Telling God's Story - Chapter 2: What the Bible Actually Is (and Isn't)

Telling God's Story has two major parts to it:

• Part One: How to Teach the Bible
• Part Two: Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible

Chapter 2 begins the portion on how to teach the Bible, and the author's objective is to give a clear explanation of the Bible's nature. He summarizes this by saying that it is "a complex and fascinating narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - not a book of rules or a manual of morals."

What we expect the Bible to be and do is critical in our approach to it. While making personal application to my life is good, that is not the primary purpose of the Bible. This is a difficult shift for us to make; but when reading the Word, we should learn to move from asking "What about me?" to "What does this tell me about God in the context in which it was written?"
A fundamental and beginning question we need to ask about the Bible is "What do we have the right to expect from God's word as a book written in an ancient world?"

In answer to this question, Enns presents two major thoughts:

1. Jesus and the Bible are similar. The fact that Jesus had weaknesses and limitations as a human and yet that doesn't detract at all from His being fully God, so the Bible has weaknesses and limitations and yet is truly from God; it is fully divine and fully human. The Bible is an ancient book, and "the fact that Genesis 1 reflects ancient creation stories does not point to error in the Bible, any more than Jesus' wearing sandals and speaking Aramaic was sin...Don't expect Jesus to be something He isn't...He was lowly. He came to serve. Likewise, don't expect something from the Bible it can't deliver. Don't expect it to be high and lofty, detached from the ancient world in which it was written."
2. The Bible is not a rule book or an owner's manual; it takes wisdom.  We've been taught that we can find answers to life's daily issues in the Bible, and as parents, we desperately want to find answers there to everyday questions as to how to raise our children; we tend to approach it as a "Christian owner's manual". But this isn't the kind of book God has given us; it does not address specifically modern situations but rather it tells "the story of how God's people are delivered from death to life, and as a result are now called upon to live a life in harmony with that high calling."

Enns goes on to say (concerning point #2) that the Bible, by telling the story of God's people and His dealings with them, is giving us a general vision for what the life of a follower of Jesus looks like. He suggests that the single most important concept for living the Christian life in any era is WISDOM (as opposed to having to find a scripture verse for everything we do).

He gives the example of his 12-year-old son who wanted to see the movie, "Saving Private Ryan". As he prayed and considered several factors about his son (such as personality type, his "internal filters", timing for him to see it in a controlled setting, etc.), he felt it would be good to watch it with him. Although a concerned friend used a verse from Proverbs to try to show him that he shouldn't have let his son see it, Peter felt that it was wisdom to watch it with his son at that time.

The fact is that much of our daily living requires that we "wing it" - this "winging it" is based on wisdom that we accumulate over the years through study of God's story, prayer, fellowship with other followers of Jesus, and life experience.

The reason it's important to move from viewing the Bible as an instruction manual that tells us how we should behave to seeing it as an ancient narrative/story about God and His people is that the latter view of scripture gives a big vision to our children. Seeing the Bible as a book of morals and principles diminishes its beauty and power to compel us to a transcendent way of life in God. "The story the Bible tells, which culminates in the Gospel, both disorients and reorients us. The Bible does not tell us about a religion that we practice; it points us to rebirth, a transformation, a whole new way of being. This, I think, has been lost on our young people; and when the vision is lost, they wind up abandoning their faith, blaming it for failing to 'connect' with their world."

Next we'll look at chapter 3: "Teaching the Bible as God's Story".