Many Christians do not know what their faith is about or at the most they have a very truncated view of what the faith is. Many spend all their time in the pages of the New Testament only and see the Old Testament as some disconnected bunch of stories that are no longer relevant to their situation.
The Bible is a wonderful compilation of God’s work on behalf of man. There are 66 books written by 40 different authors spanning 2500 years. These books of the Bible cover the first 4000 years of the history of the earth and systematically reveal God’s plan of man’s creation, fall, redemption and glorification.
There are numerous wonderful attributes about the Scriptures. They are clearly God-breathed and can be trusted as God’s testament to us. The continuity of the whole of scripture being derived from such varied sources, places and times is truly remarkable.
In them, we find a wide range of literature, including poetic history, straight historical text, poetry, psalms, proverbial wisdom, epic poetry, fairy tale, erotic love poem, prophecy, and personal letters. Given what the Bible tells us, the fact of its wide range of literature to do so, is a testament of its divine origin.
Many of you have anthologies of poetry or a book of short stories. These books are mostly disconnected collations of different stories, ideals and visions of the authors. For many modern Christians, the Bible seems to be just such a book. But it is not. In fact, the most glorious thing about the Bible is not its wide range of authors and genre, its literary quality, its preservation through history, its universal acceptance as the Word of God, or its systematic propositions of wisdom and theology.
No, the most glorious thing about the Bible is that it uses all of this to tell a story. The Bible, in its most fundamental revelation is a story. It is the story of God and man. Man’s failure and God’s faithfulness. It is the story of God’s creation, man’s fall, and God’s recreation.
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