The Bible in 90 Min

UNDERSTANDING
the BIBLE in
90 MINUTES
UNDERSTANDING
the BIBLE in
90 MINUTES
Joel McDurmon
Devoted Books
Dallas, Georgia
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE IN 90 MINUTES
Joel McDurmon
© Copyright 2020 by Joel McDurmon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechani-
cal, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior, written permission
of the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Published by:
Devoted Books
P.O. Box 611
Braselton, GA 30517
Printed in the United States of America.
Cover Design by Praneeth Franklin

praneethfranklin@gmail.com
praneethfranklin.com
ISBN: 9798647971050
Dedicated to
Greg and Angel
beloved friends.
I will always be thankful
for your friendship, kindness,
generosity, and example.
CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. The Books of Moses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2. The Historical Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3. The Wisdom Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4. The Prophets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5. The Gospels and Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
6. The Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
7. The Revelation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
INTRODUCTION
T
HE WORD “BIBLE” simply translates as “book.” For Chris-
tians, “The Bible” is “The Book,” as in the book of all books, the
most important book there is. Most Christians who read it seri-
ously find it at once challenging and comforting, transcendent and
accessible, imposing and intimate, frightening and safe, demanding
and giving, life-changing and life-reaffirming. You will certainly not
regret the time you devote to learning about it. This book will help
you understand the overall picture of the whole Bible, in its parts and
as a whole. Apart from the personal and “housekeeping” parts in this
introduction and the conclusion, you should be able to read this book
in only about 90 minutes (based on an average reading speed).
The Bible is certainly a book as it is. It is one book. It is also, how-
ever, a collection of 66 smaller books written by various authors at
several points in time over about 1500 years or so. Yet it is one, whole,
unified book with a unified story. It is a story that affects all mankind,
applies to all individuals, and describes us all inside and out. Its words
have healing power and building power. It transforms individuals,
relationships, and whole societies.
The Bible is divided into two main sections: the Old Testament
and the New Testament, sometimes called the Old Covenant and the
New Covenant. This name is because the Bible explains that God
relates to mankind through covenant, and that God has done this pri-
marily twice in human history. A covenant is a special type of relation-
ship that is both deeply personal and legal, or judicial. A marriage is
our best example of a covenant. In fact, marriage is used as a symbol
of God’s covenant with us throughout the Bible as well. The first part
1
2 UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE IN 90 MINUTES
of the Bible relates God’s first attempt at a covenant with man, but
it was one that was flawed and weak because it could be broken by
our failures. God made a second covenant, the New Covenant, which
works by first renewing our hearts, and which can never be broken. It
is built from beginning to end on his power first.
HOW THE STORY BEGINS

The Bible is a book about who we are as humans and who God is
to us and for us. It is a book about our relationship with him and our
relationships with other human beings. It tells the story of humanity’s
separation from God and how God undertakes to repair that separa-
tion on our behalf, restore us, and reunify us with himself. Through
this relationship, we are then able to harmonize our relations with
each other in all aspects of our lives. What he has done for us provides
a model of how we can improve our relationships with others and
how all humanity can flourish.
The story begins with God creating heaven and earth, and then
creating the first humans. These humans differ from all other crea-
tures in that God creates them in his image. This does not mean that
we are “little gods” or that we are “sparks of divinity.” It means we
share likenesses of some of his features, by his design. Our abilities for
reasoning, emotion, planning, building, sacrifice, and much more are
finite versions of the same attributes of our infinite creator. Both male
and female bear this image in full.
The story relates that God created humanity in this special way
because he intended them to have “dominion” over the rest of creation.
“Dominion” does not mean “domination,” as many misunderstand. It
has to do with caretaking and stewardship, in the same way we would
build and maintain a home. In fact, the words “dominion,” “domi-
cile,” and “domestic” all share the same root word, meaning “home.”
God created a special garden, the Garden of Eden, specially for
Adam and Eve, his first humans. He tasked them to work and to guard
it. They had free access to all its fruits. In this original setting, God
could dwell with mankind and have direct fellowship with them. God
gave only one restriction. He had also put in the Garden a Tree of the
Introduction 3
Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were not to eat from this tree. If
they did, they would violate God’s trust and break fellowship with
him. They would learn what evil is and they would suffer its effects.
Adam and Eve did not guard the Garden very well, for a “deceiver”
(often translated “serpent”) entered in and deceived Eve into believ-
ing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was actually a good
source for food, as well as wisdom, and that God had only prohibited
it to keep them ignorant. If they ate of it, the deceiver promised, they
would actually become like God.
Adam and Eve both ate of it. The Bible calls this “sin.” Sin means
literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the standard God sets for
what is right and good. This first sin by Adam and Eve we call the
“original sin,” and it affected all their posterity afterward. It was “origi-
nal” because it was the first sin, but also because from it originates all
sin that has since affected the rest of the world, including our own
thoughts and actions.
After Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the serpent and the
ground for man’s sake, and the man and the woman experienced
“death.” This death was not physical immediately, but relational: it
was expulsion from fellowship with God. They also experienced all
the shame, pain, suffering, anxiety, pride, and sins that flow from that
original sin as well, and much more.
Different Christians understand this story differently. Liberal or
moderate scholars see the Adam and Eve story as merely mythical.
Many of these would still argue that it still relates to all mankind
in that it describes fundamental psychological realities common to
all humans: desire, ambition, alienation, rejection, shame, fear, pride,
etc. Some moderate theologians would say that while not the actual
first humans, Adam and Eve nevertheless were historical figures, and
that God simply chose them as the representatives for all mankind
before and after. The psychological effects and explanations for these
would be similar to the previous group. Conservative theologians are
more likely to see this story as historical truth. Some even say Adam
and Eve were literally the first human beings. They would then argue
that as our first parents, their original sin affects us all directly as their
descendants. They were the parental representatives for all mankind.

When they fell, we all fell. Almost all groups see the story as address-
ing the human condition as alienated and vulnerable to some degree.
Conservative readers see it as the beginning of a unified history that
runs throughout the whole of the Bible.
The entire rest of the Bible is the saga of this separation from God and
how it is overcome. To put it in more biblical terms, this saga is about
how a people separated from God by their sinfulness may once again
be allowed to draw near unto the most holy God by his grace. As we
will see, God’s permanent fix for this problem comes in the New Tes-
tament, in the person of Jesus Christ.
The first direct promise that God would send a savior comes right
after this original sin. God curses the deceiver/serpent for his role in
deceiving Eve. In the process of that curse, God says, “I will put enmity
between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her
offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel”
(Genesis 3:15). The “seed of the woman” here is almost universally
understood to refer to the Savior, the Messiah, who would later come.
His job would include crushing the serpent’s head such that, in the
process, he was bruised. Most Christians understand this to be Jesus
Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the grave, triumph-
ing over death.
The Bible is filled throughout with themes and images related
to this saga. There are marriages, death and resurrection, sacrifices,
boundaries, ceremonial prohibitions, brutal head-crushings of ene-
mies, gardens, trees of life, new creations, and much more. We will
hardly be able to scratch the surface of it all in this short book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before we get started looking at the rest of the Bible, let me say a
few words about my qualifications to write this and why I did so.
About me: I am a conservative theologian, trained in a conser-
vative seminary, but I have also studied widely in liberal and other
traditions. I have been active in Christian ministry, scholarship, and
biblical interpretation for over twenty years, actively writing and pub-
Introduction 5
lishing for over a decade. I earned a Master of Divinity degree from

Reformed Episcopal Seminary in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Dogmatics and
Christian Ethics from Pretoria University (South Africa) in 2012. I
have authored or edited over twenty books, some of them directly on
biblical interpretation.
I also have experience with many denominational backgrounds:
Lutheran, Pentecostal, Charismatic, non-denominational, Baptist,
Reformed, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Reformed Episcopal,
Anglican, and a few others. I have also preached and taught at con-
ferences and in churches on three continents. I would like to think
I have a developed a broad understanding of how many traditions
of Christians think and feel regarding the Bible. I hope that I have
learned a sensitivity to them both to understand them well and to
explain them fairly. While some of my conclusions may not concur
with the mainstream of some of these groups, I like to think that I
represent them all fairly at the same time I offer a few of my own
insights gleaned along the way.
I wrote this book mainly because I saw the need for a basic and
brief introduction to the Bible, and I could not find one that satisfied
me. In fact, I could hardly find a brief overview of the whole Bible like
that at all. There are many people, however, who may be curious as to
what the Bible is all about—whether nonbelievers, those from other
religious backgrounds, students of all sorts, or beginning Christians,
and more—for whom tackling the whole Bible up front may seem
like a daunting task. I hope to have succeeded in this goal: to provide
a short, simple overview of the Bible, in its parts and as a whole coher-
ent message, that can be read in about 90 minutes.
With that, we are ready to get started. The next chapter picks up
with what we have already shared from Genesis and covers the rest of
the five books of Moses.
Part 1
THE OLD TESTAMENT
1
THE BOOKS OF MOSES
T
HE FIRST FIVE books of the Bible establish several themes
that run through the entire rest of the Bible. We will in fact end
up at the end of the book of Revelation returning to the same
images and ideas we encounter here in the very first three chapters of
the first book, Genesis: a new creation, the tree of life, rivers of water,
and a wedding. What we are introduced to in these books is the foun-
dation for all that is to come.
The first five books of the Bible are known as the Books of Moses,
or also as the “Pentateuch,” which simply means “five scrolls.” They
are traditionally attributed to Moses. Conservative scholars would
attribute them to a single author, Moses, whom they see as an actual
historical figure. They would date these writings to somewhere around
1400 BC. Other scholars would most likely consider Moses to be a
legendary figure, and most see these five books as products of multiple
authors, edited at several points over many years, up until around 500
BC, maybe later.
The five books in our English Bibles are named Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Genesis stands on its own in
many respects, and the other four go together in their own way as well.
Since Genesis especially contains so much foundational material, we
will give it a little more space here at first.
GENESIS
The Beginnings
“Genesis” means “beginning.” This is aptly named because it is
the first words in the book: “In the beginning.” Also, the book records
9
the beginning of all creation, the world, the universe, time, plants, ani-
mals, humans, as well as all things human: love, sin, death, shame,
betrayal, murder, fear, jealousy, envy, ambition, conquest, war, tech-
nology, childbirth, hope, and God’s plan for man’s salvation from sin
and death. It is also our first introduction to God and who he is.
In the creation stories, we learn that God is both separate from
his creation, and totally sovereign over it. Both of these are crucial
theological realities reflected throughout the Bible, and also distin-
guish Christianity in different ways from some other religions. God
is separate from his creation. He is not identified with it. Creation is
not divine, nor partly divine. It is only a creature. Only God himself
is divine. God is wholly other.
God is sovereign over his creation. It is his creation. He is all-pow-
erful to create it out of nothing with only his words. He can do with
it as he pleases, and he does. Yet he is also intimate with his creation.
He is present, close, everywhere with it.
We also learn that God has a complex nature. He refers to himself
as “us,” and when he creates mankind, he speaks to himself of “our”
image. He is one God, and yet he is also plural. God is both perfect
unity and perfect community at the same time. He is one and many.
We will later learn that the “us” is three persons in one God: the Trinity.
In short, the Bible introduces us to a God who is all-powerful, all-
knowing, ever-present, incomprehensible, but also loving, caring, and
good, providing for his creatures.
We learn that God is pleased to create his creation, and when he is
done creating it, he calls it good. The Bible views the material world as
a good thing, unlike some philosophies and religions that see physical
matter as the source of evil, filth, etc. We will see that we have fallen
into sin, but that God’s plan for man is not to eradicate this world or
escape it forever, but to redeem it.
Immediately after Adam and Eve fall, the torturous effects of sin
appear in nearly every story. Their oldest son Cain murders his younger
brother Abel. He murdered him out of envy. Abel had presented God
an offering in worship. He did what God had shown them to do:
symbolically represent a blood sacrifice in offering an animal. Cain
The Books of Moses 11
tried to do it his own way. He took an easier route: offering vegetables

from his garden. God did not accept Cain’s offering. Instead of taking
ownership of his own mistake, Cain looked over at Abel and envied
his acceptance. Feeling guilty and alienated in himself, Cain reacted
by tearing down the one whose innocence outshined Cain.
Cain never repented of his sin, and it ate him up. He was a self-
centered, self-glorifying man. He lived with a tortured conscience and
in fear that someone was out to get him. He then built a civilization
that reflected his psychology of guilt, fear, and lust for glory.
Cain was the first builder of a city. But this was no mere “city.” It
was the first of the ancient walled fortress-cities. It was Cain’s projec-
tion of his paranoia. Instead of trusting God’s promises of protec-
tion from vigilantism, Cain erected his own security—walls, wealth,
power, and arms.
The first city Cain built he selfishly named after his son Enoch. The
name means “dedication,” in the sense of “inauguration” or “founding.”
Cain was thus dedicating the city he founded to the memory of his own
legacy and progeny. This represents fallen man’s attempts at immortality
apart from God. Lawmakers and celebrities still attempt this today.
Five generations down the line, a real character shows up: Cain’s
great, great, great grandson Lamech. This guy seems to have been
bored even with Cain’s standards. Lamech wanted to outdo that old
legacy. He sought to be even more evil, more ambitious, more promi-
nent in his rebellion than the now-infamous Cain.
Lamech was the first polygamist. He bragged in a song about how
he had taken two wives instead of just one. He also bragged that he
had murdered a man, yet boasted himself more greatly to be avenged
than his “father” Cain. In Genesis 4:23–24, he sings,
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;

you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,
then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.
Lamech boasts himself as ten times greater than Cain. He makes

his own law and takes vengeance into his own hands. He kills a man
who merely struck him—hardly a punishment fitting the crime.
Lamech’s actions imply his empire will be bigger and better than
Cain’s. His sons contribute to this. It is they who make all the tech-
nological breakthroughs. Jabal improved cultivation of livestock. This
increased food supplies through wool and cheese, as well as increased
cultivation of land with livestock. More food in these cities can sustain
more people. More people means more industry and greater armies.
Jabal’s work also improved wool supplies for clothing and blankets.
Through the nature of his trade, he developed nomadic life. He lived
in tents, but sold to the cities. His transitory nature also led to the
domestication of animals for transport, and the development of the
caravan. He innovated in trade between cities and created markets to
meet the needs in different areas.
His brother Jubal created harps and pipes and was the first to play
them. After his trade arose an entire industry of music and entertain-
ment. In a world where food grew more abundant and cheap, people
had increased leisure. Leisure soon becomes a market for entertain-
ment, especially among a shallow and selfish people. Powerful leaders
soon see the potential of the arts for controlling people and for shap-
ing their values and beliefs. Jubal made it possible to unify the hearts
and minds of masses through music.
A third brother, Tubal-Cain, was the smith. He learned the ways
of forging bronze and iron, and invented all kinds of instruments.
These included implements for agriculture, tools for building, but also
weapons of warfare.
Through an explosion of science, these men transformed society.
It was industrial revolution. From their trades grew up hundreds of
applications. The great men of the cities, the leaders, began touting
their greatness by speaking of how many jobs they could create, how
they could educate men, how they could achieve greatness in union,
how they could make a name for themselves, how they could achieve
personal dreams and improve the quality of life, and for their own
ambitions, they spoke often of national greatness and exceptionalism.
The problem, again, was that Cain built his cities for his own
glory and legacy. His children did the same. They had plenty of ability,
but perverted motives—lust rather than love.
A society that booms technologically and economically, yet is
full of misguided ambition and humanism, is on a slow-glide path
to destruction. Personal ambition, narcissism, consumerism, and
self-worship will consume the culture. It will be led by tyrants who
embody those traits most powerfully. Violence will emerge through-
out society, some of it sanctioned by legal experts.
This is exactly what occurs in Genesis which leads to the whole
land being filled with violence: rapine, rebellion, organized violence
through gangs and corrupt governments. The violence grew so wide-
spread that God decided to destroy this civilization through the
famous flood of Noah. This story takes place in Genesis chapters 6–9.
The idea is that God saved the only civilized and righteous folk left in
the family of Noah. He wiped out the rest. Afterward, Noah started
over in a new creation.
In no time at all, however, one of Noah’s sons was seeking power
and control. His son Ham was caught trying to usurp his father’s
authority, and he was cursed to servitude as a result. He was like a new
Cain, expelled into the wilderness. Again, like Cain’s family, Ham’s
posterity built civilizations based on power and control. One of his
grandsons, Nimrod, built the famous cities of Babel and Ninevah. It
was at Babel that men tried to replace God by building a tower that
reached to heaven and established their own glory. They were falling
for the same temptation the deceiver had given to Eve: you can be like
God. God responded with a new type of judgment. He mitigated the
evil they could accomplish as a unified civilization by scattering them
and confusing their languages.
The Patriarchs and the Promise

The story shifts focus again from the cycle of rampant evil and
crushing judgments to the promise of a Messiah God made to the
faithful. It picks up with perhaps the most important figure of the
Old Testament, Abraham. God, purely on his own initiative and in
pure grace, calls Abraham at random to leave his home in the Mesopo-
tamian city of Ur. God promises to give him his own land, a new land,
which was at the time undisclosed, but known since as the Promised
Land. Abraham simply obeyed and went.
God also meets Abraham and makes a covenant-relationship with
him. God swears not only to give Abraham this Promised Land, but
also to provide him an heir. This was especially interesting because
Abraham’s wife had been unable to have children so far, and they were
now very old.
We learn later in the New Testament, particularly in the books
of Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, that God was making promises
about earthly things that mainly had tremendous spiritual meanings
as well. Most of all, when God was promising Abraham a son, he was
not speaking primarily of the immediate son Isaac, or his first son,
Ishmael, but of the Messiah who would be a much later descendant.
Then, all those who would believe the promise like Abraham did would
become children of Abraham, and thus children of God, through faith.
Abraham’s children did have very interesting lives, mainly because
they had power struggles with each other and their many children
had many struggles with each other as well. Too often, it seems, they
looked to immediate physical power as fulfilments of God’s promises.
So, Abraham had Isaac and Ishmael as sons, then Isaac had Jacob and
Esau. God repeated the promises he gave to Abraham to both Isaac
and then Jacob.
Jacob had an immediate experience with God who manifested as
a man. They wrestled and struggled together for the better part of the
night. God let Jacob win ultimately, showing that he would conde-
scend and give of himself in order to bless mankind. But Jacob also
demanded to be blessed before he released the man. The man blessed
him, but also changed Jacob’s name to “Israel,” which means, “pre-
vailed with God.” All of the descendants of Jacob from then on were
known as children of Israel, or “Israel” collectively. We will also learn
later, however, that this was meant to be the same spiritual reality as
the children of Abraham: it referred to all who believe in the one child
of promise, the Messiah.
Jacob had twelve children with four different mothers. Two moth-
ers were his two wives. They had a rivalry over who was Jacob’s favor-
ite. They kept having children in attempted shows of who was the
superior wife. They got their servant girls involved, having them each
lay with Jacob and bear children on their behalf. This fierce rivalry
flowed into the siblings, who often fought with each other for superi-
ority just like their mothers.
The eleventh son was Joseph. While not the youngest, he was the
dad’s favorite. His dad gave him a special coat—a coat of “palms” (not
“of many colors” as is popularly misunderstood). This referred to a long
coat which reached the hands and feet. Such a coat was worn by those
in authority. In other words, Jacob made his youngest son a manager
over the others working in the fields. It is no wonder they despised
him. They fought among themselves enough already, but this young,
entitled upstart now gave them something to unify against. When he
started telling them about dreams he had in which they would all bow
down to him someday, they grew even more agitated. They were soon
plotting his demise.
They put an animal’s blood on Jacob’s coat and tricked their father
into believing he was killed and dragged off by wild animals. They
actually, however, sold off Joseph into slavery.
Joseph ended up in a jail in Egypt. By a series of providential
events, and a God-given gift of interpreting dreams, he actually ends
up in Pharaoh’s court and is exalted to a position of state leadership.
When a famine strikes, Joseph’s brothers are forced to come to Egypt
in search of food. They had no idea they would be walking right into
the court in which their little brother was a national ruler.
After putting them through tests of loyalty, and requiring them to
bring their whole family before him in Egypt, Joseph reveals himself.
Then, he forgives them with one of the most powerful statements of
faith in the Bible: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for
good” (Genesis 50:20). He trusted that God had orchestrated this event
to save his family, and the promised seed, in the midst of a famine.
The book of Genesis then basically ends on this note. Jacob and
Joseph both die and are buried, and the whole children of Israel are
allowed to live in the most verdant area of Egypt. They flourish and
multiply while living there.
In a short time, however, a new Pharaoh takes over. He does not
know Joseph and does not recognize the arrangements made by the
previous administration. He sees the growing wealth and vibrance of
the Israelite community as a threat to his nation. He makes a move to
suppress them and subjects them to hard slavery under his rule. This
is where the book of Exodus picks up.
DELIVERANCE AND FREEDOM

The other four of the five books of Moses recount the story of
the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, the miraculous deliverance
of them by God, God’s giving them the Ten Commandments, their
sojourn through the wilderness, and eventually their preparation to
enter and possess the Promised Land.
The second book, Exodus, tells how God delivered the Hebrew
people from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments
as well as detailed instructions for a priesthood and tabernacle. God
effected the exodus out of Egypt by means of great plagues upon the
Egyptians. These included plagues of locust, lice, frogs, mice, and
more. The last great plague was the destruction of all the firstborn
sons during the night in which the Lord’s Angel of Death passed over
the land. God’s people were forewarned and instructed to place the
blood of a sacrificial lamb over their door. On seeing this, the Angel
of Death would pass over their house; but the Egyptians would not
be spared. The Hebrews were further instructed to eat the Passover
lamb with bitter herbs and with their bags packed, ready to leave on
a moment’s notice. This was the eve of the actual exodus out of Egypt.
Perhaps the most enduring and important part of Exodus is the
Ten Commandments. Notably, God began these commandments
with the phrase, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:1). This
preamble shows that God’s law established a free society for a free
people. Today we should understand the basics of the Ten Com-
mandments as the foundation for any free society to remain free and
prosper. Chapters 21–23 contain various case laws for life and justice
under God’s law during that time. Many of them still apply for today,
though by no means all.
The rest of Exodus contains detailed instructions for the religious
building of the Jews, the tabernacle, its furniture and service items,
curtains, holy oil, the garments of the priests, and many other detailed,
ceremonial aspects of the sacrificial laws.
The book of Leviticus follows with a special set of instructions
for God’s priests who would work in his temple. This was designed
to work under the Old Testament system of sacrifices and symbolism.
Priests were gatekeepers and mediators to God’s holiness. All sacri-
fices had to be brought to them and through them to God’s altar.
Holiness is an especially important theme in this book: holy living in
terms of personal ethics, for all time, but also in terms of special ritu-
als and symbolic behaviors for the old symbolic system. The famous
ceremonial laws about unclean foods as well as not wearing certain
types of fabrics mixed in the same clothing, and much more, are also
contained here. However, so are very central and eternal principles
such as:
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be par-

tial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteous-
ness shall you judge your neighbor. . . .
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the
sons of your own people, but you shall love your neigh-
bor as yourself: I am the Lord (Leviticus 19:15, 18).
The book of Numbers is so named because God summoned his

people into a militia for holy battle. Every able-bodied and willing
male over age 20 was expected to be numbered among the troops.
Forming a militia was the only time the civil government was allowed
to take a census in the Bible. In this case, God was preparing his
people to go take possession of the Promised Land. This book records
the exploits of that army, as well as acts of treason and cowardice.
Numbers contains many interesting stories about the failures of the
people to trust God along this journey, and how the journey ended
up taking many years longer than it should have due to this.
Finally, “Deuteronomy” means “second law.” As the Israelites
finally arrived at the border of the Promised Land, they would need
to prepare to adapt from a transitory life in the wilderness to an estab-
lished, permanent civilization in one land. God, through Moses, pro-
vided a newly adapted and expanded form of his law for this pur-
pose. This “second” law was the same as the first, built on the same
principles of the Ten Commandments, just somewhat expanded. It is
sometimes called a “covenant renewal,” or merely a second reading of
the law.
CONCLUSION
The first five books of the Bible are crucial for establishing the
foundation of all that comes later. The creation, fall, and promise of
redemption of mankind are the reason all of the rest of the books and
narrative exist for us.
God continues the promise of the seed of the woman by renewing
it through Abraham and the patriarchs. He then renews it through
the Hebrew people, their exodus from Egypt, and their establishment
in the Promised Land. He provides for them a system of religion in
sacrifices and symbolic worship. This all aimed at the promise of a sav-
ior to come. The law also provided a standard of morals and justice for
how a people called by God should also relate to each other and the
rest of the world. All of these things—the promises, the religion, and
the social system of morals and justice—are all gifts of God’s grace.
As we shall see, just as this people quite often failed while traveling
through the wilderness, they would often do so once established in
the land as well, and for the same reasons. This will highlight the need
for that savior to come all the more.
2
THE HISTORICAL BOOKS
A
FTER THE BOOKS of Moses, the Bible provides several
books which relate different epochs and perspectives on the
history of God’s people under the Old Covenant. We often
refer to these as the “historical books.” While that may not sound
exciting, the stories in them generally are.
Many well-known Bible stories come from this part of Scripture:
Joshua and Jericho, Gideon’s fleece, Samson and Delilah, David and
Goliath, Solomon, and more. In each of these instances, the hero is
usually also in some way a picture of the Messiah to come. In other
words, we see Jesus everywhere in the Bible, but only clearly revealed
in person when we get to the Gospels.
The historical books cover the period from the establishment of
the people in the Promised Land (probably around 1400 BC), through
the time of their captivity in Babylon (beginning in the 600s BC), and
until they return from captivity (mid-400s BC). The books include
Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, then two books each of Samuel, Kings, and
Chronicles (thus, “First Samuel,” “Second Samuel,” and so on).
The first historical book has a unique connection to the books of
Moses. Joshua had been selected by God to lead the children of Israel
into the Promised Land because Moses was not allowed to enter. The
book of Joshua recounts his exploits, most of which include simply
trusting God and allowing him to win battles for the people. Jeri-
cho was the first of the great cities in their path, and its world-class
impregnable walls fell by mere shouts because the Israelites simply
obeyed and trusted God. This was to be the pattern by which the
Israelites conquered the entire Promised Land.
19
The rest of Joshua contains similar stories. It eventually ends with

the leadership drawing lots to portion out the Land to every family in
Israel. The book stresses twice that God had fulfilled his promises in
full to the Israelites:
Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to
give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and
they settled there. And the Lord gave them rest on every
side just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all
their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given
all their enemies into their hands. Not one word of all the
good promises that the Lord had made to the house of
Israel had failed; all came to pass (Joshua 21:43–45; 23:15).
Just as the book makes clear that God fulfilled his promise, it
also adds a stern warning. Now that they had possession of the Land,
it was their responsibility to live in such a way as to keep possession
of the Land. Remember, God essentially warned, the Ten Command-
ments are a constitution of freedom for a free people. A free people
must be a people obedient to God, or else risk losing their freedom.
This is where what is probably the most famous passage from Joshua
appears:
Choose this day whom you will serve, . . . But as for me

and my house, we will serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15).
That advice might seem obvious given all that the Lord had done
for this people. It would, however, turn out to be much needed advice,
because the very next generation of Israelites grew up and apparently
grew bored with their parents’ tales of religion. This is the setting
for the book of Judges, and it is a recurring theme throughout the
book. God’s people at first come off a sort of spiritual high, full of
good will and obedience, and gradually descend into complacency,
then compromise, then disobedience, then idolatry and wickedness.
God then sends judgment, often in the form of armies invading from
The Historical Books 21
the surrounding nations. Then the people cry out for help, and God
sends a judge to call them to repentance, lead revival, and chase away
their enemies. Deborah, Gideon, Samson, among many others, were
such judges. But no sooner did the judge pass away than the people
were falling away again, and the cycle repeated. A refrain in the book
highlights this common moral decline apart from some authority: “In
those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in
his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
There may have been no king, but some of the figures foreshadow
the Messiah. Samson, for example, is a special holy warrior of God
who sacrifices his own life to destroy the enemies of God.
The brief and unique book of Ruth highlights the path to the
Messiah. This touching story of love and redemption features a gentle-
man who marries a poor immigrant girl, raises her to a higher social
status, and provides her with heirs. Her child happens to be Obed,
who then fathers Jesse, who then fathers the famous David. David will
of course be a king of Israel and the line of the Messiah.
The lack of a king during the period of the judges and Ruth, how-
ever, seemed to be more of a concern on the part of the people than
of God. God had given a small set of laws to provide for the event of
a king, but the law of Moses really expected the people to be moral
and responsible in a more democratic way than to need a central-
ized ruler, which kings tend to become. The books of Samuel record
the transition between the period of the judges and the period of the
kings of Israel. Samuel is the last of the judges (and also the first of
the prophets, as we will discuss later), and he lives through the period
in which the nation of Israel makes the poor choice of erecting a king
like all the nations around them. The first of the kings is Saul, and he
is a wicked man, though in large part a successful military leader, at
least at first. He will be succeeded by a few dozen others over the next
four and a half centuries or so.
During Saul’s reign, the nation is challenged by the Philistines,
one of whom is the giant Goliath. It is here that the ambitious and
faithful shepherd boy, David, emerged as a national hero. Half of the
first book of Samuel recounts the further exploits of David, his turbu-
lent relationship to Saul, and Saul’s attempts to kill David, until Saul’s
death at the end of the book.
Second Samuel picks up with David ascending to the throne in a
strongly divided nation. He works hard to overcome the rift between
those loyal to him and those loyal to Saul’s son. He succeeds tempo-
rarily, but his own sins mount up and lead to division and loss within
his own house.
The books of Kings and Chronicles are two overlapping accounts
of the same history, with slightly different perspectives in places
(Chronicles also overlaps somewhat with Samuel and the story of
Saul). They also each contain some material the other does not.
In the story of David, we learn from Chronicles that David
desired to build a tremendous temple, or “house,” for God. God,
however, decided that David had been involved in too much warfare
and bloodshed, and he wanted his house to be built by a man of
peace. The job would be left to David’s son, Solomon. One of David’s
last important acts was to compile the materials and make prepara-
tions for his son to get the job done after David’s death.
Solomon exceeded David in glory, wealth, wisdom, and fame, so
much so that his wealth and wisdom became world-famous. He also,
however, exceeded in the lust for power, riches, and women.
It is here that the fallacy of seeking national glory in a king like
the other nations has its consequences. The few rules God had given
Israel for regulating a king were mainly to check his power. A king
in Israel was not allowed to have a large treasury, a standing army,
foreign alliances or multiple wives (Deut. 17:14–20). The long his-
tory of Hebrew rulers gradually violated these rules, starting as early
as some of the judges. Solomon represents the apex of violation in all
these regards. He had over 700 wives and 300 concubines in a harem.
He had tens of thousands of horses and chariots (forbidden by the
law). He also had so much gold and silver that his ordinary drinking
vessels were all solid gold and all silver was counted as small change
in his court.
While God was allowing Solomon to build his temple, he was also
setting the nation up for a massive failure in terms of their false views
of success and national security. Their money, wealth, and sex were to
be their downfall.
Solomon’s son Rehoboam took over after him, but much of the
nation refused his tyrannical rule. Ten of the twelve tribes of Israel
set up another king instead. From this point, Israel was divided into
two kingdoms, Northern and Southern. They would never again be
reunited under the Old Covenant.
From this point on, the books of Kings and Chronicles record the
various successions of kings in both kingdoms. Their stories largely
replay the same cycle as the judges, except that many of the kings
themselves were the source of wickedness. Some kings would institute
idolatry and wickedness; others would lead repentance and revival.
Ultimately, wickedness overtook both kingdoms, and God deter-
mined to judge both in their own time by sending them into captivity.
The Northern Kingdom, called “Israel,” or later “Samaria,” was ended
around 720 BC by the Assyrians. The Assyrian government dispersed
the people of the Northern Kingdom all across the land north of the
Middle East. Their scattered remnants are after this called “the dias-
pora,” which means “the scattered” or “the dispersed.” The Southern
Kingdom, called Judah, lasted a little longer. It underwent a revival
under King Josiah, but the effects were short-lived. The Babylonians
invaded and began taking people captive in 600s BC. In 586 BC,
Nebuchadnezzar’s forces overran Jerusalem and completely destroyed
the temple of Solomon. The Babylonian captivity would last as a pun-
ishment until God allowed the people to return. This long process
started in 539 BC, but did not come to anything like completion
until groups began returning between 458 and 431 BC.
THE RETURN FROM EXILE

During the Babylonian captivity, Persia conquered Babylon and
inherited the Jewish land and captives. The remaining historical books,
Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, fast-forward to the Persian period and
the time of the return of the exiles.
Ezra begins with the first year of the reign of the Persian King
Cyrus. It notes that God stirred the heart of Cyrus to rebuild the Jew-
ish temple and start to allow the Jews to return. Ezra was a biblical
lawyer and teacher who is sent to train the generation of returning
Jews, in Jerusalem, in the law of Moses.
Esther appears last of the three in the order of the Bible, but actu-
ally takes place before Nehemiah historically. Esther was a Jewish girl
taken into the court of Ahasuerus (also known to history as Xerxes)
because of her beauty. She kept her Jewish identity secret and won
favor in the court of women, and she was chosen as a new bride for
Xerxes. From this position, she found herself in a precarious, but key,
position to stop a plot by a wicked nobleman Haman, who secretly
desired to destroy the Jews from the land. Despite being the king’s
bride, it was still a death sentence to approach the king unless he
extended his favor. Esther puts her life at risk in order to go before
him, to reveal her Jewish identity, and plead for her people. When
Haman’s plot is discovered, the King fumes in anger towards him and
sentences him to execution. He is eventually hung on the very gal-
lows he himself had prepared for the Jews he targeted. Xerxes decrees
that the Jews can defend themselves with lethal force, and they do
successfully.
Nehemiah picks up a little after this. He is a cupbearer to the suc-
ceeding Persian king Artaxerxes. He was concerned that even though
the temple had been rebuilt and many Jews returned already, the city
walls of Jerusalem still remained fallen. He returned with the King’s
blessing to rebuild the walls. His story overlaps with the work of Ezra,
whose plan to teach the Jewish people appears in Nehemiah 8–10:
So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly,

both men and women and all who could understand
what they heard, . . . They read from the book, from the
Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the
people understood the reading (Nehemiah 8:2, 8).
As the people embrace such teaching, they begin to make reforms

in their lives and society. A nation-wide revival breaks out, with great
hope that the nation of Israel has finally been restored from captivity.
There were, however, some vital considerations still outstanding.
ISRAEL’S HISTORY AND PROPHECY

The historical books of the Bible, as we will see, overlap in time
period with the remaining books of the Old Testament. These include
the poetry books—the Psalms, Proverbs, etc. These were in fact mostly
written by David and Solomon in their day. Likewise, the many books
of the prophets appeared during the time of the Kings, Chronicles,
and the exiles. Many of these contain historical passages and refer-
ences to historical events that were, from their perspective, past, pres-
ent, and future as well.
The book of the prophet Daniel provides a good transitional look
between the historical books and the prophets, for example. His own
story occurs during the first exile of the Southern Kingdom into Bab-
ylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The book contains substantial histori-
cal accounts of interactions with Nebuchadnezzar and the succeeding
ruler, Darius. But the second half of it contains amazing passages of
prophecies of future events. Some of these will relate to the return of
the Jews from the exile. Others will relate to even more distant future
times, when the Messiah would come and great changes in the Cov-
enant would occur.
This and many more examples show that Israel’s history was tied
to its past and future, relating to the law and the promises of God.
CONCLUSION
Some people find extended historical narratives boring. Others find
great delight in the many tales of heroic exploits by men and women of
faith. The historical books of the Old Testament contain many things
to train our own thinking about God’s message and his faithfulness to
his people, as well as our response to him and to each other.
These books relate the overarching theme that we need God for
all aspects of our life, beginning with our most basic spiritual maturity
as individuals, all the way up to the institutions of power throughout
society. Israel’s history shows that even when we start with a great
Constitution and free people, our own spiritual fears and deficiencies
can lead to societies based on outward wealth, fame, glory, sex, and
power. We can build great institutions while inwardly our families and
societies are full of division, greed, and corruption. Only oppression
and a form of “exile” for all of us will result.
Struggles over politics and national reform efforts in such an envi-
ronment cannot save us. We need something greater and something
that will transform us personally, more deeply, and in a more fun-
damental way. We will start to see these themes developed, with the
personal, spiritual, and social all mixed together, looking to a higher
figure, when we turn to the poetic books of the Bible.
3
THE WISDOM BOOKS
T
UCKED IN BETWEEN the historical books and the proph-
ets, the Bible contains five books of poetry. These are some-
times also called “poetic books,” “wisdom books,” or “the wis-
dom literature.” There are five books in this category: Job, Psalms,
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (also known as the Song
of Solomon).
Their position and their collective name may both slightly mis-
lead the reader. They were composed during the same period as the
historical books and the prophets, so they belong in some respects to
the same historical era. In fact, most of their content was written by
either David or Solomon (though more liberal scholars would attri-
bute most of them to various authors and slightly later dates). Also,
their content is not just poetry. Much of it is prophetic as well. Many
if not most of the Psalms speak in various ways about the coming
Messiah himself in poetic terms.
At least three of the other books of wisdom contain moral and
theological lessons that become allegories for the New Testament
church and the Messiah. Much of Israel’s historical record is of this
nature. People, places, and events can all foreshadow aspects of God’s
law and promises leading to their ultimate fulfillment in the later New
Testament. Such images, parables, and allegories—many of them
real-life events—provide powerful forms of poetry in themselves. The
more intentional poetry in the wisdom books is like a capstone in the
archway between the literature of the histories and the prophets.
Before we get to the Psalms and Proverbs, however, the challeng-
ing book of Job heads up this group. Whether just literature or actual
27
historical events, Job is most widely understood to address the subject,

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” But the book is much
more than this.
The book relates the story of Job, the richest of the great men
of “the east.” He seems by all accounts to be a decent and success-
ful man. The calamity which would befall him does not result from
his own actions, but from a discussion between God and Satan. God
states that Job is blameless. Satan retorts that Job only behaved so well
because he was comfortable in his wealth and protection from God. If
God were to take all this away, Satan reasoned, Job would despise God
and curse even him. God eventually allows Satan to take everything
Job has, up to the point of his health, only sparing his life. Then, a
different type of test arises.
Three of Jobs friends come to visit him. Instead of encouragement
or support, they end up rationalizing and arguing theology. They sug-
gest he must have deserved his plight, for God never lets bad things
happen to good people. Job protests his innocence. Then, a fourth
friend named Elihu interjects. He argues that they are all wrong, all
trying to justify themselves first instead of God. He says that every-
thing mankind has comes from God, and that even in times of calam-
ity we should speak in praise of him rather than condemnation or
wrath.
As soon as Elihu finishes his monologue, God himself speaks
directly to Job. He puts Job on the spot and queries him with a bar-
rage of powerful questions: Where was Job when God was laying the
foundations of the earth? Or hanging the stars in the sky? Or setting
the bounds of the oceans? Can Job find the origins and dwelling of
light? Can Job make the day and night come and go? Can Job turn
the constellations in the night sky? Can he feed and corral all the wild
animals of the earth?
Job gets the point. When God finishes speaking to him, Job
responds with the humility Elihu had suggested and God had so viv-
idly highlighted:
The Wisdom Books 29
Then Job answered the Lord and said: “Behold, I am of

small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on
my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
twice, but I will proceed no further” (Job 40:3–5).
After another round of questioning from God, Job confesses that

he repents, and gives all praise and credit to the God who can do all
things. At this point, God rebukes Job’s three friends. He not only
restores all that Job had, but doubles it.
The book of Job, it seems, does not aim so much to address “Why
bad things happen to good people?” as it does the question, “How
should God’s people respond when bad things happen?” God makes
clear that our hope is in a relationship with him. We must know him.
And if we truly know who he is, we will know he is our only source of
goodness and wisdom. In our repentance from trust in ourselves and
placing our trust in the God who can do all things, we will realize a
reward greater than anything else we could ever have.
Ultimately the book is a lesson to the Jews in their history as well.
Written almost certainly during the captivity period, it tells the Jewish
people to remain patient in their exile and loss of all they had, waiting
for the God who will rescue and restore a faithful, humble people to
more than they had before.
The longest book in the Bible, Psalms, contains some of its most
well-known passages. We will retain the older King James English for
discussing the Psalms. While it is usually more difficult to read, it is
also unsurpassed in poetic beauty. The Psalms in King James English
are unrivaled by any other translation. Psalm 23, for example, may be
one of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth
me beside the still waters. . . .
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod
and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine

enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup run-
neth over (Psalm 23:1–5).
The songs of the Lord, which is what the Psalms are, contain many
such passages that highlight all aspects of the Lord and his deliverance
of his people. We hear of his sovereignty over all human affairs, even
the most powerful of wicked kings and nations:
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers

take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his
anointed, saying,
Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their
cords from us.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall
have them in derision (Psalm 2:2–4).
We read of his power as creator and sustainer, just as he had

revealed himself to Job: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and
the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1).
There is the Messiah’s death on the cross:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art

thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my
roaring?
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of
joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my
bowels.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue
cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the
dust of death.
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked
have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.
The Wisdom Books 31
I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.
They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon
my vesture.
But be not thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength,
haste thee to help me (Psalm 22:1, 14–19).
We hear David’s famous expression of repentance, echoed since

by millions of Christians, often weekly: “For I acknowledge my trans-
gressions: and my sin is ever before me. . . . Hide thy face from my
sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O
God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:3, 9–10).
God calls us to trust in his power: “Be still, and know that I am
God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth”
(Psalm 46:10). There are many of these: “Delight thyself also in the
Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (Psalm 37:4).
We are reminded of God’s preeminence as the only true God:
“For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the Lord made the heav-
ens” (Psalm 96:5). We get the importance and power of his revela-
tion for us in his Word: “O how love I thy law! it is my meditation
all the day. . . . Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto
my path” (Psalm 119:97, 105). The Psalms often express this: “The
law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the
Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are
right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:7–8).
There are also expressions of the love that should exist among
God’s people: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren
to dwell together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1).
And of course there is the praise band leader’s favorite: “Sing unto
him a new song; play skillfully with a loud noise” (Psalm 33:3)!
Many of the Psalms are prophetic, as we said. They speak openly
about the work of the Messiah who would come. Psalm 22 above
noted his crucifixion and death. This one notes his confidence that he
would not be left in the grave!
I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my

right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my

flesh also shall rest in hope.
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou
suffer thine Holy One to see corruption (Psalm 16:8–10).
There are also many Psalms of the triumph of God’s Messiah. This
one is about the resurrection and heavenly rule of Jesus Christ:
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand,

until I make thine enemies thy footstool (Psalm 110:1).
This verse is quoted in the New Testament more than any other
passage—even more than “love your neighbor”!
In short, the Psalms are songs of praise and thanksgiving, but they
are much more than that. They contain prophecy and theological les-
sons that reach as far and as deep as anything else in the Bible.
Many people look at the book of Proverbs as a large collection
of short, pithy bits of wisdom. Since it is a book of instruction to a
young man on how to live with wisdom and not foolishness, it cer-
tainly is such a collection; but it is much more.
First, the book of Proverbs has a unique aspect also found in the
Psalms: it is both intensely personal and individual while at the same
time also highly allegorical of the whole people of God. It is impos-
sible to say which aspect is more spiritually intense, for both are true
in the deepest, most ultimate sense.
So, it is easy to understand any given Proverb as a lesson for indi-
viduals. Consider: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge:
but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:5). Or the clas-
sic, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a
fall” (Proverbs 16:18).
There is, however, a larger, overarching theme throughout the
book: the purity of God’s bride. The young man is instructed that wis-
The Wisdom Books 33
dom is worth more than precious jewels, and to pursue wisdom with
everything he has. “Wisdom” from chapter 2 forward is personified
as a female. This woman, wisdom, is said to be sufficient to keep him
from the “forbidden woman,” an adulteress and prostitute (Proverbs
2:16). Some chapters detail the destructive art of the seductress (Prov-
erbs 7). It tells us, “Her house is the way to the grave, going down to
the chambers of death” (Proverbs 7:27). The very next chapter speaks
of “wisdom,” again personified as a woman. Her ends present quite
the contrast: “For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from
the Lord, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me
love death” (Proverbs 8:35–36).
The rest of the book contains thousands of wisdom sayings. It is
not always clear how or if they relate to each other.
The end comes with a passage that has caused many a problem in
Christian marriages: the passage of the “virtuous woman.” It describes
an “excellent wife” (Proverbs 31:10) who is in many respects a superhu-
man woman, working tirelessly with the candle burning at both ends,
to keep house, order her home, make clothing and bed linens, and
much, much more. Many a relationship has been strained or ruined by
men holding this standard over the heads of their wives. Like we have
said, this is ultimately about a theological reality: the bride of Christ.
This is about the woman he makes virtuous and empowers, and about
the great works she/we do through and for him.
Anytime we try to hold mere mortal individuals, men or women,
up to the ideal standards God sets for himself, we are setting ourselves
up for failure. We are always in absolute need of his strength and his
grace. The wisdom literature from Job forward tries to teach us this!
When we rely on ourselves, or worse, try to make others measure up
on their own strength, we will drive people to despair and ruin. That
is a good note on which to turn to the next book.
Ecclesiastes contains many wisdom statements much like Prov-
erbs, but is much shorter and more narrative in style. Its name means
something like “the preacher” or “speaker of the assembly.” He is a
wise individual who has tried everything under the sun to find hap-
piness or meaning, all on his own works or strength. Despite having
all wealth and power and everything a person could want, he fails. He
now sounds a warning, tinged with a dose of cynicism:
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All

is vanity. . . . What has been is what will be, and what has
been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new
under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 9).
His darkened outlook appears in many passages like these:
He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite
him who breaks through a wall. He who quarries stones
is hurt by them, and he who splits logs is endangered by
them (Ecclesiastes 10:8–9).
So there is no advantage even to industry or hard work while

minding one’s own business. From the beginning, he tells us that
even increasing in wisdom and knowledge brings with it a dark side
of depression: “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who
increases knowledge increases sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18).
In the end, however, the preacher is not a pure cynic. He has
instead learned from his failures and “vanities.” He has learned that
if you want meaning and happiness out of life, we will have no other
alternative than to trust and follow God. He has learned that any
other way is futility, and so he arrives at largely the same lesson taught
in Job and Proverbs. He puts it succinctly:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and
keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of
man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with
every secret thing, whether good or evil (Ecclesiastes
12:13–14).
The Song of Songs, or Solomon’s Song, picks up on the theme of

bridal love expressed, as we saw, in Proverbs. This Song, however, is
The Wisdom Books 35
not sayings of wisdom, but a poetic narrative of enraptured, marital

and sexual love. The opening stanza sets the tone:
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!

For your love is better than wine;
your anointing oils are fragrant;
your name is oil poured out;
therefore virgins love you.
Draw me after you; let us run.
The king has brought me into his chambers
(Song of Songs 1:2–4).
The Song runs for eight chapters. It contains no doctrine or even

mention of God other than what we may deduce from its imagery:
that the bridegroom loves his bride, and the bride loves him as deeply.
Each desires the other and longs to come together to delight the other.
In short, the book paints the picture of a deep, passionate love between
Christ and his church.
CONCLUSION
Moving from the books on law and history into poetry, the
emphasis of the Bible changes somewhat to deep personal emotions
and relationships. This reveals that the heart of the Christian religion
is a deep, personal, intimate relationship with the Lord himself.
It is not that these ideas are absent from the law and the historical
books. God said in the historical books that he chose David specifi-
cally because he was a “man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14).
With much of the Psalms composed by David, the wisdom books
give us a look at that heart, exposed in admiration, passion, grief,
depression, despair, victory, triumph, praise, and much more. In Prov-
erbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, David’s son Solomon captures
all these emotions and mixes them with other biblical doctrines and
imagery throughout most of it.
By the end of it, we are reminded that the whole Bible is a book
about how we relate to God, how he redeems us, and how we can
relate to others through him as well. The poetic books maintains these
themes. The Messiah is sacrificial and yet triumphant. He is the wise
man over the foolish one, the faithful over the selfish, the humble and
obedient over the proud. He is the wise one who has suffered all harm
and calamity for us, fallen into the pit which we dug, for us, and suf-
fered the serpent bite, for us, from the wall through which we recklessly
broke. At last we are inspired as the whole church, his bride, by his love
for us. We are inspired to love him as he has loved us, and to keep his
commandments as he has done for us as well.
4
THE PROPHETS
S
EVENTEEN OF THE thirty-nine books of the Old Testa-
ment are prophets. Some are quite short, but several others
are quite long. Prophets take up almost a third of the pages
of the Old Testament. The historical books do, too, but unlike those,
the prophets do not contain nearly as much historical narrative and
stories (though some do have historical narratives). They are almost
exclusively judicial and theological proclamations, as well as predic-
tions of what would come to pass in the future. They are filled with
theologically rich imagery and double meanings, usually pointing to
the Messiah and his kingdom.
The prophets of God had one main mission with two distinct
parts to it. They were to bear witness to God’s law for Israel, and they
were to bear witness to the promises God made to his people. Their
witness to the law pertained mainly to the physical people of Old
Covenant Israel. The promise applied to them as well, as long as they
were people of faith; but over all it has a universal scope.
In terms of the mission to bear witness to the law, the prophets
were like prosecuting attorneys. They were to act as God’s mouth-
pieces to announce to the nation of Israel how they had departed from
the terms of his covenant with them, and to call them to repentance
and faithfulness. When judgment was to be pronounced, it was their
job to relay the bad news. When the Israelites disobeyed God, they
ultimately faced judgment by being exiled from the Promised Land
and taken captive in Assyria and Babylon.
The greater, spiritual vision of the promise, however, has larger,
spiritual meanings. It meant that the Promised Land was not really just
37
the physical land, but refers to the whole Kingdom of God, a spiritual
reality that begins in the hearts of all believers worldwide. The exile
was not just the local exile in Babylon, but was a state of mind and a
depraved society that included many of the staunchest Israelites them-
selves. Even when the prophets call down judgment on other nations,
it is not so much about Jew versus Gentile, but about faithfulness
versus unfaithfulness. So, when Israel or Jerusalem themselves rejected
Christ and the New Testament, even they were spiritually, propheti-
cally referred to as “Babylon,” “Egypt,” or “Sodom,” etc.
Likewise, the return to the Land from exile was not so much a
local, physical return to the physical land, but was spoken of as a res-
urrection of the whole nation (as we shall see) from death itself. The
prophecies about rebuilding the Jewish temple were not really about
a physical temple. In fact, that was actually abominable compared to
what God was trying to communicate about it all along. The stack of
blocks meant nothing. It was actually about the people of God them-
selves being inhabited in their hearts by God’s presence. The people
were to be the dwelling place and sanctuary of God, made holy by
his presence. They were to be a temple of living stones that spreads
throughout the whole world.
When we read the prophets, we must always keep these dual
meanings in mind: one directed toward the physical people in their
local conditions, and ultimately another directed toward a much
larger spiritual picture.
What details we have about a few of the prophets shows that God
could use anyone as a prophet. Some, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel (and
probably Isaiah), were priests. Others, however, were common folk.
Amos, for example, was a farmer and herdsman.
God often required his prophets to live or act in extraordinary
ways. For example, he had Ezekiel carry all his stuff out of his house
as one being carried away captive. He was to dig through the walls of
his house and walk out during the day in front of everyone, acting out
how people would be removed from their homes. Likewise, he had
Isaiah walk about barefoot and naked for three years to symbolize how
people would be carried away captive, in shame.
The Prophets 39
Because God considers his relationship with his people as like a

bridegroom and bride, he expresses the nation’s faithlessness and pur-
suit of other gods as spiritual adultery. Ezekiel, especially, denounces
their sin with very graphic depictions of lustful, sexual acts. God
even had Hosea marry an unfaithful woman whom he knows will
commit adultery. This was to be a living depiction of God’s marriage
to unfaithful Israel. The radical messages of the prophets were thus
sometimes reinforced through radical behaviors.
Our Bibles arrange the order of the prophets in two groups mainly
according to their length. The longer books are called “Major Proph-
ets” and the shorter ones “Minor Prophets.” There are four “Major
Prophets” who account for five books: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations
(by Jeremiah), Ezekiel, and Daniel. The “Minor Prophets” consist of
the remaining twelve prophetic books. They are sometimes called “the
twelve,” not to be confused with the twelve apostles (New Testament)
or the twelve tribes of Israel.
The Prophets did not originally occur in this order, and did not
always have the same immediate audience. Some prophets spoke only
to the Northern Kingdom (Israel). Others spoke to the Southern
(Judah). A few spoke to both kingdoms, and some appear to speak
partially or even exclusively to nations outside of Israel altogether.
They all spoke truths that were fulfilled in their own time and then
fulfilled again in an ultimate sense during the time of Christ and the
apostles. They all also have enduring, eternal meaning for us today in
different ways. Let us look at some key prophecies they contain.
KEY PROPHECIES
Many prophecies can illustrate the role and messages of the
prophets, as well as the dual nature of that message. To start with,
Hosea gives us a good example of the prophet as a prosecuting attor-
ney, delivering the Lord’s indictment against a rebellious people:
Listen to the word of the Lord, O sons of Israel,

For the Lord has a case [a lawsuit] against the inhabit-
ants of the land,
Because there is no faithfulness or kindness

Or knowledge of God in the land.
There is swearing, deception, murder, stealing and
adultery.
They employ violence, so that bloodshed follows
bloodshed. . . .
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Because you have rejected knowledge,
I also will reject you from being My priest.
Since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children (Hosea 4:1–2, 6).
Many more clearly demonstrate the role of the Messiah to come.

Isaiah 53 includes a very famous passage about the crucifixion and
suffering of the Messiah for the sins of God’s people:
He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:3–6).
Likewise, in Ezekiel 37, we see a vivid depiction of the return of

The Prophets 41
Israel from captivity. Looking out over a vision of a valley full of dry
human bones, God asks Ezekiel if those bones could live. Ezekiel says
that only God knows. God commands him to speak to the bones
and tell them to live. When he does, the bones stand up and flesh
grows and envelopes them. God then commands him to tell the winds
to enter the bodies as breath. He does, and it happens. What stands
before him is a mighty army, built originally from dry, dead bones.
Then God explains to Ezekiel:
Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up

out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into
the land of Israel (Ezekiel 37:12).
This passage is highly poetic. It clearly is a reference to the return

of the Jews from captivity. But if they were to take it only as that,
and only for them, they would have missed the larger picture. God
intended to rescue a people in a much more miraculous way from a
much more profound captivity.
When Isaiah speaks of the coming Kingdom of the Messiah, it
takes on a much more global and comprehensive outlook:
It shall come to pass in the latter days

that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be lifted up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it, . . .
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:2–4).
This vision is not mere tribal or ethnic restoration, but of global

peace and reconciliation. This is repeated in a different way when Isa-
iah speaks of the Messiah’s Kingdom:
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. . . .
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the
adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:1–9).
Understanding this globally is not so difficult. Understanding

it spiritually simply means that something like “my holy mountain”
is not a physical hill in Jerusalem, but the spiritual reality of God’s
dwelling with us, all of God’s people throughout the world.
Jeremiah makes clear that what was coming involved more than
just national and local deliverance. It was to involve an entirely New
Covenant and improved relationship with him:
The Prophets 43
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I

will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the
house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with
their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that
they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of
Israel after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their
hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my
people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor
and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they
shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,
declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I
will remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:31–34).
Like a successful marriage, this relationship was to be one of inti-

mate knowledge, love, and inward inspiration to acts of love from the
heart.
The New Covenant of the Lord would therefore be global, inter-
national, multi-ethnic, and world-changing, beginning with renewed
hearts in individuals’ lives.
This was a total paradigm shift for many individuals under the
Old Testament. It was nothing less than a total recreation of heaven
and earth as they knew it, it seemed. So, God speaks this way, and
repeats the vision in exactly these terms:
For behold, I create new heavens

and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered
or come into mind. . . .
no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping
and the cry of distress (Isaiah 65:17, 19).
As we will see later, the New Testament repeats these promises,

citing their fulfillment in Christ.
The prophets also contain some interesting, concrete predictions
that have more definite time frames and references. One of the most
intriguing is Daniel’s prophecy of “seventy weeks,” or more literally
“seventy sevens.” He says,
Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your

holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to
sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righ-
teousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint
a most holy place.
He adds more details:
And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy

the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a
flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are
decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many
for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end
to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations
shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end
is poured out on the desolator (Daniel 9:24–27).
The “prince” spoken of here is the Messiah. If you follow the

time frame of “seventy sevens” (490 years), counting from the time
Artaxerxes gives Ezra the decree to start rebuilding the temple (“holy
place”), you will wind up right at the baptism of Jesus around AD 27.
He is confirmed as the Son of God, then starts his public ministry.
After half of another seven (about 3 1/2 years), he is crucified as the
final, one-and-only sacrifice for sin. By his sacrifice, he “put and end
to” the Old Covenant system of the temple “offering and sacrifice.”
Jesus decrees, as we shall see, that the old temple will be desolated and
destroyed within that generation. We shall see, in fact, that he directly
refers to the prophecies of Daniel when he does so.
The Prophets 45
These themes appear again dramatically as the last words of the

Old Testament. Even though the prophets are generally not in chrono-
logical order, Malachi is in fact considered to be both the last in the
Bible and in history as well, until the New Testament era. His very last
words of prophecy leave the Jewish people with a reminder of both the
coming Messiah and his destruction of the rebellious in the land:
But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness

shall rise with healing in its wings. . . .
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great

and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the
hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of chil-
dren to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with
a decree of utter destruction (Malachi 4:2, 5–6).
The “anointing of the holy place” in Daniel’s prophecy therefore

refers to the anointing of Jesus with God’s Holy Spirit, and later of the
anointing of his body, his bride, with the same Spirit in the book of
Acts. Yet that same reality is an outpouring of destruction on the old
system, which continually rebelled and disobeyed the Father. We will
see the true identity of God’s people and of his enemies, and we will
see the nature of the faith that distinguishes them.
CONCLUSION
With the prophets, we get many powerful, vivid images of what
God’s Kingdom, built on his promises, is really all about. From
the time of Eve, through Abraham, and forward, the promise of a
Deliverer was to be for all mankind. It was not meant to be a special
privilege of real estate and special protection and a sense of national
superiority for one small people only. That people was supposed to
be a priestly, missionary people, taking the vision of God’s Kingdom
promises to the whole world.
As early as Moses, in the law, God said this clearly: he had given
them the law to be “your wisdom and your understanding in the sight
of the peoples.” When other nations learned of their system of law

and righteousness, they were to exclaim of Israel, “What great nation
is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set
before you today?” (Deuteronomy 4: 6, 8).
Instead, the people of old Israel repeatedly failed to be faithful: at
Sinai, in the wilderness, during the judges, during the kings, through-
out the prophets, and more. It seemed there needed to be something
deeper than outward commands to bring about the type of interna-
tional peace and righteousness of which the law and prophets spoke.
Israel had failed in all these things. In the beginning of the New
Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew, we will start to see Jesus as the
true Israel, the true Son of God, who will face all the same challenges,
live out the same events, and yet succeed faithfully. The prophets are
filled with both indictments of Israel’s failures as well as extensions of
hope and mercy and life in the fulfilled promises. That fulfillment had
to wait over 400 years as prophecy fell silent and Malachi’s final words
echoed ominously through the centuries. But Daniel’s clock of proph-
ecy was true. The first pages of the New Testament will introduce us
to their fulfilments.
Part 2
THE NEW TESTAMENT
5
THE GOSPELS
AND ACTS
T
HE NEW TESTAMENT begins with four “gospels.” Each of
these is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ while
he was on earth. (“Christ” and “Messiah” mean the same thing.
The first is the Greek word for it and the second is Hebrew.) Each
Gospel overlaps largely with the others, yet each is very unique also.
The four Gospels are followed by the book of Acts. This records how
the disciples spread the Kingdom of God after Jesus ascended back
into heaven.
THE GOSPELS
The word “gospel” simply means “good news.” While the message
about Christ contained in the four “gospels” is certainly good news
in the common sense of that phrase, in the New Testament gospels it
refers to a particular, long-expected announcement about the Son of
God. This is why the most succinct of the gospels, Mark, begins with
these words: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of
God.” Only a few verses after Jesus himself comes on the scene, he is
introduced like this: “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel
of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is
at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:1, 14–15).
Everyone in Jerusalem knew the prophecies of Daniel. Everyone
knew the seventy weeks of years had to be somewhere close to drawing
to a close. Plenty of false messiahs filled the land, claiming they were
the prince to come, the anointed of God. The Roman Empire held
Jerusalem and Judea under its rule. It kept a military presence nearby.
The Jewish people expected a powerful, political messiah to come in
49
the form of a ruling king, a great national hero. Many expected this
guy to lead a revolt and liberate them from the Roman occupation.
Such views of the coming Kingdom were most likely informed by
one of Daniel’s prophecies:
Behold, with the clouds of heaven

there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed. . . .
And the kingdom and the dominion

and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole
heaven
shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most
High;
his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom,
and all dominions shall serve and obey him
(Daniel 7:13–14, 25).
The Jewish people in the time of Christ were living with promises
and prophecies like this foremost in their mind, while under occupa-
tion by Gentile rulers and soldiers. Mark informs us that Jesus arrived
on this scene and began telling everyone the “good news” that the
“kingdom” was “at hand.” It was time to get ready.
The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John record how
Jesus displayed the power of the coming Messiah, but also baffled
many of those anticipating his coming. Instead of a political revolu-
tion, he offered a kingdom that works from the inside out, calls for
The Gospels and Acts 51
a change of heart (“repentance”), and brings change through service,

not coercion.
The book of Acts picks up where the gospel stories leave off. After
Jesus dies and is resurrected, he ascends to heaven. The book of Acts
begins here. It records how the apostles and disciples of Christ act as
his body, his hands and feet, on earth to grow and expand the king-
dom in the way that he trained and empowered them.
Why are there four gospels? Different people have different theo-
ries. The Bible itself does not say why. Jesus does say that the apostles
would become his witnesses throughout the world, so perhaps it is
simply best to see the Gospels as authoritative accounts of the life,
work, and message of Jesus Christ, coming from independent lines of
testimony. Biblical law says that a matter shall not be established on
the testimony of only one witness (Deuteronomy 19:15), and at least
two of the Gospel writers recite this principle (Matthew 18:16; John
8:17). But it is still not certain that this is the reason.
We also note that while the basic story is the same throughout the
four accounts, each provides a unique perspective and some unique
information.
The first Gospel in the order of the Bible is Matthew. It begins with
a long recounting of the genealogy of Jesus. It aims to demonstrate
clearly that he is both a descendant of Abraham and, most importantly,
the son of David. This is because God had promised that the Messiah-
King to come would be a descendant directly of David’s.
The several stories that follow in the immediate chapters portray
Jesus as re-living the life of Israel. He is called the “Son of God” like
Israel was during the Exodus (Exodus 4:22–23). He has to be spared
from a murderous ruler who kills all the newborn male children, just
like Pharaoh tried to do. He is baptized in the Jordan River, like Israel
crossed it. He spends “40 days and 40 nights” in the wilderness being
tempted. Israel had spent 40 years in the wilderness being tempted.
Whereas Israel had failed, Jesus resists the devil. Just as Israel received
a law, the Ten Commandment, upon Mt. Sinai, Jesus delivers his Ser-
mon on the Mount, a deeper, more spiritual, and more challenging
view of the law.
All of the Gospels quote from Old Testament prophecies. They all
aim to show the fulfillment of prophecies in Christ and in their era.
Matthew especially is filled with such references, providing a heavy
focus on Old Testament authority. All, nevertheless, contain heavy
influence from the Hebrew Bible, background, language, and culture.
All portray Jesus as the fulfilment of the great hope of Israel, the Mes-
siah and the resurrection of the people of God as a free and righteous
body of people.
Each then sees Jesus in light of the law and the promises. Each
records Jesus demonstrating his unique nature and identity through
his miracles, healings, casting out demons, authoritative and powerful
teachings, confounding his critics, and fulfilled prophecies.
Each portrays him as rejecting the draw of power. When the peo-
ple witness his miracles, they want to install him as their champion
and ruler immediately. They want to use his power as political and
military power, to destroy their occupiers. Jesus always rejected this,
sometimes having to escape from the throngs (John 6:14–15).
Even Jesus’ own disciples did not get it. On his last trip to Jeru-
salem, even they seemed to think he was about to institute a regime
of power. On the very night of his last supper, they began to argue
between themselves about who would be the greatest among them in
the kingdom. Jesus responded:
The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them,

and those in authority over them are called benefactors.
But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you
become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves
(Luke 22:25).
Earlier in his ministry, he had made it clear to them that his king-
dom was one of sacrifice: “whoever does not take his cross and follow
me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38). Interestingly, the Roman
punishment of the cross had factored nowhere into the prophecies or
the life of Christ or biblical teaching before this. There was no fore-
shadowing for this. Yet here, early in his ministry, before the cross of
Jesus occurred and before the Gospels were ever written, Jesus is call-
ing his followers to “take his cross and follow me.” How shocking a
message that must have been! Yet even the disciples did not seem to
remember it very long. It was, however, the heart of Christ’s message.
That message is by far most vividly and importantly lived out in
the perfect life and perfect sacrifice of Christ himself. When his teach-
ings seemed to be a threat to the Jewish religious leaders of the day,
they conspired to turn him over to the Romans as a subversive revo-
lutionary. He was betrayed by the leadership and a mob of the very
people he had come to save, based on what they knew was a lie. The
Romans obliged. Though they found him not guilty, they executed
him anyway to avoid a violent mob. They tortured him through flog-
ging, then executed him in one of history’s most painful and horrific
inventions: crucifixion, nailed on a cross.
Each of the Gospels records this event, as well as his subsequent
removal from the cross and burial in a borrowed tomb. Each records
that three days after his death, the stone sealing the tomb had been
rolled away, and Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. He spent
several days on earth, appearing to his disciples multiple times, prov-
ing to them that it was indeed him. When his time had come, he told
them to wait in Jerusalem for the promise of empowerment from his
Spirit. He then ascended into heaven to sit in the heavenly throne
room, from which he could rule his Kingdom through his Spirit. In
this way, the prophecy of the Kingdom in Daniel (and other prophets)
was fulfilled: Jesus was given all power and dominion in a kingdom
that shall never be destroyed. Likewise, his people would be empow-
ered to share in that rule. Remember: it is a rule of sacrifice and service
to God and man, not of power, coercion, domination.
Along these lines, Jesus pronounced certain prophecies of his
own. His parables often had prophetic messages warning of judgment
to come. His most outstanding prophecy was that of the soon-coming
destruction of the old temple and the city of Jerusalem, for the city
was going to reject him, and thus reject the deliverance God has sent
them. They were in fact going to crucify the holy one who would end
the old sacrificial system, not seeing his significance or the symbolic
significance of those old sacrifices to begin with. So, on his last trip to
Jerusalem before he was crucified, the following event occurred:
Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his dis-
ciples came to point out to him the buildings of the tem-
ple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not?
Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone
upon another that will not be thrown down” (Matthew
24:1–2).
The rebuilt Jewish temple had taken decades to build. It was a

massive structure of stone. It was the center of everything physically,
culturally, and spiritually for the Old Covenant Jewish religion at that
point. The thought that it would be completely destroyed and dis-
mantled to the last stone must have come as quite a shock to the
disciples, who were at that very moment admiring it.
They inquired of Jesus to tell them more, and he went on to
describe a time of unparalleled tribulation. Jerusalem would be sur-
rounded by armies. The desolation of destruction prophesied by Dan-
iel would take place. The whole city would be destroyed and there
would be tremendous suffering. He uses an extreme prophetic con-
vention of describing the judgment as the undoing of creation: “the
sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars
will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken”
(Matthew 24:19). It will be like the days of Noah, when the flood
came and wiped out all the unrighteous (Matthew 24:37–39). The
righteous, believers in Christ, would be spared. And all these things,
Jesus said, would happen to the generation of people to whom he was
speaking at that time (Matthew 24:34).
This particular prophecy is so important and central to the com-
ing and mission of Christ that all of the first three Gospels record the
whole thing (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). John is arranged con-
siderably differently, so it does not contain this. He records his own
expanded version, however, later in the book of Revelation, as we shall
see. At issue is nothing less than the central role of Christ himself.
He was to come and save his people from their sins. In doing so, he
was the fulfillment of everything promised since the promise of a Savior
and seed to Eve and to Abraham. He was also the fulfillment of every-
thing for which the sacrificial system and old temple had stood. They
were not only no longer needed, but to cling to them in some kind of
sentimental conservatism would now be a form of rejection of God and
blasphemy against the Savior himself. It was God’s decree since Daniel
that this old system would have to go: “And the people of the prince
who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Daniel 9:26).
Many of the other prophets had declared similar things.
True to their words, and true to the predictions of Jesus, about
the length of the rest of that generation passed—40 years. It was like
40 more years of Israel wandering faithlessly in the wilderness. When
the time was fulfilled, Roman armies surrounded Jerusalem. Tensions
had escalated since AD 66 over a tax revolt, and a Jewish-Roman war
had broken out. By AD 70, the Romans had enough. They sieged the
city, starved it, then broke through. They massacred millions, burned
the entire city, and did exactly what Jesus said would happen: they
destroyed the temple down to the last block. Not one stone was left
upon another.
THE BOOK OF ACTS

During that 40-year generation, Jesus was also busy setting up
the new temple for his kingdom. It would be a living temple made of
living stones. This history of the early church getting off the ground is
recorded in the book of Acts. It was written by the same writer as the
Gospel of Luke. The two books make a seamless narrative together.
Three main things stand out in the book of Acts. First, the apos-
tles become witnesses of Christ’s resurrection to the whole inhabited
world at the time. Second, Jesus sends the Spirit to consecrate the
body of believers as his new temple. Third, the Kingdom of God
grows to become international and multi-ethnic, not just Jewish.
First, we know that the apostles were called to be witnesses of
the truth of Christ. The book of Acts starts off with Christ meeting
with his apostles in the moments before his ascension into heaven.
He tells them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has
come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in
all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The
rest of the book of Acts records exactly this. The apostles and other
disciples preach his truth, make converts, and establish communities
of believers in Jerusalem, then the larger land of Judea, then Samaria
(the Northern Kingdom), and then throughout all of the inhabited
Roman Empire at the time.
Second, also as Jesus said in that same statement, he would send
his Spirit upon them to empower them for this world-wide mission.
Acts records this event in the second chapter. The imagery in the event
that occurs is astounding. When 120 of the disciples were gathered
praying in an upper room in the existing stone temple, Jesus sent the
Holy Spirit. It sounded like a rushing wind filling the room. What
appeared to be tongues of fire lit above each of their heads, and they
all began to speak in a multitude of languages in a miraculous display
of the Spirit’s power.
Two things are notable about this event. First, the temple of God
had always been a place inhabited by the literal Spirit of God. The tab-
ernacle under Moses had the Spirit. The temple of Solomon had his
presence. When, however, the Israelites had returned from exile and
rebuilt the second temple, God never consecrated it with his Spirit’s
presence. It was a widely-known fact at the time. The Jewish rulers
and priests continued their rituals and sacrifices, but it was a widely-
known fact that the central point of the temple—God’s presence—
had never returned. It was for the prior five or so centuries just an
empty shell of a temple.
With Acts 2, at the event called the Day of Pentecost, God finally
sends his Spirit to inhabit his temple. It is not, however, the old stone
building. It was the body of Christ, made of living stones—the people
themselves. The apostles later teach these things explicitly: our bodies
are the temple of God (1 Corinthians 6:19), and the collective body
of believers is a “spiritual house” made of living stones (1 Peter 2:5).
The second notable thing about the event on Pentecost was the
disciples speaking in multiple foreign languages. This speaking was
miraculous, no doubt. Its significance is even more important than

its miraculous nature. Pentecost was a large festival. Jews from all over
the Roman Empire and beyond attended. Because of the captivity and
dispersions for centuries prior, many of these Jews had been raised
in foreign lands. While they likely spoke the “universal” languages
of Greek or Latin to get around when travelling, many of them also
likely were raised speaking local foreign languages as well. Thousands
of such people were attending the festival when this event took place.
When the disciples started preaching spontaneously in multiple lan-
guages, people were astounded.
Peter seized the opportunity to announce the fulfilment of proph-
ecy and the resurrection of Jesus. Many of these people believed that
very day. They no doubt left and carried their new faith and informa-
tion back home with them all across the Mediterranean world.
This event leads to the third major point that stands out in Acts:
the Kingdom grew to become an international Kingdom, not just
a Jewish one. God’s promises always intended to have international
reach. Even Israel and the law were intended to have an international
impact and mission. But the Israelites mostly kept them as their own
blessing as an entitled people. This lent itself to a mentality of supe-
riority. The event at Pentecost shattered the idea of exclusivity. The
outworking of the Kingdom throughout the book of Acts gradually
develops its international nature. Peter himself, who normally refused
even to enter the homes or eat with Gentiles, learned a powerful les-
son from God himself about their acceptance (Acts 10).
This reality caused tremendous tensions in the earliest church.
It appears in some of the later letters (as we shall see) as a point the
apostle had to resolve theologically and socially. But Christ through
his church was already definitively shattering it very early in Acts.
By the 11th chapter of Acts, the locus of apostolic authority and the
headquarters of church missions had shifted from Jerusalem itself to
the gentile city of Antioch in Syria. It is at this point we read, “And
in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26). In
other words, the very name “Christian” as an identity did not appear
until the movement was established in an international setting. This
was to be the “new normal”—or rather, it was finally as God had

always intended it to be.
CONCLUSION
The purpose of the Gospels is to be a witness to the life and work
of Jesus the Messiah. Part of this meant showing he was the proph-
esied Savior to come. Part of it meant showing that his death, resur-
rection, and ascension paid for the sins of God’s people and provides
for all believers the same reward as him. Partly, it also provides a clear
mark to the end of the Old Covenant system. Part of that also means
that the judgments prophesied for God’s enemies were to fall upon
that generation which rejected and delivered Christ to be crucified.
We see Christ as both the fulfillment of prophecy and as a prophet
himself. He reaffirmed the prophecies of Daniel, Isaiah, and many
others in warning of the destruction of the old temple. Jesus stated it
in graphic terms and predicted it within one generation. At the hands
of the Roman armies, that prediction came to pass in AD 70.
As this drama unfolded, Jesus empowered his people to form and
live out the New Covenant. As we shall see next in the letters of Paul,
this life is to be one of service and love to God and to one another. It
is now an international mission. The book of Acts records the earliest
years of how Jesus brought this to pass through his apostles.
As the church grew, the need for organization and direction
grew as well. The apostles began writing letters to provide authorita-
tive answers to questions and problems that arose. They also provide
encouragement and wisdom for the fledgling church—lessons that
still guide and direct us in fundamental ways today. In the next chap-
ter, we will begin looking at those timeless letters.
6
THE LETTERS
F
OR THE NEXT few decades after the ascension of Christ, the
apostles and missionaries spread and grew the church through-
out the inhabited world. Questions of doctrine, practical living
issues, local needs, and sometimes disputes arose. Key leaders, mainly
apostles, would sometimes address such issues in the form of letters.
Most of the lessons and answers apply to the church in all places and
all times, still today.
Twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are
letters. These are often called the “epistles”—an older, more formal
word that just means “letters.” These letters collectively take up about
as much space as the Gospels and Acts do together. So, the letters
are each generally much shorter. They range anywhere from about 18
pages (in a printed book like this one) at the longest all the way down
to barely half a page. Most are in the middle of this range.
Thirteen of these letters are traditionally attributed to the Apos-
tle Paul. His letters generally bear the names of the city or region
in which the recipient churches were located: Romans, Corinthians,
Ephesians, etc. In a few cases, such a Timothy, Titus, and Philemon,
Paul addressed his letters to individuals.
The other eight letters are called the “General Epistles.” Two
are traditionally attributed to Peter, three to John, and one each to
James and Jude. One unattributed letter is traditionally titled “to the
Hebrews” because of its content. Despite its unknown authorship
(though many people choose to believe Paul wrote it, too), its content
is among the most important for understanding many aspects of the
New Testament. These letters are called “general” due to their audi-
59
ence. With one minor exception (3 John), they are not addressed to a
specific church or individual. They were written either to all Hebrew
converts, or to the church at large.
Liberal scholars, and some moderates, believe that the letters, as
well as the rest of the New Testament books, were compiled, edited,
and expanded over time and by several people. They think the final
forms in some cases may not have arrived until well into the second
century.
Most conservatives believe the letters were composed or dictated
largely as-is by the authors to whom they are attributed. The earliest
is usually accepted to be James. It appeared probably in the mid- to
late-40s (about 15 years or so after Christ’s ascension). About seven
of Paul’s letters appeared in the 50s, the rest in the 60s. The 60s also
welcome the epistles of Peter and Jude, with Hebrews appearing prob-
ably in the latter half of the same decade. Even conservative scholars
differ on the dating of John’s letters. Many feel he wrote well into the
90s. Some of us, however, think that the whole New Testament was
completed before the Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and John’s letters
bear evidence of that outlook as well.
The letters differ markedly in the variety of things they address.
They also, however, adhere very consistently to a single body of central
beliefs. Some parts of the letters contain detailed theological study.
Other parts provide very practical guidance for morality, personal eth-
ics, family relationships, and much more. Other parts contain rebuke
or exhortation, encouragement or comfort.
In places, the Letters contain wisdom as deep and penetrating as
the Old Testament wisdom literature. In other parts, they have praises
that resound like the greatest of the Psalms. Other parts recall prophe-
cies with as much promise, challenge, or terror (for enemies) as Isaiah
or Jeremiah. Other parts leverage relevant laws for New Testament
times. Others call Christians to live like the freest of free people, in
such a way as never to require the need for secular courts (1 Corinthi-
ans 6:1–8), although deferring in humility to secular rulers (Romans
13:1–7; 1 Peter 2:13–17), unless they demand that we disobey the
central commands of God (Acts 4:19–20; 5:29).
The Letters 61
Most of the content, however, includes teaching on basic practical

and doctrinal matters: who is Jesus? What did he do for us? How are
we saved? What does salvation mean? What does it mean to live as a
Christian? How should Christians think and act, do business, build
relationships, etc.?
Much of that first century-era included persecution for Christians
from multiple angles. Some of the content included practical encour-
agement and advice for how to live in times of persecution.
EXAMPLES OF DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE

Paul’s letter to the Romans is his longest, and it is considered by
some to be the single greatest concise treatise on Christian theology
ever written. It is certainly the most comprehensive letter for that pur-
pose in the New Testament.
While not nearly doing justice to its many topics, we can excerpt
from Romans an excellent summary of the work of Christ and our
relationship to him:
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to

those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be
stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable
to God. For by works of the law no human being will be
justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowl-
edge of sin.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested
apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets
bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through
faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no
distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put
forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by
faith (Romans 3:19–25). . . .
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. . . .
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died
for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous
person—though perhaps for a good person one would
dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans
5:1, 6–8). . . .
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set
you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. . . .
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells
in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also
give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who
dwells in you.
For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into
fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons,
by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” . . .
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved. . . . For “everyone who calls on the
name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 8:1–2, 14–17,
10:9, 13).
A significant portion of the letters involves lessons on personal liv-

ing: Christian mentality, attitude, relationships, and morals. There are
countless examples of such expressions through the letters. They are
perhaps best expressed in Paul’s teachings on the example of Christ in
self-sacrifice, the nature of love, and the marriage relationship.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in

humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but
also to the interests of others.
The Letters 63
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did
not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but
emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being
born in the likeness of men. And being found in human
form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the
point of death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on
him the name that is above every name, so that at the
name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on
earth and under the earth (Philippians 2:3–12).
This mentality ought to be the foundation of all Christian life and

action. Christ had all brilliance, money, power, status, and glory at his
fingertips. But he set that all aside in order to identify with us, even
in our lowest ways. He gave up everything even in this humble life,
choosing to suffer and die the most ignoble of deaths, all for the sake
of others. The letter instructs us to “Have this mind” as well.
This approach is a great example of what the Bible means when it
speaks of “love.” Love is not merely a feeling, but is also a standard of
behavior toward others. The classic passage from Paul, often read at
weddings, describes it like this:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is

not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong-
doing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends (1 Corinthians 13:4–8).
This plan for life appears in a very high ideal when Paul discusses
it in the context of a marriage relationship. It comes, as we shall see,
with a very interesting twist.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church

and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her,
having cleansed her by the washing of water with the
word, so that he might present the church to himself
in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same
way husbands should love their wives as their own bod-
ies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever
hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just
as Christ does the church, because we are members of his
body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother
and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh” [quoting from Genesis 2:24]. This mystery is pro-
found, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the
church. However, let each one of you love his wife as
himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband
(Ephesians 5:25–33).
There is certainly an ideal here for practical life. The twist, how-
ever, is that it is also at the same time a higher theological reality:
Christ, the husband, giving himself for the church, his bride. Paul
even quotes from the story of the creation of Adam and Eve in the
garden, saying this “mystery” was speaking all along about the greater
reality of Christ and the church, yet also applies to us in our relation-
ships. It is the loving, willing sacrifice of Christ for us (as we read also
from Philippians 2, above) that becomes the motivation and inspira-
tion for love and respect in the heart of his spouse.
The motive for us behind all such ideal living is the love and grace
we have already received first from Christ. It involves the fact that he
has already sacrificed and exalted us first:
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind,

doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of
flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blame-
less and above reproach before him. . . .
The Letters 65
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things

that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of
God (Colossians 1:22; 3:1).
John gives perhaps the most direct explanation of this dynamic:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and
whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. . . .
God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God,
and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us,
so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment,
because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no
fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to
do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been per-
fected in love. We love because he first loved us (1 John
4:7, 16–19).
Remember that love is not just an emotion, but is a standard of

behavior, including positive acts of sacrifice and giving, as well as
boundaries of self-discipline. In Romans, Paul gives an excellent sum-
mary of how this all plays out in Christian life and a broader Christian
community:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God,

to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and accept-
able to God, which is your spiritual worship. . . .
For as in one body we have many members, and the mem-
bers do not all have the same function, so we, though
many, are one body in Christ, and individually members
one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the
grace given to us, let us use them: . . .
Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one
another in showing honor. . . . Contribute to the needs of
the saints and seek to show hospitality. . . .
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who

weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be
haughty, but associate with the lowly. . . .
Bless those who persecute you. . . .
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath
of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,
says the Lord.” . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but over-
come evil with good. . . .
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. . . .
Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority?
Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval,
for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong,
be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he
is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s
wrath on the wrongdoer. . . .
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the
one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the com-
mandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall
not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,”
and any other commandment, are summed up in this
word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love
does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfill-
ing of the law (Romans 12:1–13:10).
This passage provides a summary outlook for the whole of Chris-

tian society. It starts with personal sacrifice to God. It flows into ser-
vice to others, based on your God-given talents and gifts. It must be
permeated with love for one another, preference for others. It shows
hospitality and charity. It associates with the lowly, poor, down-and-
out, the homeless and prisoners. It shows love and blessing even to
those outside the church, even to those who persecute us.
By this ethic, we do not avenge ourselves, but respect civil gov-
ernment and due process. We even consider established authorities
as God’s “servants.” This means two things: first, we should respect
The Letters 67
the authorities as those selected by God for us. Second, however, we

should also remind the authorities that as God’s servants, God is their
master, and they must uphold God’s standards of right, wrong, and
justice. Much of our own Bill of Rights (in the United States) is based
upon these basic principles.
In the end, all of these social ideals are simply applications of the
summary of God’s law: love your neighbor as yourself. This is Chris-
tian love in action, in relationship with others. As we said in the Intro-
duction to this book, the Bible is a book about our relationship with
God, and through that, our relationships with other human beings.
A NOTE ABOUT THE “END-TIMES”

We cannot leave the letters without mentioning a subject that
appears frequently in them in a variety of ways. It is a subject which
has dominated a large swath of the Christian imagination, sermons,
and commentary throughout history, and still does. It is the subject of
the “end times” or “last days.”
There are some passages that seem clearly to teach that there is
coming a “last days” cataclysm, social decline, or “apocalypse.” One
of these passages discusses a “catching away” of believers in what is
today called “the rapture.” Millions of Christians have been led to
believe that such events lie in our imminent future and could take
place at any moment. This has led millions of Christians to esteem life
in this world as less important or less meaningful, except as a chance
to escape and get to heaven. Good works, business, social causes, and
justice suffer tremendously due to such a view.
Too often, however, readers are misled or do not notice that the
“end times” or “last days” language throughout the New Testament,
including the letters and the Gospels and Acts, is speaking of their own
time, in the first century, and not ours. The “last days” was not some
series of events two thousand years in their future (which would have
been completely meaningless to them), but to the last day of the Old
Covenant era which was then passing away as they lived.
Many passages bear out this reality, but perhaps the opening to
Hebrews makes it clearest: “Long ago, at many times and in many
ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days
he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). When you realize
that this was being written in the first century, then the phase “these
last days” means that the last days must have been a first-century real-
ity. In chapter 8, the same author speaks of the passing away of the old
era: “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete.
And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish
away” (Hebrews 8:13).
In the next chapter, we will explore this reality in the Revelation
a little more closely, as well as the vision for society that Christians
should maintain as we live now.
CONCLUSION
Followers of the Bible, therefore, do not need to be concerned
with future apocalypses or cataclysm, or with being “raptured” out in
the end times. Those events already took place when the last days of
the Old Covenant ended, and Christians were “caught away” to safety
from the judgment that fell upon Jerusalem at that time.
Instead, Christians today should be busy living in love and self-
giving, building loving relationships, and creating the type of society
Paul described in Romans 12–13 above, among other places.
Toward this end, interested readers have an enormous treasure of
resources available to them in the letters of the New Testament. They
address love, sacrifice, Christian psychology, relationships, marriage,
family, local community, governments, business, justice, and much,
much more. We have only scratched the surface in this chapter. The
interested reader is encouraged to take their time and read through
the rest for themselves.
7
THE REVELATION
N
O BOOK OF the Bible has alarmed so many readers, or has
been used to cause such fear and disturbance, throughout
church history than Revelation. Its images of things like fly-
ing scorpion-locusts with men’s heads and women’s hair wearing iron
breastplates and stinging people for five months, or dragons, or seven-
headed beasts with ten horns and crowns, the “mark of the beast”
(“666”), or great wars with blood flowing up to the horses’ bridles,
have baffled Christians for centuries, as well as provided fodder for
prophecy “experts” to deceive and frighten millions. As we shall see,
it is not meant to do that at all. When properly understood, it relays
quite the opposite message.
UNDERSTANDING THE TIME AND MESSAGE

While the book certainly contains some wild imagery, we do
not need to be alarmed by it for very good reasons. Not the least
of these reasons is an interesting feature that far too often has gone
overlooked: the book itself says that its predictions were not for some
distant future date (like ours). In fact, the very first sentence of the
books says otherwise:
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to

show to his servants the things that must soon take place
(Revelation 1:1).
Just like we read with Hebrews in the last chapter, this “soon”
must mean it was very near for the author and readers of Revelation.
69
Only two verses later, the introduction repeats this outlook: “the time
is near” (Revelation 1:3) The exact same warnings appear at the very
end of the book, as a reminder (Revelation 22:6, 7, 10).
In case these flashing caution lights at the beginning and end were
not enough, the book has several others throughout the middle:
“Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the
devil is about to throw some of you into prison” (2:10)
“I will come to you soon” (2:16).
“Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to

die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight
of my God” (3:2).
“I also will keep thee from the hour of the trial that is
about to come upon all the world” (3:10).
“I am coming soon” (3:11).
“Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the

blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about
to blow!” (8:13).
The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon
to come (11:14).
The book ends on this note, with a fourth and fifth repetition in
chapter 22 alone: “Behold, I am coming soon.” . . . “He who testifies
to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord
Jesus!” (Revelation 22:12, 20).
Instead of heeding these multiple indicators, eager prophecy com-
mentators for centuries have found alleged fulfilments in every grand
event or historical threat imaginable. Just in the 20th century, people
have claimed that Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and
many others were the “beast” or “the Antichrist.” During the Refor-
mation and for centuries beyond, Protestants claimed the Pope was
The Revelation 71
the Antichrist. Some still do! Even Ronald Wilson Reagan (each name
has six letters, thus 6-6-6!) did not escape identification by some as
this demonic world-leader who was alleged to be on our horizon.
There have been hundreds of such predictions throughout the
millennia of the church. In each case, teachers could offer persuasive
arguments built on several points of likeness between the historical
events or persons and the imagery of Revelation. We have had several
even in our own recent decades, all through the 20th and 21st cen-
turies. In each case, however, every single one of these hundreds of
persuasive cases have been wrong.
The moment we understand that the “soon” warnings were written
for that first century audience, we will realize why all of these predic-
tions were mistaken. The events described in Revelation had to have
already taken place back in that early church generation.
Consider this verse: “Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff,
and I was told, “Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar
and those who worship there” (Revelation 11:14). If we read this like
a typical first century reader would do, we would immediately under-
stand that the author ( John the Apostle) was being instructed in this
vision to measure the Old Testament temple standing in Jerusalem at
that time. To anyone reading today, this indicates the temple was still
standing when John wrote the letter. This means it had to have been
written before AD 70.
Modern teachers who deny this, however, frequently run into this
difficulty and have to reinterpret this vision, instead of first following
what it would have meant for first-century readers who were most
concerned with what “soon” actually meant. They will argue that this
is to be a re-built temple that is yet in our future. They never answer,
however, why John is being told to tell people about something alleg-
edly thousands of years off in the future while at the same time telling
them it must “soon take place,” especially when the thing they are
being told about is an unmistakable feature standing right there in
front of their eyes. These conflicts make no sense, except in an attempt
to make the most sensational parts of the Bible frighten people into
certain beliefs and actions today.
The simple understanding is that John related something about

the temple that still stood at the time, and about great cataclysmic
judgments that would “soon” take place in their lifetimes. We know
now for a fact this temple and people suffered the devastating destruc-
tion in AD 70. This fits perfectly and simply.
What then do all the crazy visions and creatures and images
mean? Who or what was the “beast” etc.? In one sense, these things
really do not matter too much to us. That is, they do not matter in
the sense that we need to live in fear of them and try to pinpoint what
each detail may mean in our own times. For readers who desire to
study more, the details of such things do fit rather nicely and simply
with details about the Roman Empire, the emperors, and much more.
We are even told that the seven heads of that seven-headed beast are
“seven mountains” (Revelation 17:9), a reference to that ancient city
famously built on seven hills, Rome.
Whatever these other details here and there mean, we know
that the cataclysmic and wild events do not refer to things in our
future. Prophecy writers have tried to take that prophecy about the
flying, scorpion-tailed locusts into a first-century prophet’s best-guess
description when being shown 21st-century Apache helicopters: the
man’s face is the pilot, the woman’s hair is the spinning rotors, the
stinging tail is the guns, the iron breastplate is the metal body, etc. This
description has been persuasive to many readers already persuaded
that we today are living in the “last days” and that these visions must
somehow make sense for our time. But they were simply symbolic of
armies and destructions carried out in the first century.
Other details, however, work in the reverse. For example, how are
we supposed to expect a modern-day war with Apache helicopters, yet
also with blood flowing up to horses’ bridles? Are we really to expect
armies riding out on horseback with swords against tanks and heli-
copters on a mass scale to generate so much blood? Will we really see
a massive mixing of first century and 21st-century technologies? This
just does not make sense.
The best route with Revelation is to understand it as a message like
so much of the rest of the New Testament we have seen: marking, per-
The Revelation 73
haps in more vivid terms than others, the end of the last days of the Old
Covenant and the beginning of the New. How it explains the beginning
of this New Covenant, and its lasting nature, that ties the whole Bible
back together, and stands as a lasting vision for us still today.
THE HEALING OF THE NATIONS

After all kinds of judgment, war, destruction, and cataclysm, the
final two chapters of Revelation provide us with a grand vision of the
future. Again, this is the future from the perspective of AD 70, just
with lasting effects into the indefinite future. After that momentous
event, we should understand the visions of peace, light, and abun-
dance which follow in that perspective as well. It is future to them, but
also a spiritual reality which came about, and which has been present
for all believers from then on through today.
Two major parts of this vision deserve our attention. These are the
“new heavens and new earth,” and the restored Garden of Eden.
If you recall, when we reviewed the prophets, we covered this
prophecy of Isaiah:
For behold, I create new heavens

and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered
or come into mind. . . .
no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping
(Isaiah 65:17, 19).
After God finally triumphs over his enemies, including death

itself, he “resurrects” his people for new life. This has a spiritual reality
to it that exists already for believers. Revelation 21 picks up Isaiah’s
theme to describe this new spiritual kingdom:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first

heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was
no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, com-
ing down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride
adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from

the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is
with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his
people, and God himself will be with them as their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death
shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor
crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have
passed away” (Revelation 21:1–4).
Not only does this reaffirm the prophecy of Isaiah (verbatim in

parts), it also employs other themes we have discussed throughout the
Bible. This new heavens and new earth is not a another physical earth,
but a spiritual place. It has a new Jerusalem described in terms of a
marriage: that same fundamental image used by Moses, the Prophets,
the Wisdom books, Paul, and others. As we said early on, the whole
rest of the Bible is the drama of finding a way to draw near to God and
dwell with him again. Here we see that reality at last, couched in terms
of Isaiah’s prophecy: no more tears, no more hurting or destruction in
God’s holy mountain, “Jerusalem.”
Revelation treats many other prophecies this way—from Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Joel, Micah, Hosea, and others.
The book of Revelation is, among other things, John’s way of mak-
ing clear that all the prophets were being fulfilled in his generation’s
lifetime.
Chapter 21 describes the New Jerusalem in glowing terms of peace,
security, abundance, and light. Interestingly, this city specifically has no
temple in it anymore: “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is
the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22).
Chapter 22 then returns us to the even more primal image of
these ideas:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,

bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of
the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city;
also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its
The Revelation 75
twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The

leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
In this image, we have been returned to Eden. This is not in some

futuristic literal kind of way, but as a spiritual reality in Jesus Christ, in
fellowship with his Spirit, his people, and his teachings. This fellow-
ship—loving God and loving one another—has an ultimate mission
and purpose before it. The mission is the healing of the nations.
Far from being a frightening treatise of future cosmic destruction,
fear, and annihilation, Revelation is a book designed to show us in
spiritual language what the destruction of the Old system in the first
century would be like, and then what the future should be like in the
spiritual temple of Jesus Christ. It is a future in which believing and
practicing the teachings of Christ will transform the entire world, like
nourishment, medicine, and healing from a tree of life. The fruit of
these trees is the healing fruit of the Spirit: peace, patience, joy, humil-
ity, love, etc. (see Galatians 5:22–23).
Instead, therefore, of fearing some grand, global conspiracy or
some future “antichrist,” believers in the Bible ought to be busy work-
ing hard to cultivate these fruits in their lives, their families, their
legislatures, and every aspect of life. We should envision Revelation
21 and 22, and we should give of our lives in business, education, and
works of charity to see it come to pass. We should be doing so to the
extent that each of us is gifted and able to do so.
CONCLUSION
(WHAT NOW?)
Y
OU NOW HAVE a basic overview of the foundational text
of the Christian faith. You now know what the Bible says and
what it teaches. The introduction you have been given here is
almost entirely mainstream. It is never possible to free any presenta-
tion of ideas completely from biases or preferred interpretations. I
would wager, however, that most knowledgeable Christians would
agree that what I have given here contains the basics, the Gospel,
God’s plan of salvation for man, and basic biblical ethics, history,
and doctrine. These are the mainstream for most denominations and
does not grind an axe for the distinctive doctrines of any of them. So
now that you have this central core of the Christian message, what
next?
What you do next depends on you. You may have obtained all you
wanted from this little book: a basic understanding of what the Bible
is all about. You may be ready to move on with your life and seek no
more.
You may have read this book as understanding for an introductory
course on religions. You may now be done with it.
You may, however, have been seeking something more, or may
have been moved by something you read here. You may even want to
learn more about becoming a Christian.
Page 62 above provides a Bible passage that tells you the first baby
steps along that path.
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and

believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
76
Conclusion 77
you will be saved. . . . For “everyone who calls on the

name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 8:1–2, 14–17,
10:9, 13).
If you feel led in this direction, you should pray to God in the
name of Jesus Christ. Ask him to forgive your sins, and profess that
you trust in him and his sacrifice for our sins.
You will then want to find Christian fellowship. You will want
to study the Bible and its details more closely for ways to seek God’s
will in your life: personal attitudes, behavioral changes, new ways of
thinking, speaking, and more.
You may want to find more Christian literature in areas that will
help you grow. Some of this will be classic literature that has helped
Christians in all ages. Some will likely be more specialized for your
interests or needs. This learning and growing part of the Christian life
is vital. It is not only for beginners. It should last your whole life long.
We can always go higher and further than we are now!
You will want to find some area in which you are gifted (you
may already know what it is) in which you can begin to serve oth-
ers. There are countless works of help and charity where Christians
can help others who need it, beginning with fellow Christians. This
could be anything from basic labor for those with disability or infir-
mity, or it could be teaching (anything), financial or insurance plan-
ning, business mentorship, sports coaching, or any area of gifting or
expertise.
The Christian life is a life of constant repentance and improve-
ment, and lifelong service to God and to others. Nearly everywhere
you turn in the Bible, you will find passages that somehow relate, ulti-
mately, to one of these basic factors.
Remember the vision at the end of Revelation: trees of life bear-
ing fruit and with leaves for the healing of the nations. Everywhere we
look, there is no shortage of lives in need of healing, whether physi-
cally, mentally, spiritually, or materially. It is our call to return to fel-
lowship with God himself, through Jesus, to be filled with his Spirit,
and to bear the fruit of that Spirit. The fruit of that Spirit will lead us
to our part in healing the nations.

If you would like to read more deeply about the teaching of the
Bible, I would recommend just reading the Bible. Perhaps the easiest
place to start is with the Gospel of Mark. You can also look for reading
plans to go through the whole Bible in a year or so. These are available
in many places.
From there, questions or interest will arise for you based on spe-
cific books, passages, or ideas. You will be able to find Christian books
from all backgrounds and at all levels on virtually any biblical topic.
Just read with the understanding that most Christian works are writ-
ten from the perspective of a certain tradition and will probably have
some unique emphases with which other Christians do not agree. It
will take time reading the Bible and other literature before you discern
what emphases you agree with and desire to pursue.
If you feel like you would like to have some handle on more of
those traditions before you start reading random Christian books on
different topics, I would recommend you read a basic introduction to
the history of the Christian church. This will give you some outlines
of where different traditions are rooted, what they believe, what they
argue about, and why, etc.
If you prefer to stick with basic Christian doctrine for now, you
can probably not go wrong with the classic by C. S. Lewis, Mere
Christianity. But there is literally a library full of books on every topic
for moving forward: relationships, marriage, parenting, psychology,
counseling, Christian theology, history, worship, discipleship, biogra-
phies, and much more.
Whether you choose to read more, move on, or to engage in
some work of the Christian life, the Lord will always have an abun-
dance of work for you to do. Beware, this abundance of work may be
simply spending a lot of time working on your own behavior or atti-
tude or psychology, social skills, etc. But it may also be educational,
or business.
Whatever it may be, I will close this book by sharing one of my
own favorite Bible verses. I will admit, this is being a bit hard on
myself, but it helps me remember his grace to me and keep up my
Conclusion 79
work ethic at the same time. So, I look to this often for motivation:
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostil-

ity against himself, so that you may not grow weary or
fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet
resisted to the point of shedding your blood (Hebrews
12:3–4).
I have indeed not struggled to the point of blood in trying to

serve Christ. (I have not even struggled to the point of sweat very
often!) There is a lot to do, and a lot more yet I could give. How am
I serving? How am I improving in my life, relationships, and service?
Who am I helping?
These are the type of questions that reading the Bible should gen-
erate for you. They are also the type of questions it will help you
answer. I leave you to that endeavor.

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UNDERSTANDING

© Copyright 2020 by Joel McDurmon

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Printed in the United States of America.

Cover Design by Praneeth Franklin

1. The Books of Moses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2. The Historical Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3. The Wisdom Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

5. The Gospels and Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

HOW THE STORY BEGINS

descendants. They were the parental representatives for all mankind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

lishing for over a decade. I earned a Master of Divinity degree from

tried to do it his own way. He took an easier route: offering vegetables

Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;

Lamech boasts himself as ten times greater than Cain. He makes

The Patriarchs and the Promise

DELIVERANCE AND FREEDOM

You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be par-

The book of Numbers is so named because God summoned his

The rest of Joshua contains similar stories. It eventually ends with

Choose this day whom you will serve, . . . But as for me

THE RETURN FROM EXILE

So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly,

As the people embrace such teaching, they begin to make reforms

There were, however, some vital considerations still outstanding.

ISRAEL’S HISTORY AND PROPHECY

historical events, Job is most widely understood to address the subject,

Then Job answered the Lord and said: “Behold, I am of

After another round of questioning from God, Job confesses that

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers

We read of his power as creator and sustainer, just as he had

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art

We hear David’s famous expression of repentance, echoed since

I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my

Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand,

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All

His darkened outlook appears in many passages like these:

So there is no advantage even to industry or hard work while

The Song of Songs, or Solomon’s Song, picks up on the theme of

not sayings of wisdom, but a poetic narrative of enraptured, marital

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!

The Song runs for eight chapters. It contains no doctrine or even

Because God considers his relationship with his people as like a

Listen to the word of the Lord, O sons of Israel,

Because there is no faithfulness or kindness

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Many more clearly demonstrate the role of the Messiah to come.

He was despised and rejected by men,

Surely he has borne our griefs

Likewise, in Ezekiel 37, we see a vivid depiction of the return of

Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up

This passage is highly poetic. It clearly is a reference to the return

It shall come to pass in the latter days

This vision is not mere tribal or ethnic restoration, but of global

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

Understanding this globally is not so difficult. Understanding

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I

Like a successful marriage, this relationship was to be one of inti-

For behold, I create new heavens

As we will see later, the New Testament repeats these promises,