Reading Calvin is good for the soul

Reading Calvin is good for the soul. I can put it no other way. John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion reflects upon our God and on our God's abundant benevolence towards us, and these reflections are humbling and enriching. I thought having to read 500+ pages of Calvin during my "holiday" would be a drag. How very wrong I was.

My brain isn't particularly wired to working through the ten commandments under 50 sub-points. However, I've never been one to let learning styles get in the way of an activity being beneficial to my person. Reading Calvin, I'm coerced back to God's revelation in the Scriptures. And so it has been refreshing to join some more dots together in my understanding of God, in his simplicity and diversity.

Mind you, it hasn't all been happy happy joy joy. Occasionally I've needed to keep myself focused when I haven't felt like picking up the book to read my 20 pages for the day. So I've kept a keen eye out for helpful illustrations Calvin uses or things I disagree with, or questions I've had that are resolved by what I'm reading. As the copy I was given has already been covered with summaries, underlining and question marks I was led at times by the previous owners questioning. Though rather than minimising my own thoughts, I think these annotations focused them.

At one point I was amused to read Calvin saying:

...when circumstances demanded it, [Paul] swore without any hesitation, sometimes even adding a curse. (Page 393)

This is as good an example that I've come across yet, to demonstrate why we must read Bible verses in their context. You see, we wouldn't expect to just take a verse out of any other literature (e.g. Calvin) and expect it to make sense, but we do it with the Bible all the time.

Calvin as you may have guessed was talking about swearing oaths, and is not talking about when Paul got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and kicked his little toe on the corner of his bed.