Sorting out the Story
Imagine moving into a house without closets, without cupboards, without shelves, and without furniture. You stack up all your boxes. You sift through piles of clothes to get dressed. You move ten boxes to find the one thing you need. You empty out five more to find something else. In all your sifting the confusion spreads. As the chaos grows, you cry out in exasperation: This is no way to live!
This is no way to live at home, and it’s no way to live with God’s Word. The Bible is not disordered, but it is big. We feel overwhelmed by it. We don’t know where to start, and we don’t have the furniture we need to make sense of it all. We know there are some helpful bits here and there, but half the time we can’t find them when we go looking. Much of the rest we don’t understand at all. We don’t know what goes where, so we stick with the few things we know and work around the rest as best we can.
If you feel this way, you are not alone. This is why the Holy Spirit gives the church teachers, and this is why the teachers at Living Hope are committed to helping you furnish your spiritual house. Their goal is to give you hooks, and shelves so that you can readily access and benefit from the entire word of God.
One of the most fundamental pieces of furniture they can give you is the big picture—an outline of the Bible’s story of redemption. This outline is like your kitchen cupboards, your bedroom closets, your shelves, your backyard shed. One of the first steps in making the best use of your Bible is recognizing what goes where:
Creation
The story of creation tells us who made us and why. It tells us how we came to be, what we were created to be, and what we are created to do. It orients us as to who we are and our place in the cosmos.
Fall
The fall of mankind into sin is the next pivotal event in the Bible. Man stepped out on his own in rejection of God’s word, and everything changed. Nothing in God’s creation is untouched by mankind’s sin. Nothing in our hearts and lives is untouched by it. Everything we read that occurs after the fall has to be interpreted in light of it.
Redemption
Redemption is not a single event in Scripture. God’s work of redemption, we will find, was planned before creation and begins unfolding from the Bible’s first pages. But it reaches its climax in a single event planned before the foundation of the world, the sacrifice of Christ for our sins. The death and resurrection of Christ is the event that all Old Testament Scripture points forward to and every event afterward points back to. Christ’s work of redemption is complete, but its work in the world is not. It is at work through the gospel creating something entirely new.
New Creation
Christ’s new creation began the moment of his resurrection, and it begins for each of us the moment we put our faith in him. All of us who are in Christ are already new creatures. So far as we are concerned, His kingdom has already come. But one look around (and within our own hearts) makes it clear that the work of transformation is not complete. We eagerly await the promised day when all evil will be swept away and the entire heavens and earth created anew for us—the day when “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
