Understanding the Different Parts of the Bible: Key #4

Have you ever wondered how the Bible, with its many books, genres, and authors, fits together into a cohesive whole? Join us as we explore the different parts of the Bible and how understanding these divisions can enhance your study and comprehension of Scripture.

From a high altitude view we'll uncover the various sections of the Bible, from the historical narratives and wisdom literature of the Old Testament to the Gospels and epistles of the New Testament. Discover the unique characteristics and purposes of each part, and learn how to approach them with fresh eyes and a deeper appreciation.

Whether you're a seasoned Bible student or just starting your journey, this episode will equip you with the knowledge and tools to navigate the Scriptures more effectively. By understanding the different parts of the Bible, you'll gain a greater insight into God's grand narrative and how each book contributes to His redemptive plan.

Cited Material Links:
Institute for Religious Research

Desiring God-You Can Understand the Bible

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

In order for the believer to utilize the awesome foundational tool of the Bible as a guidebook for their lives, they have to understand it's not just a single book, it's a collection of books, and all the books point the reader back to Christ. All right, welcome to another episode of Informed Faith. My name is Patrick, your host. I am excited to be here today with you. Thanks for joining. If this is your first time, go to informedfaithbuzzsproutcom and you can read about the purpose of this podcast ministry. We're going to continue our series on five keys to studying the Bible with key number four. Today. We're getting there, folks. Key number four. The first key was illumination by the Holy Spirit. The second was preparing our minds for the truths that the Holy Spirit illuminates for us. The third was approaching the Bible with the proper attitude of humility. And in this episode we're going to gain a better understanding of the different parts of the Bible, kind of a high altitude flyover of the whole book, because once again we don't want to have just a surface understanding of the different parts of the Bible, kind of a high-altitude flyover of the whole book, because once again, we don't want to have just a surface understanding of Scripture, we want an informed faith that helps us get through trials and tribulations that we know will come in our lives. So let's get started.

Speaker 1: 1:19

I want to start with a really great quote from Marshall Siegel. He's the president and CEO of DesiringGodorg and you can go to DesiringGodorg and you can read this. But he says some of us fall out of Bible reading because we fail to make time for it. Busyness crowds out the minutes we might otherwise give sitting and hearing from God. There's always something that didn't get done yesterday or something relatively urgent that's come up today. It's pretty amazing, isn't it Just, how many things in our little worlds seem to trump listening to the one who made them all. For others, it's not busyness that gets the best of us, but a subtle cynicism about reading the Bible. I know that's true for me. You say to yourself how am I ever going to understand this? It's hard to keep getting up extra early and setting aside precious minutes when you're not convinced you'll be able to make sense of what you see. If you felt that way before, you're not alone. In fact, even the men who wrote the Bible know something of what you feel.

Speaker 1: 2:19

The apostle Peter says of the letters Paul wrote. There are some things in them that are hard to understand. I know that's true. In fact, if you go to 2 Peter 3.16, he says, as he does in all his letters, when he speaks in them of these matters, there are some things in them that are hard to understand which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do other scriptures. And that's true. That's the danger there that you can, if you don't understand it, you can make it to mean anything you want. But he says think about that. Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote books in the Bible and yet even he struggled to read Romans or Thessalonians or whatever particular letter he had in mind. If he could write on behalf of God and have a hard time understanding scripture, we shouldn't be surprised that we do as well. So that's why I want to take the time and go over briefly this high altitude view of the different parts of the Bible, and we can try and do this in 30 minutes. So if you're in your car or if you're on the treadmill, whatever you're doing, take this flight with me quickly.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Basically, the Bible is not just a single book, but it's a collection of books written throughout a period lasting more than a thousand years. There are also a variety of different kinds of books in the Bible. There's histories, there's a songbook, there's biographies, letters and more. Understanding the Bible can be difficult if one does not know why these different kinds of books are even included and what they're supposed to do with them. So hopefully, by going over this, we can all have a better understanding of what the books are about and where to go to find certain things.

Speaker 1: 4:04

First of all, the Bible is broken down into two sections. We call it the Old and the New Testaments, and most people understand that the Bible is divided into two major parts. The Old Testament actually takes up a bit more than three-fourths of the Bible. So from a Christian standpoint, the Old Testament books, which were written over a period of many centuries, ending roughly 400 years before the coming of Jesus, they lay the foundation for the understanding of him, of Jesus. Now, the New Testament books, which were written within less than 100 years after Christ's death and resurrection, they preserve the apostles' memories of what Jesus did and what he taught, and they explain what it all means in the light of the Old Testament. So most believers find the Old Testament to be more difficult to read and appreciate. I know I do and I think it's worth the effort. However, because there is a great deal in the New Testament that you will understand better if you have a basic understanding of the Old Testament. They're both the Word of God, they're both inspired by the Holy Spirit so that we will know God in an authentic and life-giving way.

Speaker 1: 5:14

What are the different parts of the Bible Other than the Old and the New Testament? How does it break down, even at a lower altitude from there, at a lower altitude from there? Well, the first section I think that we should start with is history. So there's a lot of historical narrative in the Bible. Genesis and much of Exodus and Numbers are history, as are the books from Joshua through Esther. The book of Acts in the New Testament is also history, that's the history of the early church In general. You can tell that these books are meant to report history and are not myths or legends by the way the narratives are written. So the authors usually refer to a lot of specific places. They give the names of the kings and other important figures living at the time and even date events, usually by stating in what year of a particular king an event took place events, usually by stating in what year of a particular king an event took place, like. There's an example in Luke 2 where he does that. So scholars have verified a surprisingly large number of these details from sources even outside the Bible, such as court records from neighboring nations, monuments, all sorts of archaeological finds.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Now, admittedly, the status of Genesis 1 through 11 as history you're probably thinking that's highly controversial, and it's true. It deals with events so long ago, before the invention of writing, that it is difficult to confirm its accounts of the distant past. There is a great deal of debate about how to compare the accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 with the findings and theories of modern science, as I'm sure you're aware. So, without trying to resolve all those questions here, that's not our focus we're going to focus on our reading of Genesis 1 through 11, on the two main purposes of those chapters.

Speaker 1: 7:01

Genesis 1 through 11 lays the foundational elements of the biblical worldview. So God is one transcendent creator who brought all things into existence. Right, that's one point. God created human beings to have a special relationship with him. By our own fault, we've become alienated from God. We're morally corrupt and mortal. We talked about that last time and God has not abandoned the human race but is at work to restore us to our intended relationship with him. And then, second, genesis 1-11 provides the backdrop for Abraham, so the founding patriarch of the people of Israel, explaining where he originated and what the world was like when God revealed himself to Abraham.

Speaker 1: 7:46

So with the biblical histories, the main point for the reader is to follow the storyline, the action and grasp the overall flow of events that were important to Israel's history and to the beginning of the Christian church. So as you read through the books, you might slow down when it reports a speech by a prophet or apostle, because these will often have some meaty teaching. You also want to watch for editorial comments by the author in which he tells his readers why something happened or what it meant. Okay, so moving on from the history section of the Bible, let's move on to the biographies. So the four Gospels in the New Testament Matthew, mark, luke and John are biographies. They're a special form of historical text written in the style of biographies in the ancient Greco-Roman world. So this was typical of such ancient biographies that the gospel say very little about Jesus' childhood and focus on the most eventful period of his life. That's common.

Speaker 1: 8:50

The purpose of an ancient biography was to tell the truth about an important person, so that the readers would know who he was, what he did and what values or character he displayed. If that individual was a teacher, the biography would also include examples of his teaching. So, here again, the claim commonly made by skeptics that the Gospels are myths simply does not hold up. And since the Gospels are biographies, the main point of reading them is to get to know their subject, jesus. So, as you read Matthew, mark, luke and John, pay attention to the way Jesus interacts with his people, because sometimes he is compassionate toward others and sometimes, frankly, he gets angry.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Try to put yourself into the narrative, perhaps imagining yourself in the crowd or as one of the disciples, following Jesus from place to place, and I would feel free to camp on a particular passage, to wrestle with its meaning or to meditate on something profound that Jesus says, and we talked about what meditating on the word is. It's a repetition of thought, and we talked about that Lectio Divina that priests used to do. They used to use that as a method of studying Scripture. Their thought was that they wanted, instead of trying, to master Scripture themselves. They repeated it over and over again and walked around thinking about it to allow the Scripture to master them. So I think that's a great way of looking at reading Scripture, and most Christians, for good reason, view the Gospels as the heart of the Bible. So they're definitely worth reading over and over again, and I would suggest, starting with John, read John 3, 4, or 5 times, then move on to Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Speaker 1: 10:37

All right, so we talked about the section of the Bible that is the history. We talked about the section of the Bible that is biography, which is the four Gospels in the New Testament. How about this next section, which is covenants and laws? So a large portion of the Pentateuch consists of laws that God gave to Israel to be the basis for their legal system. So that's most of Exodus, like chapters 20 through 40, and Leviticus and Deuteronomy Deuteronomy chapters 14 through 26 as well. So the laws express the requirements that God placed on ancient Israel under what is later called the Old Covenant, which is the actual meaning of the term Old Testament. So a covenant was essentially a contract, and the covenant that God made with Israel through Moses took the form of a treaty, like ancient treaties that a powerful king would make with a neighboring nation. So we don't live under that covenant. We don't have the same legal system. However, the laws reflect God's moral law, so we can and should read them to gain an appreciation for what God considers right and wrong.

Speaker 1: 11:47

And we've talked about in Romans what Paul says about what the law was good for. The law was good for pointing out sin. It was a prohibition on certain behaviors, right, but as Paul said, the law could only do so much. It was not able to save us. So the New Testament also gives some important guidance to Christians to understand what has changed and what has not, now that Christ has come and inaugurated the New Covenant, which is the meaning of the term New Testament. So keep that in mind. If you run across something in those laws that seems strange or harsh, keep two things in mind. First, israel was called to be a special nation in a culture swimming with child sacrifice, superstition and gross immoralities the Canaanites and other peoples of the region. 3,000 years ago. They were really rough. Second, some of the laws that seem odd to modern readers made good sense to the ancient Israelites, either because they kept them from getting sick or in trouble, or because they had symbolic significance that was meaningful in that culture. So keep those things in mind, moving on from the covenants and laws and once again the covenants and laws were, you know, exodus, leviticus, deuteronomy the next section of the Bible we come to is songs, and the Bible doesn't contain any written music, but it contains a lot of songs.

Speaker 1: 13:14

In fact, the longest book of the Bible is a collection of songs called Psalms, and there are songs, or psalms, which could be spoken as well as literally sung in many other parts of the Bible, including Luke and the book of Revelation, actually as well. So songs may contain teaching, but they are primarily expressions of emotion. So the psalmist sang songs to God, crying out for help, thanking God for blessings and lamenting his suffering or that of the people of Israel. They teach us not only by what they say, but by showing us how to pray, to be transparent with God, trusting him to hear us admitting, even when we are finding it difficult to trust God. Millions of people have memorized, in fact, the 23rd Psalm and have found themselves reciting it in times of trials.

Speaker 1: 14:05

Now, the ancient Hebrew poetry made heavy use of different kinds of parallelism, so in which, like, two or three lines might be saying something similar in different ways, expressing contrasts, for example contrasting good with evil, or forming a progression of thought. So as you read the poetic parts of the Bible, you'll get used to these literary devices and be careful not to overanalyze them or take imagery too literally, because, like all poetry, the language is chosen at least partly for emotional effect and to create pictures in the mind. So that was songs. Now the next one. Let's move on to Proverbs. So the Bible has a whole book called Proverbs, and there are individual Proverbs or other kinds of short sayings in other parts of the Bible as well. Probably the most common mistake people make with Proverbs is treating them as ironclad cosmic laws. The do, x and Y will always be the result type thinking, and that's not the point of a proverb. Proverbs are short, easily remembered expressions of wisdom that give generalized guidelines about the best way to live your life. By the way, like Proverbs, 1 through 9 is a lengthy poetic introduction to the Proverbs, which actually start in Proverbs 10. I don't know if you knew that or not. So most of the biblical Proverbs are written in the same kind of poetic style as the Psalms as well. And moving on from Proverbs, then we get to prophecy the Psalms as well, and, moving on from Proverbs, then we get to prophecy.

Speaker 1: 15:41

Prophecy Now there is prophecy throughout the Bible, but prophetic literature includes most of the books of the Old Testament, from Isaiah through Malachi, as well as the book of Revelation or the book of Vision. So the Old Testament books of the prophets contain a mixture of prose that means straightforward speaking and Hebrew poetry. So the focus of these books is usually the need for the people in the northern kingdom of Israel or in Judah, the tribal region in the south around Jerusalem, to repent of their sins, their violations of the covenant that God had made with them through Moses. And for that reason you'll understand the issues in these books better if you're familiar with the history in Kings and in Chronicles. Now they're warned of chastisement and even destruction if they do not stop worshiping idols, sacrificing children on altars and fire to false gods or letting injustice in the land go unchecked. The prophets also let the people know that God would not let the other nations get away with evil against them. So through these warnings by the prophets of what was coming, the Lord gave the Jews further evidence that he was the true God. Some of these prophecies about the future also pointed forward to the coming of Jesus, authenticating him as the true Messiah.

Speaker 1: 16:59

Biblical prophetic literature contains two especially noteworthy kinds of material. The first is oracles, and oracles are statements made by God through the prophet, so typically introduced by the words thus says the Lord. The other is visions, which are symbolic images and stories, often introduced with expressions such as and I saw or and I looked and behold that picture. These both picture the spiritual activities of God, angels or evil spirits going on behind the scenes or dreamlike representations of what is going to happen in the near or distant future. So these books of prophecy would be Ezekiel, daniel and Zechariah, and they're dominated by these last kinds of visions. Frequently, the author explains to the reader what some of the symbolic elements of these visions represent. So you need to really look for those explanations.

Speaker 1: 18:00

The next section we need to move to is parables. Now, parables are relatively short, simple stories told to illustrate a point or answer a question, and they're not about real people or actual events. In fact, there's no book containing only parables. Most of the parables of the Bible are stories told by Jesus in the Gospels, in which many different elements are symbolic or of specific things, but at least one is so the parable of the sower and the four soils, for instance. A parable is an indirect form of teaching. Instead of telling someone what to think or how to act, the teacher tells a story that makes the point clear for those who are open to it.

Speaker 1: 18:42

The next section of the Bible we should talk about is the epistles, or letters, and that's what epistle means is letter. There are just a few letters quoted in historical books in the Old Testament, and there's at least 19 of the 27 books of the New Testament that are epistles, or Paul's 13 epistles, from Romans to Philemon, james 1 and 2, peter 2 and 3 John and, of course, jude. Now the book of Revelation, though dominated by prophetic visions, begins and ends in the form of an epistle. Hebrews and 1 John do not identify their authors or their original readers, so they are not exactly letters. Perhaps I guess we could call them literary sermons.

Speaker 1: 19:25

All of Paul's epistles are messages to churches or Christian leaders, to churches or Christian leaders. In these letters, paul may be answering questions from a church or writing to address false doctrines or other issues he has learned have arisen in a church, encouraging a church to continue doing well, or giving young leaders instructions in how to handle some pastoral concerns. In several of his letters to churches he begins with doctrinal teaching and in the last part of the letter focuses on practical concerns. So you can sometimes get some helpful background for these letters from reading Acts as well, which tells about Paul founding churches and working with other leaders. So I would start in Acts. The other letters are written for Christians over wider areas than just a city or a single church, are written for Christians over wider areas than just a city or a single church. Several of the letters, particularly 2 Peter and Jude, were written as the apostolic era was gradually coming to an end. So all of these general epistles urge Christians to be faithful to Christ in the way they live, as pressures from ordinary life or even persecution challenge their confidence in the gospel. And this is also the focus of Hebrews. So Hebrews reads mostly like a sermon, but with a letter-like ending.

Speaker 1: 20:38

So in summary, we talked about how the Bible isn't just a single book but a collection of books written over a period lasting more than a thousand years, and there's also a variety of different kinds of books in the Bible. We talked about the two main sections of the Bible, which is the Old Covenant, or Old Testament, and the New Covenant or New Testament, and also then the other sections, which were history, biographies, covenants and laws, songs, proverbs, prophecy, parables and epistles. I hope this was helpful to you. You can find all this information on bibirrorg, and it's the Institute for Religious Research. I hope that you'll go back and take notes on this for yourself, but, more importantly, that you'll gain understanding so that you can help other people.

Speaker 1: 21:27

There's a bunch of other believers around you that need this information, that need to be supported by your knowledge, and also there's a bunch of lost people that surround us every day that need to have the understanding and knowledge of God's promises in the Bible. So I hope you'll take that in consideration. Please send me a text. Go to the show notes, click on send me a text or send us a text on that link, and I would love to hear from you, hear your thoughts, prayer concerns, whatever. This was a high altitude flyover of the sections and books of the Bible, but make sure you subscribe to the podcast, key number five. In the next episode we're going to cover the actual method, bible study method that is used in seminaries to train pastors in how to break down and understand the Bible. I think it'll be helpful for all of us and I hope you have a great week. Take care.