Think of your favorite novel, I love the Lord of the Rings. Now imagine if your friend told you they had started reading it for the first time and they had decided to start halfway through the second book in the trilogy. Obviously, you would tell them that is the wrong way to read a story. We need to start at the beginning because it gives key clues as to the problem that the various characters in the story are trying to solve. If someone didn’t know about Sauron and the one ring, then nothing else in the story really makes sense. (Why did Frodo leave home, why form the fellowship, why did Boromir try to take the ring, etc). You would be right, a story needs to be read beginning to end and so does the Bible.

This concern is essentially what is meant when we talk about the meta-narrative. It understands that the Bible is ultimately about God, not us and that God has revealed himself through the medium of history. As a grand narrative, Scripture has a flow and ebb in terms of plot, themes, characters, etc and all these things are building towards the culmination.

Some Bible stories are “easy”.  Take the story of Adam and Eve, we can teach that Adam and Eve sinned and that has broken God’s once beautiful creation. We can teach our kids that we are like Adam and Eve in the sense that we also sin. But we need to start somewhere else. We can teach that in the story God is the hero. He is the eternal, self-sufficient God who created all things for His glory. He made us in His image and as image bearers, we are tasked with reflecting and manifesting His glory in all we do. He seeks Adam and Eve out when they sin, offers a chance for repentance, and promises a future hope of redemption from their just condemnation.

Others are more complicated. What do we do with the stories of God telling the Israelites to kill all the foreigners in the land? Or the story of …steadying the ark of the covenant with his hand and being struck dead. The answer is that we should interpret the complicated parts of Scripture by those that are clear. We should understand passages not just in their immediate context, though that is essential, but also in the context of Scripture as a whole.