Spiritual Survival Guide
2: Read This If You’re Confused About Faith
First off, nothing—nothing but God. And then God’s Word rings out, “Let it be!” And it is! Everything is good, and glorious, and God’s. But then, “mess”: human sin enters in. Consequences follow, and things go from bad to worse. God hits re-start and makes big promises to bless humanity through Abraham’s family. By God’s unearned love the family endures and becomes known as Israel. Later they suffer slavery in Egypt until, under Moses, God shifts into action and liberates them. They go into the wilderness and enter into a covenant with God. God makes big promises, and the people respond. They manage to enter the Promised Land, but they struggle for hundreds of years. In time, they experience a brief time of life at the top under King David. And then they build a great temple to God in Jerusalem under King Solo mon. But, once again, they melt down in sin. And although God’s prophets repeatedly warn the people of their wayward ways, they refuse to change course. The family splits, the nation di- vides between north and south. They fall and are exiled—and live as refugees far from the land of promise. But by God’s grace, they survive. Eventually some of them return to rebuild the walls and the temple. They see visions of a new day and a new world. They continue to cling to God’s promises. And, for 400 years, they wait for God to stir himself to do something new. And then, in the small town of Bethlehem, God moves in a new and mighty way. The Word of God, the life and light
what section we’re in, and then, if it doesn’t make any sense or seem to apply to us right now, (b) to skip past it for the moment and come back to it at a later time.
It’s starting to sound like the Bible is a big puzzle that we have to sort out.
We can see why it might feel sometimes as if the Bible is this bunch of disconnected pieces. But there’s something that fits the pieces together, that connects the dots, that organizes all the scrolls into something that makes sense and has incredible power. And that something is an ongoing story running through the whole thing: an amazing love story between God and human beings. But it’s a long love story. One website we checked says that the King James Version of the Bible has 783,137 words. That’s more than three- quarters of a million words! It’s hard to follow the storyline through something that long, especially when it runs from the dawn of creation to the end of time and when the cast of characters keeps changing. Sometimes, depending on where we are in the story, it can feel like a romantic comedy. Other times it reads like a drama or a tragedy. And sometimes it’s just plain crazy and out of control—like an episode of the Jerry Springer Show. So what can we do to get our head around the shape of this huge story?
The Big Love Story (the short version)
People who came along before us have found it helpful to come up with a little sketch of the story, or a boiled-down version. Here’s one version of the big story, inspired by Rob Lacey’s book The Word on the Street , that’s less than 560 words long.
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