(The Best Road Trip You’ll Ever Take)
Growing up, I was told the Bible was one story, yet I experienced it as an unrelated collection: garden and snake stuff, Abraham, Moses, some of the cool dramatic stories like Samson and David, Psalms, the land of confusion (like Ezekiel, what?), and then into New Testament for Jesus, a bunch of letters, and then Revelation weirdness, like creatures covered in eyes.
By my mid-twenties, I’d made it through “Bible in a year” reading plans a few times, but I still felt disoriented. Certainly, God was using His Word to shape me during those years (Is. 55:11), but I didn’t enjoy it. The words whooshed past me, and I was relieved when I got to the end. The psalmist’s proclamation that God’s Word was “sweeter than honey” (Ps. 119:103) felt like a platitude. Surely he didn’t actually mean it?
However, when I gained some equipping that helped me discern the Bible’s big story and experience it for myself, my relationship with the Bible began to change. For nearly a decade, the Bible’s story has truly captivated me, and it’s become my annual practice to study it by tracing a theme across its pages. Engaging with the Bible in this way has informed much of my personal ministry, writing—and my delight. As it turns out, the psalmist did mean the honey thing. I’ve tasted and see that the Lord—and His Word—is good (Ps. 34:8).
If you’d like to become better acquainted with the Bible’s big story and learn how to trace a theme across Scripture, think of it like a road trip: Learn the story’s landscape, journey with the theme, and pay attention to what you see along the way.
Learn the Story’s Landscape
When we don’t know where we’re going, a GPS helps, and learning the Bible’s landscape (the shape of the big story) is a little like that.
Jen Wilkin’s Women of the Word was the first non-school place I heard the word metanarrative and was given a framework for the Bible’s metanarrative. (Thank you, Jen!) “Metanarrative” is a literary term for a big epic story that contains little stories, which are best interpreted through the big story. The Bible’s metanarrative is not merely a “story of stories” but an interpretive tool, a means by which we understand the smaller parts. The metanarrative landscape of the Bible can orient you when you read through the whole thing, and it will offer understanding when you “camp out” in a particular location.
Wilkin’s book described a simple framework for this big story: creation, fall, redemption, restoration.1 “Creation” refers to Genesis 1-2, “fall” refers to Genesis 3, “redemption” refers to God’s redeeming work from the exit of the garden to Jesus and the church, and “restoration” refers to God’s promise in Revelation of the new heavens and new earth. I’ve heard some argue that “consummation” is a more accurate word than “restoration,” but whatever word you settle on, this part of the story points to what Jesus says in Revelation 21:5: “Look, I am making everything new.” It’s not a restart or a rewind—it’s the wonderful revitalization we’ve longed for after the pain and problems we’ve encountered in the narrative arc, put into motion by Jesus’s redemptive work. Like in any epic story, the plot has been developing toward this end, which in our case is also a beginning: God dwelling with His people fully and forever in the new heavens and the earth.
I began to read and interpret with this simple four-part framework in mind, and slowly, I found my footing. I’ll admit that I struggled with the “redemption” part of the story, which contains the majority of the Bible. How could I make sense of these vast texts? Eventually, I felt equipped to name “mile markers” along the biblical highway that helped me understand where I was within the redemption part of the story. People have done this in different ways:
- Some have used the covenants to mark God’s redeeming works (Adamic, Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, New Covenant in Jesus, Everlasting Covenant as described in Jer. 32:37-41).
- Some recommend viewing it as two sets of three acts, with the first act, the Old Testament containing creation (Gen. 1–2), the Fall (Gen. 3), and Israel’s Story (Gen. 4–Malachi). The second act, the New Testament, contains the Story of Jesus Christ (Gospels), the story of the church (Acts and letters) and the renewal of creation and the restoration of God’s rule over all creation (Revelation).2
- One particularly intriguing framework is an acronym developed by Dr. Carol Kaminski: CASKET EMPTY. The word CASKET represents the Old Testament (Creation, Abraham, Sinai, Kings, Exile, Temple), and the word EMPTY represents the New Testament (Expectations, Messiah, Pentecost, Teachings, Yet-to-come).3
I suspect Bible teachers will vary on the best approach, but for me, a familiarity with a handful of options has helped me become better acquainted with the Bible’s big story. If you intentionally use these frameworks as a “GPS” for a season, eventually the shape of the story will settle into your memory, and you’ll mostly know where you are and where you’re going, and best of all, you’ll feel more at home within its pages.
Journey with the Theme
At the risk of overworking a metaphor, a theme is like a car in which you ride along the story’s landscape. The first step is to pick your car—ahem, theme—and these are best plucked from the Bible itself. What have you noticed in your reading? Is there a beloved passage with a theme you’d like to explore more, like “shepherd” from Psalm 23, “temple” from 1 Corinthians 6:19, or “light” from John 8:12?
Once you’ve settled on a theme, pick a method. There are two trusted roads for your theme-car: the book-by-book approach and the storyline approach.
Book by book
“Book by book” is exactly what it sounds like: You read through the Bible book by book, keeping an eye out for what each biblical writer has to say about the theme and watching how the theme develops over the course of the story. Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell describe this approach as a “moderated family conversation.”4 In other words, every family member (biblical author) gets heard. Reading this way is a big commitment, but it’s also a powerful way to focus a reading plan and becomes an opportunity for deep and ongoing meditation on God’s Word. You’ll be surprised what you notice simply because of the theme you’re traveling with! I like to pick a highlighter, mark everything that has to do with that theme, and pause to list bullet point observations at the end of every book. The study is rarely tidy, but it helps me to remember that this isn’t a set of instructions for an IKEA dresser—it’s God’s Word! We will never approach this perfect book perfectly, but we can keep going, asking God for wisdom along the way.
Storyline
The storyline approach is less comprehensive but can still be a faithful way to trace a theme. We grab one of the frameworks mentioned previously, and we allow every part of the story to speak to the theme. This can be especially helpful when you’re “camping out” in one particular part of the story, but you want to be sure you’re oriented within the big narrative. For example, studying about the priesthood of believers in 1 Peter 2:5 may inspire you to pull back and trace the theme of “priest.” What do you observe about “priest” at each plot point, and how does it develop over the course of the story? You’ll be letting the Bible teach you the Bible—and this is a really wonderful position to be in.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind about themes: They develop. So while you may think you’re riding in a Ford Taurus at the beginning of the trip, by the end you may realize it’s a Tesla or a spaceship or a school bus. Let the Bible tell you about the Bible, and enjoy whatever surprises you encounter.
Pay Attention to What you See
As you carry this story around, it will leak into your life in meaningful ways—but we want to be careful not to let our stories leak into the biblical story. If we project our own ideas upon the text, it’ll warp the story, and we’ll miss out on something beautiful. That means that along the journey, we have to continuously shake off our assumptions and pay attention to what’s actually there. As we read, we pray for wisdom and humility, we pay attention to original settings and genre and the words used by the biblical writers, and we refuse to force the text into our own boxes. Let the Bible be what it is, allow it to impact you as you are, and the result will be worship.
A decade ago, I couldn’t have honestly said that the Bible is the most exciting book in the world, but now I know that when its life-giving story saturates our lives, we experience life. The themes of its story give meaning to ours. Why? Because all of its words point to the Word, Jesus, through whom all things were created and by whom all things exist and through whom we find togetherness with God.
To read more from Caroline Saunders and trace the theme of home through Scripture, check out her new Bible study, Come Home.
ABOUT CAROLINE SAUNDERS
Caroline Saunders is a writer, Bible teacher, pastor’s wife, and mother of three who believes in taking Jesus seriously and being un-serious about nearly everything else. She loves to serve at her church (it’s not just the donuts), and every year, she retells the Bible’s big story at a women’s retreat that she and her friends offer local women through their parachurch ministry, Story & Soul. She’s had the joy of publishing two Bible studies for teen girls (Good News: How to Know the Gospel and Live It and Better Than Life: How to Study the Bible and Like It), two picture books for kids ages 4-8 (The Story of Water and The Story of Home), and two retellings of selected books of the Bible for elementary readers (Sound the Alarm and Remarkable). Find her writing, resources, and ridiculousness at WriterCaroline.com and on Instagram @writercaroline. (And finally, let it be known that Caroline’s kids said, “Mom can make a joke out of anything,” and so she ran and added that to her bio.)
WORKS CITED
- Jen Wilkin, Women of the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 50.
- Andreas J. Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell, Biblical Theology: A Canonical, Thematic, and Ethical Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 752.
- Carol Kaminski, Casket Empty, accessed May 10, 2024, https://www.casketempty.com/.
- Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell, Biblical Theology, 63.