Introduction: One Story

On the Sunday Jesus rose from the dead, two of His followers were walking home from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. They were miserable. Everything they had hoped for had been nailed to a cross. A stranger fell into step beside them and asked what they were talking about, and they poured it all out. Then the stranger did something remarkable. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself” (Luke 24:27).

The stranger was Jesus. And on that seven-mile walk He took them through their Bible, our Old Testament, and showed them that it was not a random pile of laws, histories and poems. It was one story, and He was at the centre of it. Later they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us as He spoke with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).

This book is an attempt to walk that road with you.

Why the Bible can feel confusing

If you have ever tried to read the Bible from the beginning, you probably know the feeling. Genesis is gripping. Exodus has plagues and a parting sea. Then Leviticus arrives with its pages of rules about mould and skin diseases, and many people quietly give up.

Part of the problem is that the Bible is not one book. It is a library of sixty-six books, written over more than a thousand years by around forty writers, in three languages, on three continents. It contains history, law, poetry, songs, proverbs, prophecy, biographies, letters and visions. They are not arranged in the order things happened. And it was written in times and cultures very different from ours.

But here is the surprise. Under all that variety there runs one story. It begins in a garden and ends in a city. It begins with God walking with the people He made and ends with God living among them for ever. In between, everything goes wrong and God sets out to put it right, through a family, a nation, a king, and finally through His own Son. “On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2).

Once you can see that story, the Bible starts to make sense. You know where you are, the way you do in a long film once you understand the plot.

How this book works

The Big Story has thirty chapters in seven parts, from the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation. Each chapter has the same shape:

• Read it. A passage to read in your own Bible, usually one to four chapters. This book is not a replacement for the Bible. It is a map to help you read it.
• The story. What happens, told plainly, and where it fits in the whole story.
• Where Jesus is in this. How this part of the Bible points forward to Jesus, using the way the New Testament itself reads it.
• Think about it. One question to take away.
• Go deeper. A chapter from a classic in the Ochorus library about the same part of the Bible.

You could read a chapter a day for a month, or one a week with a friend or a youth group. Either way, try to read the passage in your Bible first. Any translation will do, but this book quotes the Berean Standard Bible.

A few things to know before you start

The Bible is honest. Its heroes lie, cheat, panic and fail, and some of its stories are violent and hard to read. We will not skip those parts or pretend they are easy. The Bible tells the truth about people because it is telling the truth about God’s rescue of people exactly like them.

Christians agree on the main lines of the story. On a few questions, such as how to read the days of creation or how to map out the events in Revelation, faithful Christians reach different conclusions, and where that happens we will say so and leave you to think it through with your church and family.

Most of all, remember why the story was written. John said of his Gospel, “But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31). The Bible is not just a story to know. It is a story to step into.