I have always been a sucker for the “explain a movie plot badly” trend that’s floated around the internet for a while. Here are a few of my favorites:
- The Lord of the Rings: Group of friends spend 9 hours returning jewelry.
- Titanic: Rich girl lets poor boy freeze to death.
- Home Alone: After being abandoned by his family, young boy attacks two homeless men.
- The Wizard of Oz: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
The Wizard of Oz one is my personal favorite. The funniest summaries are always the ones that are kind of true when you think about it.
Now, imagine someone asked you to summarize the Bible. What would you say? That’s a tough question! If you asked 200 believers in a room, you’d probably get 200 different answers. After all, the Bible is a big, complicated book. And in one sense, it’s not even one book—it’s a whole library.
Yet there is a grand thread running through all of Scripture. We’re about to begin a new series called People of Promise, where we’ll look at some of these threads and motifs from different perspectives.
As Sally Lloyd-Jones puts it so beautifully in the first chapter of The Jesus Storybook Bible, “No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a story……there are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one big story.” Few things have built my faith more than studying the sweeping narrative of Scripture. I felt it so crucial that a few years ago I created my own Bible study curriculum to help people trace these big themes. Understanding the larger story can transform your devotional life and Bible study.
We shortchange the Bible if we treat it merely as an encyclopedia of moral and theological answers. The Bible is not Aesop’s fables. Zooming in on verses and books is always valuable—but if we stay too granular, we miss the grand picture of what God is doing in creation. It’s like living your whole life in Murfreesboro and saying, “Yep, I pretty much know what the world is like.” And then one day you go up in a hot air ballon of study and realize the world is a much bigger and beautiful place.
One thread I always come back to lies near the end of the story (or better, the end of part one of eternity’s story). Revelation 21:3–4 says:
“Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”
From the very beginning, God has desired to create a people to be with Him—children who bear His image in creation. Not because He needs to, but because He wants to, out of the overflow of His loving Triune nature. I love how C.S. Lewis captures this in The Screwtape Letters. From the perspective of a fictional demon, Lewis writes:
"One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over."
I imagine most people are familiar with the comedic line, “I can see my house from here!” It’s a classic cartoon gag that originated in mid-20th-century slapstick, typically shouted by a character falling from a great height or launched skyward, playing on the absurd idea that they’ve risen high enough to spot their own home.
Studying the grand story of the Bible is kind of like that. You get up high enough and you see a whole new way of understanding the lay of the land….and yes, you can see where you are intended to live. God gets what He wants—a people of His very own. Just like He promised. The grand mission accomplished, but the story never ends as we dwell with Him eternally in the light of His life and love. He is full and flows over!