Salvation History: The Bible’s Grand Story of Redemption

Most Christians who have grown up attending a gospel-preaching church can recount the famous stories from the Bible. They know about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, the animals on Noah’s ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, David defeating Goliath with his sling and a stone, Daniel surviving the lions’ den, not to mention Jesus’s miracles and, of course, his crucifixion and resurrection. However, it’s one thing to know the Bible’s stories, another to know the Bible’s story. If we read Scripture only as a collection of isolated episodes, moral examples, or doctrinal proof texts, we can miss its essential unity around the one overarching story that God is working out in history. The Bible is an anthology of sixty-six books, but it is not a random collection of religious texts telling different stories. Like scenes in a larger epic plot, the individual stories all contribute to the one larger drama. That story of the Bible is the story of redemption. God is working out his eternal plan of redemption in history, and the Bible details its story. It begins with creation, turns on humanity’s fall into sin, centers on God’s redeeming work in Christ, and ends in the restoration of all things...