I suppose that we can all think of a situation or two in our own lives where going to the instruction manual or to the owner’s manual would have been very helpful. When we need to learn how to set up a telephone, or find the fuses in a car or put together a complicated piece of furniture, the instructions can be a lifesaver! The owners’ manual and instructions are meant to make the experience with the product more positive, but admittedly, sometimes these can be quite intimidating.
I think that it is the same with the Bible. It can be a bit intimidating to get into the Scriptures and to make sense of them. Other people may believe that it takes a long time to get into the Scriptures. Still others may think that the Bible really doesn’t have much to offer them personally and feel that they get all that they need at church. So as a result, many folks avoid opening the Bible.
My hope for the next few Sundays is to give you a sense of confidence when approaching the Scriptures. I’d like to share with you such things as: What is the Bible? How did the Bible come to be? How it is organized? What is its main message? And what is its primary teaching? If I take the time to read my Bible, what’s in it for me?
Ok, so what if a person carrying a stone came by and simply dropped it on the ground. A while later, a different person carrying another stone came by and dropped it on top of the previous one. Then another person came by and did the same. Now, suppose that this continued for about 1600 years. When the last person dropped his stone on the pile, presto – the whole pile of stones coalesced into a perfectly shaped statue. Now, consider this - most of the people that dropped the stones did not know each other. They lived at different times in history and did not know each other. What conclusions can you reach?
One of the conclusions that we can reach is that it was all a great big coincidence. But another conclusion is that this incredible effort was under the direction of a person or intellect that was in a position to guide a multi-century endeavor. Well friends, the Bible is exactly that. From the time the first part of the Scripture was written until the time it was assembled as a whole, 1600 passed. There were many authors each making contributions at different times in history and in different locations of the world. They had no capacity to consult with each other nor to plan with a committee their work. And yet, at the end of the day, the 66 different books that make up the Bible coalesce into a beautiful whole. Clearly, God the Holy Spirit guided the preparation of the Holy Scriptures.
Over the next several weeks, we are going to take a look at our instruction manual – that miraculous, often neglected, frequently questioned book called the Bible. The goal will be to get everyone engaged in using the Bible at church and in for personal reading. Our adventure will begin by looking at the Old Testament – the Scriptures that God gave to the Jewish people before Christ was born. [Point out blanks on the sermon notes page.]
The events in the first books of the Bible occurred near 1500 B.C. and so that is the time when the first the Bible was started. The final book of the Bible was written at about 100 A.D. Multiple writers were involved in preparing the scriptures over these sixteen centuries. How is it possible for so much time to transpire and yet for the Bible to be such a completely unified document in terms of theme and message? Answer - there was a greater mind at work than the individual writers. Listen to the words of a couple of the Apostles:
• All Scripture is God-breathed… (2 Timothy 3.16a)
• For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (1 Peter 1.21)
When Paul and Peter wrote this, the Bible as we know it today hadn’t yet been assembled. The words that they wrote were referring to the writings that we today refer to as the Old Testament. Both Paul and Peter were absolutely convinced that the Old Testament scriptures were of divine origin. [Ask people to open their Bible to the Table of Contents]
There are many misconceptions about the Old Testament. Some say that we don’t have to worry about what the Old Testament says because the only thing that counts is what was written after Jesus was born. Some people say that the Old Testament is all Law – full of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. Some will say that the Old Testament message is completely and qualitatively different from the message in the rest of the Bible. Some say that the Old Testament is full of myths (Creation account; Noah and the Ark; Dividing the Red Sea, etc.). Some say that the Old Testament has been done away with and therefore is no longer relevant. All of these are absolute misconceptions or outright errors. I’ll take the time to deal with these things later in a future message in this sermon series.
Sometimes the Old Testament is clouded in mystery. Many people have this sense that to make hide or hair of this you need to really be a Bible scholar. I’d like to say that all you really need is to have a sense for the big picture. This will help contextualize the reading and provide a feel for what is being read.
Generally the Jewish people divide the Old Testament into three parts: 1. The Law (Torah); The Prophets ; 3) The writings. There are actually several ways that the writings of the Old Testament are classified today. I’d like to spend a bit of time looking at these broad classifications and describing the general content of these major parts of the Old Testament.
The first major part of the Old Testament is The Book of the Law: There are 5 books in category. [Point out Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Table of Contents] This part of the Old Testament has several major themes running through it: 1. Primeval History – that is, how the world came to be; how humanity came to be; the fall into sin; the promise of redemption. 2. Patriarchal History – the choosing of a people and the lineage of that people beginning with Abraham. 3. Rescue from slavery – perhaps epitomized with the Egyptian captivity of the chosen people, but generally with the continued falling into sin and restoration of God’s people. 4. The birth of a nation – God leads his people into the land of Cana and tells them to claim it as their own. 5. A nation consecrated – God’s people are set aside to be holy and to be the people through whom God would bless the world by the birth of the Messiah. These are the major themes in the Books of the Law.
Next come the Books of History: There are 12 books in this category. [Point these out: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, II Kings, I Chronicles, II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther] In these books, we find the people of God moving into the land of Canaan and organizing themselves under a King. We see this monarchy rise and fall and taken captive by nations. We see the people of God taken into exile and we are privy to some of the things that happened during the exile. We see the people return from captivity.
Next come the Books of Poetry: There are 5 books in this section. [Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon] The writing in these books is more subjective. They relate God in a personal way. In the historical books we have God saying, “I am the Lord thy God!” In poetry, we here a much more personal, “The Lord is my Shepherd.” Through human experience, trial, trauma, loss, joy, love – God reveals his plans and purposes through the books of poetry.
The last category are the Books of the Prophets: There are 17 books in this section. Five of the writings are referred to as the Major Prophets. [Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel] And twelve are referred to as Minor Prophets. [Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obdiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachai] Now the distinction isn’t made because what the Minor Prophets had to say was of lesser or minor importance, just simply that they wrote less. The Prophets included law and poetry and history in their writings, but the distinguishing characteristic of the Prophets is that they speak with the authority of God to the people. There is a clear, “Thus saith the Lord,” sort of quality to their writing. In this way, they warned the people when they were straying; they told of future events – sometimes really troubling things, but sometimes incredibly hopeful things like the coming of Messiah.
The Old Testament was initially passed on by word of mouth, from fathers to their children. Eventually, the contents of the oral traditions were written down. The original language used in some of the manuscripts and writings that have been preserved are in Hebrew and Aramaic. So what we have today are translations into the modern day languages.
I’d like to close out this part of this first sermon series by getting really practical. I’m going to share some fun fact and describe how Biblical citations are put together nowadays. As we have been describing, the Old Testament is divided into books. We said that there were 5 books of the Law; 12 History; 5 Poetry; and 17 Prophets. So there are a total of 39 books in the Old Testament.
Book names of often abbreviated. The most common abbreviation scheme is to take the first three letters of the book name. So Genesis becomes Gen; I Kings becomes IKi; Psalms becomes Psa; Isaiah becomes Isa; and so on. Hey here’s a fun fact for you to look up later: The longest book in the Old Testament is Psalms; the shortest is Obadiah.
Scribes later divided the books into chapters. The chapters are each numbered. If we look at the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we see that it is divided up into fifty chapters. Each book of the Old Testament is divided into few (Obadiah only has one chapter) or many chapters (Psalms is divided into 150). Fun fact: there are 929 chapters in the Old Testament!
Finally, each of the chapters in each of the books of the Bible is divided into verses. Here is another fun fact for you: there are 23,214 verses in the Old Testament!
So a Biblical citation is assembled by putting book name, chapter and verse together in one of the following formats:
Book Chapter.Verse or Book Chapter:Verse
This ends up looking something like this:
Gen 2.13; Gen 3:15; Psa 46.10; Isa 1.18
Friends, we are going to stop here for today, but we will continue this sermon series next week. Please continue to bring your Bibles! Let’s pray: Merciful God, as we learn more about your Word, move us to read it daily and to mark, learn and inwardly digest your great truths. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
God bless you, friends!
