Somewhere between Passover and Pentecost, there are fifty days.
The ancient practice of counting those days is called counting the Omer — a daily acknowledgment that something has been accomplished and something is still coming. Israel counted from the exodus to the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The early church counted from the resurrection to the outpouring of the Spirit.
We are counting too.
From Promise to Presence traces God’s unbreakable word through all 66 books of the Bible — one book per day, from Genesis to Revelation. The thread running through every page is the same: God made a promise, and he kept it. He is still keeping it. Every book of Scripture is another mile marker on the same road.
How to read this series
There are no calendar dates. Start on Day 1 whenever your count begins, and go at your own pace. Each day takes about five minutes to read and another five to sit with the questions.
Every day includes three areas of reflection drawn from the pattern of the Shema — Israel’s great declaration of faith in Deuteronomy 6:
Roots — what God has already done in you. The vertical. The place you return to before you go anywhere else.
Reach — whoever is on the road with you today. The unexpected neighbor. The person you didn’t plan to see. The horizontal.
Harvest — what the people around you are learning from how you live. The next generation isn’t only your children. It is everyone watching.
Each area ends with a sticky question — not a to-do, but a slow question worth carrying through the day.
The theological anchor
This series draws heavily from the work of Walter C. Kaiser Jr. and his landmark study The Promise-Plan of God: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. Kaiser’s thesis is that a single, unfolding promise — first spoken in Genesis 3:15, developed through every covenant, and fulfilled in Jesus — holds the entire Bible together. Each day’s reading surfaces that promise in a new book, a new era, a new voice.
The promise does not change. The landscape does. That is the point.
A note on the Shema
“Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, and strength” is not a demand aimed at people who aren’t trying hard enough. It is a description of what happens to a person who has first been loved by God. He loved first. He forgave first. He gave the heart before he asked for it back.
The command assumes the prior act.
This series is built on that premise. Every day, in every book, you will find a God who moves first — into the ruins, into the wilderness, into exile, into flesh. He is always already on the road toward us.
We are simply learning to recognize him.
Rooted in Messiah is a 7Tiersgarden.com site.