As many of you already know, I started the Ninety-Day Lent and Easter New Testament reading plan early. And so, the reading I had today was Ephesians. Not the first and second chapters of Ephesians, nor the third, forth, and fifth chapters, but instead all six chapters. That’s a large chunk of readings, especially coming after all six chapters of Galatians the day before. Back in the Gospels, Acts, and the larger Epistles the daily readings had been only two or three chapters. Why the change? Why not split these up as well? Why not balance things out so we’re reading the same number of chapters every one of the 90 days?
The most compelling possible reason I can think of is that the smaller Epistles were left together because they are small enough to be read in one sitting and splitting them into smaller chunks would make it difficult to follow the tightly woven line of reasoning they often follow. The longer books of the New Testament are also tightly woven together, but it’s harder to avoid splitting them up. Reading the six chapters of Ephesians all at once is one thing, the 28 chapters of Matthew is another.
A second, complementary reason is that by the time we get to the longer readings in Galatians, we’ve been reading the New Testament for 68 days, which means (hopefully) that our ability to focus on scripture has grown and we can better handle six straight chapters.