The Bible is not a handbook for life or an encyclopedia to which we turn when we don’t know what to do. The Bible is not a love letter from God. The Bible is one continuous story of God bringing about the gospel. As Jen Wilkin puts it in her book Women of the Word, “The Bible purposes to tell us this Big Story in a thousand smaller stories, from its first page to its last.”[3]

Do you struggle to connect the dots in your Bible reading? As you work through the Old Testament into the New Testament, does it feel like there’s a gaping hole between them of stories, events, and laws that don’t seem to fit together?
Maybe you read the Bible like this: The Old Testament is law and wrath, but when Jesus finally appeared in the New Testament, everything became about grace and good news. Then the Bible ends with some rules and promises and a terrifying and cryptic picture of the end times and eternity.
The best we can do is say that we’re not really sure what this means. Perhaps God was angrier back then; Israel is special; you’re David and your problem is Goliath; Jesus saves; follow these rules; and you’re unsure how it will all go down, but you’ll be walking on gold pavement. Sound accurate? Can you relate?
That’s how I understood the Bible. I avoided the Old Testament because I couldn’t make sense of it, and I really didn’t like how angry God seemed. There were times when the New Testament left me baffled and with more questions than answers (for example, the entire book of Hebrews). This disconnect begins when we forget the narrative arch of Scripture: the gospel. We need to read our Bibles with a bird’s eye view that sees how the gospel stretches over the pages of Scripture from beginning to end.
Jesus is revealed from Genesis to Revelation.
After Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples were downtrodden. They thought the Messiah had finally come—they were so certain that they had left everything behind to follow him. Yet, three days prior he was crucified and placed in a tomb. Then something strange happened. The women went to the tomb and found it empty, and an angel announced that Jesus was alive. Peter and John checked the tomb themselves and found only the grave clothes.
Two of these downtrodden and perplexed disciples were walking on the road to Emmaus when their Savior (though with his identity veiled from them) approached them. When they explained their sadness over the events that had taken place, he rebuked them.

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27).

The thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
“Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” What does this tell us about the Bible? Jesus doesn’t enter at the New Testament—Jesus is present throughout the entire Bible. Jesus isn’t the climax or falling action of the story—he is the entire story.[1] That thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
Eden wasn’t simply a foiled plan A and the gospel plan B. Before the foundations of the earth, the gospel was already in place. As Michael Brown and Zach Keele write in Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored,

Before the creation of the world, a plan was already in place to send the Son as the second Adam to remedy the disastrous results of the first Adam’s failure to fulfill the covenant of works in the garden of Eden and bring humankind to glory.

Read More
Related Posts:

Some good people have wearied their children by expecting conduct from them as if they were experienced Christians, and have thereby given them a disgust and distaste for religion, and made them look upon it as a burden.” Parents should instead use a light touch: “A little advice now and then, always in the spirit of love and not too much at a time, is the best course.” After all, he writes, “If any correction or restraint is attempted . . . in anger and heat, . . . it is like Satan casting out Satan. If you do not bring in the authority of God and act in a spirit of meekness and steadiness, you may make them fear you, but you will do but little good.”

ohn Newton’s mother spent the first six years of his life, and the last six of her own, teaching her son in the ways of the Lord. But after her death, Newton’s life changed drastically. He was treated harshly, first by his stepmother and then by the headmaster at his boarding school.
Soon, Newton ran away to become a sailor and dove headfirst into a life of sin, before turning to the Lord at age 22. John married two years later, and within five years, he became a pastor. John and his wife, Polly, were unable to have children. But in 1774, after almost 25 years of marriage, they adopted 5-year-old Betsy, one of Polly’s nieces who had been orphaned. Nine years later, they adopted another of Polly’s orphaned nieces, 12-year-old Eliza. When Betsy joined the family, Newton was almost 50; when Eliza entered, he was nearly 60.
Until recently, most of Newton’s writings on parenting were inaccessible, but now Marylynn Rouse has collected them as part of a year-long devotional. As I’ve worked through these writings, Newton’s unique parenting perspective has encouraged me. It was sown by his mother’s influence in his early years, shaped by amazing grace, and forged in the maturity of middle age.
Here are six intentional principles Newton taught Christian parents preparing to launch their children.
1. Set a good example for your children.
Integrity is the oil that allows the rest of the parenting engine to run. Some parents think loving their children means protecting them from harm. But embodying before your children what you expect from them is one of the highest forms of parental love, and it protects them from great harm. Newton said, “Many poor children are forced to blush every day for the behavior of their parents. If you love them, be careful of laying stumbling blocks in their way.”
2. Talk frequently with your children.
Newton encourages parents to train their children in God’s truth, but he wrote, “I mean more by this than to teach them a catechism by rote as you would teach a parrot. They should be conversed with, and every occasion laid hold of, to explain and make them know that God sees and hears them and that this God is only to be known and worshipped in Jesus.”
Newton said parents should leverage their children’s natural curiosity, and he used this approach with Betsy:
When you read our Savior’s discourses, recorded by the evangelists, attend as if you saw him with your own eyes….
Read More
Related Posts:

Scripture is about God and His glory, and we can trust its inerrant revelation about Him precisely because He is without error and has inspired the Scriptures.

The physical act of writing out letters and then physically sending them in the mail to others is part of a bygone era. These days, fingers strike digital keyboards and send icons, and digital texts and emails are electronically sent. But while the format of writing and sending letters has largely changed in our digital age, two things have remained the same: Who writes the letter and what they have to say still matters a great deal.
We largely care about the content of letters because of who has sent them. If I were to receive a certified letter from the President of the United States and, within this letter, he was to present me with an invitation to the White House, wherein I was to be honored with a reward, I would pay special attention to every word written. As one in a position of authority and power, his words in such a letter would carry significance and weight. On the other hand, when I receive an email from the latest displaced Nigerian prince requesting I give him full access to my bank account, I give much less weight to what is written. The former writes from a position of power and authority; the latter writes with no authority.
The biblical doctrine of inerrancy has just as much to do with who has inspired the Scriptures as it does with what the inspired Scriptures have to say. If, for example, we were to contend that the Scriptures had been inspired by a mere mortal man, then we would place much less significance on what they have to say. Even if the man purported to have inspired them was generally acknowledged as good, trustworthy, and mostly faithful to the truth, we would still have to consider it likely that he had gotten certain facts wrong. We would even need to agree that his directions and commandments could be the result of his own faulty desires, and therefore not always good. We could hardly claim a book inspired by a mere mortal man was inerrant; on the contrary, we would be forced to admit that it was extraordinarily likely that there were multiple errors and inconsistencies to be found throughout.
Read More
Related Posts: