When reading the Bible on your own, where do you usually turn? If you’re like me, you have your favorite passages and books. You might have Romans stuck on repeat. Or the Sermon on the Mount. Or maybe you picked up the habit of flopping the leather binding open anywhere, entrusting your eyes to providence.

Good habits, all, since Scripture is the living Word of God, and you could do much worse than to read the Sermon on the Mount every day for the rest of your life. I’m certain that you’d never reach the limit of the Beatitudes’ ability to change you.

That said, there are 66 books in our Bible for a reason, and all of its diversity of author and time and culture comprises a resounding unity despite its magnificent complexity. Sometimes I think the Bible wasn’t written so much as woven.

It’s one thing to read Jesus’ Sermon in Matthew 5-7. It’s altogether another to begin to piece together the sermon as a series of references that Jesus is making to the ancient text we now call the Old Testament. In Bible Gateway Plus, the MacArthur Study Bible alone has 286 notes on those two chapters:

Open that drawer in Bible Gateway Plus and catch a glimpse of Scripture’s tapestry, thread by thread. In his sermon, Jesus calls on Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers (really, the whole Pentateuch). He adds filaments from Kings, from Job. The Psalms supply consistent coloration.

And then Isaiah. No good New Testament writer forgets to remind his audience about Isaiah, who prophesied the Gospel, which Jesus is fulfilling, literally, as he speaks.

This is all a way of saying that it’s worth exploring Scripture from beginning to end, even its densest and more difficult books. It’s worth digging into it on your own and with the assistance of professional study sources, such as the MacArthur Study Bible and the NIV Study Bible—notes which you gain access to on Bible Gateway with our membership program: Bible Gateway Plus.

I believe it’s essential to engage with and cherish the complexity of the Bible. I believe it’s a joy to our lives as Christians to seek out the difficult verses and meditate on them and to explore the interwoven nature of Scripture’s language. Because Scripture is God speaking directly to us, and not all his words are easy to understand or explain. Nor should they be.

When was the last time you read Isaiah or Jeremiah? I challenge you to it! With its range of resources, Bible Gateway Plus equips you to read through the most challenging passages in Scripture and connect them with the totality of what God is doing for his people from Genesis to Revelation.

Think about it. To engage with the living Word in a thread-by-thread fashion—even if you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for—is to be graced with God’s voice and with the movement of his Spirit. God has given us this magnificent tapestry depicting his love for us, and the notes collected in Bible Gateway Plus can train you to look for the beautiful complexity of the Bible’s pattern.