Karen Lee-Thorp - Story of Stories: A Guided Tour from Genesis to Revelation

Why I Want to Tell You This Story

A t the age of twenty-five I was hit by a truck. A large industrial truck loaded with gravel. The driver hit my little car because of someone elses error, and the results for me included permanent injuries and brain damage. Two years after that accident, when I was still coming to grips with how those few minutes were changing my life, I began to write this book.

Its not the story of my hardships, nor the story of how Ive grown amid hardships, as important as that tale is (to me, anyway). Instead its the vast story of God at work in the world, the Lover who has pursued his wayward beloved across millennia despite hardships I can scarcely imagine. I tell this story because I dont think Im the only person who needs to know that Im part of a tale much bigger than the one that started on my birthday. My life is not an indie film in which Im the director and the star. Im a small but valued player in an epic masterpiece in which God is the Director and the Star. So are you.

God has an annoying habit of not telling me why my scenes go the way they do. However, he has given me an overview of the whole story and has explained some of the past scenes. The Bible is the definitive account of how Gods epic unfolded from the creation of the world through about A.D. 100. It closes with a glimpse of the glorious finale that has not yet taken place. Its a huge help when I have to decide how to play a scene, or when Im frustrated and want to quit. Its also a ripping good yarn.

Yet lots and lots of people who revere the Bible dont get around to reading more than a few famous lines here and there. They dont know what to do with stories and poetry and letters written twenty or thirty centuries ago in Hebrew or Greek. I was trained how to read something written long ago and hear it speaking afresh to my generation, how to research an ancient culture to fill in the background the original readers already knew. Ive written several dozen study guides on books of the Bible, so my head is deep into the ancient world. But not everyone has the time or aptitude for that. Ive read the Bible with heroin addicts and engineers, survivors of child sexual abuse and parents with toddlers. All of these people have needed to know that God is not an abstract doctrine, but a Person, and that they are part of a great story that is good and beautiful and true.

So I decided to write a guided tour of the great story that doesnt make it seem boring. Story of Stories isnt fictionI havent invented any scenes, and if you see dialogue in quotation marks, its word-for-word from the New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible. Yet Ive tried to show how gripping, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking the story is if you know whats going on. Ive included background information thats not found in the Bible itself but that will help you understand whats happening and why.

Did I mention funny? It turns out that God has a sense of humor, especially about the gap between what people think they know and what they really know. If you dont like irony, this may not be the book for you. After all, Im the person God hit with a truck.

There are many different ways to use this book. You can read Story of Stories cover to cover like a novel, or you can sample what it says about a specific section or book of the Bible. You may wish to read a chapter, or part of a chapter, each day in your personal or family devotions. If youre just about to read through a particular part of the Bible, you might find it helpful to get the background here first. The table of contents in the front and the index in the back can help you find particular passages.

For the past five hundred years or so, passages in the Bible have been referenced by book, chapter and verse. The name of the book comes first, then the chapter number(s) and then, after a colon (:), the verse number(s), if any. For example, Genesis 13 means the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. Genesis 1:1 means the book of Genesis, chapter one, verse one. In books with only one chapter, just the verse number is used, for example, Obadiah 12. The chapter and verse divisions were added many centuries after the Bible was written, and they often dont provide an accurate indication of the natural divisions within the biblical books. However, they do help us find particular places in the Bible easily, so I use them throughout this volume.

I have left out many, many details from the storynot because theyre unimportant, but for several reasons. First, I want to give you the big picture. Second, I want to give the most help with the parts of the story that are hardest for readers today. It kills me to cover Jesus Galilean ministry with his disciples in one chapter, but for readers today the Gospels are much easier than, say, the Prophets.

Third, this is not a scholarly reference book. It is, however, thoroughly researched. The technical work and theological reflections of many scholarsmore than could possibly be listedhave gone into it. Biblical scholars differ on many important points of interpretation and continue to debate them actively. But every position taken in this book has significant support within these scholars debates, particularly among those who honor the Bible as the inspired and authoritative Word of God.

There are plenty of good reference texts available, but they often deal with debates that leave ordinary readers in the dust. So Ive chosen to tell the story of God reaching down to mortalswhich is truly the story of all storiesas if we were talking in my living room, yet with the deepest respect for God and his Book. I hope this telling motivates you to read the Bible itself with a sense of its flow, its drama and, above all, its main character, who invites you to join him in scenes that I look forward to hearing retold at the end of days.

Karen Lee-Thorp

A Promise of Deliverance

Genesis 13

I nside most of us is a nagging feeling that things arent going the way they were meant to go. Were not the people we were meant to be. And theres more to life than meets the eye. So we start asking questions:

Whats going on?

Is there any point to this exercise?

Does anybody care?

How did we get into this mess, anyway?

Genesis is a Greek word meaning beginning. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible, so it is (not surprisingly) about beginningsof the earth, the human race, marriage, languagesand also of how we got into this mess. It launches the tale of the making, breaking and restoring of the friendship between God and humans.

God is the name Genesis uses in its first sentence to name a Being with personality and aliveness, a Being who is communicating to us from beyond our world. Genesis doesnt argue for this Beings existence; it assumes it. After all, according to tradition the book was written by a man named Moses who had an intimate friendship with this God. To the writer of Genesis, Gods existence seemed obvious.

The events of Genesis occurred long before Moses was born. Many of them were passed down orally from generation to generation among his people, the Hebrews. Some were probably written family records. And Moses got the straight story from God when God assigned him to write the book. Imagine penning a book by discussing the material with a Being you could not see but whose presence and personality you were constantly aware of. To Moses, this was not spooky stuffGod was his Boss and Comrade.