Very useful speed summary of the bible for gnostics reluctant to read it.
Must say I have never been endeared to this great book because I have encountered so many Christians who have got lost in it’s wilderness. Wasted their lives. Misinformed about the most fundamental things.
I also never knew where to start. And I am still not sure I want to start.
Its difficult to know how many christians came to know the holy spirt from reading the book. Most apparently don’t. Up till now. There is no specific procedure on knowing the spirit. Just wishin and Hopin in a prayer closet means God has made himself deliberately scarce for a reason like letting enemies nearly take over the world, to put the faithful in a corner to render them introspective where God is waiting for them internally. It literally happened to my Mother at 92 she was tormented into despair by world events. And finally an internal voice spoke to her with reassurance.
She was never allowed to become Lay Gnostic. I have often wondered why. Different story line is her life, I muse. Her torment in old age is still increasing with her new Fibre Optic phone hacked producing random malicious calls on the day she makes a hospital visit. And her email log-in mechanism via Fibre Optic has been broken for 6 weeks. She lifts off the phone for tech support, expecting the new Fibre Optic dial tone and she gets insulting frightening voices directed at her and slams it down in disarray. What’s an old lady supposed to do ?
Any way this video is a wonderful quick summary of the bible and for look up, printout purposes I enclose below the transcript
The Bible is a huge book. Actually, it’s 66 books, but why are there so many? Do we really need all of them?
Here’s what each of the books contributes to the text.
Genesis is about the beginnings of stuff, and to say that God made everything.
God made the world, and everything in the world. God’s most important creation is humans.
Genesis also talks about the beginnings of sin, but sin is not from God, because sin is not a thing that exists.
Sin is just a corruption of stuff. And humans get corrupted with sin, so as humans multiply, so does sin.
but God still has a plan to redeem the world.
Genesis talks about the beginnings of God’s covenant people, the people God’s gonna work through to bless the whole world.
God chooses Abraham to be the father of his covenant people, which he calls Israel.
So Exodus is about the salvation of God’s people.
God’s people are slaves in Egypt,
but God uses Moses to deliver them into the promised land, and this foreshadows how Jesus saves his people from slavery to sin and
brings them into the kingdom of God.
Leviticus is about the sanctification, or the making more holy, of God’s people.
Leviticus is a big elaborate system of rituals and ceremonies, but the purpose of all this is so God’s people can be holy just like he is holy.
God wants his people to be set apart as a light to the rest of the world.
Now, Numbers is about God’s people wandering in the desert.
You see, right after they were saved, they didn’t immediately go into the promised land.
Instead, they wandered in the desert for 40 years.
And along the way there was a lot of setbacks, challenges, and punishments.
But Deuteronomy is a covenant that God makes with his people right before they enter the promised land.
God promises blessings if they’re faithful to the covenant, and curses if they’re not.
And Moses gives them this covenant, but unfortunately he dies before he’s able to enter the promised
land.
These first five books are called the Torah, or the Pentateuch, because they’re the books of Moses.
But something interesting to notice is that the themes of these books parallel the life of a believer.
First, we’re created, then at some point in our life we’re saved, and then God sanctifies us.
It’s always Exodus before Leviticus. It’s always salvation before sanctification.
God always redeems his people before he asks anything of them.
But sanctification isn’t an upward process, and there’s always a lot of spiritual wandering and struggle.
And the vast majority of believers will die before they enter the Promised Land, but what matters in the end is whether they were faithful to God’s covenant.
So in the Book of Joshua, God’s people are right outside the Promised Land, but the land is currently inhabited by a lot of evil nations.
So they’re gonna need to fight to take it over, but they have faith in God
So God strengthens them so that they can conquer for God’s kingdom
The book of Judges goes over a pattern that goes something like this
God’s people prosper and do very well, but then they forget about God
So then they suffer and then they turn back to God so they prosper again
And every time they turn back to God, it’s because of a judge that God appointed the book of Ruth is set during this time
It’s about Ruth now she is not an Israelite, but she still migrates over to the promised land and joins God’s covenant
And she’s not an ordinary nobody either. She’s the great-grandmother of King David, who is the ancestor of Jesus himself.
So this shows that God often works through people who others consider to be insignificant.
And this sort of applies to David, who the next book is about.
First Samuel is all about David, who starts out as just a normal shepherd boy, but after he defeats the giant warrior Goliath,
everyone sees David as more of a hero than the current king, King Saul, and this gets Saul really jealous.
But honestly, can you blame him if people are saying things like this?
Yeah, but anyway, 1st Samuel is all about King David’s rise to power because he’s eventually gonna become king.
2nd Samuel is all about David’s kingdom. It starts off really well, and it’s expanding.
But David is told that he’s gonna have a descendant who’s gonna be a new and better version of him, whose kingdom is gonna cover the entire world. And the reason this is necessary is because David isn’t perfect.
He eventually sins, and because of that, everything goes downhill for him. 1st Kings is about David’s son Solomon.
He does a lot to glorify God, like building a huge, beautiful temple, and dispensing a lot of wisdom for the people.
For example, when two women are fighting over a baby,
Solomon figures out which woman the baby really belongs to by offering to cut the baby in half.
But Solomon isn’t perfect either, because he eventually becomes a total playboy, and then things go downhill for him as well.
And so Second Kings is all about the downward spiral of the kings who came after Solomon.
The kingdom split into two, and both kingdoms had many evil kings who turned to false gods.
And both kingdoms ended up being destroyed by other nations eventually.
But during this time, God raised up Elijah, who called the people to repent and worship God alone.
And although nobody listened to him at the time, later everyone saw Elijah as very important.
So First Chronicles covers a lot of the same events as First Samuel and Second Samuel,
but while those books are more like personal biographies of David,
First Chronicles is more like a history textbook about the kingdom as a whole, and it talks about the rise of the kingdom.
Second Chronicles is similar, except it talks about the fall of the kingdom, going to the Babylonian exile.
It focuses less on the personal sins of the kings and more about the collective sins of the kingdom.
But something to keep in mind is even though everything was falling apart over time, there were a lot of reforms along the way.
You see, even when God’s temple was literally being used as a place of demon worship, God’s people didn’t give up on it, and many prophets still tried to reform the temple.
This book really ends on a downer, but it sets us up for the hidden gem that is Ezra.
The theme of this book is honestly nostalgia.
You see, the Israelites used to have a big, beautiful, glorious temple,
but it got destroyed and they were sent into exile.
They were eventually able to return and rebuild the temple,
but when they did, it just wasn’t as good as it used to be.
It didn’t have God’s presence like before, and they were not able to recreate their old experiences, which is something that everyone can relate to.
The book of Nehemiah is about the same thing.
For a brief period of time it looked like the good times were about to come back, but Nehemiah got disappointed when he realized that the new generation didn’t care about being holy.
And this shows that we’re not able to recreate what was lost,
which is why we need hope that all good things will one day be restored.
The book of Esther is a really interesting story about a plot to kill all of God’s people, but through a bunch of crazy coincidences, like Esther becoming the queen, she was able to rescue her people.
Now, the thing about this book is it’s the one book that doesn’t mention God by name.
But through these coincidences, we can see that God is the one orchestrating this entire story.
Fun fact, the Jewish people still celebrate this story to this day by eating triangles.
Wondering why evil exists?
The Book of Job has an answer, or at least a partial answer.
You see, if we only received good things from God, then we would only love God for the good things that we receive.
So God allows evil things, but if we love God through those evil things, God’s gonna turn them around for redemption, and God also says there’s a lot of cosmic stuff behind the scenes that we don’t understand.
Psalms is the music of the Bible, containing a psalm for just about every human emotion.
Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings.
And the book of Ecclesiastes is one big existential crisis, about a man who gains everything in life but learns that it’s all meaningless in the end.
It’s a very depressing book, but it shows the depressing reality of a life lived without God.
Song of Solomon is a big book about how awesome love and sex are.
Isaiah is a microcosm of the whole Bible.
It’s generally divided into chapters 1 to 39 and then chapters 40 to 66,
just like the Bible is divided into the first 39 books and then books 40 to 66.
I know that the chapters and verses were added later,
but there’s still an interesting pattern.
Because the first 39 chapters are about judgment and the rest are about hope, just like the Old Testament is associated with the law and the New Testament with the gospel.
And there’s a lot of other interesting patterns, so make of it what you will.
But either way, Isaiah has the most explicit prophecies of Jesus in the entire Old Testament.
The book of Jeremiah prophesies the destruction of all false religion.
You see, it doesn’t matter how many religious rituals you do. If you don’t have true faith, it’s all worthless in the end, and God’s gonna destroy it.
And that’s exactly what happened to the Israelite religion when God destroyed their temple and sent them to exile in Babylon.
And right after this happened, Jeremiah wrote another book called Lamentations.
He’s really sad that Jerusalem was destroyed, but he understands that the people deserved it.
Ezekiel also talks about how the Israelite religion went downhill, and does so in very vivid imagery, but also prophesies hope that the skeleton of Israel’s religion will be revived, and God will make a new covenant where the law is written on people’s hearts.
Basically, Ezekiel prophesies that the New Testament is going to happen. Daniel does something similar, but does it in more kingdom terms. Daniel prophesies that God’s going to make an eternal kingdom
that’s going to outlast all of the earthly kingdoms.
Hosea is about how God’s people are cheating on him, and it compares them to an unfaithful woman.
Joel compares the Judgment Day of God to a storm of locusts, and it’s going to be for all nations, so the point is that no nations are going to escape God’s judgment.
Amos is also about the judgment of the nations, but specifically because of how they oppress the poor.
Obadiah is about the judgment of Edom, the rival nation of Israel,
but it tells Israel not to gloat over the judgment of Edom, because Edom represents all people.
You see, Edom has the same letters in Hebrew as Adam, and Adam represents mankind in general.
But Israel represents anyone who trusts in God, and those people are going to be spared from the judgment of the world overall.
Jonah is the story that everyone associates with the big fish,
but it’s also about common grace, which means that God still cares about people who don’t exactly believe in him.
You see, Jonah was one of God’s people, but in the story he often disobeyed God.
And there’s a lot of pagans in the story who are not God’s people, but they still obey God.
So it’s more complicated than believers are good and unbelievers are bad.
Micah is about the destruction of Israel because of their corruption,
but that that’s not the end of the story, because God’s gonna raise up a new ruler, he’s gonna be born in Bethlehem, and he’s gonna be a ruler for all the nations.
Now Nahum shows that God is free to use anyone for his purposes, because it’s about the destruction of Nineveh, but in the last two books we saw Nineveh being used for God’s purposes.
In Micah, God used Nineveh to destroy Israel as a judgment,
And Jonah showed that God still cared about Nineveh, even though they were eventually going to be destroyed.
Habakkuk is a plea to God to destroy all evil, and the answer is that he will, just be patient.
Zephaniah is probably the harshest prophecy of judgment in the Bible,
but it says that God does this because he loves people, and that he actually rejoices in them.
It’s interesting that sometimes the prophecy uses the third person for God,
and sometimes it uses the first person for God in the same paragraph.
I wonder why that is.
Haggai says that God is going to make the temple great again one day, but how’s he going to do that?
Now, Zechariah is where it gets real. God is coming, and it implies that God’s going to come twice.
Now, he’s going to live among his people, but interestingly, it says that the Lord is going to send the Lord to live among his people.
How does that work?
And Malachi says that before God comes, he’s going to send his messenger ahead of him.
Remember that prophet Elijah, who wanted everyone to repent?
He’s the messenger that God is going to send back ahead of him.
And that concludes the Old Testament.
The Book of Matthew is a big book about Jesus’ life, going from his birth to his baptism to his death and to his resurrection.
And it’s written to a Hebrew audience, so it focuses on how Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures.
It shows that Jesus is the King prophesied in the Old Testament,
And that means he’s the Messiah or the Christ. Mark is another story about Jesus
But it portrays him as a superhero doing miracles every five seconds
Luke is also a story about Jesus written from a non-jewish perspective
So it focuses on how Jesus is the Savior of all of the nations
Not just the Jews and it also focuses more on the women in Jesus’s life such as Mary the Mother of God
Now John provides a unique perspective on Jesus because the first three books are called the synoptic gospels
and they focus mostly on Jesus’ public ministry and speeches.
But because John was in Jesus’ inner circle, it focuses a lot on Jesus’ private conversations, which means things get deep.
The Synoptic Gospels focus a lot on Jesus’ kingdom,
but in John, Jesus talks about who he is himself.
All the Gospels recognize that Jesus is God,
but John goes most in-depth as to what that means,
and as a result, it gets into some really cosmic stuff.
So Acts is the story of how the church started.
Right after Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciples were in Jerusalem, and the Holy Spirit came upon them and empowered them to start the church.
And then the church spread from Jerusalem to a bunch of other places.
This happened thanks to a guy named Saint Paul, whose job it was to preach to all the nations, not just the Jews.
And in doing so, he wrote a lot of letters to them, so let’s look at some of them.
Romans is basically a big summary of Christian theology.
Paul uses the law and the gospel to explain God’s whole plan of salvation.
1 Corinthians is basically Paul saying to the Corinthian church,
Stop being so weird! You guys are acting so sexually immoral,
you’re making the pagan unbelievers in your city look like a Baptist grandmother.
So Paul talks about how to have good Christian morals,
and how to do things like love, friendship, and the Lord’s Supper correctly.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul congratulates the Corinthian church for getting better after they got his first letter, but then they were wondering why they’re still being persecuted if they got better,
And Paul assures them that it’s not because God’s mad at them.
Galatians is about Paul telling the Galatian church to stop preaching a false gospel.
You see, some of them were saying you need to be Jewish to be Christian, and Paul says that’s not true.
You see, who counts as God’s people was never based on who’s biologically Jewish, but rather who trusts in God’s covenant, and all people are equal in Christ.
Ephesians talks about how Christian relationships are supposed to work.
This means relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, servants and masters, and between friends.
And all of this is in light of our relationship with Christ.
Philippians talks a lot about rejoicing and suffering because it was written from Paul in prison.
So Paul says that because we have hope in Christ, we can always focus on what’s good.
Colossians talks a lot about the cosmic significance of Christ.
Did you know that Christ holds the whole universe together and that all things were made for Christ?
First Thessalonians is about the second coming of Christ.
We always need to be ready for it because it could happen at any moment. It could even happen right now.
Sorry, I had to. So when Jesus comes back, he’s going to descend down to earth, and while he does, we are going to meet him in the middle of the air and then descend down with him like a parade.
Second Thessalonians is also about the second coming of Christ,
but it also says that the second coming will be the judgment day, and all of the enemies of Christ will be cast into eternal destruction.
1 Timothy has instructions on how to run a church.
Things like how to choose a good pastor, what good conduct looks like, and how to expose false teachers.
2 Timothy also has instructions about running a church, specifically with a focus on preaching the Bible, because all scripture is the word of God and all of it is useful for us.
That’s kind of what this video is about.
Titus is about making sure everyone in the church receives good teaching.
Men should learn from older men how to be good men.
Women should learn from older women how to be good women.
and all Christians need to learn from the church and be disciplined by it.
Philemon is a letter about Christian forgiveness. Philemon had a servant who ran away. The Paul tells Philemon to accept his servant back, not as a
servant but as a brother, and to forgive all of his debts. The book of Hebrews connects the Old and New Testaments. Remember Leviticus and all those ceremonies and rituals? What was the purpose of all that? The purpose was to be shadows of Christ, but now that Christ has already made his sacrifice there are no more sacrifices necessary. The purpose of ritual is to raise our minds to the higher heavenly realities, because Christ is our high priest in heaven.
James is written by James, and it’s about what good religion looks like.
If you say you have faith, but you don’t help other people, that faith of yours is dead.
First Peter is about how Christians should act in society.
If you’re Christian, you should be able to explain why.
And Christians should always behave well in society.
So if they get in trouble, it should only be for being Christian, not because they were just misbehaving in general.
Christians need to live good lives to impress the unbelievers and always be respectful to them.
Second Peter is about the final judgment of the world.
Everything evil will be destroyed with fire.
Some people ask why it’s taking so long to happen, but Peter says to be patient because a day for the Lord is like a thousand years.
First John is all about why love is so important, because God is love.
But how do we know what true love is?
It’s easy.
Christ is our example, and that means we shouldn’t trust any spirit that doesn’t confess Christ as Lord.
Now Second John tells us to be careful of false Christs, because there are some people who claim to believe in Christ, but won’t confess Christ coming in the flesh, so we need to be on the lookout for those people.
And third John warns us not to imitate those who do evil, because such people don’t know God.
Jude is about protecting the church from false teaching.
There’s a lot of teachers that will just say whatever people want to hear, but that path leads to destruction.
All right, that’s about it.
Did I forget anything?
Oh.
Yeah.
So, I’m not going to try and fully analyze Revelation, because if I do then my comments section will be longer than the Bible itself.
But generally speaking, Revelation is an extremely dramatic vision of what goes on behind the scenes spiritually, and there’s a lot of very vivid imagery.
But the point is that God wins in the end.
All things will be restored.
God will make all things new, and we’re going to live in a redeemed world forever and ever.
Amen.
So there’s so much in the Bible that I didn’t talk about,
but the purpose of this video is just to give you a general idea of each book, so you can read it all for yourself.
Each book of the Bible is like a gem that the light of the Holy Spirit shines through.
But when it’s all put together, we see the overarching message of Christ.
Afterword
Good summary this. Next we just look for a speed summary of each book. LOL.
Did you see the Red bit in the middle ? The faithful rise to meet J descending from the stratosphere and the whole formation goes on a sort of parade.
“So when Jesus comes back, he’s going to descend down to earth, and while he does, we are going to meet him in the middle of the air and then descend down with him like a parade”
At least now I have vague idea about the many chapters Julie refers to. I am still learning the christian lexicon.
And we sit here knowing this.
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