Reading the Bible as a Unified Story — Genesis 1-50

0:14 Hello. It's nice to be here. We're back in town to see friends and spend time with family. We live in Northwest Washington, about an hour and almost two hours North of Seattle. To give you a little bit of context, we're like ten minutes East of the ocean and twenty minutes South Of Canada.

0:40 Okay? And we spend our time, we and my family, we spend our time distributing missiological insights that could lead to breakthroughs among strategies for reaching frontier people groups. We're going to talk more about frontier people groups a little bit later. As I was preparing for this morning and praying, the Lord brought to mind the importance of reading the Bible as a unified story. So for the next few minutes, we're going to explore this basic but profound idea.

1:21 The Bible is a really large book made up of the old and new testament. You probably knew that. But these old and new testaments are made up of many books. There's a lot of ancient history, there's poetry and there's letters written across the span of fifteen hundred years. And on top of that, there's a cast of hundreds of people over this period of time.

1:47 And it can be difficult to keep it all straight. I know that I struggle with that. And so it's easy to get lost not only because it's an ancient text from another part of the world but also because the book is large and can seem complex. But despite the variety and diversity, the Bible shows a remarkable unity. The most dominant type of literature in the Bible is narrative.

2:16 It opens with, In the beginning. And the second to last paragraph concludes with, and they reigned forever and ever. Narrative composes five zero two chapters or 43% of the text. That's nearly half of the Bible is narrative. On the other hand, poetry makes up 33% of the Bible or three eighty seven chapters.

2:47 So although the Bible is a diverse set of literature and may appear fragmented at first, it ultimately presents itself as a unified epic narrative that leads to Jesus. There's one main plot line weaving the different books and the stories together. And once you grasp this core story line and how all of the books fit together, you can pick up the Bible at any point and know right where you are and what's going on. So here's how the story works. I know this is going to be basic for a lot of you but as I've been preparing to teach these things to my children, it's been extremely impactful to have a macro level view of the storyline of the Bible.

3:38 In Genesis one and two, we see creation and the royal task. Don't worry, I'm not going to go through it chapter by chapter. God in these chapters confronts chaos. We see chaos and out of it He creates a wonderful ordered world full of beauty and potential. He then appoints humans to oversee this world and multiply and create new communities.

4:08 This opening story offers an ideal vision of the vocation of humans. Humans are to take this good world and develop all of its potential while living in harmony with God and with each other. In Genesis three through 11, we see rebellion and the fallout. As the humans go about this task they've been given, they're faced with choices about what is good and evil. Will they trust God's wisdom or will they seize autonomy and define good and evil for themselves?

5:14 Okay. Genesis 12 through the rest of the Old Testament, God's covenant with Israel. The tension between the just and generous creator God and the rebellious nations who have given into evil develops the plot conflict that drives the storyline of the entire Bible. God's response sets in motion a plan to restore divine blessing to the whole world and he will do this through one family chosen from among the nations, the people of Abraham who later become Israel. The story of God and Israel is the first main subplot of the biblical story and it has three main movements.

5:59 Movement one: God chooses Israel to bless the nations. And this is Genesis 12 through Deuteronomy. God makes a covenant promise to Abraham's family to bring them into a land where they'll become a nation that brings God's blessing to the world. The family grows but they become enslaved in Egypt. And as a nation, Egypt embodies all that has gone wrong with humanity idolatry, injustice and giving in to evil.

6:30 So, God raises up Moses and defeats Egypt's evil, rescuing his people and bringing them to Mount Sinai. There, he enters a covenant relationship or partnership with Israel. Furthermore, he will personally live among them. They are invited to obey the terms of the covenant which start with the 10 commandments followed by hundreds more. By being faithful to these commands, they will become God's priestly representatives to the nations.

7:05 Movement two, Israel's royal failure. Joshua, Judges, first and second Samuel and first and second Kings. Israel enters the promised land and they blow it big time. They begin worshiping the gods of the nations around them leading to corruption and justice or injustice, sorry. Even their best kings like David and Solomon, they fail miserably.

7:30 Eventually, the leaders of Israel run the nation into the ground Then the tribes of Israel are conquered by the superpower Babylon. Most of the Israelites are then dragged into exile in Babylon. And so now we see two main big conflicts in the story. One, all of the nations have continued with their rebellion. And two, even God's own chosen people are doing the same thing.

7:55 Movement three, Israel's exile and the prophetic hope. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea through Malachi. Despite Israel's sin, all was not lost. Among Israel was a vocal minority called the prophets. And they had previously warned of Israel's downfall but they also made it clear that it wasn't the end of the story.

8:21 God had promised to restore divine blessing to the world through this family. And even Israel's rebellion wouldn't stop him. Their hope was that after the exile, God would return to live among his people once again and a great leader would come and lead Israel in faithfulness to their God. Moreover, it would be through this very leader that God would rescue the world. So, the storyline of the Old Testament comes to a close.

9:24 They claimed Jesus was the kind of human we were all made to be but perpetually fail to be. Furthermore, they claimed Jesus was the faithful Israelite who would fulfill God's promise to return divine blessing to all of the nations through Abraham. And here is how he would do it. Humanity and Israel's embrace of evil had created a world of violence and death. But Jesus was a man of compassionate power.

9:53 He proclaimed that He was bringing God's kingdom back over the earth and he would confront the tragic effects of evil. But Jesus' plan to defeat humanity's evil and sin was to let it defeat him. After dying for the sins of the world, His resurrection from death sealed His victory over all of our evil and death. And He now offers up His own righteous life as a gift to those who would follow Him. Chapter five, the spreading of the kingdom.

10:27 After his resurrection, Jesus' followers experienced the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling them with his presence in Jerusalem. Jesus appeared in the flesh many more times sending his followers out as witnesses to share the incredible news of what he had done for Israel and all of humanity. This Jesus movement became a multi ethnic international movement that flourished, especially among the poor. It was made up of small communities of mutual love and generosity called churches. People would gather to celebrate their new way of life as redeemed humans enjoying an intimate covenant with God.

11:09 They would eat together and worship Jesus while challenging each other to abide by His teachings. A large portion of the New Testament is made up of letters from Jesus' appointed leaders called apostles. Written to all kinds of different churches, these letters showed the recipients what it meant to participate in Jesus' kingdom in the first century world. Moreover, the entire New Testament presents Jesus as the way forward for humanity itself. In Jesus, God's brand new world is inaugurated.

11:45 His followers continue to look to the day when he will return to finish what he started. Conquering evil completely while fully establishing his kingdom on earth with us forever. Chapter six, the return of the king. All of the disciples of Jesus, the apostles and Jesus himself have set their future hope in God's covenant promises to completely redeem our world and set all things right. This hope is focused on the return of Jesus to consummate the kingdom he inaugurated through his life, death and resurrection.

12:21 On that day, he will return to fully confront and deal with evil in all of its manifestations removing it completely from his good world. He will make all things new and people from all nations who submit to his love and justice will be invited into this new creation. It is here and at an unfathomable degree that the great human vocation of ruling as caretakers in the presence and goodness of God will be carried forward. There's the narrative of the Bible. It's a really great epic story.

13:52 Different things that you're looking for. So they're all literature but they communicate in really different ways. So the same thing is true for the Bible. If you don't pay attention to what style it's written in, you will miss out on the brilliance of each book. So what are the main types of literature in the Bible?

14:14 First and foremost is narrative, which we've mentioned. And that makes up 43% of the Bible. After that is poetry, is 33. And then there's what we would call prose discourse, which is 24%, the remaining 24% of the Bible. So, nearly half the Bible is narrative.

14:34 And this is not an accident. Stories are the most universal form of human communication. Our brains are actually hardwired to take in information through story. And stories are really enjoyable. But why?

14:54 Stories train us to make sense of the seemingly random events that happen in life by taking those events and putting them together in a sequence. And then together, you can start to see the meaning and purpose of it all. And what links all of this together? Good stories always have a character who wants something and then through these characters the author can explore life's big questions like who are we and what's really important in life. And a good story always resolves in, no, it always involves some kind of conflict, some challenge to be overcome, just like in our own lives.

15:38 And that forces us to think about our own challenges. Why there's so much pain and disappointment in the world and then what we can do about it. And stories usually end with some kind of resolution giving us hope for our own stories. And since these are Bible stories, the question should be asked, Are the characters there showing me how I should live? I think that's not quite the point.

16:06 Most of the characters in the Bible, all of the characters in the Bible except one, are deeply flawed. You should not be like them. But we are supposed to see ourselves in them, which helps us see our lives and our failures from a new perspective. And without even realizing it, these stories will start to mess with you and change the way that you see the world and other people and yourself. Back to the different types of literature though.

16:43 So there's historical narrative but there's also narrative parables and short biographical narratives like the four gospels. Okay, then there's poetry. And I don't read a lot of poetry. But one out of every three chapters in the Bible is poetry. I think that that's pretty significant amount of real estate given to poetry in the Bible.

17:07 But why is there so much poetry? Poetry mainly... Poems mainly speak through dense creative language linking together images to help us envision the world differently. Poems use lots of metaphor to evoke your emotions and your imagination. Lots of fancy language, you know, but wouldn't it be easier if they just told us what we needed to know?

17:56 There are lots of types of poetry in the Bible. There's types of songs, right, or Psalms. There's the reflective poetry of the wisdom books and also the passionate resistance of the prophets. And then the last big literary type is called prose discourse And it makes up a quarter of the bible. And these are speeches or letters or essays.

18:22 And the focus here is building a sequence of ideas or thoughts into one linear argument that requires a logical response. For example, like, Hey, have you thought about this thing? You should also consider how it connects to this other thing. And if you do, then you'll see that this is the result. And in light of that conclusion, therefore, you should probably stop doing this one thing so that this other thing will be the outcome.

18:53 So you're persuading, the author is persuading us with reason. Discourse forces us to think logically and consistently and then do something about it. Biblical discourse is found in law collections, in wisdom literature and the letters of the apostles. So in conclusion of this section, each book of the Bible has... Sorry.

19:19 Does each book of the Bible only have one literary type or style? And the answer is no. Most of the books have a primary literary style like narrative, for example. But then embodied in that narrative, you'll come across poems or parables or collections of laws. Every book is a unique combination of literary styles.

19:41 In order to read that book well, I need to become familiar with each literary type and how it works. To summarize where we are so far, the bible is a collection of books written in different literary styles like narrative, poetry and prose. And most of us are familiar with these kinds of literature. We all know a narrative when we see one like The Hunger Games or The Great Gatsby. And most people can recognize poetry whether it's Walt Whitman or the songs of Bob Dylan.

20:17 And every day we're surrounded by prose in news articles or essays. And all of these examples are modern American literature in that they come from this time period and this region of the world. But there's also medieval English literature from another place and time or ancient Greek writings from this place and time. And in order to read the Bible well, we need to keep in mind that it all comes, that it comes from this part of the world and was produced in this basic period of time. Ancient Jewish literature from the ancient Near East.

20:55 It's Middle Eastern literature from two thousand years ago. So what do we need to know or what's unique about ancient Jewish literature? A key feature is that it lacks a lot of the details that modern readers have come to expect in stories and poems. And this makes it seem really simple, but actually it's very sophisticated literature because every detail matters. And that's great but the lack of detail means that the stories are often loaded with ambiguities.

21:31 And we're familiar with this. So take one of the first stories for example, Adam and Eve in the Garden. Where did the talking snake come from? Why did God allow him there? Why didn't Adam and Eve die on the spot like they said they would?

21:47 Or like God said they would? And who's the offspring of the woman who's going to bite or who's going to crush the head of the snake but be bitten by him? So there's a lot of puzzles even just in this story. And some of these are questions that we have that are but are not important to what the author is focusing on. Some of the ambiguities are intentional.

22:09 Intentional, you think? Won't that lead to bad interpretations? People filling in the gaps with their own answers? That's a risk that the biblical authors took in writing this way. We all tend to impose our own cultural assumptions onto the Bible but they apparently thought that the risk was worth it.

22:31 These oddities are really invitations into an adventure of reading and discovery. What do I mean by that? For example, the strange promise about the offspring of the woman crushing and being bitten by the snake. That word offspring right there in Genesis three is a clue to pay attention to genealogies which lo and behold run all of the way through the biblical narrative. They trace the lineage of Eve all the way to King David and his offspring.

23:10 And in the New Testament, Jesus is connected to the offspring of this royal line. Now, when you read the prophets, Isaiah connected this king to the suffering servant who would die on behalf of his people. And then in the book of Revelation, there's this symbolic vision. Can you guess? It's about a woman and her offspring.

23:32 It's Jesus and his followers who conquer the dragon by giving up their lives. So each part of the story is loaded with ambiguities but altogether it makes sense. And this is the literary genius of the Bible. It forces you to keep reading and then interpret each part in light of the others. So Scripture is interpreting itself.

24:43 Okay. Are you tracking with me? Meditation literature. In Psalm one, we read about the ideal Bible reader. It's someone who meditates on the scriptures day and night.

24:59 In Hebrew, the word meditate means literally to mutter or to speak quietly. So the idea is that every day for the rest of your life, you slowly, quietly read the Bible out loud to yourself and then you go and talk about it with your friends, pondering the puzzles, making connections and discovering what it all means. And as you let the Bible interpret itself, something remarkable begins to happen. The Bible starts to read you. Because ultimately the writers of the Bible want you to adopt the story as your story.