The Bible, Abridged

In the beginning, there was God—which is to say, there was love, because God is love.

God’s love is creative. In fact, long before He created us, He created other living beings. We call them angels—or at least we call some of them angels. Others we call demons because at some point in the past, prior to God’s creation of the universe, the most glorious angel, Lucifer, the Morning Star, led a mutiny against God, which a large minority of the angelic population joined. The coup failed, but nothing has been the same since. Now there is a war in the invisible realm between the angels of light and the demons of darkness. That battle is something that has affected everything and wounded everybody in this world.
‍
Sometime after the rebellion, God created the heavens and the earth. It started with a single tiny, blue sphere on a huge black canvas. Brown and gray land masses bubbled up from the watery surface and hardened into dry land. Vegetation was added, and it made the planet, from a distance, a brilliant mix of deep blue and fluorescent green and desert brown, coated with swirls of cotton white clouds. More planets were added to the mural—the blindingly bright sun, the glowing moon, and billions more, creating the misty band we call the Milky Way. Billions more galaxies were added, almost as if they were created for no other reason than to be marveled at from Planet Earth.
‍
Animal life came next. First sea creatures, then winged creatures, fashioned to dance in the sky, and finally land animals of every kind. And then God created human beings—in His own image! First male, then female. He put them on the most lush, beautiful plot of land on the globe— the Garden of Eden, where they could enjoy pristine beauty, blissful companionship with each other, and unhindered intimacy with Him forever.
‍
There was just one stipulation: The man and the woman had to leave one tree untouched, one fruit untasted. “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden,” God told Adam, “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Death was something they could only grasp theoretically, because it had never happened before.
‍
But the devil had a score to settle, and Adam and Eve were the pawns in his chess match with God. He came to Eve, the one who had not heard God’s warning with her own ears. First he tried to twist God’s word to confuse her. When that didn’t work, he called God an outright liar. “You won’t die,” he said. “You’ll be like God. That’s why He doesn’t want you to eat that luscious fruit.” He planted in her heart a seed of desire that grew into an act of rebellion. She ate the forbidden fruit. Sin was passed like a virus to Adam, who also ate. Soon they were covering themselves with fig leaves and hiding from God. But He found them, and He pronounced on them a curse: Painful childbirth, a lifetime of grueling work, and death. “You will return to the ground,” God said to them, “for dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

From that point on, things went downhill. Adam and Eve passed on their propensity to disobey God to their children, via DNA. Generation after generation became increasingly violent toward one another and distant from God. And they all died.
‍
Finally God got fed up. He decided to start over. He found one righteous man, Noah, and he said, “Build a boat—a big one. An ark. Put one male and one female from every species in the ark. Your family can come too.” Noah did everything just as God commanded him, and God sealed the ark and sent rain—40 days of it, until every creature on the planet, except those in the ark, were dead.
‍
As soon as the ground was dry, the ark was emptied, and God said to Noah’s extended family, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth”—which, of course, they didn’t do. The descendants of Noah settled down in one city and they worked together on a building project: The tower of Babel. It was an ambitious project fueled by pride. God had to create language barriers in order to compel them obey His command to scatter out and fill the earth.
‍
But what never changed through all that demonically inspired human rebellion was the stubborn love of God. He created people in order to bless them with life at its best. And so He didn’t give up.
‍
Instead, He tried a whole new approach: He focused His blessing on one particular group of people in one particular location. He decided to draw all people to Himself through one nation— the nation of Israel.

It began with one man—Abraham. God said to him, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
‍
It was a promise that felt like a cruel joke to Abraham and his wife Sarah, because they were already senior citizens, and they had no children. It wasn’t until Abraham was 100 years old, and Sarah 90, that she gave birth to Isaac.
‍
Isaac and Rebekah had Jacob, and Jacob had 12 sons. His favorite was Joseph, which made the other brothers so jealous that they sold him into slavery. Joseph was brought against his will to Egypt, where he eventually became the second most powerful person in the land. And when there was a famine, his whole family came from Israel to Egypt, and there the family stayed for the next 400 years, during which time the 12 brothers evolved into the 12 tribes of Israel. They were enslaved to the Egyptians until God raised up Moses, an 80-year-old man with a regrettable past, to lead them out of Egypt and back to Canaan, the land He had promised to give them.
‍
He gave them laws to follow, which they didn’t, and so instead of going straight to Canaan they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, taking full advantage of the sacrificial system by which God would accept animal blood as a temporary covering of their sins.
‍
And when they finally did make it to the Promised Land, the Israelites continued to rebel against God, so predictably that they fell into a recurring cycle of sin, followed by judgment, followed by repentance, followed by deliverance, and on and on it went. God, in his determination to fulfill His plan to bless the world through the people of Israel, raised up judge after judge to deliver them until finally they said, “We want a king.”
‍
God said, “I am your king.”
‍
They said, “Yeah, we know, but we want the kind of king the other nations have. You know, a man.”
‍
God said, “OK, you asked for it,” and he raised up Saul, who quickly disobeyed Him, which caused His spirit to fall on a young man by the name of David, which made Saul insanely jealous to the day of his death.
‍
Then David became king, and he was a man after God’s own heart, and so God blessed him as a leader. Israel started winning all its battles and expanding its territory—until David had an affair with Bathsheba and ordered the murder of her husband. Not even the man after God’s own heart could break free of the sin that had poisoned the human heart since Adam and Eve.
‍
After David came Solomon, who built a great temple in Jerusalem but also had 700 wives and 300 other girlfriends.

It was right after Solomon’s death that the kingdom of Israel divided—with 10 tribes uniting in the north, and just two tribes sticking together in the South.
‍
The northern kingdom of Israel continued to decline until it was finally conquered by Assyria. The people of Israel were scattered and have never since been regathered.
‍
But God didn’t give up. It was right about the time of Israel’s fall to Assyria that prophets in the southern kingdom of Judah began predicting the coming of a Savior. “For to us a child is born,” Isaiah prophesied, “to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.”
‍
The people of Judah swelled with patriotic hope. Israel is going to be great again, they thought— like it was when David was king.

But, later, Isaiah prophesied about the coming of a very different kind of man. He said of this man: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.”
‍
The people of Israel didn’t know what to do with that. Naturally they assumed it couldn’t be the same Man who would reign on David’s throne. So some began to look forward to two different saviors: the Messiah, who would reign; and the Servant, who would suffer—not for the sins of world, of course, but for the sins of Israel, God’s chosen people.
‍
Eventually, Judah was also crushed by a superpower. Babylonia swallowed them up and marched them out of their homeland.

But 50 years later the exiles were given permission to return to Judah. Most opted out, but some did return. And to that remnant, the prophet Zechariah said: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

And then, silence. For over 400 years the people of Israel waited, with not a word of encouragement from the Lord. A new superpower, Rome, took its turn ruling the land of Israel.
‍
And then suddenly, God started speaking to His people again—first to a priest by the name of Zechariah. The angel of the Lord told him that he would have a son who would make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
‍
And then an angel appeared to a teenage virgin and said to her: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
‍
No wonder that after John the Baptist was born, Zechariah prophesied, not about Jesus the Suffering Servant, but about Jesus the Messiah. He said: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, salvation from our enemies.”
‍
Sure enough, Jesus proved to be the Messiah. Who else could still storms and cleanse leprosy and heal paralysis and restore sight and multiply food and walk on water and raise the dead? And yet He didn’t seem to buy into their patriotism. He didn’t confront Roman oppression. Instead, He talked about how God loved the whole world. And He told people that whoever ate His flesh and drank His blood would live forever. He repeatedly predicted His own death. Finally, one Passover, when Jesus was with His disciples, He held up a piece of unleavened bread and said to them, “This is my body, which is for you.” And He held up a cup of wine and said, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
‍
And the next morning, the body of Jesus the Messiah was nailed to a cross, and His blood was poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. He was the Suffering Servant who was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. He died, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring all of us to God.
‍
And then he was raised from the dead. Having fulfilled his ministry as the Suffering Servant, He was exalted as Messiah—King of kings and Lord of lords.

But how is the whole world supposed to know who Jesus is and what He has done—not just for the people of Israel, but for all people? How are they supposed to find out that their sins can be forgiven, and that they can live forever? That’s the job of God’s chosen people.
‍
On the day that He was raised from the dead, Jesus said to His disciples: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
‍
Later, He gathered His disciples together again and said to them: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
‍
Then, one more time, right before He returned to heaven, He said to them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

The disciples said, “Amen,” and as soon as they received the gift of the Spirit, on the Day of Pentecost, they became Christ’s witnesses—not in all Judea and Samaria, or to the ends of the earth, just in Jerusalem, because they were stubbornly ethnocentric. But God was determined to get them to fan out. And so when the church was viciously attacked in Jerusalem, all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria—and those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.

Finally the apostle Peter went kicking and screaming to a house full of non-Jews and preached the gospel to them with a bad attitude, and the whole family put their faith in Jesus and were filled with the Holy Spirit, praising God in languages they had never learned.

When the Jewish church leaders got wind of it, they called Peter on the carpet, and he said, “Wait, I didn’t want to do it. God made me do it. And then He gave them the same gift of the Spirit that He gave us. How could I argue with that?”

His testimony caused the Jewish Christians to praise God and say, “What do you know? Even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life.”
‍
Then God called Paul and Barnabas, two of the leaders of the church in Antioch, to be missionaries. Everywhere they went they stopped first at the synagogue and shared the gospel with Jews. And over and over again the Jews rejected the gospel and persecuted the missionaries. Only then did they go to the Gentiles, who, unlike the Jews, were receptive to the gospel. Paul considered it a fulfillment of another of Isaiah’s prophecies, one which read: “I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.”

As Paul continued his missionary travels, he continued to encounter open-hearted Gentiles and hard-hearted Jews. Finally he wrote a letter to the church in Rome and explained why this was happening. He said that the Jews could not shake their insistence on earning salvation by their good works, while the Gentiles were eager to accept the free gift of righteousness by faith. And then he said that, although there is remnant of believing Jews, by large Israel has experienced a temporary hardness of heart until the full number of Gentiles has come into God’s kingdom—but a day is coming in the future when God’s family will be full of Jesus-following Jews and Gentiles.

Today God’s family consists of more than two billion people, almost a third of the world’s population. And the day is coming when there will be, in heaven, a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They will be wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. And they will cry out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

They will be filled with the joy that God originally intended them to feel—because they will be in the new Garden of Eden, in perfectly healthy and forever young bodies, beholding beauty that is beyond anything they have ever seen, relating to one another with love that is free of everything that destroys relationships, and enjoying a closeness to God that no one on earth has ever experienced.