The Bible As One Story

By: Jethro Abanador

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He filled the earth with life
starting from plants, animals, fishes, birds and all sorts of creatures and put them all in the
garden called Eden and God saw all His creation as good. He then created man, male and
female, and placed them in the garden to take care all of His creation and to subdue the whole
earth. God gave everything that was good to them except the tree of knowledge of good and
evil. Here we can see that God has given them a choice, to fully trust God in everything or to
decide for themselves what is good and what is evil and it came to pass that the man and the
woman gave in to temptation and choose to have their own way; them first sin. God drove them
out of the garden and cursed them as punishment for their sin, but God, also gave them
something to hope upon about a wounded savior.

As time passed by, the people began to increase and also wickedness also increased due
to the evil hearts of men with which they decided to build a tower so high up into the sky so that
they make their selves known and to be greater than God. Well of course God did not allow this
and punished them by confusing their languages and they scattered still increasing in number
but their hearts remained wicked and sinful.

As the wickedness of man grew, God’s wrath and anger also grew and decided to end all
life on earth through a great flood. God wanted to start a new in the person of Noah, a man who
walked with God and was found righteous before Him. So God commanded Noah to create an
ark where he and his family and the animals that were with them safe. So the flood came, killing
all life on earth except those who were in the ark with Noah. After the event, God made a
promise to Noah that He will never again destroy life on earth through water.

Generations passed, God then called Abraham from the land of Ur to the place called
Canaan and established His promise to make Him into a great nation, he will be blessed and he
will be a blessing to other nations as well, an everlasting covenant to his descendants as well. A
covenant that has been passed to Isaac, his son, which in turn passed down to Jacob whose
name is changed to Israel. From Jacob, twelve sons were born to him, one of them named
Joseph with whom the other brothers envied. From this envy, Joseph was brought to Egypt as a
slave and ended up a Governor whose purpose is to bring the whole assembly of Israel to Egypt
to save them from the famine.

After sometime, the generation of Joseph had died; a new pharaoh arose and made the
whole assembly of Israel slaves. God remembered them and sought to save them through His
servant Moses and Aaron. Through them God unleashed His wrath upon Egypt through a series
of plagues culminating to the decimation of all first born through out the land of Egypt to the land
of Canaan, the land promised to Abraham a long time ago. When they came out of Egypt, God
taught the whole assembly of Israel His ways, through Moses but, they were a stiffed-neck
generation who constantly sinned and God opted them to wander the wilderness for forty years.
After Moses died a new leader was raised up in the person of Joshua who led the whole
assembly in conquering Canaan.

Though God has given them success, the assembly of Israel still managed to deviate
from God’s plan and purpose and continued to mingle with the other nations resulting in sin.
When Joshua died, the people began to sin greatly against God. As a punishment God has
given Israel to the other nations to conquer them and punish them. This resulted with the people
turning back to God, pleading and praying for God to rescue them, so He gave them the Judges
who serves as God’s messengers and lead the whole land of Israel victory against their
invaders. And after sometime a new cycle of sin, punishment, repentance and deliverance
happened until the time came when the people of Israel fully rejected God by asking for a king to
rule them.

The era of the kings came, the land of Israel was united under the rule of Saul, who was
rejected by God because of his disobedience and passed the kingship to David, the man after
God’s own heart, but managed to sin against God through adultery and murder, then passed to
Solomon the wisest of all, he started well but in the middle rejected God and at the came back to
God, the united kingdom of Israel. After king Solomon, Israel became a broken nation forming
the northern kingdom and Judah. Due to the sin of the Northern Kingdom, God gave them over
to the Assyrians and scattered them all over the world. As for the kingdom of Judah, because of
God’s promised to David that from his lineage, Israel will always have a king, endured battling
sin and corruption to holiness and righteous then going back to sin until God had enough.
 Israel was conquered by different nations starting from Babylon, then the Persians, then
the Greeks and lastly the Romans. The people of Israel were exiled at the start of the Babylon
occupation. The whole land of Israel was in ruins and the temple of God that was built by
Solomon was destroyed. Then the first and second wave of exiles going back to Israel has
started with the purpose of re-establishing the temple of the Lord that was destroyed, this
happened during the Babylonian occupation through Zerubbabel, a descendant of David. Then
the third wave of exiles returning to Israel happened. This was during the Persian occupation,
led by Ezra whose purpose is to re-establish the word of God through out Israel. Then the last
waves of exiles return still under the Persian Empire led by Nehemiah, whose mission is to
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Then comes the silent years where God has never communed
with the people nor God rose up other prophets.

What we can see here are the following; 1.) God is always at work, whether seen or
unseen; 2.) Man is prone to temptation and can never save himself from sin; 3.) There is a cycle
of sin, punishment, repentance and salvation all through out the Old Testament; 4.) God always
provides a way out for the sins of the people of Israel.

These four truths can be summed up with the purpose of the birth, death and resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the promised savior ever since the beginning after Adam and Eve
sinned against God. He is our deliverer from the bondage of slavery that is sin, He is our leaders
who fights the battles for us and lead us into victory against temptation as He overcame them in
the wilderness, He is our redeemer in our time of crisis, the rightful King to govern us, and the
one who will lead us back to our true home which is heaven. Jesus Christ is the only way, the
only truth and the only light and only through Him that we can come to the Father. He is our
righteousness and our holiness and His purpose will manifest over the entire world through us
whom He has redeemed from darkness and brought to light. That is His story, from the
beginning until this very day; it is all about Him and His power, glory, honor and majesty. Glory
be to our God! Amen!