Class Notes

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The Story of the Bible

1.     Creation and Purpose

• God creates the world out of nothing, full of beauty and potential.
• He appoints humans to oversee this world, multiply and create new communities.
• Humans are to take this good world and develop all of its potential while living in harmony with God and each other.

2.     Rebellion and the Fall

• As humans attend to their task, 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?
• A dark and mysterious character - the devil - entices the humans to doubt God’s generosity and rebel. This leads to disaster; humanity’s relationship with God is fractured, and their relationships with themselves, their families, and the earth breakdown. This all leads to the rise of two cities (Enoch and Babylon) where pride and violence reign.

3.     God’s Covenant with Israel

• God’s response sets in motion a plan to restore divine blessing to the whole world. He will do this through one family chosen from among the nations, the people of Abraham, who later become Israel.
  • God makes a covenant (contract) 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.
  • Israel enters the promised land, but they soon fail to keep their part of the covenant. They are exiled from the land.
  • Despite Israel’s sin, God sends the prophets to warn and guide Israel back on track. 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.

4.     Jesus and the Kingdom of God

• God sends Jesus of Nazareth as the solution to all of the conflict of the Old Testament. He was the kind of human we were all made to be, but constantly fail to be.
• Jesus’ plan to defeat humanity’s evil and sin was to let it defeat Him first. After dying for the sins of the world, His Resurrection from death sealed his victory over all of our evil and death. He now offers up his own righteous life as a gift to those who would follow him.

5.     The Christian Faith

• After His Resurrection, Jesus’ followers spread the good news of our salvation to all nations.

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6.     The Return of the King

• Our hope is that one day Jesus will return to fully establish the Kingdom of God among us and remove evil and suffering from this world.

Remember

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About the Bible...

• although a diverse collection of literature, ultimately portraying a unified story that leads to Christ.
• mostly a narrative as the dominant type of literature (43%)
  
• poetry as well (33%)