How sweet are your words to my taste,
    sweeter than honey to my mouth!
 Your word is a lamp for my feet,
    and a light on my path. – Psalm 119:103,105

Learning Every Day:

This is going to be a bold statement: I do not believe I have ever before “heard” the biblical narrative with the depth, the perspective and the clarity that is my experience now.

By “hear” I mean a combination of several words, such as listen; perceive; receive; understand; process; enter.

What I am doing is making my way through the entire sixty-six book collection. Not just re-familiarizing myself with the text, the overarching story, but sharing what I am learning as I go.

The teaching part is key. Simply put, we never know something quite so well as when we try to tell it to someone else. Or in my case share it with a roomful of intelligent, curious, faith-filled men.

Over the next couple of weeks we plan to complete our lightening tour of the Old Testament and move into the New. What stands out to me is how necessary and relevant the entire story is to the coming of Jesus. Because the narrative history of the Hebrew people is – essentially – a microcosm of the entire human experience in terms of people’s attempts to forge a relationship (or to heal the broken relationship) between the created and The Creator.

If I were to come up with an alternate title (and subtitle) for the Genesis through Malachi collection it could be: “Broken Covenant (a tangled web of promises, betrayals, love and judgement – and the failure of religious law to put things right).”

I am developing:

• a framework for a broader understanding of Judeo-Christian history,
• a rudimentary but functional grasp of the historical timeline and where the Bible stories slot in,
• a big-picture view of the steering currents that run through the entire biblical cannon.

There is this sense, now, that I can follow where the story is going and how the different players fit into the plot. Sure, I have skipped a lot, especially in my teaching Tuesday mornings, but I believe we are all hooked into the same through-line.

Don’t ask me to explain – for example – the finer points of the esoteric levitical code that governed the behavior of priests almost a thousand years before Jesus. But I can tell you that no matter how many laws the Old Testament came up with, the relationship with God remained at best distant and dishearteningly unredemptive.

After Solomon, Israel split into two before both kingdoms (Israel in 722 and Judah in 586) eventually lost their identity as nations. Keeping covenant with God required the combined effort of Patriarchs, leaders like Moses, Generals, Judges, Kings, Prophets and Priests – both men and women.

Yet Israel continued to struggle to be faithful. Fortunately, God never fails and – as the promise came to Abraham – “through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 22:18).

We are about to discuss the balance of the Minor Prophets, then transition into the New Testament – the testimony of witnesses to how God did, and is doing, something radically new.

New, yes, but still an account that continues on the Great Arc of the biblical narrative, from Genesis to Revelation, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Always learning, growing, asking questions, recalibrating, open to God’s Spirit and stumbling into truth – DEREK