How do you tell people about the Bible?

The Bible is Huge

There is so much in the Bible that it is so hard to understand everything. I remember many times as a good  christian kid going to summer camp, I would convince myself  “I am going to read the Bible cover to cover!” I made it through Genesis, and the first part of Exodus, then I crashed and burned when Moses explains the law. It is easy to get lost trying to make it through the Bible while keeping a close eye on the historical passing of time.

Bible Lessons are Fragmented 

Daniel and the Lions Den? I totally know that story. David and Goliath? So cool! Joshua? He did that awesome thing with the walls and yelling really loud.

Sunday School taught me every cool story in the Bible you can find, but I had no idea how it all came together. There was just a people called the Israelites and they were always captured and they always got out of it through some awesome story. What does it all have to do with Jesus? What do they all have to do with each other?

Testaments?

Why is the Bible split into two completely different sections? If Jesus is so important what is the point off all this other stuff?

The old testament does and says so much that the new testament seems to contradict. All the violence, messed up situations, and harsh rules must have a reason, how does it reconcile with a God of Love?

Something Gets forgotton

So much our our Christian discussion and division in modern society has been drilled down into using single, out of context verses in order to prove our point. 

“But the Bible says…”

“But the law states…”

“The English NIV translation of the Bible is the perfect and infallible word of God”
(I make fun of my earlier self here).

We try to use bits and pieces of the Bible in our everyday walk with forgetting one extremely important detail:

Its About HIM

The Bible is not a story about us, it is a story about God. We look at the heroes of the old testament and try to praise the Israelites for their deeds. We miss the fact that God is trying to tell us something with those people, and we all too often focus on the messenger or the message and not on the author

The Journey is the Key

The old testament is crucial to understanding the purpose of Jesus Christ. Nothing God did in the old testament was enough to bring humanity back to Him, and everything God did was a prophecy of the one that could.

Our Choice

If God is the protagonist of the story, Satan is not the antagonist; we are. God gives us every possible opportunity to step into the light, yet we choose the darkness

 

God gave us every opportunity to come back to him, and only one worked. 

  1. God gave us choice, we chose darkness
  2. God gave us a fresh start, we still chose darkness
  3. God honoured a select few with status, we abused that status
  4. God gave a list of rules to follow, we could not follow the rules
  5. God gave role models to look to, their influence died after a generation
  6. God gave rulers to be consistent modelling, the rulers themselves chose darkness
  7. God performed great miracles in the face of darkness, no one cared a day after
  8. God showed their choices have consequences, we were ashamed and drew further away
  9. God let us come to their own conclusions, we did not conclude well