Through the Bible in Seven Minutes

As the year comes to a close, I am at the end of my annual through the Bible reading. I am struck once again by the sheer beauty, consistency and symmetry of the Scripture. Even though it is composed of sixty-six separate books written over the course of more than one thousand years by forty different individuals, it sustains one theme from Genesis to Revelation: God cares for His own. I won’t pretend to know all the reasons why God chose to undertake this project we know as human history – His ways are far above my comprehension – but there is plentiful evidence to support the central theme as it is embodied in the famous verse, “God so loved the world.”

Although Scripture teaches us that God’s love is unconditional, it also makes plain the fact that the measure of God’s favor is dependent on the human response to His love. Some modern Bible interpreters reject the idea that God’s full character includes an element of judgment. Yet, to do this these people must excise entire sections of the Scripture record and ignore scores of passages which in plain language describe the wrath of God which leads to judgment. ( See The Goodness of Wrath)

We only have to read to the third chapter of Genesis to find God executing judgment on His creation. Due to their disobedience, Adam and Eve, our fore parents, are removed from the perfection of the Garden of Eden and left to fend for themselves, more or less, in an environment that is far from perfect. A mere ten generations later, the record reveals that humans had become so despicable in their misbehavior that God passed judgment using a world-wide flood to wipe clean his creation, saving one faithful man and his family by means of the ark. Here too, there is another division when Noah’s son Ham is excommunicated for his transgression leaving the lines of Shem and Japheth to continue.

A few more generations pass when God again must deal with human disobedience at the Tower of Babel, dividing them into groups by giving each a different language. Shortly thereafter, God again chose one man to further His plan, the man called Abram, descendent of Shem. This line is further split assigning chosen status to the progeny of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This line, after growing into a nation we call Israel, then became God’s history lesson. God repeatedly showed His love and favor while continuing to display His wrath when His people disobeyed.

In the desert wanderings, after God lovingly removed Israel from Egyptian bondage, He winnowed out the unbelievers so that His remnant was prepared to conquer the land He had promised Abraham. After the conquest, throughout the period of the judges and kings, God chastised Israel time and again by allowing the surrounding heathen nations to place them in bondage. The low point for Israel was the Babylonian captivity and destruction of Jerusalem with its holy temple in 576 B.C. which seemed to mark the end of God’s favor, but He promised through His prophets that after seventy years they would return. And so they did.

The returned remnant rebuilt the temple and instituted a system of religious observance that sometimes mirrored God’s plan and sometimes mocked it. Then, when the time had fully come, as Paul puts it, God sent the Seed He had promised all the way back at the fall of Adam. The Jews had been looking for the Promised One for centuries. Ironically, when He finally arrived in history, the Jewish religious leaders who should have welcomed Him failed to recognize Him because of their slavish reliance on the human religion they had developed.

God’s plan continued unthwarted as He used the disobedience of His chosen people to complete His perfect plan. The Spotless Lamb of God, pictured for centuries in the Jewish ceremonial sacrifices, was mocked, beaten, and crucified by the very people He came to save. In their recklessness, the Jewish leaders inadvertently brought salvation to all who would believe, and they wrought destruction on their cherished religious charade. The very people who killed their Messiah lived to see Jerusalem utterly destroyed as a judgment for their unbelief.

It was here that the mystery of God, hidden for the ages says Paul, came to light. The Seed that had been promised to Abraham became the Light to the nations spoken of by many of the prophets throughout Israel’s history. The ringing bell of the New Testament sounds the message that the kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of the Lord. God brought His Son into the world not just to save humans but to save His entire creation. The hidden mystery is that God will recreate Eden and populate it with the faithful of every generation, nation, tribe, and tongue.

As I finish the year in the book of Revelation, I am reminded that many people today hold to an interpretive scheme for the book that looks for a coming rapture, tribulation and subsequent thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. Most of the people I know who treasure that view are unaware that for about eighteen hundred years, a different interpretation held sway over most of the church. Indeed, many Christians today still believe the ancient message. According to that view, God’s judgment pictured in the book of Revelation was executed in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple for the final time. That view rings most true to me as it recognizes the history-changing significance of the Cross of Christ and the finality of the subsequent judgment on the apostate nation of Israel. (See “Why I am a Preterist”)

Whether one holds to the dispensational-millennial view of Revelation that places most of the book in the future or the view that sees all but the last couple chapters as completed history, one thing remains the same for all believers. We can all treasure the fact that God is in control, whether in judgment or in favor, in war or in peace, in tragedy or blessing. That is the ultimate message of the Bible, in my opinion. God loves His creation, and the record given to us in Scripture demonstrates that He is calling a people to Himself. I pray that you may be among the called so that no matter how the last pages of Scripture play out, you will be assured an eternity with God sharing nothing but His favor as the ages roll on.