What’s Your Bible All About?

What’s the Bible all about? I just finished up a great course in Biblical Theology at Westminster Seminary. For the class I read some outstanding material on the storyline of the Bible. One of the amazing things in studying the Bible not just as a collection of theological truths is that you see the amazing way the writers and collectors of the Scriptures knew they were telling small sections of a great salvation story. And most didn’t even know how the story would end. That’s the point Peter makes in his first letter,

1 Peter 1:10-12 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

In one of my assignments I came across this amazing insight into the story of the Bible from Ed Clowney. I’ve highlighted the last sentence. Stop and take in the head-spinning reason we have the Bible.

“The Bible is not only from God, it is about God. The Bible story is not the history of Israel, nor the biographies of saints whose lives may inspire us. It is God's story, the account of his saving work. God speaks his promises and acts to keep them. The initiative is always his. In the Garden of Eden, after the sin of Adam and Eve, the Lord came seeking them. God promised that the Son of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, even as his heel was struck (Gn 3:15). That promise is the rationale for human history. Had God spoken his word of judgment rather than his promise, human history would have ended at the foot of the tree in the Garden. God's plan to send Christ is the reason we have the Bible; indeed, the reason there is a human race.” (“The Glory of the Coming Lord Discovering Christ in the Old Testament”; Modern Reformation 4:6; November/December 1995, 22-26