Know the Word · The Big Story · Lesson 1

The big story of the Bible

The Bible is one story, not sixty-six separate ones. Walk the whole arc once, from creation to new creation, and every book you open will have a place to sit.

The Bible on your shelf is a library: sixty-six books, written across roughly fifteen centuries, in three languages. It is tempting to treat it as a drawer of separate documents, a poem here, a rule there, a story somewhere else. The books themselves resist that. Read from the first page to the last and one story keeps unfolding, told in six movements: Creation, Fall, Israel, Christ, Church, New Creation.

Learn the six movements and you will always know where you are. Open any book, in any week of any year, and you can ask one settling question: which movement am I in? This lesson walks the whole arc once, slowly enough to keep.

1. Creation: God makes everything, and makes it good

The story opens with God. Before there is a problem to solve there is a Maker to know, and he makes people in his own image, to know him and to work his world. Everything that follows assumes this first page: the world is his, we are his, and what he made was good.

2. Fall: the good world breaks

Adam and Eve believed a lie about God and disobeyed him. Sin entered, and with it death, shame and exile from God's presence. The Bible never minimises the damage, and neither should we. Yet in the very sentence of judgment God spoke of a coming one, born of the woman, who would crush the serpent's head. The rescue plan is announced in the same chapter as the ruin.

3. Israel: God calls a family to bless the world

Out of a world gone wrong, God called one man, Abraham, and promised that through his family every family on earth would be blessed. That family became Israel: rescued from Egypt, given God's law, led by kings, warned and comforted by prophets. Israel's story is the long middle of the Bible, and its point is always forward. The prophets kept narrowing the promise toward a coming king, a child who would carry the government on his shoulders.

4. Christ: the promise arrives in person

The Gospels are the hinge of the story. The Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh: born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate for our sins according to the Scriptures, buried, and raised on the third day. In Jesus the blessing promised to Abraham reaches the nations, and the serpent's head is crushed at a cross outside Jerusalem.

5. Church: the rescued become the witnesses

The risen Christ builds his church, the people of God from every nation, and sends them out with the news. The first believers devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. That is still the shape of the Church's life, and it is the movement you and I live in.

The story gets personal

The big story is not only about the world. Paul says that anyone who is in Christ is already a new creation: the old has passed away. The final movement has begun, in God's people, one life at a time.

6. New Creation: the story ends in a garden city

The last two chapters of the Bible answer the first three. John sees a new heaven and a new earth, a city where God wipes away every tear, and death, mourning, crying and pain are gone for good. The One on the throne gives the ending its title: "Behold, I make all things new." The story that began in a garden ends in a city with the tree of life at its centre, and God with his people for ever.

Reading with the story in mind

From here on, every time you open the Bible, place what you read. A Psalm? Written inside Israel's story, sung by people waiting for the king. A letter of Paul? Church movement, written to people living between the resurrection and the return. A prophecy? Israel, with its eyes on Christ. The story is the map. This school will keep handing it back to you.

Words to know

• The Fall. The second movement: Adam and Eve disobey God, and sin, shame and death enter the world (Genesis 3).
• Covenant. A binding promise God makes and keeps. The story of the Bible can be told as God making covenants and keeping every one.
• New Creation. The final movement: God remakes heaven and earth and lives with his people, with death and tears ended (Revelation 21).

Practise this lesson

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