The Bible's Storyline 1 - Part 1
Posted on May 20, 2011 by Pastor Tom
This Spring and Summer, I will try to paint the picture of the Bible’s Overall Storyline. I know many of you will miss the weekend message because of vacations. So I will post pieces of the messages on this blog so you can follow along. We start in the beginning.
“David killed the giant Goliath. Daniel spent a night in the lion’s den. Adam and Eve did something questionable and ended up blaming others for this misstep. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Esther was a courageous queen. There was a flood and a crossing of a sea and Jesus walked on water. A guy named Paul came on the scene at some point. Mary and Joseph were in there somewhere. Was that the same Joseph with the coat of many colors? The Lord is my shepherd and He’s also the guy who got mad in the temple one day. Isaiah and Jeremiah are in there but I don’t think we can find the phrase “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” in there. There are lots of angels and there’s a devil. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy but God is a jealous God. In the end, God will somehow win.
What am I doing? Well, I just described scattered parts of the Bible in no particular order. It was kind of confusing. Yet if someone asked us to put the pieces of the Bible together in a storyline, we might come up with something like I just shared. I grew up in a family that regularly attended church. I went to Sunday School. I heard the stories and the messages when I was old enough. Yet if someone asked me at the age of 20 to tell them the Bible’s basic storyline, I would likely have come up with something similar to that first paragraph. That might be your experience or your knowledge as well. You know bits and pieces of the Bible. But how it all fits together is some kind of mystery.
If we’re confused about the basic storyline of the Bible then it’s quite possible we’re confused about God. We might not understand the character of God or how He has worked through history. We might believe that the God of the Old Testament is cruel and judgmental while the God of the New Testament is love. If we don’t understand the Bible’s storyline and God’s activity through it, we can even be confused about our own identity and place in this world.
So today we begin my attempt to paint the big picture of the Bible. My hope is that by the end of this summer, you will be have about 15 key markers from the Bible that proclaim God’s activity. These will enable us to place the David and Goliath story in a bigger context. They will help us see how the Old Testament and New Testament do not describe different gods but the same God who has been and continues to be at His work in history and in our lives. They will help us know our God more deeply and enable to answer some questions people around us have about God’s Word.
We have to start at the beginning. Genesis 1 – one of the most studied and controversial chapters in the Bible. But as we go through it, I would invite you to ask yourself “what is this chapter primarily saying about God?” Then we will ask “what does this mean for our lives?” And if I’m still living and really brave, I will venture into that question –how do we respond to Christians with different interpretations of Genesis 1 than ours? I conclude that Moses wrote Genesis and was well prepared to do so through his training and experience. I believe God’s Spirit carried him along to write these words.
Next time – What does Genesis 1 say about God?
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