Episode Details

All of us feel connection to stories. From childhood and beyond, we never stop appreciating a plot where a hero rescues his people and restores the place they call home. Whether we are talking about Harry Potter, Star Wars, or the Lord of the Rings, we feel pulled in by a similar pattern that guides these narratives forward. 

This is no accident. Like all great stories, these echo the great story God told through the world he made and the book he wrote. If you want to understand the grand story of the Bible, you have to comprehend it’s beginning, middle, and end as well as the key themes that move it forward. 

Review

You have now learned two important skills in the first two weeks of this curriculum:

Discerning the author’s intention (week 1)

The law of proximity and context in determining meaning (week 2)

You could think of these as “small skills,” that is, they apply most directly to the immediate passage you are studying paragraph.

You could think of the skill this week, Reading the Bible as Story, as a “large skill” in that it takes the entire Biblical canon into account- it zooms out to the whole Bible rather than focusing on the more immediate details in the passage. Both small skills and large skills are important to reading the Bible well.

The Bible as Story

What do you think I mean when I say that “the Bible is a story”? Several distinct narratives fill the pages of the Bible- stories about David, Jesus, and others. Yet, the focus of this lesson is not on reading any of these individual stories, but on reading the whole of the Bible as one big story. In other words, each of these individual stories (as well as the other parts of Scripture) all fit together in one large plot line from Genesis to Revelation that’s ultimately about Jesus.

You may ask, Where are you getting the idea that the Bible is one large story? I was astonished when I first learned that the most similar chapters in the Bible to Genesis 1 and 2 are Revelation 21 and 22 (the last two chapters of the Bible). Think of it, in each of these passages there are trees (including the tree of life), rivers, precious stones, light, stars and suns, and dominion.

The biggest difference is that there has been substantial progression from Genesis’s description of the garden to Revelation’s New Creation. The garden has become a garden city and God’s presence is forever immediate and available to his people (Rev 22:4). Like any great story, the Bible has developed the same themes it introduced in the beginning, and over the course of its narrative, those same things have developed and escalated to their fitting conclusion.

At the center of this narrative is the main character Jesus who has no less than four separate narratives about his life, death, and resurrection and who also claims that the Old Testament Scriptures “bear witness” about him (Joh