Copyright © 2021 Dennis C Stevenson Jr  

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Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.

Let's Dig Into The Bible

How could a collection of ancient manuscripts tell a story that makes sense today?

How could a writing process spread over fifteen hundred years and at least thirty-nine authors tell a story that connects?

It defies logic that the Bible could be any more than a fragmented and disjointed mess of out-of-date exhortations and irrelevant stories.

But the exact opposite is true.

Through many authors and long timeframes, the Bible tells a tightly choreographed story of God’s redemptive love. Despite the diversity of foreign cultures and strange landmarks, the Bible speaks urgently to us today about our spiritual condition and need for a Savior.

Many people pick up their Bible and start reading, only to be confused and overwhelmed by all the strange details. But if we take a step back to see the larger pattern and organization of the stories in the Bible, the entire book makes sense. The key to understanding the Bible lies in seeing how the books fill in the details of a much larger message. Once we focus on that greater structure, each of the individual pieces falls into place.

A Brief Overview of the Entire Bible

After God created the world and made Adam and Eve the on-site managers, Adam made a selfish decision. By choosing what he wanted and disobeying God’s command, Adam altered the course of human history and passed his rebellion on to all of his descendants.

This introduced the fundamental question of the Bible: How could the effects of Adam’s decision be reversed?

Many years later, God chose a family to be His special people. They were an inauspicious group who grew into a great nation. He bound Himself to them and revealed His standard to them. Yet, time after time, they rejected God’s loving relationship and willfully turned away from Him.

God repeatedly appointed leaders to deliver the people from the consequences of their selfish choices. But once the immediate crisis was over, they turned back to their wicked ways and soon found themselves in trouble again. When they asked for a king to be a human intermediary between themselves and God, He graciously granted their request. Sadly, most of the kings were wicked men who led the people farther away from God.

God appointed special spokesmen who reminded the people of God’s goodness and the price of disobeying Him. Rather than heeding the words of these divinely inspired messengers, the people disregarded them and mistreated them. God’s words fell on deaf ears, and the people ignored God to pursue their agenda.

Despite the rebellion of God’s people, the Bible documented what a proper, godly life looked like through the lives of an obedient few. Through poetry and wise advice, anyone seeking holiness could understand how to live. But most people ignored righteous living in favor of selfish interests.

So, God punished the people at the hands of foreign oppressors. Ripped from their homeland, He sent them far away to live under the rule of enemy empires. But God did not abandon them, and after a time, brought them back to their homes again and re-established the temple where they could worship Him.

Then God stepped back and waited for the time to be right.

If we’ve learned anything up to this point, it’s that no human effort or institution could offer a solution to the problem of redeeming humanity. Every opportunity to serve God had failed. The result was a spiritual disaster.

How could God make things right? After thousands of years of every human effort, how could a permanent solution happen?

At just the right time, God sent His Son to be born as a human. He lived a life that fully satisfied God’s righteous standards. Instead of enjoying the benefits of His relationship with God, He gave His life and exchanged His righteousness for the penalty of sin. As a result, those who believe in Him can enjoy a redeemed relationship with God–just as if they had lived up to God’s standards.

After God’s Son returned to Heaven, His work on earth continued through the power of the Holy Spirit, who came just as He promised. He established the church, and the message of redemption spread over the whole earth. People from every nationality and culture joined this church through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus.

In the first years after the church began, error crept in. God appointed men who had known Jesus to offer encouragement, correction, and instruction on how to live properly in this new relationship with God. These men wrote letters that the church has saved and remain as the authoritative instruction on how we should live redeemed lives.

But God is not through. He has shown how he will bring an end to this current situation. Jesus will return, this time not to suffer, but to reign. He will judge the earth and will deliver the consequences of Adam’s rebellion to all who stand before God without a Savior. He will recall the wickedness that went unpunished in this life, and each person will receive the full measure of God’s wrath.

But for the redeemed, God’s wrath will not come. He has already poured it out on Jesus. Instead of wrath, they will enjoy a new creation centered on God. And they will worship God forever.

In summary, this is the story that we find in the Bible. It is one of loss leading to hopelessness, of love leading to sacrifice, and death overcome by life. Every chapter of every book of the Bible contributes to this marvelous story.

God is the Author of the Bible

While we don’t have a single narrator describing the events as we read, the Bible tells us that God, through the Holy Spirit, superintended the writing of scripture. The Holy Spirit was the mastermind behind the organization and message of the Bible. God didn’t leave it up to individual people to communicate His message. He orchestrated the entire thing. From start to finish, His fingerprint is on every page.

Because God was intimately involved in writing the Bible, we know that the Bible accurately reveals Him and His plan. Through it, we discover who He is, what He is like, and what He has done. In the pages of scripture, we learn what He loves and what He hates. When we talk about God, we are talking about what we've learned about Him through the Bible, validated by our own experiences.

Of course, individual authors brought their style to it. We see Solomon’s wise words in Proverbs. Paul’s impeccable logic drives his epistles. Samuel’s storytelling makes 1 and 2 Samuel flow like a novel. James’s practicality moves naturally through his letter.

The Holy Spirit wasn’t a dictator in His inspiration. We see a celebration of diversity in the styles of writing throughout the Bible. But despite the differences, the message was directly from God. It was His way of revealing Himself to us.

Traditionally, the Bible follows a roughly chronological pattern. That’s why most Bibles have Genesis first and Revelation last. Genesis begins with “in the beginning” and Revelation ends with eternity future.

But there is more than that. This organization of the Bible also follows a thematic organization. It’s convenient that this also mostly aligns with the chronological view.

•           Genesis through Deuteronomy are the Books of Moses or “The Law”

•           Joshua through Esther are History books.

•           Job through Song of Solomon are Wisdom books

•           Isaiah through Malachi are “The Prophets”

•           Matthew through John are the Gospels

•           Acts is a New Testament History book

•           Romans through 3 John are Epistles or letters

•           Revelation is a New Testament prophetic book

The chronology moves forward through time. However, History and The Prophets overlap and address concurrent events. They are the same chronology told from different perspectives. Some authors of the Wisdom literature were also contemporaries of the History books.

From Moses (who wrote the first five books) through Malachi (the last Old Testament writer) was about a thousand years. Throughout that time, holy writing was coming out regularly. The Old Testament features thirty-nine individual books and some of the longest ones at that. The Holy Spirit didn’t exactly have an editorial calendar, but except for the four-hundred-year period that the book of Judges describes, there was a cadence of communication from God.

Then came the great silent period. After six hundred years of nearly continuous communication, even if much of it was condemnation, God seemed to go silent. Between Malachi and Matthew, everything seemed to stop. This was unnerving for the people of Jesus' time. It was like God had forgotten about them.

Then, after Jesus’ ascension into Heaven, there was a burst of activity. Twenty-seven books came out in approximately forty years. And then they stopped again. It’s been almost two thousand years since the ink dried on John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ.

We now consider the revelation closed. That doesn’t mean that God is done. Just that His communication is complete. He’s told us everything we need to know. We certainly have enough to understand the gospel and follow lives of spiritual growth.

For this book, we’ll start with Genesis and end with the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Between these two bookends, I’ve divided the narrative up into eleven different segments.

1.         In The Beginning: Genesis 1-3

2.         God Chooses His People: Genesis 4-50

3.         God Chooses Leaders: Exodus–Judges

4.         Give Us A King!: 1 Samuel - Esther

5.         The Wisdom in the Middle: Job–Song of Solomon

6.         God’s Spokesmen: Isaiah–Malachi

7.         The Life and Times of Jesus the Christ: Matthew–John

8.         The Birth of the Church: Acts

9.         The Spread of the Church: Acts

10.       Error and Instruction: Romans–Jude

11.       And Then Comes the End: Revelation

When we look at the Bible through this framework, the unifying thread of God’s story becomes clear. Not only that, but we will also see how the structure of the Bible ultimately and finally tells the story of salvation.

Introduction to the Old Testament

Part 1

We call the first section of our Bible the Old Testament. It contains 39 individual books that span the time frame from the creation of the world to the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon. It is called the “Old” Testament because the books it contains are the oldest writings of the Bible.

A major theme of the Old Testament is God’s relationship with the nation of Israel. In Genesis, we read how God selected one family out of all the people on earth and promised to dedicate Himself to them to be their God. With few exceptions, the Old Testament describes this ongoing relationship between God and His people.

A major feature of the Old Testament is the institution of the sacrificial system which Moses started on behalf of God. It began with the Tabernacle, a traveling tent-temple in which God made His resting place on earth. Later, with King Solomon, the place of worship shifted to a permanent temple. Only at the altar and with a proper sacrifice could the faithful gain a covering over their sins before God.

Much of the Old Testament centers on the Law. This is the body of instruction that God gave to Moses. The Ten Commandments are a famous element of The Law, but it contained many more instructions beyond those ten. It described God’s holy standard of living. It pointed out sin and proscribed the means of dealing with that sin.

Throughout the Old Testament, the people of Israel struggled with the Law. They often disregarded God’s instructions and flirted with the pagan worship practices of the surrounding people. Despite their unfaithfulness, God remembered His promises to them. While He frequently punished their disobedience, He always restored them to favor when they repented.

The entire Old Testament was written before Jesus was born. The Jewish religious leaders collected and assembled this group of ancient books and identified them as the Word of God. As Jesus grew up, the Old Testament was His scripture. Throughout His ministry, He quoted from many of the books we find in the Old Testament.

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Genesis 1-3

If we want to follow the story of the Bible, we should become familiar with the characters we’ll be reading about. The first 3 chapters of Genesis introduce us to the protagonists, antagonists and the fundamental conflict that will continue throughout the whole Bible.

Each of the chapters introduces one new character in a developing drama. By the end of these three chapters, they will have made a terrible mess of everything. We’ll be left wondering what God could do to restore the situation.

The Protagonist

The protagonist is the person who the story is about. We think of them as the “good guy” that we want to cheer for.

Genesis 1 identifies the protagonist by the fourth word:

In the beginning, God…

It’s easy to say that God is the good guy. He’s the author of the story, but He’s also one of the main characters.

The entire first chapter of Genesis is all about God in action. Through the revelation to Moses, who wrote the book of Genesis, we meet God and understand what He’s like.

The first thing we see is God’s power. Genesis 1:1 summarizes that idea when it says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This simple sentence points us back to God as the creator of everything.

The process of creation is something we are familiar with. We talk about creating a painting, or a kitchen table, a blanket, or even a tasty meal. We call this activity “creation” because it seems like at one point the thing didn’t exist, then it did!

In reality, whatever we created existed before we got involved. It was just in a more basic form. The paint was still in the tube; the table was a stack of lumber; the blanket was just a fold of fabric; and the meal was uncooked and unseasoned. What we call creation is more like transformation.

God had a different take on creation. When God started His creation, nothing existed. He didn’t transform the matter from one form to another. He created matter, then shaped it into what He wanted. Scholars call this ex-nihilo creation: Creation from nothing.

When we read Genesis 1, if we are paying attention, we will recognize right away that God’s kind of creation is way beyond anything we have ever seen or done. The amount of power it would take to call matter into existence and then give it a specific form is spectacular.

Another thing we see about God is His satisfaction with what He created. By the end of Genesis 1, we see God has moved through six periods of creation. At the end of each one, God reviewed it and passed judgment: “It is good.”

We all have varying standards of what makes up “good”. Some of us have high standards, others have relatively low standards. But God’s standard is unwavering. To be good, something must be completely good. It can’t have any aspect that isn’t good.

When God called His creation good, He meant it was exactly what He had intended to create. No part of it fell short of His creative plan. He didn’t have to guess in a few spots and hope it would work. He envisioned all of creation, and what He made perfectly aligned to that vision.