The Bible is a huge book.
Actually, it's a whole library, with 66 individual books, covering more than a thousand pages
even when printed in two columns of rather small print per page.
Little wonder that it makes most people feel inadequate, and leads to people not even trying to read it.
So, in this video, I am going to try to give you a very quick summary
that will narrow your reading down to as little as ten or fifteen minutes
to get the best of the best out of that great big book.
We start with the book of Genesis.
It includes stories about Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, and Abraham and Isaac.
Then we have the Exodus, with Moses leading some of Abraham's descendants out of Egypt.
Moses gets the Ten Commandments and a lot of other rules from God
to make up the first five books of the Bible.
These books as a whole are often referred to as The Books of Moses, or The Law.
Then there is the early history of the Kingdom of Israel
in books like First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, and First and Second Chronicles.
A collection of books like The Psalms, The Proverbs
and the book of Job make up a classification sometimes just referred to as Literature.
And then we have the Prophets, from big names like Isaiah, to little ones like Habbakuk.
All of this together is often just referred to as the Old Testament, or The Law and the Prophets.
What you have there is about three-quarters of the entire Bible.
That last quarter is called The New Testament.
The word "testament" is important. It's like a promise or agreement.
I personally think there only ever was one promise
but there was the old way of understanding it, and the new way of understanding it.
The promise was made to Abraham. Remember Abraham, back in the book of Genesis?
God promised to make a great nation through one of Abraham's descendants.
The Old way of understanding that promise
was that it was going to happen through one of Abraham's grandsons...
a guy named Jacob, whose name was later changed to Israel.
The Old Testament is full of references to the Children of Israel, and later to the Kingdom of Israel.
These Hebrew-speaking people became convinced that they were the fulfillment of that promise.
But the NEW understanding of the promise was that the descendant of Abraham
through whom God was going to build a great nation was really Jesus.
It took 4,000 years for this descendant to arrive, but in the past 2,000 years
we have been able to see how much greater the kingdom is that he came to establish
than the one that existed in the old understanding of the promise.
Mostly, the New Testament is divided up between the four gospels
which cover things that happened during the lifetime of Jesus
and a bunch of letters or epistles, written by leaders of the early church
which grew out of the teachings of Jesus.
Like with the Old Testament, there are a couple of books in the New Testament
that don't fit well into those two categories either.
One is the Book of Acts, which records early events in the church
and the other is The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which majors on the return of Jesus
to judge the nations of the world, at some time in the future.
So that is the big picture.
What I want you to focus on, is this area, right here in the middle... and, in particular, on JESUS.
You down-size the Bible by three-quarters
if you just focus on this new understanding of the promise that God made to Abraham.
But you can make it even easier, if you leave the Epistles aside until later.
Unfortunately, that is precisely the opposite
to what you will encounter in almost any church that opens the Bible at all.
It all centers on the epistles, and almost never gets around to looking at Jesus himself and what he taught.
So let's say that you just work on getting to understand the four gospels, and leave the rest of the experts.
If you do, one thing you will discover is that you and the experts are moving in virtually opposite directions.
In almost no time at all, you will discover that they have come up with a hundred excuses
for never getting around to reading the teachings of Jesus
or, worse still, for condemning the teachings of Jesus.
And the most common way in which they do that
is to convince people that everything the epistles say about the Old way of understanding God
includes everything that Jesus said.
Seriously... the most common teaching in Protestant Churches these days
is that the real New Testament begins with the Epistles
and Jesus and all that he taught is no better than the endless genealogies in the Book of Numbers
or the hundreds of rules in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
I'm just saying that to prepare you for the opposition you will get if you let anyone know
that you are going to start with the teachings or Jesus.
They really do not like that!
Okay, so four gospels.... Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
My Bible has 1,500 pages, and those four books take up a little over ten percent of the entire Bible
or about 160 pages.
But it's much easier than that, because, while these are four different books by four different authors
they all tell much the same story.
So you could read just one of them... an average of 40 pages...
and get most of what is included in the others as well.
The longest one is the first one, The Gospel According to Matthew... just 48 pages in my Bible.
Even if you read only one page a day
you could go through that entire book more than seven times in a year.
And if you did, then I would wager a guess
that you would know more about this new understanding of the promise
than more than 99% of the best trained theologians in the world
and certainly more than 99.9% of the people in their congregations around the world.
Are you getting the picture?
Just 160 pages, perhaps starting with the first 48
and you won't have to go asking the so-called experts every time you have a question.
You will have the answers right there in the teachings of the One we CALL "The Truth... the Way, and the Life."
Here is a very good verse to help you get the picture.
It comes from the first chapter of the fourth gospel, John's Gospel:
"The law... (remember the law?) The law came through Moses; but Grace and Truth come through Jesus Christ."
That's a wonderful introduction to this all-important spiritual center of the Bible.
Everywhere you turn, you will find people trying to drag you back into the Law, and away from the Truth
which has been perfectly revealed through Jesus Christ, the actual, literal Son of God.
But hang on!
Didn't I say that the churches would condemn the teachings of Jesus as being PART of the Law?
Why would they do that, if they are trying to drag you back to the law?
Well, you see, there is this terrible double-think that goes on with the churches. I'll show you.
You see Jesus here, the central focus of the Four Gospels?
Well, just before he started his ministry, there was another guy... a guy named John the Baptist.
John preached around the country, getting people to let him wash them in water from the Jordan River
as a sign of them wanting to change.
This was all happening before Jesus came.
John was a prophet. He predicted that the promised special descendant of Abraham was due to arrive.
John specifically described the difference between his message
and the message that Jesus was going to preach.
John would finish his message off with a ritual... getting dunked or sprinkled with water.
But he said that this new descendant of Abraham was not going to do that.
He was going to cover people with God's Spirit... a kind of invisible baptism.
In fact, everything about this new kingdom was invisible.
The old kingdom was called the kingdom of Israel
but the new kingdom that Jesus was going to preach would be the kingdom of heaven.
So where did John fit in? Was John part of the new understanding, or part of the old understanding.
As you read each of the gospels, you will see that something strange happened.
When Jesus arrived, John did not follow him.
He had become so busy with his own routine
that he just kept right on doing his thing, while some of his followers left him to follow Jesus.
At one point, John sends messengers to Jesus
asking Jesus if he really is the one that John had come to tell the people about.
John ended up disillusioned with the very person he had prepared the world for.
In one place, Jesus says that the law and the prophets continue up until John
and "since John" the kingdom of heaven was being preached.
So where did that put John? Was he part of the Old or part of the New.
Well, Jesus answers that question in a couple of other places when he says
"He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist."
Obviously that excludes John and his mode of baptism from the kingdom of heaven.
So... all that to say this:
The same people who tell you that everything that Jesus taught is part of the Old Testament
still tell you to get baptised in water.
Why? Because they themselves are still trapped in the Old Testament.
They still construct elaborate religious buildings. They still promote political agendas. They still support war.
They still get all religious just one day a week.
And they still teach that all it takes to be part of God's invisible kingdom
is to get yourself dunked or sprinkled in water.
Old Testament from start to finish. And anti-Christ... the true descendant of Abraham... from start to finish.
Well, I said that I would finish this in under 15 minutes, so I better wind it up.
What I'm telling you is that you can get the essence of the entire Bible just by reading the gospels.
If you start anywhere else, it will just get more and more confusing. So, you can start with Matthew.
But I'll make it even easier. Start with chapters five, six, and seven of Matthew's Gospel.
They are called the Sermon on the Mount
and they represent some of the best teachings of Jesus, all clumped together.
They finish with a promise from Jesus that, if you will build your life on those teachings
nothing will ever destroy you.
We recently released on this channel, a word for word recording of that great sermon, nicely illustrated.
It is just fifteen minutes long. Please check it out.
This most famous sermon of all time is sometimes described as the Cornerstone
on which everything else in the Bible should be broken
until it conforms with what Jesus was teaching in that great sermon.
Read it... and read it.... and read it. Build your life on it.
And test every other teaching that comes your way against what that great sermon teaches.
Do that, and you will have what it takes not only to understand everything else in the Bible (as needed)
but to understand all the questions of life.