“Have you ever considered….How would you describe the Bible to someone who has never read it before?” That’s the question that popped up on Facebook a few minutes ago thanks to You Vision. Not one to shy away from a challenge…. Here goes:
It’s a book that starts with the story of the Creator making the world and ends with the end of the world and a new beginning in a new world. Adventures and schemes are around every turn. Lessons to be learned, warnings to be heeded, gifts to be accepted and rules to be obeyed fill the pages.
There are heros and villians, there’s romance, jealousy, love, hate, envy, and conspiracy. Cheaters, liars, kidnappers, murderers and rapists are in these pages. There’s joy and sorrow, there’s obedience and rebellion, there’s great wisdom and great foolishness found in there as well. There’s prosperity and pain, laziness and hard work, acceptance and rejection, food and famine. There’s betrayal and forgiveness, blood and lightning, fear and courage, justice and injustice. There are judges, shepherds, tent makers, fishermen, prostitutes, poets and priests and prophets, queens and widows; cripples in body and in spirit, and there is good and evil wrapped up in the middle of it all.
There are floods, fires, earthquakes, plagues, droughts, desserts and gardens. There’s faithfulness and infidelity. Things and people are lost and found; there’s living and dying and living again. There’s great selfishness and great selflessness, there’s generosity and parsimony, building up and tearing down, great wealth and abject poverty. There’s giving and receiving and taking away and giving again. It’s about good gifts and gifts gone wrong. It’s about war, peace, treaties, slavery, servants and kings. In those pages there are plans and purpose and provision and protection from the unseen evil. There are giants, monsters in the sea and demons loose. There are magnificent beings whose only purpose is to serve and praise and worship the Creator. There are miracles and there is madness. There’s a lake of fire and a city made of Gold and precious jewels.
And what ties it all together? The maker of us all, the Creator of this world, used the red thread of the blood of His Son that He sacrificed in our place so that we would never have to pay for all the wrong we do. There are gifts offered to us and warnings sent to us. And, there’s the ONE gift offered that if we accept it guarantees that we will live forever – with the Creator. It tells us how we all can share in the new beginning. And, it tells us that not all of us will share, some of us will reject the gift even though it’s as plain as the nose on your face!
It is the story old as time because it began before time began. In the end, it’s about Good triumphing over evil.
It’s about my family.
PS. The new beginning is going to be incredible! If you want to know what the ONE gift is- here it is- right here, in the pages, smack dab in the middle of all of this other stuff:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only son; that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16
How would you describe the Bible to someone who has never read it before?
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