Message Theme & Verses: Two Testaments
Memory Verse: Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.
The Bible is a collection of many books telling one story from beginning to end. The Holy Spirit inspired many different men to communicate the truth of God in three different languages and in several different ways. Almost half of the Bible is told in stories and another third is poetry and the last quarter or so is discourse, speeches and letters that try to convince us to do something or act a certain way.
God tells the story of who He is and His plan for the world through 66 books. There are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament. God promised to keep the truth of the Bible in tact so that even today, 2,000 years after Jesus died on the cross, we can trust that we have God’s word for us.
God wants us to know who He is and He tells us about Himself in the Bible. Whether reading poetry, letters, or stories, God has given us the Holy Spirit and teachers to help us understand His plan for the world. It is important as we read through the Bible that we see that every book and every type of book tells a piece of the story of Jesus. He is the hero of the Bible, the Savior who rescues His people from their sin.
The Old Testament tells of how God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the world and put people in charge of it. Then, the people sinned against God by disobeying Him and wanting to follow their own path. The rest of the Old Testaments is the story of how God chose a man to bring hope to all the nations. This man would become a family and then a large nation because of the faithful promises of God. Eventually, the Savior who will set all things right, will come from this family line. But the Old Testaments stops before this Messiah comes.
The New Testament picks up where the prophets of the Old Testament left off. We begin with the lineage of Jesus, showing that He is from Abraham’s family, a son of Adam, and a son of King David, Israel’s greatest leader. Then, we see the life of Jesus, including His death on the cross for the sins of His people and His resurrection. Finally, the remainder of the Bible is instructions to the church and a look forward to when Jesus will return to judge the wicked and save His people for good. So, the Old Testament looks forward to Jesus and the New Testament looks back to what He has done.
We do not have the original manuscripts that the prophets and the apostles wrote. But we do have many copies that are considered to be 99.5% textually pure. For instance, we have 6,000 Greek copies of the New Testament and 21, 000 written in other languages. The copies we have are from less than 100 years after the originals were written. We can know that Jesus is a true, historical person. In comparison, we all believe the stories of Caesar, but we have only 10 documents copied 1,000 years after the events.
Even today, people are still finding ancient copies of Bible books. In 1946, a shepherd boy found a treasure of 900 documents in a cave in the Middle East. These scrolls were probably hidden in the caves when the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in AD 70. The Temple Scroll was among these papers and is a 2,000 year old, 8 meter long writing. Praise God, we see that through these scrolls kept in jars, that God’s word has been preserved. The writing on the scrolls are almost identical to the words we have in our Bibles today.
Questions
1. How many books are in the Bible? (66) Old Testament? (39) New Testament? (27)
2. What 3 languages did the authors use to write the Bible? (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek)
3. What kind of literature makes up the most of the Bible? (Narrative, 43%)
4. Who is the hero of the Bible?
5. When was the Jewish temple destroyed? (AD 70)
6. Do you think it is good that the Bible has different types of books? Why?
7. What do you think is the purpose of the Bible?
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