The breadth, or scope, of the Bible’s content could more easily be defined by what it excludes than what it includes. And what can be said about what it includes? How about beginning with “In the beginning…” and concluding with, not an ending, but an ongoing into eternity? And what’s in-between? Absolutely everything! That’s a very broad, inclusive scope, is it not?
Christ Himself personified the scope of human history and His role in it when He stated in Revelation 22, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” From creation to culmination, it’s all here in the Book. From the incredible origin of the gene-pool God built into our first parents, resulting in the billions of human population who have already lived and died, to the untold billions yet to come – complete with the future climax of the ages – the Bible tells it all. Its scope could not be greater nor more grand. It is replete with tragedy and triumph, success and failure. Every virtue and vice capable of humans is played out in someone’s life there in the Bible. The depths of despair and the euphoria accompanying the very blessing and beneficence of God are sprinkled throughout the pages of both Testaments. There is hardly a human predicament not described somewhere in it. Comingled with it all is the unmistakable, gracious, and sometimes judgmental intervention of the God who began it all.
And, while the scope transverses the whole of human history, there is no mistaking the center of it all. That center is a person – the Redeemer, Yeshua Ha-Mashiach, Jesus, the Messiah. What the Redeemer is all about is, of course, our redemption. That’s what the Redeemer does – He redeems. This is what the manger of Bethlehem is all about. It’s what the cross of Calvary is all about. And it’s what the empty tomb is all about as well. It’s all there in the Book – skillfully woven together while encompassing 1500 years, transpired on three different continents, penned by forty-plus writers. No subject deemed important to mankind has been omitted. God Himself has seen to it. How’s that for a comprehensive scope?
Well, it’s true. The Bible doesn’t tell us all we would like to know. But, it does tell us all we need to know and all that’s good for us to know. God has seen to that also.
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