What is the Bible?

Hope you've had a wonderful Sabbath day, friends! If you're here in the Sandhills of North Carolina, we had an absolutely spectacular day, didn't we? I was happy to spend a few hours outdoors at a local park, walking four miles with a friend, and then having a yummy lunch with our Life Group.

I've spent most of the afternoon working on the first week of a six week study I'm leading beginning this Tuesday. It's called "Unwrapping God's Gift: Understanding the Bible". I'm pretty excited about it. As always, I struggle with how to shrink down and clarify all the goodies I have swimming around in this fishbowl head of mine. Pray for me!

Each week's topic will be a question. This week's is What is the Bible? It's a question that is foundational to the rest of the study.  Putting it a little differently:

• Is the Bible a record of man reaching out to God?
• Or is the Bible a record of God reaching down to man?

Simply, is it man's word or is it God's? The answer is not only crucial to the gals' understanding of the material we'll be covering the remaining weeks, but it's critical to their understanding of themselves, God, and Jesus. 

Since I'm a member of a church belonging to the EFCA, I decided to take their Statement of Faith on the Bible and break it apart:

We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.

I'll leave you with a few facts that I'll be sharing as we get kicked off:

• The Bible contains 66 "books" divided up into two "Testaments", the Old and New.
• It was written by 40 different authors over a span of 1500 years.
• It was written on three different continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe.
• It was written in three different languages - Hebrew (OT), Greek (NT) and Aramaic (NT)
• Amazingly, all the books share a common storyline - the creation, fall, and redemption of God's people. 

I'll be blogging more about our lesson this week! Blessings!

Oh! Part of our homework will be to memorize the first ten books of the Bible. Want to join us?

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel