How many people open a book and start reading halfway through? Generally speaking, it doesn’t happen very often, with one notable exception.

In this week’s video lesson by Ray Vander Laan, he spoke about the importance of the Old Testament. People today often hear ‘Old’ Testament and think that the first half of the Bible is outdated and tend to ignore the ‘God of the Old Testament’ for the ‘God of the New Testament’. The Bible is one book with one story, though, and if you don’t have the first half of the book, you can’t understand the second half, and vice versa.

In English, to know something is to be aware intellectually. You can know a phone number, your blood type or an address, etc. We file it away as information, knowledge. These are things we accept as true.

In Hebrew, the word for ‘to know’ is ‘yadah’ (ya-DAH). This definition includes knowledge, but the word is broader which also includes experiencing the information, and not just indirectly but intimately and personally.

Ray then references the book of Matthew, chapter 18:21-22 as an example, which says, ”Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”

A key question to be answered when reading this passage is, “Why did Peter choose the number seven?” Maybe you can recall the number seven in the Bible being representative of completion and perfection. From this, we know Peter asked Jesus if we are to forgive our brother who sins against us perfectly. But what happens if the brother sins for an eighth time?

Jesus answered this by saying, “Seventy times seven”. We know the number seven represents completeness and perfection, but when Peter heard this, his mind would have taken him back to Genesis.

After Cain murdered Abel and was cast out of the garden, chapter 4 shifts to genealogy. Seth was born of Adam and Eve to replace Abel and so on. Here, Ray diverts slightly and states genealogy isn’t considered very important in the west. In the east, family genealogy is very important. Students in Jerusalem, even in secular schools, can recite genealogy. They would sing songs about the genealogies to learn them, much like the ABC’s.

 Referring back to the text, Ray states Cain’s descendant Lamech commits murder because a man wounded him and brags about it to his wives. Lamech said to them, “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times” (V24) Lamech is known because of this as one of the most vengeful people in Scripture for inciting this curse.

Jesus said to Peter in essence, “You shall out-forgive Lamech. You need to forgive him one more time than he hurt you. When you repay evil for evil, evil always wins.”

In the west, we are not taught to ask, “why do I need to know that?” Maybe the answer will bring cultural or historical context. Asking why God chooses the number seven brings an entirely deeper meaning to Jesus’s answer. Learning the answers to questions we ask about Scripture enriches a lot of what the Bible says and glues the story together.

Word-pictures and metaphor and cultural details are important. It joins the story together, from Old to New Testament. With that in mind, Ray introduces the idea of the Grand Narrative – the single story or thread that connects all sixty-six books of the Bible and forty different authors over thousands of years.

We learned there are three foundations to experiencing the Grand Narrative –

1. The story is how God reveals Himself and His truth. If you ask God a question, maybe He would tell you a parable instead of answering directly, Ray posits.
2. There is only one story which could be considered weakness in western thought. We see it as sixty-six books, or we divide it in half by Old and New Testaments.
3. What am I supposed to do with the story? What is God’s intention? The west thinks His intention is to learn the story: what happened, who did it happen to, when did it happen, how did it happen, etc.

We are to do more than understand what is written – we are to believe it. The devil knows the story too, and he knows more than we do, because he has been roaming the earth much longer than we have, but his knowledge doesn’t do him any good. He is still eternally cast out of heaven.

Others think we are to prove the story is true. Some of these people go into archeology to find artifacts that support the Bible. However, there are things archeology doesn’t seem to prove or disprove, like miracles. The Bible authenticates itself.

Ray gives another example of the difference between eastern and western way of knowing things again going back to Genesis 4:1, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.”

In Hebrew, ‘to know’ means to know experientially. Adam really knew Eve, and Eve really knew Adam, experiencing each other in a way that God intended and resulted in the birth of a child. God wants us to intimately experience the story of the Bible. He wants us to be in the story.

In some ways, the story is finished. We won’t be stapling new stories onto Revelation. But the story that the Bible records isn’t finished. We are to help finish the story. We are called to live out the story. Wherever you are is a tiny piece of His great story, His Great Narrative. As trivial as our story may seem, it is eternally important, part of something really big.

David thought he was becoming an incredible shepherd. Shepherds were often young and in their free time when they weren’t moving their herd, they practiced throwing stones with the slings they carried on them. Shepherds were skilled at this, sometimes out of necessity to defend their livestock against predators

David thought he was becoming an incredible shepherd, but God needed Him to be so good with the sling that He gave him the opportunity to refine his skills and uses David to slay a giant. David was just doing what shepherds do, what he had done repeatedly. David was preparing himself to slay Goliath for years without knowing it. But God did.

Each of us are given stones to throw, things we are good at or interested in, and God uses our stones for His purposes to ultimately spread the Gospel and make His name known to draw people to Him.

God doesn’t ask us to throw someone else’s stone, but the one God gave us through talent or experience. He threw His stone so the world may know.

Join the story. Throw your stone.