The Bible is one story with two parts, divided into four chapters, told over the course of 66 books, and it is all about Jesus.
This story is not
a fairy tale,
but rather it is the story
that all fairy tales
are about.
The Bible's hero
is concealed
in the Old Testament
and revealed
in the New.
Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
The genius of the biblical story is what it tells us about God himself:
a God who sacrifices himself in death out of love for his enemies;
a God who would rather experience the death we deserved than to be apart from the people he created for his pleasure;
a God who himself bore our likeness, experienced our creatureliness, and carried our sins so that he might provide pardon and reconciliation;
a God who would not let us go, but who would pursue us—all of us, even the worst of us—so that he might restore us into joyful fellowship with himself;
a God who in Christ Jesus has so forever identified with his beloved creatures that he came to be known and praised as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:3).
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ—which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.
What we have been told [in the Bible] is how we men [and women] can be drawn into Christ—can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to his Father—that present which is himself and therefore us in him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.
