whole Bible that way. That's the methodology behind it. And after talking to so many of you, I have found that walking you through it for that year made all the difference. It really made a difference. Don't want you to get lost. We want you to navigate the library so you see the story. And once you see the story, feel free. read any book you want, but you're reading it in the context of the overarching story.

You see, my problem was, I knew the stories, but I didn't know the story. And that's what the great adventure Bible does for you, as well as all of the other studies. Now, here's what we've done. The chart is great. When I got the goat, Bible, there's a chart right inside of it, and you can buy the charts, independently. People are going through Bible studies. My word, don't try to do this without getting the big picture. It's a very inexpensive little chart that will tuck right into your Bible and it'll make all the difference. But here's what we did. We biggie sized it. We took the great adventure Bible

and we baked it into the Bible. And so the chart is in there at the appropriate places and the plan is in there and a reading plan. Bible in a year is in there. It's all there. And I also have a three-month plan just to read the narrative books, the 14 narrative books. Did you know that if you read four chapters a day of those 14 narrative books, you'll read through the story in three months? Two chapters, six months, one chapter a year. It's amazing. So I say all of that today to inspire you and to give you a vision for what you can understand. Listen, I was not a straight-A student. I was not known as a thinker.

I was not known as an academic. I was the class clown. And I got into stand-up comedy for a while. And I was interested in hockey. And I was interested in track and girlfriends. You know, in high school. I might have made an honor roll here and there. but when I got a hunger for God, I guess it's part of my personality.

I'm tenacious. I'm focused, and I had to figure it out. And I remember when I, after 48 hours of building that chart, I got tears in my eyes, and I thought, I did it. I can see it. And we've taken that chart and run that by many theologians, one of which was Cardinal George. And he loved it. He only asked one question.

At that time, Genesis began on the timeline chart. and the dates and the years, you know, at the top, it started with zero. And he looked at me and he said, we were in Chicago. And he said, he said, why did you put a zero there? And I said, I don't know, I guess I just figured zero was the beginning. He said, we don't know how long ago that was, especially with what we're finding out now in astrophysics and all that. But they are saying now it's about 18.5 billion years old.

that's a long time ago. I didn't have that kind of paper, put that kind of chart on. And so he said, why don't you just drop that? And I said, okay, your eminence. And I did. And it was such a wise move on his part. It's like those first 11 chapters of Genesis are a certain type of history that goes way back. And it's a certain kind of language that tells the beginnings of everything that a child can understand and a Dr. Lennox can understand. Isn't that beautiful? So as I bring this podcast to a close, I want to encourage you. I don't want to challenge you.

I want to encourage you. If you don't have a great adventure Bible, you might seriously consider that. If you have a Bible, make sure you've got 73 books in it. Maybe someday in the future we'll talk about the difference between 66 Protestant books and 73 Catholic. And there's a great explanation for it. get a Bible with 73 books and I always tell people this get a Bible that you can live in you know I mean it get one you can live in you can underline favorite verses cross references maybe a date of something I use the blank pages in the front and back to write down key events in my life one Bible is so filled

with key events all my children's birth engagement where we were and everything it's like reading my history and so if you right now in life are really looking for answers. You're looking for direction. It's in front of you. It's God's story. And your story will only mean something if it's in his story. Let's pray. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord Jesus, we thank you today for your word. We thank you, Lord, for guiding and directing us. Your word is a sure foundation. Your word is truth. Your word is a light. for our path. We ask you, Lord, to put a hunger in our hearts. We of all people, Lord, your people as Catholics. We pray, Lord, that there will be a revival in Bible study. And as the children's

Bible comes out now that, Lord, every home in this country will have a Bible for children that they can engage with age appropriate to find out who you are and what is expected of them and why we are in awe of you. Lord, I pray all of this in your name, in the name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. All the information, my friend, will be in the notes if you want to go ahead

and get yourself a copy of God's Word. Talk to you next week.