An overview of the whole biblical story. It's not what you think it is! See the story in a whole new light.
An overview of the biblical story from Creation to Redemption from a twenty-first century perspective. The perspective you will find in these pages is thoroughly contemporary in that it issues out of the compendium and mindset or worldview ofcontemporary data. Just as, for instance, medical science has discovered that the truth of the human body is far more complex than our ancestors believed, so the truth of the Bible is also far more complex than our ancestors believed. This is not to say that everything previous generations have believed about the Bible is wrong—it’s not. We cannot escape our own worldview, nor can anyone adequately understand the worldview of a different era. We always see things from our own perspective, our own time, our own place in the world and in society.
“The overall shape of the Old Testament as we have it today was formed by the experience and worldview of the Jewish priests in Babylonian captivity and the subsequent Second Temple Jewish establishment. It’s not that the story of the Old Testament is nothing more than a man-made product of Jewish production, but rather that it issues out of the failure of humanity to actually become what God has created humanity to become, based on the test case of ancient Israel. This process of failure has been, and continues to be, guided by God’s Holy Spirit through the ages. This pattern of repeated failure (call, fall, and hope) is the engine of human growth, maturity, and progress. This vision is necessarily postmillennial in character, and evinces an eschatology of hope. The Old Testament provides a story of God forging a kind of human character that is able to endure the hostilities of earthly existence.
The New Testament was birthed out of the angst and ashes of the failure and destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70 by Rome. The importance of the advent of Jesus Christ becomes more clear after the destruction of the Temple and the kingdom of Israel. The story of Jesus Christ is best read in the light of A.D. 70 because without the destruction of the Temple and the kingdom the primary meaning of the story of Jesus Christ would not exist as we know it. It is necessary to see that Christianity rose from the ashes of ancient Jerusalem.
In addition, in the light of Hebrews 7 we see that Jesus Christ is not just another character in the Old Testament mold, like John The Baptist was. Jesus Christ transcended the priestly establishments of both Aaron and Levi. Jesus Christ was a priest in a completely different tradition, that of Melchizedek, of whom little is known still today. The meaning and implications of this fact are extremely important, as well as mind-boggling.” –Introduction