Getting to grips with the big picture
Imagine you picked up the latest novel by your favourite author and decided to read a few paragraphs from the middle. The next day you read a chapter from near the beginning, the following day you read a few pages from near the end, then later that week you read a few sentences from one chapter, then a few more sentences from another chapter. After that you stopped reading it because you didn’t think the novel was very good and you couldn’t understand what was going on!
You just wouldn’t approach a novel like this, it just wouldn’t make sense. But this is the way that many people approach the Bible and therefore it’s not surprising that they often find it so confusing.
Clearly there are many differences between the Bible and a novel; however, some of the same principles do apply. We also need a ‘reality’ check, after all the Bible is a very big book, in fact it’s not just one book, it’s a library of 66 books, and they are not in chronological order, so reading it from cover-to-cover wouldn’t necessarily remove the confusion.
It is for these reasons that I think it is absolutely essential that we help people get to grips with big picture of the biblical story.
When you are doing a jigsaw puzzle it’s very hard to make sense of an individual piece of the puzzle by itself, it’s very difficult to know where it fits into the picture, you need to work out which pieces it joins to. And what is usually very helpful it being able to see a picture of the finished jigsaw so you can discover where that individual piece fits.
Several of the articles in this series have stated how important it is that we teach young people the tools to understand the Bible correctly, in my opinion, enabling them to fit the ‘small parts’ into the ‘big picture’ is one of, if not the, most beneficial tool you can teach them.
Having an overview of the Biblical story not only helps you understand where individual parts fit into the whole, it also provides you with an outline of the Gospel message, it explains God’s plan for humanity, and it also provides an extremely useful theological framework. It’s a framework of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation.
- Creation: God created a perfect world out of nothing. Humans are the pinnacle of his creation and are God’s representatives on earth, made to live in relationship with God (and each other) and serve him.
- Fall: Humans disobeyed God. This had far reaching consequences on individuals, communities and the entire planet.
- Redemption: Jesus Christ reconciled us with God when he died for our sins.
- Consummation: The Holy Spirit enables transformation to take place and the church is meant to be establishing God’s Kingdom here on earth in part. Jesus will return to establish a new heaven and a new earth which will be perfect – God’s Kingdom in full.
This framework is something that we will explore in more depth in future articles because it can be a very effective way to get young people thinking theologically. Think of an issue that you want to explore with your groups. For example, marriage, homosexuality or suffering. There are three main approaches you can use to find out what the Bible has to say about the subject.
- Quoting: You find a few ‘proof-texts’ that show what the Bible says about that particular issue. The danger of this approach is that you may decide what you think the Bible says about the issue and then find verses that support your case. (See article, “Quote, Unquote”)
- Narrative: You find a passage that addresses the issue. This can be much more effective than “quoting” individual verses; however, it is still crucial that the passage is read in context.
- Framework: You find out what the ‘big picture’ of the Bible can teach you about the particularly issue being explored. What does creation teach us about marriage, homosexuality or suffering? What can we learn about the situation from the fall? How should we approach the issue in light of redemption? How should we respond to the issue when thinking about consummation?
In practice a combination of those three approaches is usually a good idea. However, in my opinion, the most essential one is the ‘framework’ – and sadly that’s the one which is often not present. Helping young people get to grips with the ‘big picture’ of the Bible is crucial if we want young people to discover what the Bible has to say about the difficult issues they are wrestling with.
Phil Green, *essential project director
