THE BIG PICTURE STORY OF THE BIBLE
Before I share my view of the Big Picture Story of the Bible, let’s deal with an issue.
Some people cite that if they buy into the Bible being God’s Word, they will get locked into either no longer using their minds or they will become over judgmental. Sometimes I wonder if that is a smoke screen. Reading and studying the Bible with our minds means taking it seriously. Taking the Bible seriously has all sorts of consequences. And those consequences are less about us being judgmental and more about us being obedient to a way of thinking. Not wanting to give someone, or something, authority over us is the root issue.
So how do we understand and use the Bible?
I want to suggest that we use the Bible in two ways:
· First, to understand our relationship with God, and
· Second, how we are to live our lives.
Don’t get those out of order. The Big Picture Story of the Bible is all about God and his relationship to us. It starts in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the collected writings before the birth of Jesus that reveal God to humans and reveal that God is constantly calling humans into a relationship with him.
God constantly calling—you might even say chasing humankind –- is a never-ending theme of the Scripture, including the Old Testament. Many people don’t like the Old Testament. It can be hard for us sometimes when we read it because it contains violence and it seems as if God is judging people, but let’s break this down a little bit.
In the culture of that day, how might civilizations conclude if your god or their god was more powerful or more real? They reached that conclusion by whether they could defeat you in war! Not very nice, but humankind had drifted so far from the true God (that is part of what the Old Testament says—for example see Genesis and The Flood) that humans didn’t know what the true God was like.
So what did God do? He revealed himself! How? He proved he existed in a way that humans would recognize, and unfortunately that meant he had to show his power and he did it through the smallest and weakest of people: Israel.
What else do we get from the Old Testament? We get the law. What we often read as the rules and some of them don’t make sense to us. What was the law all about? It was about setting apart a people who were to live their lives for the one true God.
When you look at the law in total you see tremendous concern for the poor, the widowed, and the orphan. Every seven years they were to take a year off from work, and every 50 years all debts were canceled and property returned to families. Could you imagine what a nation would look like if it lived like this!
What else is in the Old Testament? That after God revealed himself through a people called Israel, we see that they kept turning their backs on God. So what does God do? He sends prophets to call them home; sometimes they listen, but most times they don’t. Buried in the “calling home by the prophets” are references that God himself will come put things right once and for all.
The story of God chasing after humanity continues and its most dramatic moment is God himself coming to restore our relationship with him. And this time the terms of that relationship are clearer because the world can now hear those terms. What are the terms of the contract, i.e., the covenant? This is not a new idea in the Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham. God’s relationship to us has always been about faith. Have faith that God came, have faith that God loves you, have faith in Jesus and you will have faith in God. This is the New Covenant.
When the Bible is studied in the light of God’s purpose to redeem humanity through Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, nothing in the Bible can put us into the bondage of legalism, i.e., the keeping of laws in an effort to please God. The law is not the theme of the Bible, rather it is redemption through the grace of God.
People are brought into the bondage of legalism when they stop studying the Word of God with the idea of redemption and salvation in mind. Many people come under bondage, not through reading the Word, but through what someone else has told them the Word says, quoting only a portion of Scripture or quoting a particular interpretation of a particular verse.
It is true that the law reveals our sins, but God’s grace points us to Jesus and his blood to cover and atone for our sins, if we will only receive him and be born again.
If you have a moment read Genesis 15, one of the earliest moments when this first covenant was made. It is often one of those parts of the Old Testament people don’t understand and, therefore, dismiss. If you have read it, you will note that animals were cut in half (you might be thinking, how can I not note this). In Abraham’s day that is how a contract between two kings was made. And the lesser king would walk through the animal halves, no doubt getting blood on his feet and robe. Its symbolism was this, “Let this be done to me, i.e., cut in half, if I fail to keep this covenant.” In this story, though, who walked through the blood? The answer is God. A smoking pot and a flaming torch are symbols of God. You already knew this, just think about how God led Israel through the desert with a pillar of fire and pillar of a cloud of smoke.
God said that fateful day, “Let me be torn in two if you Abraham, and your descendants, fail to keep the Covenant.” Centuries later God the Son was stretched in two on a Cross, for God keeps his word. And not only does he keep his Word, he does not give up chasing after us even if that means death on a Cross. And, thus, the New Testament and New Covenant are born.
The new covenant covers members of all races who will accept Jesus as Savior and Lord by faith. The new covenant fulfilled the promise of the old (cf. Hebrews 8:6) and, ratified by the blood of Jesus, extended God’s plan for reconciling humanity to himself to cover all races, nations, and cultures (cf. Galatians 3:28,29).
So, again, what’s the point? The Bible’s two main precepts:
· First, it reveals God’s desire and plan for relationship.
· If we accept that relationship then, the Bible provides guidance for how to live, which we might call those rules or the law.
But “rules without a relationship lead to rebellion”!
If you don’t understand the rule or teaching in the Bible, run to your relationship with God, strengthen your relationship with God, and God will reveal to you the nature of his teaching.
The Bible is God’s Word to us, showing how he is constantly seeking us out. Some have called it his love letter to us. It has been unbelievably scrutinized and yet it is not an academic work. John 5:39-40 says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”
We need to remember that we don’t worship the Bible, as sacred as it is; we worship God in Christ. The Bible, along with worship and prayer, helps us to know and love God more, so we need to study the Bible, but we need to understand the goal.
Consider an owner’s manual and a car: Would you sit and only read the manual, or would you like to take the car out for a ride? And even having said that, the Bible isn’t God just speaking in the past. God speaks through it today. Martin Luther says the Bible is alive, it speaks, it has feet and runs after us, it has hands that grab us.
The Bible speaks to people who have yet to come to know Jesus by revealing to them the good news. The Scriptures say, faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the Word of God.
The Bible speaks to Christians to build our relationship. It is like food, and as we read it we are enlightened, challenged, and encouraged.
Can we really understand it, do we need doctoral degrees? Jesus read Scripture. He knew it was inspired by God and he treated it with having supreme authority. We, too, can and must read the Scriptures and be willing to sit under its authority. At times the Bible can be puzzling; it certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t difficult parts to understand. But rather than throw those out, we must seek to understand. Albert Einstein is reported to have said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are mere details.”
The Bible reminds us of at least three things:
1. First, it reminds us that the God we worship is characterized not least as a God who speaks, who communicates with his human creatures in words. This differentiates the God of the Old and New Testament from some other gods past and present.
2. Second, it is central to Christian instruction that we be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:1-2). Again, this means that the idea of reading a book in order to have one’s life reordered by the wisdom of God is not counterintuitive, but consistent with the nature of being a disciple of Jesus.
3. Third, it reminds us that the God we worship is the God whose world conquering power, seen in action in the death and resurrection of Jesus, is on offer to all those who ask for it.
The idea is not simply one of reading a book. Rather it is to spend time with God in order to know God and be energized for the task of mission. Studying God’s Word is not a distraction, but flows directly from the fact that we are made in God’s image, and that, as we hear his Word and obey his call, we are able to live out our lives in a manner to reflect the creator into the world.