Overview of the Bible

“God the Creator appears as God the Redeemer, actively furthering a great plan for recreating a race and restoring a cosmos that sin has spoiled. The backbone of the Bible is the narrative histories, from Genesis to Acts, telling of a covenant people, an exodus from captivity, a promised land, a monarchy that over the centuries became a focus of unfaithfulness, a national captivity and return from exile, a prophesied Savior who died and rose and reconstituted the covenant people in faith-union with himself, and an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to make the beginning of heaven’s life a matter of experience here on earth. The rest of the biblical material is linked to this backbone in terms of its content, just as your rib cage, the other bits and pieces of your skeleton, and your nervous and muscular systems are linked one way or another to your backbone. The Old Testament prophetic books and wisdom books and the New Testament epistles explain and apply the truths about God that are displayed in the history and tell us how to live in response to them. The Psalter models for us the practice of prayer and praise, complaint and celebration, and the book of Revelation gives visions of final victory when Christ comes again. Such is the organism of Bible teaching; such is the vision of the world’s story seen from God’s point of view on which the sixty-six books converge.”

–JI Packer