by Stephen Rodgers
My father has a story he tells from time to time about something that happened when he was a Sunday School teacher. He was doing “sword drills” for a group of 2nd or 3rd graders (for anyone who doesn’t know the term, those are basically games where kids compete to see who can look up verses the fastest). The kids were doing pretty well, and just to see what would happen, he asked them to look up “2 Hezekiah 3:15.”
There is no such book as 2 Hezekiah.
The first thing that went wrong was that the kids kept looking for the non-existent book. He kept dropping hints that they should check the table of contents, and a few of them did just that.
The second thing that went wrong was that one child leapt to his feet, called out in an excited voice that he “had it,” and proceeded to read…something…aloud. The other children were disappointed that he “found” the verse before they did; my father was disappointed for an entirely different reason.
Martin Luther once wrote that “it is a sin and shame not to know our own book or to understand the speech and words of our God.” I’m afraid that the sin and shame that Luther observed in his time has only grown more prevalent in ours.
For the next 70-80 weeks, we’re going to have a new series here on the Beacon. The working title for it is “BOB”…Books of the Bible. We’re going to go over the meta-narrative of Scripture, the various genres that comprise the Scriptures, and each book of the Bible in some detail. In particular we’ll discuss things like authorship, chronological context, historical/theological themes, background and setting, literary features, summaries, and anything else that comes up. I’m hoping we’ll even have time for some tangential issues like the Canonicity of the Bible and the Apocrypha.
These articles won’t be exhaustive; if you really want to dig into one or more books of the Bible you’re going to need to go well beyond what we’ll cover in this series. But it’s a start.
I hope that you will stay tuned, keep reading, and that this series will give you a renewed love, understanding, and appreciation for God’s word.