04 - The Story of the Bible
Core truth: The Bible is one God-breathed story, and the whole thing is about Jesus.
Anchor texts: 2 Timothy 3:16; Luke 24:27
This week's step: Start reading one of the Gospels, a chapter a day, with the three questions.
This might be the most important session in the course, because it hands them the lens for everything else. If they walk out seeing the Bible as one connected story instead of a pile of disconnected rules and tales, they'll read the rest of their lives well. Today you also confirm the reading method, so by next week they're running it solo. Don't try to teach the whole Bible. Teach the shape of it.
Connect
Pick up the week.
- How did the creed sit with them after seven days? Any questions surface?
Transition gently: last week was about God, this week is about the book where we meet him.
Read
Read these together.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Dig
Let them answer first. Draw this out.
- "Breathed out by God." 66 books, 40-odd authors, written over centuries, in three languages. What does it mean to call all of that one book that God breathed?
- In Luke 24, the risen Jesus walks two disciples through the whole Old Testament and shows them it was about him. What does that tell you about how to read the parts of the Bible that aren't obviously about Jesus?
- If the Bible is one story rather than a rulebook or a quote collection, how might that change the way you read a random chapter?
Frame
Two things today: where this book came from, and what the story is.
Where it came from.
- The Bible is 66 books, written by more than 40 people over a huge span of time, and yet Christians have always confessed it as one book that God himself breathed out.
- It carries his authority. When it speaks, God speaks.
- Whatever else you think you know about God, this is the thing that tests it.
- Impressions, feelings, traditions, all of them get checked against Scripture, never the other way round.
What the story is. Here's the overarching story, fast:
- God creates a good world and makes people to live with him in it (Eden).
- People rebel, and the result is exile, away from God's presence.
- The rest of the Bible is God refusing to accept that exile. He calls Abraham, builds a people (Israel), rescues them out of Egypt, gives them his presence in a tabernacle and then a temple. They keep wandering, keep ending up in exile. The prophets promise someone is coming to put it all right.
- Then Jesus arrives, the greater Adam, the greater Israel, the true temple, God himself come to dwell with us. He dies, rises, and pours out his Spirit so God can live in his people.
- And it ends in a new creation, Eden restored, God and his people home together for good.
That's the thread under all of it: God is more committed to dwelling with his people than they ever were with him. Every move in the story is God closing the gap that sin opened. Once you see that, the whole Bible starts to click, and you'll know where any single passage sits in the bigger movement.
Land
- What did you think that the Bible was? (Rulebook, self-help manual, nice verses?)
- What changes if it's a story about God coming to get his people back?
Next Steps
- Start one of the Gospels this week. Mark if you want it fast, Luke if you want it full. A chapter a day.
- Run all three questions on every chapter. This is the week the training wheels come off, so do the reading yourself and we'll compare notes next time.
By the end of today they should be able to run the three questions without you. Do one chapter together in the session, out loud, so they've felt it work before they go home.
Pray
Thank God that he didn't stay silent or stay away.
- Pray that as they read this week, they'd meet the God the book is about, not just learn facts about him. Reading rightly should lead to encounter.
- This is the session that carries the whole course's conviction. We want to teach them to read, not to hand them conclusions to memorise.
- Don't get bogged in Bible trivia or the speed-run of every story. The point is the arc and the thread, not coverage. If they leave with "one story, about Jesus, God coming to dwell with us," you've done it.
- If they ask "where do I even start reading," the answer is a Gospel, not Genesis-to-Revelation in order, and definitely not Leviticus first.