The Bible (part 1)

Every word of God is flawless (Proverbs 30:5).

Some people are intimidated by the Bible. They’re curious about it’s contents, but the large page count puts them off. Not only that, but God’s Book is made up of 66 different segments, written by a variety of people over more than a thousand years of time. Where should you begin reading? How do the parts link together as a whole? For the next few devotions, I’m going to talk about the parts of the Bible and help you understand their place in God’s revelation to mankind.

The Bible contains many different kinds of literature—history, poetry, advice, and predictions about the future. But all these writings share a common purpose—they reveal God’s heart to us, and they strip away the lies we use to disguise our true nature. God is perfect, while we are deeply flawed. We don’t like to admit our failures, so we bend over backwards trying to make ourselves look good. The Bible can be uncomfortable to read, if you think that most humans are basically good. But God’s Book can be very reassuring to those who understand their limitations and feel bad about their mistakes.

Much of the Old Testament is poetry. Hebrew poetry is not based on rhyme, but on the rhythm of ideas. Ideas are often repeated using slightly different words. This gives important themes dramatic impact. It also helps clarify ideas that might be hard to understand, by stating them in more than one way. But perhaps most important of all, poetry is easy to memorize. We often teach children through rhymes and songs because they learn faster that way. And memorization of God’s Book was important, because most people did not have their own copy to read like we do. Before the printing press was invented, each copy of God’s word was hand written—a very labor-intensive process, which meant that copies were expensive and few in number.

Originally, all the books of the Bible were written on scrolls, long sheets of paper or animal skin that were rolled up for storage. But scrolls were limited in how big they could be, and some books of the Bible were too long to fit on a single scroll. That’s why we have books named 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, and so on—these books needed two scrolls because of their length. Sadly, those ancient scrolls no longer exist; we can be thankful that love for God’s word has resulted in many copies being made.