The Bible storyline order matters

The Bible has a storyline to it. It is not like a news website where you choose the articles you want to read and the order doesn’t matter. The order of the Bible does matter. It is more like a novel than a dictionary, a building storyline of God with his people that develops over time. In order to best understand the part you happen to be reading, it helps a lot to know what has happened beforehand.

There are times when the Biblical authors themselves use the order of events in the Bible to make a point. Here are some examples:

• Paul when it comes to promise and law. Paul notes that God’s relationship with his people fundamentally started with his promise to Abraham. The law was given through Moses 430 years later on (Gal 3:17-18). Paul is noting that God set up the relationship due to a promise, not something that the people needed to do. This means that the law, which came later on, cannot contradict this. God doesn’t bring in extra conditions to be his people after the fact. No, they were already his people when they received the law. The law was never intended to be the way they were right with God; it had other purposes instead.

• Jesus when teaching on marriage. Jesus was asked about divorce in Matthew 19:3. He responded by noting that God set up marriage in Genesis 2, and Moses allowed divorce by a concession many years later in the law. The order means that God’s uniting of people in marriage is the fundamental command, and the divorce clause was a later concession. We should not use the divorce clause to think that divorce should be an easy thing; God wants faithful, long-term marriages as a reflection of the gospel.

• Paul when warning against idolatry. Paul tells the early church in Corinth that idolatry is very dangerous and they should take temptation seriously. He uses the storyline of Israel in the wilderness to back this up. The Old Testament people of God were rescued and made God’s special people, sustained in the desert, and still disobeyed and were punished. The takeaway from this is that being one of God’s people doesn’t mean you can ignore God and do what you like. We need to learn the lesson from history.

I think we miss the storyline of the Bible because our Bible reading and preaching diet is often kind of atomised. Many devotional guides focus on one or two verses with an explanation. Sermons cannot do massive chunks of Bible text at once, so they deal with smaller sections. And the impression we get is that we can dip in anywhere and take out what we like with no Biblical context. That is one big reason why there are crazy false teachings out there, taking Bible verses to apply to ourselves with no understanding of the context.

I grew up in the church and never saw the storyline as significant for years. I attended a seminar while at university that covered the Bible in a day that really changed my life and thinking. By God’s grace, I’ve gone on to teach this material to many others through my local theological college. Christians need to know the Bible storyline; it helps so much in knowing God and his work better.

If you want to know more, there are great books on this topic. Allan Chapple’s “GPS: God’s plan of salvation” is fantastic. It is worth reading Vaughan Roberts’ “God’s Big Picture: Tracing the Storyline of the Bible” as well.

Of course, there is one big way to know God’s word better. We should read it, in big slabs and systematically. This will help us to see the Bible as more than a random collection of inspirational verses. It is the story of God with his people, a rich story with a certain order.