Big Themes of the Bible

Jon Morales, Heath A. Thomas

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087712994
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Big Themes of the Bible teaches readers to better understand the work of Christ as he's revealed to us in some of the major themes of Scripture. Each of the big themes in this book—creation, forgiveness, people, presence, yoke, and healing—captures important aspects of the story of God and his good purposes for his creation.

Chapter 1

Creation

In the middle of a controversy about divorce, Jesus challenged his adversaries, “‘Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female’?” (Matt 19:4). He was quoting from Gen 1:27 and then quoted Gen 2:24, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matt 19:5). Notice that he argued by going to the first few chapters of Genesis, where we find the biblical account of creation.

In our day, it is not uncommon to find many who avoid the Old Testament and consider it either unhelpful in understanding the Christian faith or harmful in evangelism. They prefer to focus on Jesus. But Jesus did not simply focus on Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures were his Bible, and Genesis provided him with one of the most important themes we find in all of Scripture—that God is the Creator.

Since at least the nineteenth century, people have been coming to the opening chapters of Genesis with the wrong questions. How old is the earth? How long were the creation days? How about evolutionary theory? These are good questions but not the questions people were asking 3,000 and 4,000 years ago in the ancient Near East. Armed with the wrong questions, people miss the point and beauty of the first few chapters of Scripture.

Imagine that you invite someone from a foreign country who has never heard of American football to come and watch the Super Bowl with you and your family. You’re very excited about the game. Your team made it to the Super Bowl. Your fifty-inch HD TV is ready to go. The snacks are superb. You’re wearing your team’s jersey. The day has come! And the game starts. And you’re the kind of person who zeroes in on the game; you tune out everything else so you can be fully in the moment. Now your friend is sitting next to you, and he begins to ask you question after question. “What are the shoulder pads the players are wearing made of? Why do so many players have long hair? Is that a rule? Is it to look menacing like Vikings? I like that! Why do they stop the game so often? I don’t like that! How long is the field? . . .”

What are all those questions doing for your enjoyment of the game? They’re ruining it. These are the wrong questions about the game. They do not fit the occasion. Likewise, the questions Genesis answers are not how questions: How long are the creation days? How old is the earth? Genesis 1–3 answers why questions, and why questions are always more exciting and significant. Think about it. What’s more significant and exciting to a husband? How his bride got to the altar on his wedding day, or why she got to the altar on his wedding day?

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here? Why is life so difficult and puzzling? Genesis answers these questions and many more.

What Beginning?

The Bible opens with ten words that are as poetic as they are potent: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). These words were written for us, but first they were written to the people of Israel poised to enter the land of Canaan more than 3,000 years ago. Both the land of Canaan, in Israel’s future, and the land of Egypt, in Israel’s past, were filled with people who worshiped many gods. So Moses makes clear to Israel that they are in the middle of a story, a story with a beginning and moving toward an end. In the beginning of their story, which is also the beginning of the universe, there is one God, not many.

Notice what Moses did not say: “In the beginning many gods.” Or, “In the beginning we.” Or, “In the beginning mother nature.” Or, “There was no beginning.” He said, “In the beginning God.”³

Did you know that until 1964 the prevailing theory of the origin of the universe in scientific circles was that the universe had no origin? It was called the steady-state hypothesis, which posited that the universe had always existed and would always exist in its current state. If as a scholar or scientist you tried to question the steady-state hypothesis, you would be ridiculed—much as many are ridiculed today for questioning evolutionary biology. The steady-state hypothesis stated: there was no beginning to the universe. This idea directly contradicted the first three words of the Bible, “In the beginning.” No wonder many people in the twentieth century started saying, “Let’s just focus on Jesus!” However, in the 1920s, some scientists began publishing articles showing evidence that the universe was expanding, and if it was expanding there must have been a beginning. But it took about four decades for the scientific consensus to do an about-face and affirm, “Yes, there must have been a beginning to the universe.”⁴

The Creator: Father, Son, and Spirit

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Here I want you to learn a new word. I don’t like obscure words, but this one is important. The word is aseity, from the Latin “a” (from) and “se” (self). Scripture teaches that God is an aseity. He is from himself. He depends on nothing or no one for his existence. He has always existed. He is self-sustaining. He has no needs whatsoever. This God, as Genesis puts it, created “the heavens and the earth,” which is a merism, a totality represented by contrasting parts, as when we say “head to toe” to refer to the whole body. The biblical God created everything that exists.

But there is another important aspect of creation disclosed in the Scriptures. Creation was the activity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Genesis hints at this work of the triune (three-in-one) God when it mentions God, but also “the Spirit of God . . . hovering over the surface of the waters” in Gen 1:2, and then the word of God, which is the agent by which all things were created. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (v. 3). This word of God, we learn in the Gospel of John, is none other than Jesus Christ, God the Son (John 1:1, 14).⁵

Other Scriptures speak of the Spirit’s agency in creation. Concerning all the creatures of the earth, the psalmist says, “When you send your breath [spirit], they are created” (Ps 104:30). One of Job’s friends confessed, “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (Job 33:4). God sent his Spirit, and creatures came into being. As Michael Bird says, “The Spirit is the source of all energy, movement, and vitality in the universe.”⁶

Similarly, a number of texts speak of Jesus’s role in creation. “For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). “God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe through him” (Heb 1:2). Jesus’s early followers saw him calm a furious storm, heal the blind and lame, exorcise demons, multiply meager food rations into food for the masses, walk on water, change the molecular structure of water to become wine, and raise the dead. Such mastery over nature and supernatural forces, together with the testimony of God at Jesus’s baptism and on the Mount of Transfiguration as well as the testimony of Jesus about himself, most profoundly related to his own sufferings, death, and resurrection, gave rise to the disciples’ conviction that Jesus was one with God and thus the agent of creation. John says concerning Jesus, “All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (John 1:3).

One of the biggest differences between biblical thought and other systems of thought is creation. The Bible teaches creation by the three-in-one God of everything that exists. In some Eastern religions, there is no clear distinction between god and creation. Everything and everyone is a part of the divine. In secular thought in the West, people often refer to “Mother Nature,” which is an emotive way of saying that only material things exist. Everything we need com...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• About the Library
• Introduction: People and Elephants Are Not Trees
• Chapter One: Creation
• Chapter Two: Forgiveness
• Chapter Three: People
• Chapter Four: Presence
• Chapter Five: Yoke
• Chapter Six: Healing
• Epilogue: People as Trees
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index