Slide 1 - Canon Teaching - 2019

Why is the Bible the way it is? What is its structure? How was the Bible put together? When
was the Bible completed in its present form? Why have some books and not others?

These are all questions that Christians ask, and we will take time to discuss some of these
questions this morning, namely, how was the Bible made and how does that help us read it?

Slide 2 - Start with the OT

● What is the big picture of the OT?

○ A story about how to wait patiently, by meditating on the law and walking in
God’s commands, for God to fulfill his promises to bless the world through his
chosen people, led by one Great Davidic Son + King

How Is This True?

This is all found in the arrangement of the Hebrew OT

Slide 3 - M.C. Esher

Two hands in scripture - human hand and divine hand, we cannot overemphasize either one to
the detriment of the other

2 Timothy 3.16 - ​All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, and for training in righteousness.

Slide 4 - How The OT Was Made

Explain the Tanakh

T​orah - One story, written mostly by Moses (though added to by others at various times), that
starts with creation, follows Israel’s history to and from Egypt and to Moab, about how Israel
needs circumcised hearts, not more laws.

N​evi’im - The story of Israel receiving the land by faith and losing the land through sin and
hardness of heart. The writing prophets are a theological and historical commentary on God’s
dealings with Israel, including his announcements of both judgment and future restoration.

K​etubim - Stories and poems that teach how Israel should live with wisdom in the land while
they wait for Yahweh’s restoration.

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Slide 5 - Understanding The Pentateuch
I. One story
A. Starts with creation
1. Adam - Begins in the garden, ends in exile, grows to worldwide sin (Gen.
1 - 6)
2. Creation 2.0 - Begins with Noah - Adam 2.0 - Eve’s offspring/seed -
(From Noah, back to worldwide sin and confusion - Babylon, Gen. 6 - 11)
3. Creation 3.0 - Abram - Many covenant promises
a) Seed/offspring filling the land
b) Seed/offspring being a blessing to the whole world
c) Seed will be slaves in another land for 400 years
d) Carries on from Abraham into Egypt and from Egypt to Moab (Ex
- Deut)
e) Ends with Mo’s death - failure is promised - restoration is
conditioned on repentance (Dt. 30.1 - 10)

II. Slide 6 - ​Written mostly by Moses

A. Written to be a reminder of Yahweh’s salvation - Ex. 17.14
B. Written to be an invitation into covenant relationship with Yahweh - Ex. 24.1 - 4
C. The rest of the OT + NT agrees to Moses writing the Pentateuch
1. But Mo got some help and used other books - ​Slide 7
a) Numbers 21.14 - Book of the Wars of the Lord
b) Joshua 10.13; 2 Samuel 1.18 - Book of Jasher
c) 1 Kings 11.41 - Book of the Acts of Solomon
d) 1 Kings 14.19 - Book of the Chronicles (throughout Kings)

III. Other people made changes and updages here and there - ​Slide 8
A. Gen. 22.2, 14 - Reference to the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Chr. 3.1)
B. Gen. 36.31 - Reference to kings in Israel
C. Ex. 1.11 - Updated city name - Ramsees
D. Deut. 34 - Moses’ death - Esp. 34.10 - 12
1. Later changes were made, whether in updating of names or inclusion of
Moses’ death, but no one ever seemed to question Moses’ authorship of
the Pentateuch as a whole

IV. Slide 9 - ​To show Israel’s failure to obey ultimately needed circumcised hearts, not more
laws, in order to be the people of Yahweh. Israel’s failure, however, sets the context for
God’s unfailing love toward his people.

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 A. Slide 10 - ​Israel’s failure is implied in several ways in the Pentateuch itself - Ex.
32; Lv. 20.22; Dt. 4.25 - 28; 29.22 - 30.10; 32.
B. Slide 11 - ​What was ultimately needed was a renewed heart - Deut. 10.12, 16;
30.6
C. The laws in the Pentateuch are part of the story
1. 10 Commandments + Social Justice + Tabernacle Code - Ex. 19 - 30
a) Then the story of the golden calf - Failure
(1) Then Covenant Renewal
D. After the golden calf and after Israel’s unwillingness to hear from God
themselves, the priests are given to Israel, and a whole new body of law is given
as well
1. Exodus 35 - Leviticus 16
a) Sacrifices to goat demons - Lev. 17.1 - 9 - Failure
(1) More laws are added - Lev. 17 - 25 (Holiness code)
(a) Covenant Renewal - Lev. 26
E. The Pentateuch, in its present form, was created and arranged to show that Israel
was unable to keep the law, and that if they were to keep it, they could only to it if
God circumcised their hearts.
1. Who is the shining example of righteousness in the Pentateuch? Abraham,
who was made righteous by God through his faith in God, not through the
law.

V. When was the Pentateuch, as we now have it, completed?

A. Almost all of it was completed by the time Moses died.
B. As early as Joshua’s covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem (Craigie,
Deuteronomy, NICOT), sometime during Solomon’s reign (Wenham, WBC), or
sometime after the exile (Deuteronomist).

Slide 12 - The Prophets

I. Covenant protectors
II. Evaluating Israel’s history based on their commitment to the Mosaic Law

Two Blocks
I. Slide 13 - ​Former Prophets - Joshua - Judges - Samuel - Kings
II. Slides 14 - 15 - ​Great success under Joshua - Victory in taking the land - Jsh. 21.43 - 45
III. Signs of trouble in Joshua - They did not drive out
IV. Things get worse in Judges - Jdg. 2.10; 17.6; 21.25
V. Israel wants a king, but not Yahweh, so God first gives them Saul, a miserable king

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VI. Everything falls apart in kings - no more land, no more temple, no more king in Israel.
Israel ends up in exile

Slides 16 - 17 - Loss of Identity

If you go through the OT, we can see that Israel’s identity was built on four primary pillars.
Israel had their covenant with God through Abraham, they had their king, a promise to David (2
Sm. 7), the Promised Land, and their temple, the symbol of God’s presence among them.

In the exile, all of these things are lost, yet the prophets start to speak of a new covenant to come.
There is hope.

Emphasizing One Long Story

I. There are no real narrative gaps between ​Jsh. 24.33​ and ​Judges 1.1​, suggestive of one
story continuing to be told across these two books.

II. Judges alludes to Israel’s lack of a king as part of its problem ​(17.6; 21.25)​, and Samuel
is the book where Israel’s true king, David, is chosen by Yahweh. Additionally, the first
section of Samuel is dedicated to the birth and early years of Samuel as Israel’s final
judge, all the way through his selection of Saul, to his formal retirement, and later his
death. All that to say, the story that was begun in Joshua and carried on into Judges now
flows chronologically and thematically into Samuel.

III. The final chapters of Samuel ​(chs. 21 - 24)​ break the narrative by going back into
David’s life to tell two dark stories ​(ch. 21, ch. 24)​, while in the middle you have
David’s song ​(ch. 22)​ and his final words ​(ch. 23)​. These chapters, dark as 21 and 24
may be, are a sort of highlight reel of David’s faithfulness to Yahweh first as Yahweh’s
first chosen king. For our purposes, however, the narrative of Samuel functionally ends
at ​2 Sm. 20​, and from there, turning into ​1 Kings 1​, we find a seamless break.

Slide 18 - Two Hands

Again, what we have in the former prophets are a collection of the stories that show both the
constant inability of Israel to love God, yet the constant and unfailing love and mercy and
faithfulness of God.

Authors and editors arranged certain stories, in and out of chronological order, with great care
and precision so that they could best communicate the truths of God to their people, and as they
did this, they were being carried along by the Holy Spirit, who gave authority to their words.
Neither hand cancels out the other.

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Slide 19 - How The Prophets Were Made
As we now consider the latter prophets, we want to pause to consider how the prophetic books
came about, what the process may have looked like. We’ll look at general ideas, a specific
example, and also understand some of the reliability of the OT witness that we have today.

Slide 20 - ​It is at this part of the Bible where we really need to understand the two hands idea.

Slide 21
1. God speaks to the prophet
2. The prophet speaks the message he was given
3. The prophet (or a helper) writes and arranges the message(s) into what we now have

Slide 22 - The Production of Jeremiah

Having looked at those three general steps, we’ll see how this played out in the book of
Jeremiah, and in the process, we’ll learn a little bit about some of the Old Testament texts from
which our Khmer and English bibles are translated.

Slide 23 - Wait to show the slide

Jer. 36.1 - The year is ​605/4BC

Jer. 36.2 - Everything since the days of Josiah, which starts in ​640BC​, this is probably all of
Jeremiah 1 - 20, a good chunk of material, 35 years worth of preaching and poetry.

Jer. 36.23 - The whole thing gets burned up by Jehoiakim

Jer. 36.28 - Jeremiah and Baruch start on Jer. 1 - 20 - 2.0

Jer. 36.32 - The second edition is the same as the first, but many similar things were ​added​.

God gives Jeremiah lots of different messages and Jeremiah goes to preach them in the best
places possible, sometimes in the temple, sometimes to the king. As he speaks them out, he and
his boy Baruch start writing these various messages down, and in ​605/4BC​, God calls on
Jeremiah to compile all of his messages since​ 640BC​!

Can you imagine what that must have been like! Gathering 35 years of poems collected on
scraps of leather, paper, and putting it all into a coherent narrative full of poetry, history, and
biography.

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Slide 24 - Enter The Cairo Genizah
The Ben Ezra synagogue became ​the​ synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, a highly affluent Jewish city
early on until the rise of Islam.

Near the end of the 1800s, while attempting to expand the temple, a ​genizah​ was discovered. A
genizah​ was a room where old documents, bearing God’s name, would be placed since nothing
bearing God’s name could simply be thrown away.

Slide 25 - ​Over the centuries, this storage room was forgotten about until it was found on
accident, and inside were all sorts of documents, copies of the OT, land deeds, marriage and
divorce records, shopping lists, etc, ranging from the ​800s AD​ until the ​1700​s.

Inside the genizah, somewhere between 20,000 - 30,000 documents were found. Early on,
different people would try to come and view the scrolls, but most were unable to enter the
synagogue.

One man came in and began selling documents, and ended up selling two documents to two
ladies who brought them back to their Hebrew professor at Cambridge University in England,
Solomon Schechter.

Schechter was allowed into the synagogue and spent most of the rest of his life studying and
translating these documents.

Slide 26 - Schechter Is Jeremiah 2.0

When Schechter showed up in Cairo, he probably wasn’t sure what to expect, but when he got
into this room, I imagine that he felt something like what Jeremiah and Baruch felt when they
had to start writing their second edition. The two had to rewrite everything, and apparently some
new things made it into the second edition that were not in the first.

Slide 27 - Two Hands

This is how our bibles came about. These books, as we now have them, came about through the
careful and artistic obedience of men, men who were carried along by the Spirit as they
artistically wove together their poetry, so that God’s people could have a record of his
faithfulness to his covenant, so that his people could trust him in all of their situations in life.

These books are written by real people to real people. Jeremiah really did have to go through
some horrendous stuff.

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Slide 28 - ​Example of Lamentations
Another quick example of this is the book of Lamentations.

Lamentations is five chapters, each chapter has 22 lines, each line beginning with each
successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Lamentations 3, the center of the book gives three lines for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
and each line beginning with that Hebrew letter.

The whole point of the book of Lamentations is to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem
when Babylon invaded.

Consider the commitment to artistry, the commitment to creativity, the commitment to beautiful
and communal expressions of grief and overwhelming sadness. Can you imagine how long it
took to think through all the words, the way that the whole thing sounded together, bringing the
most beautiful possible expression about?

Jeremiah worked so hard on this, and the whole thing was inspired by God.

Are there not two hands in play here? What happens if we lose either of these hands? Either we
will lose the artistic creativity of Jeremiah in the production of Lamentations and reduce it to him
getting a divine email from God and just writing it down.

If we lose God’s hand, however, we have a very creative man giving thoughtful expression to his
grief, but Lamentations is a mere poem from ancient history that we read and study.

We must keep both hands.

Slides 29 - 31 - Reliability Of The OT Scrolls

In ​1947​, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and the most impressive finding was the Isaiah scroll,
the complete text of Isaiah. Since the DSS Isaiah was so much older than the best Hebrew copy
(150BC) ​we had before that (​1050BC​, Codex Leningradensis), people were eager to compare the
two in order to see all the errors that developed over nearly 1,000 years.

As scholars looked and compared, they found that from ​Isaiah 1 - 46​, a grand total of ​11 words
were added​, none of which compromised the meaning of any text to which the words were
added.

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In these pictures, you can see all the little scribal notes that were added so that later scribes could
be sure that they were making all the proper spelling changes.

Slide 32 - What Are The Writings?

The writings are grouped into three categories:

Slide 33 - ​Wisdom = Psalms - Job - Proverbs

Slide 34 - ​5 Scrolls = Ruth (Feast of Weeks) - Song (Passover) - Ecclesiastes (Tabernacles) -

Lamentations (Ninth of Av) - Esther (Purim)

Slide 35 - ​Historical = Daniel - Ezrah/Nehemiah - Chronicles - Israelites living with wisdom

before, during, and after the exile. Chronicles is its own summation of Genesis - Kings with an
eschatological ending. There has to be a better return than this.

These books are grouped together at the end of the Hebrew OT to be pillars of Israel’s wisdom,
stretching from creation to return from exile, and stories of how to live with wisdom while
waiting for God’s promised restoration.

Slide 36 - ​How Were The Writings Written?

Who wrote Proverbs?
Prv. 1.1​ - Solomon ​(970 - 930BC)
22.17 - 24.34 - ​Words of the wise
25.1​ - Hezekiah’s men; Hezekiah = ​729 - 686BC​ - 200 years later, they’re copying other
Proverbs from Solomon
30.1​ - Agur, son of Jakeh
31.1​ - Lemuel

Who wrote Psalms?

David writes many of them. 72.20 - The psalms of David are ended.
Psalm 101 - A psalm of David.
Someone clearly came in and added other Psalms to the book even though Ps. 72 is David’s
“final” Psalm.

There are two hands at work in the production of the Bible.

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Slide 37 - ​Example of the Seams of The OT
Some of the OT’s over-arching theology can be seen in the relationship between the divisions of
the Hebrew OT.

Deuteronomy 34 (Torah) - A greater prophet than Moses will come one day

Joshua 1.1 - 9 (Beginning of the prophets) - Wait and meditate on the law and obey Yahweh

Malachi (final book of the prophets) - A greater prophet than Elijah will come and restore God’s
people

Psalm 1 (beginning of the Writings) - Blessed is the man who waits on and is delighted by the
Law of the Lord

2 Chronicles 36 (final chapter in the entire Hebrew OT) - God’s people are restored. Written to
people already back in Jerusalem with a restored temple, but no presence of God. “There has to
be a better restoration than this!”

The Hebrew OT, in every way, is a story that invites its readers into a covenant relationship with
Yahweh, calling them to meditate on its words while they wait patiently and faithfully for
Yahweh’s great restoration.

Slide 38 - ​Evidence Of The OT Canon

If you do any reading on this subject, you will quickly find out that there are many more
questions than answers, but what no one questions is whether or not this formation of the OT was
accepted by Jews throughout history.

Yeshua’s Letter – 180 – 175BC

The earliest witness to this threefold division of the Hebrew OT is in a letter written around the
years 180 – 175BC. “My grandfather Yeshua had devoted himself especially to the study of the
Torah​, the ​Prophets​, and the ​other books​ of our ancestors…”

Dead Sea Scrolls – 4QMMT – 150BC

In one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, around 150BC, a line on one of the scrolls read, “We have
written so that you may understand the book of ​Moses​, and the books of the ​prophets​ and of
David​.” The name ​David​ is used as a way of summarizing the third division because The
Writings begin with the Psalms because it was the biggest book, and David is its most famous
author.

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Jesus – Lk. 11.51, 24.44
11.50 – 51 - …so that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may
​
be charged against this generation, 51) ​from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah…

24.44 - …that ​everything​ written about me in the ​Law of Moses​ and ​the Prophets​ and ​the Psalms
must be fulfilled.

Jesus’ own references show that he understood a Hebrew OT with three clear divisions, the Law
the Prophets, and Writings.

The reference in 11.51 refers to Abel, in Genesis 4, and Zechariah, who though is not technically
the last prophet to die, his story is recorded at the end of 2 Chronicles, which was the final book
of the Hebrew OT. Jesus’ reference, therefore, refers to the whole Hebrew OT, from the first to
final page.

Additionally, in 24.44, Jesus references the three fold division of the OT where the Psalms stand
as a way to summarize the entire division of the Writings.

Slide 39 - From The Hebrew OT To Our OT: The Dead Sea Scrolls
Found in 1947 when two goat herders happened upon a cave, tossed a rock inside to see how
deep it was, and heard pots break. Climbing inside, they found hundreds of pots full of
thousands of old scrolls and the scroll started getting sold on the black market as rare artifacts.

Eventually someone put an ad in a very famous American newspaper, saying that these scrolls
would be a great gift for individuals or schools who love old religious stuff.

These scrolls date back to at least ​200BC. ​This is where the great Isaiah Scroll was found.

Slide 40 - From The Hebrew OT To Our OT: The Septuagint

After Alexander the Great stormed the world, he took with him the Greek language, and Greek
became the primary language for the known world for quite some time.

The Septuagint (LXX) is the Hebrew Old Testament in the Greek language, made because in
Alexandria Egypt, there were more Greek speaking Jews than Hebrew speaking Jews.

When the OT is quoted in our New Testaments, the NT authors are mostly quoting from the
Septuagint.

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Slide 41 - From The Hebrew OT To Our OT: The Masoretic Text
While the Septuagint became the ​primary​ OT used in the New Testament era, the Hebrew
language did not die out.

From around ​500 - 1000AD​, there were a family group of scribes who dedicated every waking
hour of their lives to making copies of the Hebrew Old Testament, including creating a system of
vowels for the language.

These guys were meticulous in their trade, counting every letter, every word, every line, making
notations of every single difference they found in any copy they found and went to great lengths
to find the original phrasing.

The earliest complete copy of the Hebrew OT that we have is called the Codex Leningradensis,
dated to ​1050AD​. While this is so late after the latest events in the OT, we have incredible
amounts of agreement between the MT and the DSS.

Our English and Khmer bibles translate their OT from the Codex Leningradensis.

Slide 42 - What About The Apocrypha?

The Apocrypha is a set of 14 books written by mostly unknown authors between the close of the
OT and opening of the NT, some chronicling the history of the Israelite people, others telling
bizarre stories that have little to do with the teaching of the OT.

These books were included in the Septuagint, which is probably why there is one or two
references to them in 2 Peter and Jude, but other writings from the earliest church fathers show
us that from the earliest days of the church, those books were considered as uninspired in regards
to their authority.

Internally, some apocryphal books say that they are of a lesser and different authority than the
Hebrew OT.

Externally, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are thousands and thousands of biblical scrolls
found, but there are, comparatively, only a few scrolls with these apocryphal books on them.
This shows that the people making the DSS did not find it important to copy the apocryphal
books.

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Slide 43 - ​Why is the Apocrypha In The Catholic Bible?
In ​405AD​, Jerome made a translation of the whole bible from Greek into Latin, called the Latin
Vulgate. Jerome included the apocryphal books because of their value to the church but made it
clear that they were NOT to be understood as Scriptural.

In ​1546​, the Catholic Church held the Council of Trent, and declared that the Latin Vulgate was
the​ authoritative bible for all Catholics. This is why the Apocrypha is included in the Catholic
bible and not any Protestant bibles.

Slide 44
When Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers began translating the bible from Latin into
the common languages of the day, and it was decided that they should not translate from Latin,
but from the original languages. Since the apocryphal works were not in the Old Testament, the
Protestants separated themselves from the Catholics and did not include them into their
translations.

Slide 45 - The New Testament

The New Testament will not take us nearly as long since there is so much less material to deal
with, time covered, and theology implied in the structure. This picture is of the Lindsfarne
Gospels, produced in England around the year 715AD. Beautiful stuff.

Slide 45 still - The Four Gospels + Acts

Though each gospel tells the same specific story, many of the differences found in each gospel
can be understood in light of the fact that each gospel had its specific original audience, purpose,
and structure.

Each author chooses to include various events, placing them in the order that best supports his
goal, which is not always chronological. Each author probably had some sort of intended
audience for the “first” readers, but the intent of the gospel accounts was to be circulated
throughout the empire, which greatly reduces the interpretive value of an “original reader,” and
forces us to derive the meaning of a text from the author’s use of language and story telling
technique.

Each gospel account was written by ​1) ​compiling information from a few shared sources
(hypothetical), commonly known as “Q”, ​2)​ from the personal experience of each author, which
also explains a few of the differences in detail between the gospels, and ​3)​ each book would be
copied and passed around with other churches in the area, and expanding out from there.

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Slides 46 - 47 - The Apostolic Letters
There are 13 letters from Paul, and nine other general NT letters, whose author, date, and original
reader are either unknown or general.

Each author either wrote by himself or was helped by scribes, as was the case with Romans and
probably with 1 or 2 Peter. We can see in Colossians that Paul intended the Colossian church to
read that letter and then send it to the church in Laodicea, and that the church in Laodicea would
send their Pauline letter down to Colossae once that one had been read.

This likely explains how we have so many NT copies in so many languages from such an early
time period. People would be evangelizing and church planting, and they needed something with
which to guide their people, so they’d ask their uncle from back home to send a copy of
Colossians to their buddy in Smyrna and vice versa.

Slides 48 - 49 - The Authority of the NT

People have often asked how the NT, or the bible for that matter, gains its authority. Is the bible
authoritative because the church decided it to be so? Is the bible authoritative only when it
speaks to us in a transformative way? Or, is the bible authoritative because its very authors were
aware that what they were writing was not just books and letters, but the inspired word of God?

1 Cor. 14.37 - Paul is aware that his letters contain commands from the Lord, not just his own
thoughts.

1 Th. 2.13 - Paul’s preached word is the very word of God and not the word of men

2 Pt. 3.15 - 16 - Peter puts Paul’s letters on the same authority as the OT.

1 Tim. 5.18 - Paul first quotes from Deuteronomy 25.4 when he talks about not muzzling an ox,
and then he goes on to quote Jesus’ words found in Luke 10.7, “The laborer deserves his wages.”
What we have here is Paul putting Luke on par with Deuteronomy.

From these verses alone, though there are others, we can see that the NT attests to its own
authority.

There was never a church council that decided which books would be understood as
authoritative. Some books were chosen over others since many were clearly out of agreement
with the NT letters, but there was never any sort of political power play. The church, throughout
history, has submitted to the authority of the NT.

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Slide 50 - 51 - Circulation of NT Letters
As letters were written, they were almost always carried by the author to the recipient, but the
letters never stayed in that one church. As we saw with Ephesians, it was written to all the
churches in a general region, allowing each church to write their name on that letter. In
Colossians 4, we see that Paul tells the Colossians to send their letter to the Laodiceans, and vice
versa.

What would happen in these situations is that each church would make a copy of their letter and
keep it, while sending the original on to the next place. This explains why we have copies and
fragments all over the Roman empire within the first few centuries.

Slides 52 - 53 - The Reliability of the NT

Many people have attacked the reliability of the NT on the grounds that it has grown and
changed over the centuries, and that what we have now as our NT is probably nothing of what
was originally written in the first century.

We have 5,800 Greek copies and fragments of NT documents, most of which come to us from
the first four centuries of the church, some from as early as 120AD just 60 years or so after most
of the NT books were written. By comparison, most other works of antiquity have only a few
extant copies, the earliest of which come 500-800 years after the original work was produced.

In addition to our 5,800 Greek manuscripts, we have over 20,000 manuscripts, dating from the
first few centuries and ranging throughout history, all in different languages.

If this were not enough, the works that have been preserved of the church fathers provide us with
over one million quotes of the NT, which alone allow us to reconstruct the entire NT if needed.

There are, all things being fair, many changes between the NT of our day and the NT of the first
century. In fact, there are 400,000 differences, however, less than 1% of these differences are
considered meaningful. Almost all of these differences have to do with tiny spelling changes
that do not change or modify any significant meaning or doctrine.

One scholar has gone on record to say that by comparison with other works of antiquity, it is
simply embarrassing how much evidence we have for the NT.

Conclusion - Our God Reveals Himself

Through our study of the process of “making” the bible, what becomes overwhelmingly clear is
that we have a God who reveals himself, in all of his glory, to the world. If we are to know God,
we must know God according to his own word, there is no other option.

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If you do not know your bible well, it doesn’t mean that you don’t love God, but it does mean
that you do not know him well. If you do not know God and you love him and know some
things about him, then giving yourself to the careful and thorough study of the bible will only
add richness and depth to your relationship.

Our God, through his authoritative word, invites us into covenant relationship with him, and tells
us the story of how he has, how he is, and how he will redeem the whole world, crushing the
head of the serpent through the death and resurrection of the Son of God and through the
passionate preaching of the gospel in our day.

The Great Covenant, the Great Redemption, the Great Snake Crusher, are all most clearly
revealed to us in the person and work of Jesus. In Jesus, our shame is covered. In Jesus,
relationship with the Father is restored. In Jesus, victory is accomplished. In Jesus, salvation is
begun. In Jesus, we are carried through the process of salvation until we reach its goal, restored
relationship and eternal life with God the Father in the Greatest of All Gardens, that Great Eden,
eradicated of all sin, death, pain, and tears, filled with none but the love of the Trinity shared
among all of us who are brought to the Father, by the Spirit in the Son; a place full of delight and
loving relationship.

The Bible brings us inn to this story in its structure and in its theology.

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