What I learnt about the Bible today was...

"The unfolding of your words gives light..." - Psalm 119:130

nb. Im gonna be blogging some lectures including this one over at http://liamsessays.blogspot.com/ check it out if you like

Today I had a great lecture on the Book of Mark and its got me thinking about a couple of things which Ill unpack on you now; Click here or Continue Reading below to read the rest of this post Marks Gospel is a narrative, it is written to tell us something, the author wants to tell us a story it is not trying to be a historical archive of everything that happened in the events it detailed, Mark was telling us what he thought the reader needed to know. Its supposed that Marks intention in writing the gospel was to provoke repentance, inspire worship of Jesus Christ the messiah and the son of God. The book has a purpose.... Recently Ive been going through the bible in a year and Ive been perplexed about somethings (while acknowledging God soveriegn hand in authoring his word) such as large proportions Genesis (although I really strongly believe the 7 day literalist interpretation) and its seeming vagueness with somethings. But today I came to a sub-conclusion (while not claiming to understand in fullness) that if I believe God authored the bible and its his divine word then I have to trust he's given us the details we need to know. Secondly the lecturer talked about the sequential nature of reading scripture, which he said was crucial to a full understanding to the scriptures as a whole and indeed individual books such as Marks Gospel. I will expand on what this made me think: I have begain as I said ealrier reading the bible in a year and it has been such a great opening of the gospel, reading scripture sequentially pulls together the bits and pieces of scripture you know things about like the connection between Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham, Issac and Jacob. Its so key to gaining a holistic knowledge of the bible, many people claim it to be religious, and a more "spiritual" way of reading the bible is to do a bit of bible bingo (which still has its place) where you open up the bible in the middle and reading little chunks, this is great for a snack in what the bible calls the bread of life but we need to have meals. I have learnt so much what a grounding influence the word is, and how it is spiritual food. When you look at the bible in little chunks it also becomes overwhelming as you cant get an overview of it, so it just becomes a very thick book which you know has lots of small verses of it within. Another thing is there is a beautiful redemptive narrative over the whole of the bible. To massivly simplify but not I think to under sell it, the old testament is the story of man turning its back on God, and the new testament is the story of God returning man to himself. Hope it makes sense, Enjoy peeps 4HisGlory