Summary
The Bible is held together by a single story, a narrative that encompasses all of history and takes in all things. It is the story of the one true God—the Father, Son, and Spirit—and tells of God’s actions in the history he has created with the world and human beings.
The Bible unfolds in several stages:
1. Creation
In the beginning, God made a good world and placed human beings in that world with a special calling: to know and respond to him and to take care of the world. (Genesis 1-2)
2. Sin, its consequences, and its spread
People didn’t want to live within God’s limits and, encouraged by a rebellious spiritual being in the form of a serpent, they rebelled against God. Death entered the world, and their relationships with each other, with God, and with the world were disrupted. Over the generations that followed, sin showed itself to be like a powerful disease that had gotten in the bloodstream of all humanity. Humanity’s rebellion is pictured most vividly at the tower of Babel. There, God confused people’s languages, and the world became a community of nations divided against one another. (Genesis 3-11)
3. Election
The calling of Abraham’s family to be a people who will bring God’s blessing to the world broken by sin. Through the nation that would come from him, the divided nations would once again find blessing.
a. Protection and Law: They are kept by God through the threats of infertility, famine, and slavery, and they are called to live a special life, communicated to them largely through the Law of Moses (Genesis 12-Deuteronomy)
b. Kingdom: Despite being called to be a light to the nations around them, they end up looking just like them. Their wish to be ruled by a king is evidence of this desire to be like every other nation, but God warns them that under their first king Saul the experiment will be a failure. God intervenes and gives them a better king David, whose own personal character and behaviour is far from perfect. As the generations and centuries pass, the kings lead the people mostly away from their calling. (Joshua – 2 Chronicles)
c. Prophets: God sends spokespeople to call the people out for their wrongs and summon them back to faithfulness. They are warned that their failure will lead to the disaster of defeat and exile by a powerful foreign nation. The prophets also make promises about a future day that will be better, and the promises focus on God’s personal involvement in their lives (Ezekiel 34), the heart transformation that God will bring (Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 36), and zeroes in on a particular figure, a Messiah, through whom this will come (e.g., Isaiah 53). (Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah – Malachi).
4. The Coming of the King
The Son of God became a human being in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He did this to rescue humanity from its greatest troubles. Jesus came as a member of the family that God had called, but unlike all who went before him, he didn’t take a wrong step. After the messy history of the kings, Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, and said that it was present in him. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom brought him into conflict with the leaders, and he was put to death on a cross. But despite appearances, this death was in fact the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and the powerful offering that would defeat evil. Jesus’ resurrection was proof of that power. Death was not the end. Jesus promised that after he returned to his Father, he would send his Spirit to empower his followers’ lives. (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John)
5. The Kingdom Community
The community of Jesus, the church, was born when the Holy Spirit Jesus had promised came upon his followers to unite them and to be a sign of God’s healing work. As individual people responded to the good news of Jesus’ victory over sin and death, the Spirit joined them to the community of the church. The church’s call is to live faithfully for Jesus (the New Testament letters show the kind of care we must take for our belief and practice) and bear witness through its life and words to the majestic and death-defeating love of God from now until the day of Jesus’ return. At that day, evil will be judged, God will be live among people again, and all pain and sadness will be over forever. (Acts – Revelation)
As 2 Peter 1 indicates, the Bible is a treasury of writings that were given to us by “eyewitnesses of God’s majesty” so that we could know this story. We ourselves can now be witnesses to his majesty as we learn and live this story and as we take seriously the calling God has placed on us to continue to share his blessing with the world.
Discussion Questions
Discerning Scripture’s Story
1. Which parts of the story do you feel least familiar with? How does this affect your personal Bible reading habits?
2. One of the ways we can learn to tell the Bible story is to have our eyes opened to how the various parts show up in Biblical texts. Read the following passages from the New Testament and take note of how they touch on the different stages of the Bible story:
a. Luke 1:67-79. This is the passage where John the Baptist’s father speaks after John’s birth. (In verse 76, he is speaking about and to his new baby.)
b. Acts 7:1-54. This is Stephen’s speech before the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, in which he retells much of the history that led to Jesus.
c. Acts 13:16-39. This is one of Paul’s sermons, delivered to a mixed group of Jews and Gentiles.
3. Read Romans 1:1-6. How does Paul point to the story of scripture to begin his great letter?
Heeding Peter’s Counsel
4. Read 2 Peter 1:3-4. What does Peter say is the purpose of God’s “great and precious promises” for believers in Jesus?
5. Read 2 Peter 1:12-15. How many words do you see in these verses that are related to memory? What do you think Peter is referring to in verse 15?
6. Read 2 Peter 1:16-18. What event is Peter talking about in verse 17, which makes him an “eyewitness of Jesus’ majesty”?
7. Read 2 Peter 1:19-21. Where does Scripture (called “the prophetic message” here) come from, according to these verses? What does Peter say about Scripture’s trustworthiness? What does he say we should do with the message of Scripture in verse 19?
8. What practices and habits in your life help you to heed Peter’s counsel?
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