The Bible is a big book.
It’s a wealth of knowledge, history, ethics, incredible stories, theology, culture, unique individuals, supernatural occurrences, and bold claims. But where do you start? What’s the point of it? What sets it apart from other religious books? Is there a shorter version?
Even to Christians who read the Bible regularly, we can sometimes think that there is all of this unimportant stuff, this noise of history, characters, or stories that are intimidating, confusing, or just don’t seem related to our lives. We’d really like to read the Bible to get to the stuff that makes a difference in our lives.
In this article, I’d like to give you the “headlines” version of the Bible that I hope will motivate you to read the rest of it. While I can’t be all-inclusive, I can give you what I think are the biggest themes that can unlock the rest of the Bible for you. In fact, I dare to say that if you just had these five themes below, you’ll have an incredible lens with which to read the entire Bible — and why it is so incredibly relevant to your life.
Let’s dive in!
What we’re going to briefly go through is “The Gospel” or the “Good News.” There’s probably no more important way to read the Bible and understand it than to understand the Gospel. There are lots of ways to emphasize, describe, or list how to explain the Gospel, this is just my way. I hope it helps.
Photo Credit: Roman Kraft/Unsplash
Genesis 1:2-4: “In the beginning God…
The opening four words of the Bible set everything else up.
Before there was any “thing” there was only one being - God. Before there was time, space, matter, stars, puppies, cheeseburgers, California, or the Grand Canyon, there was God. Everything was created through Him, for Him, and by Him. All of, well, everything is because of Him, including you:
"So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Which means He is the authority on all life and non-life. He gets to say why things exist, whether they should or not, how it all began, and when and how it will all end. You wouldn’t be here without Him, and you wouldn’t have a purpose without Him.
This means you should look to Him as the authority in your life. This realization can be a bit startling, because it means you don’t determine your purpose, how. Your life will go or what happens to you when you die; you discover all of these things through God. From the account in Genesis, we can see that the first headline is this:
Headline: The heavens and the Earth were created to declare God’s glory, and people were created to display God’s glory.
Commands, rules, guidelines, or boundaries can often seem like barriers, but they’re really intended to keep the flow of life moving in the right direction. Like the painted lines on a road, the various signs directing the flow of traffic, or the guardrails keeping us from going over the cliff — it’s all to keep us moving in a safe, intentional manner towards our destination.
The commands of God are similar in that they are there to keep us moving towards Him ultimately. Our lives are not our own as we discovered above, which means God gets to set the guardrails, the destination, and the rules by which we travel.
God’s commands aren’t just Old Testament rules given by God to Moses, they’re in the New Testament too. In fact, Jesus gave more than a few commands, such as the most important one that is made up of two parts—
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. (Matthew 23:36-40)
This command especially, tells us what the character and desire of God is: to love God above all else, and one of the most important ways to do that is to love others because God loves them.
Headline: God’s commands are a way of connecting us to His character.
Sin isn’t a mistake, it’s willful rebellion.
There’s probably no greater indictment upon humanity outside of Jesus’ insistence that “no one is good but God alone” than from the Apostle Paul. As a former religious perfectionist, and self-proclaimed righteous individual, Paul realized when He met Jesus that He, and everyone else in humanity have no shot at being good apart from God. Paul essentially gave some bad news to people who think they're good people:
...For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’ ‘Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.' ‘The poison of vipers is on their lips.' ‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’ ’Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways and the way of peace they do not know.’ ’There is no fear of God before their eyes.’” (Romans 3:9-15)
I never see any encouraging cards or car bumper stickers with Romans 3 on them. It’s hard to read, harder to accept, and even more difficult to think we can do anything about it. If we look in the mirror and are honest with ourselves, the indictment from Jesus and Paul makes total sense — we do, willfully, sin against God.
We’re powerless to stop sinning on our own. We seek out sin, we sometimes delight in it, we minimize it, explain it away, ignore it, rationalize it, or convince ourselves we could be doing something worse. And lastly, we must realize that sinning isn’t something we do to become sinners, we sin because we are sinners. Without Christ, it is a part of nature.
Headline: Sin isn’t just a part of our activity; without Jesus, it’s a part of our identity.
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/CasPhotography
If we were to stop at the above headline of sin, our lives would be a hopeless, heartbreaking, depression-filled wandering of meaninglessness. We’d harm everyone and everything around us, including our relationship with God. Why? Because we’d be following our own ways, and not God’s ways
In the Old Testament, people are taught the danger in following their heart, a popular and lasting motto that still lurks around today. In Ezekiel 36:24-26, God tells them:
’I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
God was essentially saying that His people, and even us today, we have hearts that aren’t just sick, they’re made of stone. Our hearts have hardened to the point of weighing us down and shutting God out. In Matthew 15 Jesus picks up this idea of how bad people’s hearts have gotten by talking about the people who should know better, the people who follow God:
‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’
And He continues by saying that from their (and our hearts without God) we cause harm to ourselves and to others:
But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
Jesus was letting the Pharisees, and anyone listening know that it wasn’t the outside that truly mattered, God has always look at the heart, and the people’s hearts were sick and dead. More than that, without God our hearts aren’t just dead, they’re deadly. But God had promised that He would not leave them, forsake them, and that He would essentially perform not just heart surgery, but a heart transplant:
I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart. (Jeremiah 24:7)
But how could this happen? Only with the realization that cuts to the heart (Acts 2:36-37): That Jesus Christ died, while we were still sinners.
Our sin necessitated His death, but He willingly went to the cross, and willingly gave up His Spirit for us. In Christ, God has given us a hope that we could not provide for ourselves and could not accept without Him drawing us near to Him with His kindness and mercy. In Christ, God has given us a new future, a new hope, and a new heart that can seek after Him.
Headline: In order for God to give you a new heart, He had to stop His.
If you notice, up until this point humanity hasn’t contributed anything good to the equation. Everything Good has been God’s doing. God’s creation is good, His commands are good, and giving His life for us was especially good.
All we have done up to this point is rebel. Before we accept Christ as our Lord, Savior, and the leader of our life from now on, we have harmed our relationship with God and with others. It’s not a good track record.
But in light of God’s grace through Jesus Christ — giving His life for us and coming back from the dead, proving that there is hope and life after death — we can finally do something of value. We can give our lives to Him. To be clear we can’t and don’t do this because we are good, quite the contrary. We can do this because He is good, and we are not, which is what draws us to Him in the first place.
He breaks our stony hearts by extending the offer of eternal life when all we have brought is death. He causes us to feel Godly sorrow and to want to repent because of His kindness and mercy (Romans 2:4). He has patiently waited for us to turn to Him and away from sin even as He has watched us spit in His face over and over again and rebel. We crumble to our knees in anguish and somehow in gratitude as God looks at us as tells us He loves us even when we have rejected Him.
At some moment in time, we have a choice we have to make — and everyone makes it. Do we accept Christ, or do we continue to reject Him? There is no third option, there is no middle ground, and everyone makes a choice. What will yours be?
Headline: Faith is a transfer of trust.
This is the gospel, or one of the ways of thinking about the gospel. It permeates the Old and New Testaments alike. It’s the lens with which we must read the Bible. My suggestion is to take these five themes and memorize them, and as you read the Bible look for these themes to build your faith in Christ.
Photo Credit: Thinkstock/GordonImages