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5 Stories in Your Bible You Won't Believe You've Never Read

By Sarah M. Updated this week 7 min read

Most people picture the Bible as a calm book. Robes, sandals, a few famous stories everyone knows.

It is not a calm book. It has a wheel of eyes hovering in the sky. A talking animal. A king who raises the dead. A valley of bones that stands up into an army. And almost nobody who owns a Bible has read a single one of these — because they all sit past the same wall, in the same dry stretch, where nearly everyone quits.

Here are five of the strangest. Every one is real. Every one is sitting in a book that's probably in your house right now.

1

A wheel in the sky, covered in human eyes

Ezekiel 1

A man is standing by a river when the sky rips open. Out of the storm come four living creatures — and beside each one, a wheel turning inside another wheel, moving any direction without turning its body. And around every rim, all the way around: eyes. Hundreds of open human eyes, staring out of the metal. Above it all, a dome like ice, and a throne of fire.

People read it for the first time and swear it can't be in the Bible. It's the first chapter of Ezekiel.

2

A man who lost an argument to his donkey

Numbers 22

A prophet beats his donkey three times for stopping in the road. The third time, the donkey turns its head and speaks to him — asks him, out loud, what it did to deserve this. And he's so furious he argues back, like a talking animal is nothing. Then his eyes open and he sees what the donkey saw the whole time: an angel with a drawn sword blocking the path. The animal had stopped three times to save his life.

He'd been beating it for protecting him. That's Numbers 22.

3

The night a king begged a witch to raise the dead

1 Samuel 28

A desperate king — the night before a battle he knows he'll lose — sneaks out to a medium and asks her to call up a prophet who's been dead for years. She starts. And then she screams, because it works. The dead man rises, furious he's been disturbed, and delivers a prophecy so bleak it drops the king to the floor: by tomorrow night, you and your sons will be dead.

By the next nightfall, every word had come true. That's 1 Samuel 28.

4

A field of bones that stood up into an army

Ezekiel 37

A prophet is set down in a valley full of scattered human bones — thousands of them, bleached, long dead — and told to speak to them. So he does. And the ground starts to rattle. The bones come together, bone to bone. Tendons stretch across them, then flesh, then skin. And when breath enters them, they open their eyes and stand up — a vast army rising out of the dust.

It reads like a film. It's Ezekiel 37.

5

The man who wrestled God until sunrise

Genesis 32

A man alone by a river at night is suddenly grabbed by a stranger, and the two of them wrestle — all night, neither one giving in. As dawn breaks, the stranger touches his hip and wrenches it from the socket with a single touch, and still the man won't let go. "I won't let go until you bless me," he says. And it dawns on him who he's been holding onto all night: God.

He walks away with a new name and a limp he keeps forever. That's Genesis 32.

So why has almost nobody read them?

Because every single one sits past the same wall. Everyone opens the Bible to page one and starts marching. Genesis grabs you. Exodus keeps going. And then, a few weeks in, you hit Leviticus — offerings, purity laws, rules about mildew and cloth, page after page of it. And that's where it ends. Not because faith runs out. Because you've hit the driest fifty pages in the book, and fifteen tired minutes before bed can't carry you over them.

It was never a willpower problem. It was a design problem — the hardest part of the book stacked right at the front gate. And it has a fix almost nobody knows exists.

You don't have to read it in a straight line

The whole Bible can be arranged so you never hit that wall. Instead of one march from page one, it's laid across 365 days — and each day, you don't read one thing. You read four.

A short piece of the Old Testament. A Psalm. A Proverb. A piece of the New Testament. Four short passages, every single day.

On the day the Old Testament piece lands you in the worst of Leviticus, it's short — a few minutes — and a Psalm is landing in your day, a Proverb is handing you something you can use, and the New Testament piece is three sentences into something you don't want to stop reading. You're never stuck in the dry book, because you're never only in the dry book.

You start today — not January 1

No plan to track. No bookmarks. You open it to today's date and read for about fifteen minutes. Miss a day? Read the next date. There's nothing to fall behind on, ever. A year from the day you open it, you've read the entire Bible — every story above, and all the rest.

It's called the Life Principles Daily Bible, with Dr. Charles Stanley's notes on every reading, so the strange parts finally make sense instead of flying past. Over 400,000 copies are in people's hands.

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