The Epic Story of the Bible E-Book

Greg Gilbert

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A User-Friendly Introduction to Interpreting and Understanding God's Word Many Christians view the Bible as a book that they know they should read, but it can be hard to know where to start. If they spend time regularly reading it, it can often feel like a chore to be checked off for the day. What many miss is that the Bible is a sweeping story full of narrative, poetry, and letters—something to be marveled at and enjoyed.  In The Epic Story of the Bible, Greg Gilbert aims to teach Christians—or those interested in Christianity—what the Bible is and how to study it. Adapted from the ESV Story of Redemption Bible, Gilbert examines major themes woven throughout Scripture and shows readers how to understand its various genres, helping them appreciate the word of God with less confusion and greater confidence.  Download Reading Plan - Accessible: Written in an approachable and easy-to-read format - Ideal for New Christians or Interested Non-Christians: A good introduction to understanding the Bible for those wanting to take the next step in learning more about their faith  - Gospel-Oriented: Points readers to the gospel for the purpose of deeper understanding and worship - Examines Major Scriptural Themes: Gilbert shows how themes such as God's presence, covenant, kingship, and sacrifice are woven throughout Scripture 

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“Greg Gilbert is a world-class expositor. (Trust me; I got to sit under his preaching for nearly twelve years.) The Epic Story of the Bible will revolutionize your ability to grasp the sweeping, soaring narrative that centers—from Genesis to Revelation—on Jesus the King. Read and marvel.”

Matt Smethurst, Lead Pastor, River City Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia; Editor, The Gospel Coalition; author, Deacons and Before You Share Your Faith

“I sometimes worry when we try to identify the Bible’s major theme or core message since the Bible is more like a rich ecosystem of themes working together to offer us a picture of God and his glory. However, in this very readable book, Greg Gilbert brings together important biblical themes to help Christians, whether new to or seasoned in the faith, understand God’s word. With a good command of biblical themes, helpful illustrations, and personal anecdotes along the way, Gilbert shows himself to be a clear and accessible guide for God’s people.”

Mark Jones, Pastor, Faith Vancouver Presbyterian Church, British Columbia, Canada

“This is a resource that equips us to be better Bible readers and infuses delight in God’s redemptive work. What a gift! Greg Gilbert skillfully leads us over the terrain of Scripture, helping us grasp its sweeping story and biblical themes. It will be a great asset to the training work of churches and organizations in how to study the Bible and rejoice in our Savior and King.”

Taylor Turkington, Director, BibleEquipping.org

“I am thrilled about Greg Gilbert’s guide to exploring the story of the Bible. This provides the essentials we need to get started—an overview of the Bible’s intricate and epic storyline, along with its central themes. I am eager to see how this helps many engage the Bible with eagerness and understanding.”

Drew Hunter, Teaching Pastor, Zionsville Fellowship, Zionsville, Indiana; author, Made for Friendship

The Epic Story of the Bible

The Epic Story of the Bible

How to Read and Understand God’s Word

Greg Gilbert

The Epic Story of the Bible: How to Read and Understand God’s Word

Copyright © 2022 by Greg Gilbert

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

The Outline of Biblical History on page 40 is from According to Plan by Graeme Goldsworthy. Copyright © 1991 by Graeme Goldsworthy. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, USA. www.ivpress.com.

The Outline of Biblical History in chapter 2 is also used by permission of Inter-Varsity Press Limited and reproduced with permission of Inter-Varsity Press Limited through PLSclear.

Cover design and image: Peter Voth

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7327-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7330-9 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7328-6 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7329-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilbert, Greg, 1977– author.

Title: The epic story of the Bible : how to read and understand God's word / Greg Gilbert.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022001607 (print) | LCCN 2022001608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433573279 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433573286 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433573293 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433573309 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Introductions.

Classification: LCC BS475.3 .G555 2022 (print) | LCC BS475.3 (ebook) | DDC 220.6/1—dc23/eng/20220321

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001607

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001608

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-08-08 03:58:36 PM

Contents

Introduction

1  What the Bible Is, and Where It Came From

2  The Trail Ahead: The Grand Storyline of the Bible

3  My Dwelling Place: The Theme of God’s Presence

4  You Will Be My People: The Theme of Covenant

5  The Lord’s Anointed: The Theme of Kingship

6  Without Blood, There Is No Forgiveness: The Theme of Sacrifice

7  Setting Out

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

As the plane descended toward the city, I didn’t see any mountains out the window. At some level, this was disappointing, because that was why I’d come in the first place. But on the other hand, when your plane is landing in a driving rainstorm, your primary emotion usually isn’t disappointment of any kind but rather just relief to feel the wheels land, the brakes kick in, and the plane slow down enough that your body slumps back down in the seat again. I dropped my head back and grinned. For a year, I’d been planning this trip, and now I was here, in Kathmandu, Nepal, about to set off on a two-week trek to the South Base Camp of Sagarmatha, better known as Mount Everest.

I was excited, and more than a little nervous. For whatever reason, I’ve always been fascinated by mountains, and through the years I’ve seized every opportunity I could to be in and among them—skiing the Rockies in Colorado, hiking the Green Mountains in Vermont and the White Mountains in New Hampshire and Maine, even spending a week in the utter wilderness of Alaska at a working gold mine, just for the fun of it. So when the time and opportunity opened up, I jumped at the chance to trek into the tallest, most dramatic mountain range in the world, the Himalayas, and set foot at the base of the tallest mountain on Earth. That’s where the excitement came from.

The fear came from reading online about other people’s experiences on this Base Camp trek. For the most part, what I had signed up to do was relatively easy and safe—no technical climbing, no crampons or elite winter gear or oxygen tanks required. This was Everest for Dummies for sure, not Everest the movie! And yet, it wasn’t a walk in the park, either. By the end of the trek, we would finally top out at an elevation of 18,200 feet, high enough (I was told) that if a helicopter took you there immediately from sea level, you’d be unconscious within fifteen minutes due to the lack of oxygen. Of course we were planning to do all kinds of acclimatization, but still, I’d read the blogs. It was no sure thing that those measures would work for any given person. You can do everything right to get yourself ready for high altitudes, only to get halfway up into the Himalayas and realize suddenly—and sometimes catastrophically—that your body just doesn’t have the necessary hardware. Your brain begins to swell, your lungs fill up with fluid, and within a few hours you find yourself being medevacked back to a Kathmandu hospital—that is, if the weather on the mountain is conducive to a rescue. Beyond that, there were other dangers, too: falls, broken bones, getting knocked off the mountain by a yak—you know, the usual kinds of things I have to think about in Louisville, Kentucky!

So as the plane pulled up to the gate at the Tribhuvan International Airport, Nepal’s only international airport, I pulled my passport out of my backpack and turned to the page where my Nepali visa was pasted. I checked all my information again: name was spelled correctly, dates correct, vaccinations all up to date—a bunch of facts I’m sure I had confirmed probably a hundred times on this flight already, but excitement makes you do funny things. I shoved the passport back into its special pocket on my backpack and locked it in. I’d read on several websites that you can’t be too careful in the Kathmandu airport terminal. Besides the normal threats like theft of money and documents, I’d also been told of a terrifying scam in which the customs agents will sometimes “neglect” to stamp your visa as you pass through, and then when you show it to the next set of agents, you’re immediately placed under arrest for “invalid documentation.” From there, the scam is to get as much money out of you as possible. You’re given a choice—you can either spend a month in prison, or you can pay an exorbitant fee to be driven over the course of a few days to a bureaucratic office to “get it sorted out.” If you choose the latter, you pay up front and then—unbeknownst to you, of course—you’ll be told at various points along the way that it’s going to cost you even more money to get any further. Finally, after a week or so and a few thousand dollars, you return triumphantly to Kathmandu Airport with your newly “sorted out” visa.

Was any of that actually true? I have no idea. But you better believe I watched the customs agent like a hawk as he examined my passport. And I got that stamp, baby!

Fully sorted out diplomatically, I walked across the terminal to the pickup area, scanned the drivers holding signs with various people’s names on them, and finally found my guy, complete with a bright blue hat that read “Ultimate Expeditions.” Once in the van with two or three others, I finally relaxed and let myself revel in what was happening. I was in Nepal, about to hike to Mount Everest—not up it, no, but even hiking to Everest, I figured, was pretty amazing.

The plan for that evening was pretty straightforward. The driver would take me and the other passengers to our hotel, we’d have a little while to rest in our rooms, and then we’d gather in the hotel restaurant for dinner and what was being called “the briefing,” a presentation in which our guide would explain, before we ever took the first step, what we were about to experience.

The briefing wasn’t long. The guide started by showing us a video depicting an aerial flyby of the trail we were going to hike, then a fly-around of the whole Everest massif—a U-shaped trio of mountains including Lohtse (the fourth-highest mountain in the world), Nuptse (the twenty-second), and of course Everest itself. He told us about the places we’d visit through the course of the trek and explained the fascinating aspects of each one—the Lukla airport, commonly said to be the most dangerous in the world; the mountainside town of Namche Bazaar, gateway to the high Himalayas and home to the highest and remotest Irish pub on the planet; the little village of Khumjung, which displays what the monks there claim is a real yeti scalp but which the villagers themselves will tell you is just a yak butt; Tengboche Monastery, built over a hundred years ago on a ridge that provides hikers with breathtaking panoramic views of the Khumbu region; and Base Camp itself, a tiny village of brightly colored tents huddled at the foot of the massive Mount Everest and inhabited by the tiny group of (let’s be honest) slightly crazy people who would be headed to the summit on the very days we were there.

I listened with utter fascination not only to my guide’s descriptions of these fantastic places I was soon to see, but also to the smaller asides he made throughout the meeting. “When we land at Lukla, notice how the plane doesn’t really descend; the runway is at ten thousand feet, so the plane will just kind of hit it.” “You need to eat carbs and drink water like crazy, because they help with acclimatization.” “When we’re passing through the rhododendron forests, look for children hiding up in the trees; it’s a game to them, and they like to give flowers to tourists who notice them.” “Respect the Sherpas who pass by us with enormous loads on their backs; essentially every item needed for human survival in the high Himalayas has to be brought in on foot, and to huff it all in on their backs is how these people make a living.”

When the briefing was finished, I was stoked for the trek to start. I didn’t sleep all night. I just lay in the bed with images and words from that meeting rolling around in my mind’s eye. It was an incredible presentation, hyping the trip and giving vital information. But I’ll be honest—looking back on it now, I had no idea just how important the briefing would turn out to be for shaping the entire experience. What the guide conveyed—the information, the maps, the geography, the images, the history and cultural background of the region—threw the entire two-week trek into 3D for me. At any given moment, I knew where I was on the trail, and I knew where we were going. When we got to Namche Bazaar, I understood why that town was so important, and I was able to appreciate it all the more because of it. When I saw a sign for Khumjung, I smiled because I remembered, “Oh, this is where I’m supposed to look for the yeti scalp!” Even more, I avoided making mistakes: I ate carbs and drank water; I made way for heavy-burdened Sherpas and took a silent moment to respect them for making human civilization possible this far up in the Himalaya. The briefing hadn’t been long, but it had been crucial. It changed and deepened and enriched my experience of the Himalayas in ways I never would have guessed.

You probably didn’t pick up this particular book because you have an interest in mountaineering. But I tell you that story about the briefing in that rain-pelted hotel in Kathmandu because that’s essentially what I’m aiming to do with this book—give you a briefing about what you’re going to see, what you’re going to experience, what you should look for and look out for as you set off on the long trek of reading the entire Bible.

A trek. That’s exactly what it is when you decide to read the entire Bible. After all, it’s sixty-six different books with thirty-some different authors, written over the course of a millennium and a half. And it’s long—almost 1,200 chapters and three-quarters of a million words, meaning that if you decided to read the entire thing aloud, all at once, it would take you just under three days to do it—about seventy hours and forty minutes if you’re an average-speed reader. Moreover, the Bible contains many different kinds of literature. There’s poetry and narrative, lists and genealogies, biographies and law codes and prophecies and sermons and open letters and personal letters and even something called “apocalyptic.” It’s no wonder so many people feel bewildered when they open up the Bible and attempt to read it. Actually, most people do pretty well through Genesis and the first part of Exodus. But once Exodus starts launching into Old Testament Law and doesn’t really come up for air for a book and a half, that’s when many people start thinking, “Wow, life’s gotten busy! Maybe I’ll give this another try next week . . . or month . . . or year.”

I think the key to reading the Bible, though, is to understand that all of those authors and books—all 1,189 chapters of them—are actually working together to tell one overarching, mind-blowing story about God’s action to save human beings from their high-handed rebellion against him, and from the effects and consequences of that rebellion. And the thing is, the story of how he did that is quite literally epic in its scope and its sweep. Wars between angels rage in the spiritual realm, while on earth kingdoms rise and fall, empires clash, cities are built and destroyed, priests perform sacrifices, and prophets point their bony fingers to the future. And in the end, a great throne is toppled and a great crown falls to the ground, only to be given finally to one thirty-year-old man—a subjugated peasant from a conquered nation—whom God enthrones over the entire world as the one who alone can and does offer mercy to rebels. If there’s ever been an epic story told in the history of mankind, this one is it!

Maybe you’ve read epic stories before, stories so sweeping in their enormity, in the comprehensiveness of the world they build, that you feel not so much like you’re reading the story from the outside as that you are actually a part of it. And when it comes to an end, when you get to the last chapter, you hesitate to read it because you know you’re about to have to leave this world you’ve been so immersed in. I felt that way when I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I—a self-assured, cocky college freshman—cried when the book was over, because the world Tolkien had created, the story he wove, had captured my imagination and pulled me entirely into it. Its themes, its rhythms, its poetry and prose, the arc of despair giving way to hope—by the end, I wasn’t just reading that story; I was in it, living it, experiencing it.

Imagine, though, if I had read The Lord of the Rings like most people tend to read the Bible. Imagine if I’d taken Rings, opened it to a random place and read the first sentence or two my eyes landed on. Sure, there might have been some beauty in it; I might have been able to “get something out of it” immediately; there might have been some “life application” to be had. But that kind of reading would have been empty, vacant, and lifeless compared to reaching that same paragraph with the full weight of the story behind it. Or imagine if I read The Lord of the Rings with the main questions in my mind being “What does this mean for me? How can this help me be a better person? What lessons can I learn from this?” Again, you might wind up learning some important things reading the book like that, but you’d be fundamentally misunderstanding the story’s aim. You’d be reading it in a fundamentally self-centered and far too self-aware way, when the aim of the story is really to sweep you away in the narrative, to carry you along in a story in which you are not the starring character but in which the idea is to fall in love with other characters. That’s how epic stories are meant to be read—not as tiny little morality tales, but as horizon-busting, eye-bugging, world-broadening, even life-shaping experiences.

One more example: imagine reading The Lord of the Rings out of order. You pick it up, flip over to Rivendell for a moment, then hop over to Mordor before slamming back into the Shire; maybe you decide to read half of Tom Bombadil’s song the next day, and then end it up with a little bit of Shelob’s Lair. Now, if you’ve read the story from start to finish once or twice already, that might be lots of fun—reading your favorite parts over again. But it’s no way to understand the story of The Lord of the Rings! And it’s no way to understand the epic story of the Bible either, even though the hop-skip-and-jump method of reading is the one I think most Christians try to employ most of the time. When my daughter was about six years old, I asked what she learned in Sunday school one Sunday, and she replied, “Abraham died for Jesus’s sins on the ark, and then King Josiah raised him from the dead!” If you read the Bible the way most of us tend to—and in the order most of us tend to—you might be thinking that’s actually not a terrible summary of the story!

But of course we know it is terrible, don’t we? That’s not the story, and that’s not how the Bible should be read—not out of order, not as a bunch of little morality tales, certainly not with ourselves and our concerns at the center of our consciousness of it—but rather as the sweepingly epic story of God’s heroic rescue of mankind from our deadly rebellion against him. That’s what I hope this book will help you learn to do.

You can think of reading the Bible as a trek through the Himalayas and this book as the briefing meeting, just like the one I had in Kathmandu, before you set out on the trek. My hope here is to do several things.1I want to introduce you to some of the things you’re going to see and experience as you read the entire Bible. I want to point out some things you should watch for—beautiful things that you might otherwise miss and dangerous things that you should be on guard against. I want to tell you about the various kinds of terrain you’re going to traverse, that is, the different genres of literature you’re going to be reading, and I want to help you begin to understand the unique skills and rules you’re going to need to keep in mind in order to traverse that terrain without, well, breaking your literary ankles. But maybe above all, I want to get you excited for the trek. I want you not to be able to sleep tonight, knowing what’s waiting for you out there. I want your heart to be full of expectation and eagerness for what you’re about to see as you begin to read and experience this grand, epic story that is the Bible.

So let’s start the briefing . . . by getting some basic facts about the trail.

1  I preached on this topic at T4G 2020. Text of the full sermon is available “A T4G 2020 Sermon: What Is and Isn’t the Gospel” on the 9Marks website, https://www.9marks.org/.

1

What the Bible Is, and Where It Came From

Nepal is a country in South Asia, situated just to the northeast of India in the heart of the Himalayan Mountains. It’s not a large country—only about the size of Arkansas—but it boasts a population of almost 30 million. The flag of Nepal is the only one in the world that’s not in the shape of a quadrilateral. Instead, it looks like two triangles fused together and is meant to represent the mountains and their importance to the history and culture of the nation. The vast majority of the people are Hindu in religion and culture, and most of the rest are Buddhist. The most popular dish—eaten by some of the people for all three meals—is a lentil and rice mixture called dal bhat. Both hearty and cheap, it has the benefit of leaving both the stomach and the wallet feeling relatively full. Nepal also boasts the world’s largest elevation change, from just above sea level at the Tarai Plains to the highest point on the entire planet, Everest’s 29,032-foot summit. Strangely, Nepal’s clocks aren’t set to any normal time zone; my home in Louisville wasn’t nine or ten hours off, but rather nine hours and forty-five minutes off! I never learned exactly why that is, but so much for trying to figure out what time it was back home.

All these facts I learned in the days and weeks running up to my trip to Nepal, and also during the twenty-two-hour series of flights I had to take to get there. In one way or another, all of those facts were important for the trip I was about to take. They taught me something about the nation’s culture, its history, and its geography. Just by knowing a few basic and interesting facts about Nepal, I was able to orient myself to what I was about to experience. I knew, for example, that dal bhat was not to be missed. I knew I’d be encountering Hindu and Buddhist religious practices, and sometimes even a syncretistic mixture of the two of them. And I knew it would be entirely fruitless for me to schedule phone calls with anybody back in the States.

Anytime you’re about to visit a new country or set off on a journey, it’s a good idea to get some basic facts about the place you’re going. What’s its character? Its history? Where did it come from and what are you likely to encounter there? Without a doubt the same thing is true when you’re setting off on a journey of reading through the entire Bible. After all, for all of us here in the twenty-first century, we are headed to a time and place that is almost completely foreign to us. The customs are different, the history is largely unknown to us, and even the kinds of literature and writing that make it up can strike us as unfamiliar and downright strange.

So before we dive into the deep end, let’s take a few moments to get familiar with the Bible at the highest level—not its storyline; we’ll get to that in the next chapter. Let’s look at its even more basic structure, the most fundamental facts about what it is and where it came from.

At its most fundamental level—before we even get to what Christians believe about it being the word of God—the Bible is a collection of sixty-six different books written by thirty-some different authors over the span of some fifteen hundred years, the last of which was completed about two thousand years ago. It was written in three different languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic—and in the English Standard Version it contains 757,349 words, about 30 percent longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace. If you sat down to read the Bible from cover to cover at a normal out-loud reading pace, it would take you just under seventy-two hours to do.

In reality, to call the sixty-six books of the Bible “books” is a little misleading. For the most part, they’re not books in the sense that this book you’re reading is a book. Some of them are, to be sure, but many of the books of the Bible are . . . other things. They’re poems or letters or sermons or songbooks or collections of sayings. Though that may sound daunting at first—especially if we’re trying to learn how to read the Bible as one sweeping story—I think this variety imbues the Bible with an extra layer of fascination and mystery.

In 2007, author Max Brooks wrote a fictional work called World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It wasn’t your normal everyday novel, running from start to finish with prose written from the standpoint of a third-person author or even from the standpoint of one of the main characters. Instead, Brooks told his story by switching back and forth between various literary types—a journal entry, then an email, then a list of supplies, and on and on. It made for a fascinating story because as a reader you constantly had to be reading between the lines in order to catch the deepest themes of the story. In many ways the Bible works in the same way. Some of its story is told in prose, but that prose is then augmented by prophecies and songs, letters and memoirs. And as the story builds and grows, its themes rolling and swelling forward, you see it come to life in a way you never would if it were a straight-line prose narrative.

Of course, one of the benefits Max Brooks had in writing his World War Z was that he had 100 percent authority to include in his book anything he thought would push the story forward. If he wanted to include a grocery list, in went the grocery list! Email? Done! If he’d even wanted to include something utterly unrelated to the story—a birthday card from his mom—who would have been able to tell him not to? (An editor. That’s who. But that’s not my point.) My point is that Max Brooks, as the singular author of his book, got to decide what to put in his book. If that’s true, then who exactly made those decisions when it came to the Bible? Who decided that this prophetic book should go into it, but not that one? These four accounts of the life of Jesus, but not that one? This letter, but not those over there?

The answer to that question isn’t as easy as it is for some other books. For World War Z, the answer is five words long: Max Brooks and his editor. For most books, in fact, the answer is about that simple. But for the Bible, not so much. The trouble, though, is that people really want