Monday, November 13, 2006

GOD's history for us (old post)

the HomeTeams are reading through the book of Esther now. after spending a few weeks discussing the first few chapters together i'm realizing that it really is a different type of book than Philippians. Philippians was written as a letter from 2 people to a group of people. the words that they wrote were written as an outpouring of their hearts. however, with Esther it's very different. Esther was written down as a historical story of GOD's salvation (again) for his people. The story of Esther was to be told each year at the festival of purim to remind the Israelites that once again GOD had saved them.

i think it's easy for us to forget that history is an important part of our faith. i think that it's something we easily overlook. but there's a reason that there are more pages in the Bible dedicated to the history of GOD's people than to stories of Jesus. with history we can see GOD's provision and be sure that if he is a consistent GOD then he will continue with his provision. the life and death of Jesus is another part of that provision. please don't hear what i'm not saying; Jesus is important, so very important, but i think it's easy to neglect parts of the Bible that don't deal with Jesus. please take my words with grace, but what if the Bible isn't about Jesus, but about GOD. and the story of Jesus isn't the focal point of the story, but another part of the story of GOD? if this was true, and we read scripture in this context, i wonder what impact it would have on our lives?

3 comments:

Todd Newton said...

Gasp, did you really just say that there's more to the Bible than just Jesus??

Good thoughts, Steve, even if they are old. I wonder what some of my "old" thoughts would look like now if I hadn't began posting them nigh on a year ago.

I remember going through Esther; that was a lot of fun. We should have some kind of JTC reunion at some point and go through an incredibly short book (like Jude haha).

stephen said...

jude might be too long of a book for the tangents that might occur.

Anonymous said...

wait, when did you write this?

you can imagine the excitement taking place in my mind when i read this.

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.