It’s Tuesday night. Not a chill, kick-back and relax Tuesday night, but an end of term, bags under eyes, praying-for-the-weekend type of Tuesday night. In the room are social workers, teachers, doctors, students, artists and more busy young people from eighteen to thirty. All in all, there’s twenty-five of us in the small hall. I’ve got two hours to try and teach the whole Bible. Easy stuff, right?
Having worked our way through the Torah, Joshua and the Judges, Kings Saul, David and Solomon, we finished at the fall of Israel to the Assyrian empire.
I was sweating.
They were smiling.
‘I had no idea that geography was helpful to understanding the Bible.’
‘Oh, that’s what’s really going on in Numbers. Context matters.’
‘I’ve never heard anyone talk about Amos.’
Or, my personal favourite: ‘Joel, I’m angry at you. Now I know how much time I’ve wasted not reading my Old Testament. Now I can’t wait to get stuck in.’
Are you Hungry to Read The Whole Bible?
I don’t list those quotes to enlarge my ego, but point out a very basic truth: people are hungry.
Hungry to read their Bibles.
Hungry to find the God that leaps off the page.
However, churches, despite how good their preachers may be (and that’s a big maybe), only have their Sunday slot to teach scripture. Whether it be a ten-minute homily or hour-long exegesis, it’s completely insufficient to complete the mammoth task at hand: learning the whole Bible.
That’s where this post comes in.
This week we’ve been going through a series of blog posts aimed at helping you learn Bible. The point is to break down the Bible into bite size chunks. Starting with dividing the Bible into Old and New Testament, we are going to break each Testament down even further into sections and slowly walk through the entire thing. This is not a line by line study, but a sweeping overview.
People are hungry.
Hungry to read their Bibles.
Hungry to find the God that leaps off the page.
My goal is simple: to let you see the Bible from a bird’s eye view. From there, I’ll point you towards resources that will help you dive into the detail: videos, commentaries, courses and study guides to help you.
Let’s not waste anymore time.
Two Testaments. Two diagrams. Two pages.
Welcome to the 2 Page Bible
Page One: The Old Testament
This page is a simple summary of the whole Old Testament (OT), with books placed into chronological order. The story of the OT can be broken down into three parts, and we’re currently going through these sections on this blog: ‘Torah’, ‘The Jewish Kingdom’ and ‘Exile and Return’.
Page Two: The New Testament
This page is a simple summary of the whole New Testament (NT), with books placed into chronological order. The story of the NT can be broken down into three parts: ‘Jesus and the Twelve’, ‘The Growing Early Church’ and ‘The Universal Church’. The New Testament is a library of books compiled across the first century AD, and so this diagram has a more precise timeline.
