The Root of Learning: The Bible's Big Themes
Five themes that help us make sense of the Scriptures
In “The Root of Learning,” we discussed the importance of starting meditation by hearing the voice of the Scriptures – letting them be the objective beginning to this experience. We landed on this definition of learning:
Learning means summarizing what the human and divine authors are saying and doing with the words of a text of Scripture (its illocutionary force), and what a reader should do in response (its perlocutionary effect).
Sometimes it’s easy to get a good idea of what a text is doing and how I’m supposed to respond: when I read, “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Colossians 3:13), it doesn’t take much learning to know that Jesus has forgiven me of an infinite debt, and to see that therefore I must also work to forgive those who wrong me.
(How I can do that might be a different matter!)
But what about a verse like, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:9)? The words are easy enough to understand. But what is this verse doing? And surely we’re not supposed to take that blessing at face value and follow it, right?
Or what about a story like Abram telling the Egyptians Sarai is his sister, with everything that follows after (Genesis 12:10-20)? What is Moses trying to communicate with that story, and how is it supposed to be significant for us?
There are deep waters here, and I won’t pretend that a thousand-word essay can equip you fully to get a sense of every passage of Scripture. See the “Resources” section below for recommendations of books and audio and video collections that offer deeper help. But today’s post is one interpretive tool that can help us orient ourselves in a passage of Scripture.
The Big Themes
There are four big themes that cycle through the entire storyline of the Bible. The biggest cycle covers the entire sweep of history, from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, but each “chapter” of history has its own version of the thematic cycle, and sometimes you can see each one play out in individual stories in the Bible.
In Creation, God makes a good world to enjoy with his people. Some kind of order is established (like the world itself, the people of Israel, the Davidic/Solomonic kingdom of Israel, or the Church), and God establishes a covenant to set the terms by which his people relate to him and steward the creation he’s entrusted to them.
The creation theme helps us see God’s power, goodness, and care for his people. New iterations of the creation – like the land of Canaan, the Tabernacle and Temple, or even the Church – take up and develop elements of the original Creation in Genesis 1 and 2 (read Genesis 1-2 and then Revelation 21-22 to see the beginning-to-end connections).
The Covenant theme helps us see the specific kind of relationship that God has with his people in a given era. As soon as God “creates” a people, whether it be Adam and Eve (Genesis 1-2), Israel (Exodus 19ff), or the royal line of David (2 Samuel 7), he has what in the college ministry world we called a DTR (define-the-relationship), where he sets the terms of what it means to be faithful to him.
God’s character is the same from the beginning of the story to the end, but the terms of his covenants with people develop over time. That’s helpful, because knowing that we’re not under the exact same covenant as Abraham or David lets us learn something from those covenants without having to keep every element of those covenants. (Here’s a good summary of the big covenants that shows how they develop).
The Fall theme shows how sin and its effects corrupt God’s good creation. The initial Fall occurs in Genesis 3, bringing alienation from God, broken relationships, futility, and death into the world. And just as JRR Tolkien said, “There cannot be any 'story' without a Fall - all stories are ultimately about the Fall,” the effects of the Fall recur through every story in the Bible until the final new creation.
The Fall theme helps us see both external threats to God’s created order (natural disasters, oppressive enemies) and internal threats (corruption of his people, internal oppression, rebellion), which may be the same kinds of threats we face today. We learn from how God’s people either respond to those threats or create them, and from how God himself responds to them.
The Redemption theme shows us that while God does judge sin, including those who have given themselves over to be agents of the Fall, his ultimate purpose is to rescue his people, even (often!) rescuing us from ourselves. In Redemption, some aspect of the Fall is temporarily or permanently undone, and God graciously carries his people through some of its effects by rescuing, protecting, or forgiving them (or all of the above).
One important thing to see is that Redemption isn’t a simple cycle through the Bible’s story – each major act of Redemption grows to include more people and/or undoing more effects of the Fall. You can see it briefly here:
It’s also important to note, as Jesus did (Luke 24:25-27), that the history of redemption is also about preparing people for the final act of Redemption that comes through him. So when we see Redemption in the Bible, it’s either anticipating the final Redemption that happens through Jesus or building on that Redemption.
And the New Creation theme shows us that God doesn’t just abandon or judge the fallen world; he re-creates a new order that improves on the fallen old one. When God performs an act of New Creation (like the covenant with Israel in Exodus 19-20, giving Israel the land of Canaan in Joshua, or establishing the Church in Acts 2), he creates a new order and a new kind of relationship with his people, moving the world a step closer to the final New Creation. The New Creation theme helps us see God’s character and celebrate his goodness and grace.
That said, until the final New Creation, the Fall continues to corrupt each new instance of God’s redemptive work; seeing how sin and death continue to afflict Israel, the Davidic kingdom, and even the Church today humbles us and makes us long for the final completion of that work, when “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3).
Resources
Books:
The ESV Study Bible is still my top book recommendation (and I’m still waiting on my endorsement deal from Crossway …)
God’s Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts is an excellent one-book summary of the big story of the Bible that shows how key themes develop through the story.
How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and How to Read the Bible Book by Book, both by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, give great resources for understanding the Bible as a whole and specific books.
Audio / video:
The Bible Project has excellent videos on all kinds of subjects, including surveys of the books of the Bible. See their Old Testament collection and New Testament collection.
Alastair Roberts (not sure if he’s related to Vaughan) has a set of audio commentaries on every chapter of the Bible that I find really insightful.
Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash