Understanding the Bible --- Introduction

The Word “Bible” simply translates as “book.” For Christians, “The Bible” is “The Book,” as in the book of all books, the most important book there is. Most Christians who read it seriously find it at once challenging and comforting, transcendent and accessible, imposing and intimate, frightening and safe, demanding and giving, life-changing and life-reaffirming. You will certainly not regret the time you devote to learning about it. This book will help you understand the overall picture of the whole Bible, in its parts and as a whole. Apart from the personal and “housekeeping” parts in this introduction and the conclusion, you should be able to read this book in only about 90 minutes (based on an average reading speed).

The Bible is certainly a book as it is. It is one book. It is also, however, a collection of 66 smaller books written by various authors at several points in time over about 1500 years or so. Yet it is one, whole, unified book with a unified story. It is a story that affects all mankind, applies to all individuals, and describes us all inside and out. Its words have healing power and building power. It transforms individuals, relationships, and whole societies.

The Bible is divided into two main sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament, sometimes called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. This name is because the Bible explains that God relates to mankind through covenant, and that God has done this primarily twice in human history. A covenant is a special type of relationship that is both deeply personal and legal, or judicial. A marriage is our best example of a covenant. In fact, marriage is used as a symbol of God’s covenant with us throughout the Bible as well. The first part of the Bible relates God’s first attempt at a covenant with man, but it was one that was flawed and weak because it could be broken by our failures. God made a second covenant, the New Covenant, which works by first renewing our hearts, and which can never be broken. It is built from beginning to end on his power first.

How the Story Begins

The Bible is a book about who we are as humans and who God is to us and for us. It is a book about our relationship with him and our relationships with other human beings. It tells the story of humanity’s separation from God and how God undertakes to repair that separation on our behalf, restore us, and reunify us with himself. Through this relationship, we are then able to harmonize our relations with each other in all aspects of our lives. What he has done for us provides a model of how we can improve our relationships with others and how all humanity can flourish.

The story begins with God creating heaven and earth, and then creating the first humans. These humans differ from all other creatures in that God creates them in his image. This does not mean that we are “little gods” or that we are “sparks of divinity.” It means we share likenesses of some of his features, by his design. Our abilities for reasoning, emotion, planning, building, sacrifice, and much more are finite versions of the same attributes of our infinite creator. Both male and female bear this image in full.

The story relates that God created humanity in this special way because he intended them to have “dominion” over the rest of creation. “Dominion” does not mean “domination,” as many misunderstand. It has to do with caretaking and stewardship, in the same way we would build and maintain a home. In fact, the words “dominion,” “domicile,” and “domestic” all share the same root word, meaning “home.”

God created a special garden, the Garden of Eden, specially for Adam and Eve, his first humans. He tasked them to work and to guard it. They had free access to all its fruits. In this original setting, God could dwell with mankind and have direct fellowship with them. God gave only one restriction. He had also put in the Garden a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were not to eat from this tree. If they did, they would violate God’s trust and break fellowship with him. They would learn what evil is and they would suffer its effects.

Adam and Eve did not guard the Garden very well, for a “deceiver” (often translated “serpent”) entered in and deceived Eve into believing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was actually a good source for food, as well as wisdom, and that God had only prohibited it to keep them ignorant. If they ate of it, the deceiver promised, they would actually become like God.

Adam and Eve both ate of it. The Bible calls this “sin.” Sin means literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the standard God sets for what is right and good. This first sin by Adam and Eve we call the “original sin,” and it affected all their posterity afterward. It was “original” because it was the first sin, but also because from it originates all sin that has since affected the rest of the world, including our own thoughts and actions.

After Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the serpent and the ground for man’s sake, and the man and the woman experienced “death.” This death was not physical immediately, but relational: it was expulsion from fellowship with God. They also experienced all the shame, pain, suffering, anxiety, pride, and sins that flow from that original sin as well, and much more.

Different Christians understand this story differently. Liberal or moderate scholars see the Adam and Eve story as merely mythical. Many of these would still argue that it still relates to all mankind in that it describes fundamental psychological realities common to all humans: desire, ambition, alienation, rejection, shame, fear, pride, etc. Some moderate theologians would say that while not the actual first humans, Adam and Eve nevertheless were historical figures, and that God simply chose them as the representatives for all mankind before and after. The psychological effects and explanations for these would be similar to the previous group. Conservative theologians are more likely to see this story as historical truth. Some even say Adam and Eve were literally the first human beings. They would then argue that as our first parents, their original sin affects us all directly as their descendants. They were the parental representatives for all mankind. When they fell, we all fell. Almost all groups see the story as addressing the human condition as alienated and vulnerable to some degree. Conservative readers see it as the beginning of a unified history that runs throughout the whole of the Bible.

The entire rest of the Bible is the saga of this separation from God and how it is overcome. To put it in more biblical terms, this saga is about how a people separated from God by their sinfulness may once again be allowed to draw near unto the most holy God by his grace. As we will see, God’s permanent fix for this problem comes in the New Testament, in the person of Jesus Christ.

The first direct promise that God would send a savior comes right after this original sin. God curses the deceiver/serpent for his role in deceiving Eve. In the process of that curse, God says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). The “seed of the woman” here is almost universally understood to refer to the Savior, the Messiah, who would later come. His job would include crushing the serpent’s head such that, in the process, he was bruised. Most Christians understand this to be Jesus Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the grave, triumphing over death.

The Bible is filled throughout with themes and images related to this saga. There are marriages, death and resurrection, sacrifices, boundaries, ceremonial prohibitions, brutal head-crushings of enemies, gardens, trees of life, new creations, and much more. We will hardly be able to scratch the surface of it all in this short book.

About the Author

Before we get started looking at the rest of the Bible, let me say a few words about my qualifications to write this and why I did so.

About me: I am a conservative theologian, trained in a conservative seminary, but I have also studied widely in liberal and other traditions. I have been active in Christian ministry, scholarship, and biblical interpretation for over twenty years, actively writing and publishing for over a decade. I earned a Master of Divinity degree from Reformed Episcopal Seminary in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Dogmatics and Christian Ethics from Pretoria University (South Africa) in 2012. I have authored or edited over twenty books, some of them directly on biblical interpretation.

I also have experience with many denominational backgrounds: Lutheran, Pentecostal, Charismatic, non-denominational, Baptist, Reformed, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Reformed Episcopal, Anglican, and a few others. I have also preached and taught at conferences and in churches on three continents. I would like to think I have a developed a broad understanding of how many traditions of Christians think and feel regarding the Bible. I hope that I have learned a sensitivity to them both to understand them well and to explain them fairly. While some of my conclusions may not concur with the mainstream of some of these groups, I like to think that I represent them all fairly at the same time I offer a few of my own insights gleaned along the way.

I wrote this book mainly because I saw the need for a basic and brief introduction to the Bible, and I could not find one that satisfied me. In fact, I could hardly find a brief overview of the whole Bible like that at all. There are many people, however, who may be curious as to what the Bible is all about—whether nonbelievers, those from other religious backgrounds, students of all sorts, or beginning Christians, and more—for whom tackling the whole Bible up front may seem like a daunting task. I hope to have succeeded in this goal: to provide a short, simple overview of the Bible, in its parts and as a whole coherent message, that can be read in about 90 minutes.

With that, we are ready to get started. The next chapter picks up with what we have already shared from Genesis and covers the rest of the five books of Moses.

(To be continued. . . .)

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Understanding the Bible in 90 Minutes is available on Amazon or for FREE in PDF.