Here it is. What the Bible is all about:
God graciously saves sinners through Jesus Christ.
That’s it. That is the theme of the Bible. Many subordinate themes support this foundational idea, but they are only supporting it, not supplanting it. I will seek to develop each element in this sentence to give you the beginning of an idea of how this theme provides the interpretational framework for all the information of Scripture.
God. First of all, the Bible is about God. In English grammar we would say that “God” is the subject of the sentence above. That means that He is the “doer” of the action (verb – saves) in the sentence. “Sinners” is the object receiving the action, not the doer of the action. The Bible is all about what God does to save guilty, sinful men. [We abominate as heresy any attempt to make man his own savior, or even partial savior. The church has stood against those views since the early days (really since Genesis 3)].
Therefore, when we read the Bible we need to ask, “What is God doing in this passage?” Whatever man does in the text needs to be understood in the light (context) of what God is doing both in the specific passage and in the Bible overall. Man, in the text, is the object of the sentence – the recipient of God’s grace – not the subject of the sentence, the gracious source or the example to follow. As the Holy Spirit so pointedly puts it, “Who makes you better? And what do you have that you have not received?” (1 Cor.4:7). God makes the difference, not man (Gen. 3:15a). God makes the difference between unbeliever and believer, and between one believer and another. If there is anything in man to boast of, let him boast of God. Therefore, the Bible is not a book of examples to be imitated, but of God’s saving grace to be recognized, sought, and trusted.
No comments:
Post a Comment