Organizing the Dysfunctional Closet
… In her excellent Old Testament survey The Epic of Eden, Sandra Richter says that we often approach the Bible as one would a disorganized and dysfunctional closet—that there’s a lot of seemingly random and unrelated stuff all cobbled together in one place. Many of us learned to read the biblical stories as isolated little snippets that hold some moral or spiritual lessons, but the thread that connects them is often lost.
But, as Richter rightly points out, the Bible is designed to be one cohesive narrative from start to finish, with every passage and story playing a role. One of the primary ways the Bible uses to organize all that text, from history to poetry to parable to epistle, is the concept of covenant. We’ve already seen in our Genesis series so far how God continues to work with and through people despite their sinful nature. As God created human beings in his image with the vocation of being his stewards and representatives in the world, he continues that work in flawed and frail human beings. Continue Reading….