This course introduces you to the storyline of Scripture. The story of redemption—creation, sin, the Christ event, the Christian life, Judgment Day and our eternal bodies in a renewed earth—is relatively simple and well known. What is not known, however, are the individual stories in the plot and how they weave together into a whole. We know, but we don’t know THE STORY, the intricacies of the plotline on which all the individual stories hang. Our sermons, Bible studies and Sunday school lessons are generally disconnected to the grand sweep of history. Few would know, for instance, how the story of Abram is the answer to the problem of the tower of Babel, or that the way the writer presents the story of David and Goliath is a clear play on early chapters of Genesis. Imagine walking into a complicated spy movie. Without knowing the plot and subplots, the characters with the protagonists and antagonists, what’s at stake, etc., we are simply lost. Much of what we do with the Bible resembles pretending we are film critics commenting on a scene to a movie we have never seen all the way through. Virtually no one has sat to listen to a presentation of the Bible all the way through, as we would watch a movie. 

Furthermore, most of us, when interpreting the Bible, begin our reading from our twenty-first century context with little sense of the historical or literary context of the text. Our only hope for sound biblical interpretation is to know the plot and characters with an understanding of how the parts join together to make a linear whole. Knowing how the Bible’s story works will keep us from errant interpretations because it enables us to say, “That’s not how the story goes!” In church history, this is known as the “rule of faith,” the rule against which all texts are measured as to their fidelity to Christian truth. Despite the advent of sin and Satan’s plan to launch a counter kingdom where he supplants God as Lord of the universe, at its heart, the storyline of the Bible centers on God, as King, creating and preserving his unstoppable rule and plan for his creation. Nothing can stop it!