M'Cheyne Bible Recap: The First Hyperlinked Text

In this episode, Nate draws connections between the different reading cycles within the M'Cheyne Reading Plan. In Nehemiah we see commentary on Abraham's story in Genesis that we read earlier this month. In Acts 22-23, we see Paul offering commentary on his own Damascus road experience from chapter 9. The Bible really is the first hyper-linked text and reading multiple chapters a day from different parts of it allows us to see that more clearly.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, nate Claiborne. We are now in our fourth week of the McShane Bible-Reading Plan and if you've been keeping up with all the cycles within it, you're now about halfway through the book of Genesis, you've read Ezra, you just finished Nehemiah today and you're most of the way through Matthew and through Acts. Both of those books will finish up, of course, on Sunday, and then the Matthew cycle moves on to the book of Mark and the Acts cycle is going to move on to Romans and just kind of continue its way through the rest of the New Testament and getting us all through Paul's letters over the course of the spring. Now, as I was thinking about this today, there's a part of me that not thinks knows that we could do this as a daily podcast. I would love to have the time for that and the energy for it, but while we're doing the weekly podcast, sometimes it's really difficult to think about what we would really want to highlight week to week, because there's just so much. I mean the section of Genesis that we're in we went from, I think, since our last episode we got into Genesis 17, where God establishes His covenant through the sign of circumcision with Abraham, and then we get the rest of Abraham's story. We get the birth of Isaac, we get the near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. So there's a lot there just in Genesis. Nehemiah obviously has a lot going on in that as well. We haven't even talked about Matthew and Acts, and my suspicion is maybe that some of us are only doing Matthew or Acts. Maybe you're doing Genesis and Matthew, maybe you're doing Genesis and Acts. I would love to get some more feedback from people Just how you're engaging this plan if you're doing the full four chapters, if you're just doing one cycle, two cycles, if you're just not even doing it at all because it's just you already have something else that you do, or there was just this was not an attractive option for where you're at. It just kind of helps us think through how to talk about things on the podcast. So remember, you can send me an email about it at podcast at newcityorlandocom.

Speaker 1: 2:34

For today, though, let's just kind of talk about little bits and pieces of everything we have been reading, although I will say, if you're really interested in digging into the Abraham story in more detail, that is what we're talking about right now in our Sunday morning Bible study. It's a commissioned community that I lead. If you're interested in that, you can find that on our app. It's the name of the group is where Bible meets culture. If you ask to join the group, you can get the information about what exactly what we're going to be talking about and where and when we meet on Sunday morning. We are, at least this Sunday. We're going to be talking mostly about Genesis 15, 16, and 17. So we're a little bit behind where the reading plan is. But that's kind of the track that we're taking. It's sort of a.

Speaker 1: 3:24

We're moving through the Old Testament this spring and we're really focusing in on some of the high points of the story, abraham story being one of those things. If we're thinking about something that ties several of these readings that we've been doing together, it's this idea of inner biblical commentary. So just to kind of see an example of that, let's look at Nehemiah, which we were finishing up. We read some last week. One great example of this is in Nehemiah, chapter nine. We have the nation of Israel coming to confess their sins, but we also get a recap of the history of Israel. So this is a longer chapter I'm not going to. I'm not going to read through all of it, but it is an example of a part of the Bible in the Old Testament that's written later giving us commentary or a retelling of earlier parts of the story. So you know.

Speaker 1: 4:30

So in Nehemiah, chapter nine, here we even we get a little bit of commentary on our story with Abraham. So in Nehemiah 9.6, for instance, says you are the Lord, you alone, you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them and the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham. You found his heart faithful before you and you made him the covenant to give his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Parasite, the Jebusite and the Gurgashite. And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.

Speaker 1: 5:19

So what we kind of see here, it's thinking back to Genesis 15, 16, and 17, what we were just talking about, what you would have been reading in the Genesis cycle, and it is recapping it in a very dense form, but it's also looking backwards at it, so you're able to see. You know the conclusion that I just read there God kept his promise to Abraham, whereas when you're reading the story in Genesis, the promise is still yet to be fulfilled. There's still God is telling Abram he's going to give him these things, uh, but Abram hasn't really seen much of it, especially as you're getting into 15, we have the. The prompting of Abram's questioning of God is that God has promised to make him a great nation and yet he was in a battle with these kings and he's lost some men and then lot and him separate, and lot was his family, was potentially his heir, and then now in Genesis 15, it's just Eleazar the of Damascus who's going to be his heir, who's not even related to him. And so you know he's expecting God to come through on his promises, but he hasn't really seen much evidence of that being the case in 15. And God reassures him, and that's where we get the statement that Abram believed and God accounted that to him as righteousness.

Speaker 1: 6:39

In Genesis 15, six, we have a little bit of a different way of saying that here in Nehemiah nine eight is that God found his heart faithful and made him a covenant and kept his promise. Because of God's righteousness, he kept his promise, and it was Abram's faith that was significant there, and so what? What we're kind of seeing is the as we're reading these different parts of the Bible, in some ways the it's self-interpreting, so we're not reading any one part in isolation, and that's one of the values of reading all of these chapters in the way that we're reading them is that you start to see connections between parts of scripture that you might not otherwise see. I think it's that there's different authors that have made this comment, but there's a sense in which the Bible is the first hyperlinked text where parts of it refer back and forth to each other, which is pretty incredible, considering this is a book that was written over the course of thousands of years a thousand plus years by different authors in different places, and yet the stories within even the Old Testament, we see that they're not radically different when they're told from different vantage points across time in history, that they're able to be harmonized, that it's one coherent story that takes us from Genesis to Revelation, and yet there are all these little details in the midst of the story, and so one of the one of the encouragements to us is we can really resonate to some degree with both Abraham and Nehemiah's vantage point, because for some of us right now we're seeing all these things that God has promised in scripture, but we're not really seeing the fulfillment of them. We're waiting, we're being patient, we're expecting that God is going to come through on his promises, and for some of us it's actually the others that we've seen God come through time and time again on his promises and that's strengthened our faith, and so there's a way in which we can encourage others who are waiting to see God come through on some of his promises. But there's also a reminder there that even as we've seen him come through his promises come through in fulfilling his promises in the past, we worship a creative God. That's something we're going to talk about on Thursday with our New City Catechism.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Question is that God is the Creator. He is Creator of heaven and earth, and part of that creativity is that God does keep his promises, but he's too creative to fulfill them in the same way twice, and that's maybe a bit of an overstatement. But there's something too the way God fulfills his promises is a pattern for the way he might fulfill them in the future. But he's not so bound that he has to do everything the same way every single time. And we see some of that happen even throughout the book of Genesis, which Nehemiah here is commenting on In a slightly different vein.

Speaker 1: 9:47

In the book of Acts you might have noticed in yesterday's reading, even into today's reading we get an inter, not just an interbiblical commentary, but within the book of Acts it's kind of a commentary, and all I mean by that is in Acts 9, we read the story of how Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, and in Acts 22, we have Paul giving a speech where he's explaining that story that we just read, and so we're seeing how he understands that story. We're also seeing how he would present that story to a different audience as part of his missionary efforts. So I'm going to let I will let you kind of sit in that and think through that and maybe read back. Read Acts 9. If you've been doing the act cycle, go back and read Acts 9 in connection with Acts 22 and see what you notice is similarities, maybe differences, the ways in which Paul expands on what happened in Acts 9, or maybe ways that he condenses what's going on there so that that might be interesting to us. I also just want to underscore this was the thing we talked about a little bit last week of all of the geographic movement that we're seeing in Acts where Paul is going from real place to real place, interacting with real people in real time. It's not this sort of you know mythological journeys do have similar things to that, but at the time that Luke is writing Acts, this is still something where he's presented it at the beginning of the book.

Speaker 1: 11:25

If we remember all the way back to January 1, thinking of the beginning of Acts 1, where Luke says I wrote the first narrative, theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day that he was taken up and after he had given commands to the Holy Spirit, to the apostles whom he had chosen, he presented himself alive to them after his suffering, by many proofs appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God. So Luke is highlighting there's eyewitnesses who can attest to some of the things that he's saying and he's presenting this account rooted in history for people to actually go back and verify if they want to verify, and they can do some research and see if they can not necessarily prove what Luke is saying is true or false, but Luke is confident in what he is saying and so he feels comfortable directing people to his sources, and so just the geographic movement, the real people that keep showing up throughout the book of Acts is just a reminder to us that these are, these are events that really happened. These are not stories that are made up. These are not fictional accounts where the only thing that's really important is the essence of the teaching. It's the, the importance that God has acted in history as part of keeping his promises that he made all the way back in Genesis 12 to Abraham. So we can even see, even even we're reading in Acts Genesis and Nehemiah they're all tying together with that story that we're reading in Genesis, and we will continue to see that in weeks ahead, as things that we're reading tied together. Some of it is intentional in the way the plan is designed, and some of it is just because the Bible is telling one consistent, coherent story, and so if you're reading it at different parts and different stages, it can help us understand the whole story better than if we're just reading in isolated pieces, one at a time. So that's that. That's probably all we really need to touch on today.

Speaker 1: 13:29

There's more that we could talk about. As I said, we could totally be doing this on a daily basis, but, looking ahead to next week, we'll look back a little bit at the end of Acts and the end of Matthew. If you really want to discuss Genesis more, find our group on the app and join us on Sunday morning, and then we'll look a little bit ahead to Mark and Romans and Esther. We're starting Esther tomorrow, and we won't spend too much time there, though, because we did just spend two separate spring sermon series in Romans, and so not not to downgrade Romans, but I'm just going to assume a level of familiarity with some of what's going on in Romans that I don't think would be there for some of these other parts of scripture that we're reading.

Speaker 1: 14:15

But, as always, if you would like us to highlight something different or if you would like us to take different angles on some of the discussions that we're having, just let us know. Send us an email about that. I've got some other things that I want to talk about in future episodes that are not necessarily specific to the reading, but are maybe just specific to how we might read scripture better as a whole, but I'm going to save those for a little bit later on as we get into February. So I look forward to continuing to read and maybe seeing some of you on Sunday morning at our Bible study gathering. See you next time.