God’s Word is packed full of power … power unlimited … to transform your life. But one of the biggest problems people have with the Bible is understanding it. Making sense of it. Knowing where it comes from, and where what they’re reading today fits into the big picture. Well, I think it’s time we did something about that.   About the Bible – Old and New We’ve all heard of those word association tests that psychologists use. You know, they say ‘black’, you say ‘white'; they say ‘rabbit’ and you say ‘carrot'; day/night; God/mmm love; devil/mmm evil; Bible/hmm … Bible? How do you respond to that? Stuffy, old, irrelevant? Well, different people will have some different views but actually in Australia where I live, the Bible is one of the least trusted of all historical documents. Over the last week and a bit on the program we’ve been talking about the incredible power that we unlock, when we read the Bible. But this thing that we call “the Bible”, it’s a big book, it’s massive and it can be daunting. So today I thought it might be useful just to have a look to see what this Bible is exactly. I want to share with you a secret, it’s sad but true. I never read a book cover to cover until I was in my early twenties. I managed to get through school and university and did pretty well I might add, without ever reading a book from beginning to end. I remember at university, in first year English, we studied the book Wuthering Heights which absolutely bored me to tears, I’m sorry and I never opened the book once. There are companies that publish crib notes, you know the summary of the book and a summary of what’s in it and a summary of what some of the critics say, so I just quickly read those, crib notes, wrote essays and did, by and large, reasonably well. And I never, ever liked libraries either. You know how libraries have this kind of dusty, dank smell; all of them are the same. Every library on the planet has the same smell. I thought about it for a while, I thought ‘Berni, why don’t you like libraries? Why did it take you so long to read books?’ The answer I guess has two parts. Firstly, libraries for me always felt really big and inaccessible. They have tens of thousands of books and in the old days when I was at university, they had card systems for accessing, for finding things, I mean these days they have computers. The old card systems had what they call the Dewey Classification system and finding anything just took so incredibly long. And secondly, when you did find the stuff, there was always so much of it, there was so much time involved to, I don’t know, look through all those books and research them. I mean, some people are natural book worms, well I’m not. I still frankly don’t like libraries. I’m sorry if you’re a librarian, I just don’t like libraries. I haven’t darkened the doorstep of one since I finished my last degree quite a few years ago now. You know something; I think for a lot of people the Bible is exactly like that. It feels big and inaccessible. There are many, many people who wouldn’t mind having a read but, for goodness sakes, where do you start? Well today let’s break it down a bit, let’s make it a bit more accessible. I remember when I started Bible College only a few months after becoming a Christian, everyone took for granted that we knew about the Bible. The reality was, I didn’t and my hunch is, I wasn’t alone. Let’s unpack it a bit, let’s demystify it a bit. All of a sudden you know it becomes a whole bunch more accessible. The thing that we call the Bible is made up of 66 different books written by different people over somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 years. That’s the kind of period over which the Bible was written. And it wasn’t just written by different people but at different times and the last book was written, well almost 2,000 years ago. There are essentially two parts to the Bible, this was complete news to me when I first opened it, the Old Testament and the New Testament, and when I started at Bible College I didn’t know which one was which. The Old Testament, well the Old Testament is God’s story and the story of how He interacted with and engaged with His chosen people, the Israelites. The Old Testament is written completely B.C., before Christ, before Jesus came to be on earth with us here. What Christians call the Old Testament is in fact exactly the same as the Jewish Hebrew scriptures, Jews still use those same scriptures today, Christians call it the Old Testament. It’s written mostly in the original language of Hebrew, the language of the Jews. Now there’s small parts of books like Daniel which is written in a language called Aramaic which is the language that Jesus actually spoke but by and large, the Old Testament was originally written in the language of Hebrew. And what we have today, the thing that we call the Old Testament is an English translation of that. Now there are lots of funny name books, Deuteronomy and Judges and Chronicles and there’s Ezekiel, there are 39 separate books and there are kind of 4 main parts of the Old Testament. The first 5 books, Genesis to Deuteronomy, are the Jewish or Hebrew Law, the Torah. And then you go Joshua through Ezra and Nehemiah and that’s kind of the history of what God did and how His people responded. And then after that are the wisdom books, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Lamentations. And the rest of the books in the Old Testament are written by men called Prophets. Men whom God called to call His people back to Him. That’s the Old Testament, it’s a story of God engaging with Gods people. And the New Testament is 27 books. Now, it was mostly written in the language of Greek. The first 4 books, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are gospel accounts, they’re the historical account of Jesus’ life and His ministry. And the next book, the book of Acts is the story of the first 20 or so years of the Church after Jesus rose again to be with His Father. Then there’s a whole bunch of letters called Epistles from people like Peter and John and Paul, written to Churches that they were involved in or in some cases, to individuals. This may be old hat to some, but I know to many, just a simple understanding of the basic structure of the Bible is going to be a real help. I know that when I was a new Christian, no one ever bothered to explain it to me – I wish they had. Now some people might be saying to themselves, that’s all well and good, but how accurate is the Bible. Because before the printing press was ever invented by Gutenberg in 1450, the Bible – there’s this massive thing, the Old Testament and New Testament – was transcribed over and over by hand by people called Scribes who copied them by hand. It’s hard to imagine. But these days, there’s a science called Textual Criticism. It studies whether any errors crept into the Bible as it was copied through all these generations manuscripts. And what it tells us, is that having studied thousands of manuscripts, the levels of accuracy are remarkable. I mean it’s a science, people have done it. There are very, very few words or sentences where there is any doubt what was originally written. And blessedly these days, this thing called the Bible has been translated into easy to read, contemporary versions. No more thee’s and thou’s – great, modern day, accurate, easy to understand translations. And did you know that in the Bible, over half of the 66 books, over half, you can read in half and hour or less. Now look, in a few minutes we can’t hope to do anything but scrape the surface. Today we’ve just talked about some basic factual stuff. No-one really taught me this stuff. I remember becoming a Christian and going and sitting in a Church and people just teach from the Bible which is wonderful but no-one ever explained to me that...

Released on 11 Apr 2021