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# Bible Basics
## Purpose
The purpose of this resource is for people know and know how to read the Bible.
If you are learning about ideas that are (supposedly) from the Bible, but you
are not learning the Bible, your discipleship is deficient.
We need to be able to go directly to the foundation that is God's Word.
Famously, our Lord, in Matthew 4:4, quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, in saying, "Man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of
God."
There is value in studying a wide array of resources, but no resource will feed
your soul like the Word of Yahweh.
No other resource is as essential and powerful as God's Word.
God can use anything in our lives, but there is no other resource that we can
have the same expectation that He will show up for us as when we honor Him by
going to Him in His Word.
The original context in Deuteronomy 8 involves a lengthy, decades long,
teaching of our need for God's Word.
For some, this need is more readily apparent.
For me, like the Israelites of Moses' day, it was taught in time.
But these words now ring true to me, and so I set forth on this worthy mission
to help people know the Word of God.
When I was a young believer, I remember getting great benefit from my early
readings of New Testament books.
Matthew and Mark really fleshed out my understanding of who the Lord Jesus is.
Matthew 5 and 6 taught me about the nature of sin.
Acts gave me a glimpse at life in the early years after our Lord's ascension.
But then I decided to go to Jeremiah.
I had heard a bad sermon at a youth camp that talked about how Jeremiah was
young like us, and so I decided that would be my next book of the Bible to
read.
That was a big mistake.
Jeremiah can be a confusing book even for veteran readers of the Bible, as
someone barely versed in the New Testament, I got precious little out of it.
I soon stalled out and my Bible reading remained in a pretty discouraging state
for a long time.
I came back to the Bible at times.
I was greatly blessed in my reading of John, as it fleshed out my understanding
the Holy Spirit.
But the Bible still seemed like too daunting of a thing ever be truly familiar
with.
There were certainly other problems in the mix for me, but those might have
been greatly mitigated with a better understanding of God's Word.
Thinking back to my fist experience with Jeremiah, let us have a look at the
first paragraph and list all of the things I probably did not understand at the
time, but really should have before diving into this book.
Jeremiah 1:1-3 (ESV):
> The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in
> Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the LORD came in the
> days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of
> his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of
> Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of
> Josiah, king of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month.
1. "the land of Benjamin" - I probably did not know anything about the tribes
of Israel, so the land of Benjamin would have been meaningless to me.
2. Josiah, king of Judah - Again, I knew nothing of the tribes. I also knew
nothing of the split of Israel. So likely no idea why we were talking about
the king of a place called Judah!
If I had read 2 Kings, I would know about Josiah, and I would know that he
was a very good king who live at a very unfortunate time. I would also have
learned about Josiah's successors, who are listed here and were not so good.
3. "the captivity of Jerusalem" - I knew some about Jerusalem, as it features
heavily in the Gospels, but I had no real understanding of why it was
significant to this generation. Also, it speaks of the captivity of
Jerusalem as something I should already know about. I knew nothing of why
such a thing would be happening or why it might be significant.
Perhaps we can infer some of what we need to know, but that is still a lot of
haphazard guess work to make it through one paragraph.
It is much better if we simply say that books like Jeremiah have prerequisites.
That is the purpose of this resource.
I want to provide a tour through a series of books in the Bible that provide an
understanding of the overall narrative of Scripture so that we can then
understand the rest.
Understanding the narrative gives us a skeletal structure that gives form to
Scripture.
It takes us from a place of seeing the Bible as a messy blob to knowing it as a
masterfully crafted view of our holy God and his manifold wisdom in the Gospel.
## The Gospel
Speaking of which...
Before we dive into this resource, we really do need to discuss why any of
this matters.
Hopefully, you are already familiar with the Gospel and have experienced the new
birth.
Regardless, please do read this section before you go any further.
Some might think of this as a spoilers section.
But while this resource does focus on a narrative, it is not about suspenseful
story telling.
We are where we are in history.
We want to know how we got here, but we already know, at least up til this
point in history, where this story goes anyway.
And our time has certain pressing realities that we can know without knowing
how we got here.
We *should* know the pressing realities of our time.
And there is no more pressing of a reality than our sin and God's righteous
judgment against it.
## Know Your Translations
## Know Your Bible
Below is a list of books of the Bible that should give a basic understanding of
the general thrust of the Bible.
This plan will lead us through 18 out of the 66 books of the Bible.
Some are only partial.
My trusty little *ESV Personal Reference Bible* has 1439 pages in it (not
counting legal notices, concordance, and the like).
Below, I have counted out the number of pages in each of the books listed in
this plan.
You almost certainly have a different print and likely have a different
translation, and so the numbers will not match up, but this should give you
some idea of the proportions of what this skeleton looks like compared to the
whole Bible.
| Book | Pages |
| ------------------ | ----------:|
| Genesis | 56 |
| Exodus | 46 |
| Numbers | 47 |
| Deuteronomy | 42 |
| Joshua | 27 |
| Judges | 28 |
| 1 Samuel | 35 |
| 2 Samuel | 30 |
| 1 Kings | 33 |
| 2 Kings | 34 |
| Daniel 1-6 | 9 |
| Ezra | 10 |
| Nehemiah | 15 |
| Matthew | 40 |
| John 14-17 | 4 |
| Acts | 38 |
| Galatians | 5 |
| 1 Corinthians 1-15 | 14 |
| | Total: 513 |
That is roughly 35.65% of the Bible.
We certainly do not want to stop at 35% of Bible.
Shoot for 100%. Many times over.
Shoot for 5000%!
But if you get through this 35%, the other 65% should be much easier to
approach than if you had not read this basic outline.
## What To Expect
### How To Read The Bible
The Bible is not a novel, genres, etc.
### Tripping Hazards
Christianity has boundaries to what it considers orthodox.
While it is a bit less formal, cultures also have boundaries of orthodoxy.
There are certain beliefs that will put one outside the bounds of
respectability.
Sometimes Christ and culture agree.
Whether someone boasts of being an Arian or an Aryan, they are Biblically
heterodox.
The Bible was not written in our time.
The Bible was not written in our grandparent's time, nor was it written their
grandparent's time.
The Bible was *finished* around 2000 years ago.
The Bible is not of our time, but it was written for our time, because it was
written for all times.
The Bible offends different times in different ways.
For many people in the 1800s, the Bible would be too anti-slavery.
For us today, it is often seen as too pro-slavery.
Though it is decidedly against our modern conceptions of slavery with Paul's
excoriating treatment of *enslavers*, so I do not think that is really the
biggest hurdle in the contemporary western world.
Before we continue, consider again the enormous breadth of human experiences
across the vastness of years and continents that the Bible has addressed.
Do you expect that the eternal God, the Ancient of Days, who's Word this is
really shares all of your culture's values?
Is God basically a 21st century American?
Or should we expect that we, like all cultures of all times and all places,
need correction in some areas?
God is holy.
He is otherly.
Calling God great is an appropriate, but somewhat strange adulation.
God is not simply great, He is greatness.
It is like calling Christ Christian.
Is Christ his own disciple?
<Consider pulling from God's rebuke of Job here.>
This is the God whose Word we are approaching.
You are a sinner who has distorted God's design for creation, He is holy.
He is not like you, and his ways are above yours.
Be ready to change.
For us today, the biggest hurdles undoubtedly center around the sexual
revolution.
Namely feminism and homosexuality.