The Whole Story of the Bible in 16 Verses

Chris Bruno

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781433542824
• eBook ISBN: 9781433542855
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The Bible contains a sweeping story, but it's all too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Whether it's the dimensions of Noah's ark or the regulations for sacrifices in the temple, sometimes we miss the big picture when sifting through all the important details contained in Scripture. Helping readers discover the overarching narrative that binds the Bible together, this book highlights 16 key verses that stand as "turning points" in the biblical story line, enabling us to see God's incredible plan to redeem his people from Genesis to Revelation. Whether it's the creation of humanity, the establishment of the covenants, or the coming of the Messiah, this book will help Christians see how God's Word tells a single story about his sovereignty, glory, and grace.

PART 1

THE TIME IS COMING

And behold, it was very good.

Genesis 1:31

Our view of the world begins with our view of God. The way we think about God shapes the way we think about everything else, along with the way we act and respond to every circumstance. Because of this, we need to get our thoughts about God straight at the beginning of our journey. In other words, as we set out to tell the story of the Bible, we have to begin with God. He is the Author of the Bible and the hero of every story found in it, so we can’t even think about telling the story without starting with him.

To do this, we are going to start at the last verse of the first chapter of the Bible, which says:

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Gen. 1:31)

At first glance, Genesis 1 doesn’t seem to give us much information about God. Instead, it seems as if we have just the story of creation, with the existence of God more or less assumed. But as we read through the account of the creation week in the first chapter of the Bible, the authority of God is pretty astonishing. God speaks, and things happen. If you have ever been in the room with a CEO, a senator, or maybe even the president, you’ve seen what happens when a person of authority speaks. Things happen, and they happen quickly. With God, we can see this same principle at work—multiplied by about a million.

If you aren’t familiar with the creation story, let me summarize it: God made everything, and everything he made was good. We don’t need to go much further to get the point. In the beginning, there was nothing, and God made everything just by speaking. He spoke, and creation obeyed. It obeyed by coming into being, by sprouting every living thing, and finally by submitting itself to God’s sovereign power. The emphasis in the whole chapter, and especially in verse 31, is the ease with which God spoke the world into being and the harmony that existed between Creator and creation.

So at the very beginning, we meet a God who is able to create everything that exists with seemingly no more effort than it takes you or me to tie our shoes. We meet a God whose creative power and authority extend to every part of the universe.

When he had finished making everything, God looked at it all and saw that it was “very good.” Notice that God was the One who pronounced the verdict. The entire universe came to be because he spoke, and he was the only one qualified to evaluate his creative work. We don’t see the angels coming alongside God to give him some encouraging feedback. (In fact, we don’t even know when and how God created the angels, though we can be pretty sure they started praising him right away.) No, the focus at the very beginning is on God, his creation, and his authority over that creation.

When we put together God’s power to create and his authority to evaluate his creation, we find that God is the sovereign Ruler of the universe. In other words, God is the King who has the right, the power, and the authority to rule over his creation. And the King’s official decree over his kingdom is that it is “very good.”

Isn’t this kind of surprising, when we stop and think about it? If we look around our world or turn on the news, the world doesn’t seem “very good.” Everything is decaying, everyone is fighting, and no one seems to know how to fix anything. How, then, could God say this?

You don’t have to be a Hebrew scholar to understand the meaning of this phrase in its context. First, we can see that God’s declaration applied to everything that he had made. It’s not as if just one part of the creation was good, another part was just okay, and still another part was kind of crummy. No, in the beginning, every part of the creation was good.

Second, not only was the creation good, it was very good. We are not talking about average work. I don’t know about you, but whenever I try to create something with my hands, I can never quite get it right. I remember putting together a model Corvette when I was in middle school. The picture on the box displayed a sleek and shiny sports car—it looked even better than the real thing. But when I put the model together, the glue clumped up and the paint job looked like a four-year-old had done it. It was certainly not everything it was intended to be!

Even the best of our creative efforts lack something. Many musicians (of which I am not) consider Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony one of the best and most important musical scores in history. But after its premiere, not many people gave it much attention. The orchestra had time to rehearse it only once before the performance, and at one point the musicians flubbed it so badly that Beethoven literally stopped the music and made them start over. Not many people pronounced the symphony “very good” after that first performance. But when God pronounced the creation “very good,” he meant that it was everything he intended it to be.

This doesn’t just mean that it was beautiful or awe-inspiring, though we can be sure that it was (and often still is). When God said the creation was “very good,” he was proclaiming that his creation was doing what he wanted it to do. Trees were growing where they should, fish were swimming the right way, and humans were relating to each other, the creation, and their Creator just as he intended (we’ll come back to that in the next chapter). In short, God’s kingdom was in perfect harmony with its King.

While you probably know that a couple of stops down the line we will see this perfect harmony broken, it is plain to see that God’s creation still reflects his mighty power. Think about the most beautiful place you have ever visited. For me, this is probably the Na Pali coast on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Imagine a sixteen-mile stretch of towering green cliffs, dotted with waterfalls, some as high as four thousand feet above the ocean. When you sit on a small boat in the water looking up at these mountains, you feel very small. But you also see that God’s creation can still be very good. Maybe for you it is the vastness of a canyon, the view from the top of a mountain, the wonder of an untouched field the morning after a snowstorm, or any one of a thousand other aspects of nature. We don’t always see this when we look out our windows to see trash in the gutter or snow that is black with dirt, but God made the world to be “very good.”

In Psalm 104, we can see that the earth, the sky, and the ocean, along with all they contain, continue to reflect his creative power and mighty authority. And verse 27 concludes, “These all look to you.” In spite of all that has gone wrong, God’s kingdom still looks to him and depends on him, just as it has from the very beginning.

Before we leave this first tree in our tour through the forest, it’s important that we insist on the ongoing goodness of God’s creation. Paul reminds us in 1 Timothy 4:4 that “everything created by God is good.” He doesn’t say that most things created by God are good. He also doesn’t say that everything created by God was good. No, Paul affirms that God’s entire creation is still good.

I can understand why some people disparage the “physical world” and hope to escape to the purely “spiritual world.” After all, it’s not hard to find problems in the world today! But if we claim to have a truly biblical view of God’s creation, then we must continue to insist that God’s created work is good and that he has a purpose for it.

On the flip side, we also can’t forget that the world is not an end in and of itself. We cannot speak of the creation apart from the God who made it—and who not only made it, but also has authority over it and upholds it by his sovereign power. So if we are seeking the good of the created order (as we perceive it) to be the highest virtue in the universe, then we haven’t seen the whole picture. Instead, we have to affirm that its goodness depends on God, the Maker and King of creation.

Genesis 1:31 gives us a window into the creation story, but it is not the whole story. Even though God is the King of his creation, he doesn’t want to rule it alone. But to tell that part of the story, we need to move to our next tree.

Creation
Kingdom

God created a kingdom, and he is the King.

In the image of God . . . he created them.

Genesis 1:27–28

The famous sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin wrote that almost all of our wisdom consists of knowledge of God and knowledge of self. In the first chapter, we learned something about God in his creation and rule of the world. As we move to the second stop on our tour through the Bible, we will get a glimpse of some truths we must know about ourselves. So before we leave the creation week behind, we need to back up to look at the important description of God’s creation and commission of the human race:

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen. 1:27–28)

In spite of his sovereign power and absolute right to rule his creation, God chose not to do it alone. Instead, he created Adam and Eve as the pinnacle of creation. While lots of Christians disagree about the best interpretation of Genesis 1–2, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that God created Adam and Eve for a specific role: to serve as his image bearers, or representatives, in the creation.

When we consider what it means to be made in the image of God, it doesn’t take long to get lost in the maze of theological discussion. Scholars have debated the meaning of these verses for centuries, so we can’t (and don’t need to) unpack all of those arguments here. But we do need to consider a couple of key options.

Some argue that the image of God has to do primarily with our ability to use reason and intellect. Others argue that the image of God is tied to our ability to relate to God and others. Still others say that it is linked to the task and commission that God gave to Adam and Eve. But it is most likely that the image of God is bound up in both the characteristics and the relational tendencies that we share with God.

In the ancient world, an image of one of the pagan gods would be placed in a temple in order to represent that god. While there is not a one-for-one parallel between that practice and the idea of the image of God, we can say that we too are God’s representatives on earth. This doesn’t mean that we walk around worshiping each other or leaving oranges for each other, like we might see in front of one of those little Buddha statues at a Chinese restaurant. Instead, it means that we are able to fulfill the commission he has given to us. So being made in the image of God meant that Adam and Eve were able to do what God had called them to do.

Also, notice that both Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. It's important to see that the word translated “man” in verse 27 applies to both men and women. And just in case we might misunderstand, God clarifies that both men and women are included in the group that he made in his image. When we remember the common mistreatment of women in the ancient world, this becomes even more important. It means that, while men and women have specific roles God has designed them for, we cannot say that only men (or only women) get to be called the image of God. Both were called to play a role in God’s good creation.

In our text, this role has two important parts. First, God called Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it. While this command obviously included the expectation that Adam and Eve were to have children, there was a little more to it. If we look carefully at the parallel account of the creation in Genesis 2, we see a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: The Time Is Coming
• Part 2: The Time Has Come
• Where to Go Next
• Notes
• General Index
• Scripture Index