News
reporter: Jonathan, 3.5.04
[ THE BIBLE ]What is the Bible?
I think as Christians we underestimate the Bible.
To us it seems to be a book of laws, a book of dos and don’ts.
The Bible is a story.
A true story.
As Christians it should be our story.
We’re told that no one can add to the Bible.
In a sense this is true.
But I think this causes us to distance ourselves from it.
Because it is our story I think we can add to it. And we must add to it.
We need to continue to write the story.
We have to live our lives as part of this story.
How do we do that?
N T Wright asks us to think of the Bible as a 5 act play.
Act 1 – Creation
Act 2 – The Fall
Act 3 – The life of Israel
Act 4 – Jesus
Act 5 – The Church
Now Act 5, The Church, has not been completed. Only Scene 1 has been written.
To perform this play it needs to be completed.
How best would we finish this play?
To do justice to the message the Author is trying to give we must first read what has been written so far.
To live our lives as part of the Bible story we need to READ the bible!
Wow!
Nothing new you say!
But! We need to read it as a story. A whole true story. Our story. Not pick out pieces of the Bible as we need them. Not taking parts of it and saying “you can” or “you can’t”.
When we take it as our story, and read it as a whole. We find out that Joshua (for example) was not some mystical guy that did some magical and heroic things, some old codger who did things back in the weird old days.
Joshua was just like us. Our Ancestor. Someone trying to please his God. Our God.
He was part of our story.
A story that we must continue.
Not in blindness.
But with direction -
The knowledge of the story that has already happened.
