BIBLE READERS AND TEACHERS know that the Bible is a storybook.
My Sunday school teacher in the primary department recommended the Bible to me, and I began to read it. At a crisis in my college days I knew that my one hope was to read the Bible.
I read it, not in snatches, but in hours and days out of desperation. I started in Genesis chapter 1. When I reached the book of Jonah, I came upon the verse, “Salvation is of the Lord!”
I realized then that the Bible did not give a full history of Israel, but a history of God’s work of saving his chosen people. It is all about what God did. He who holds the worlds in his hand came down to save us.
The Bible is the story of how God came down to be born of the Virgin Mary, to live and die for us, and to rise in triumph from the tomb. It was not my grip on God that was my hope, but his grip on me.
As I continued to study and teach the Bible, I saw increasingly that God’s promise in the Old Testament was kept in the New Testament.
It was kept in the coming of God the Son. John’s Gospel witnesses to the deity of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Jesus, John tells us, is the one whom Isaiah saw in his vision of God seated on his throne between the cherubim (John 12:41).
The Angel who appeared to Moses at the burning bush in the desert identified himself as the “I AM” God. Not only do the four Gospels tell the story of Jesus. So do the five books of Moses, who gave God’s promise of the Prophet to come.
So does the rest of the Old Testament. Remember that the apostle Paul, preaching in every synagogue from the Scriptures, was preaching from the scrolls of the Old Testament. Paul gave the apostolic witness to Jesus in whom all the Old Testament Scripture is fulfilled.
