God’s Dwelling Place: A Bible Overview

The Heart of the Biblical Story: God Loves His Neighbours as Himself

In a previous life, I spent about a year and a half living in the Middle East. One evening, sat in the empty upper room of a dingy cafe in a sketchy part of town, I was having a lively conversation with two young men who had confided in me that they had left Islam. One lamented that his life now felt completely empty — he was glad that he’d left Islam, but now had nothing. He asked me the question we often dream of being asked, only to discover we have no answer: ‘So what is Christianity all about, anyway?’ I tried to summarise the biblical story in one idea: God loves you and wants to be near you. The overview of the Bible that I present here is essentially an exposition of that Sunday School truth.

I have heard many Bible overviews over the past few years, and always enjoy them. Of course, trying to reduce the narrative of the universe that is more fully explained in over a thousand pages (which St. John still considers brief, cf. Jn. 21:25) inevitably means omitting some key aspects of the story, but the constraint is part of the fun. Having said that, one point of the narrative that is often overlooked, admittedly anecdotally in my experience of hearing Bible overviews in several churches/organisations, is Pentecost. Of course, if one has limited space and wants to present Scripture as a unified story, one always has to choose a primary lens or dominant metaphor for the overview. The one that (it seems to me) is most popular at the moment is that of the Kingdom of God.