Following Jesus: The Big Picture

Following Jesus

This material is part of our Life Church “Following Jesus” discipleship curriculum. Here are some quick links to the main material:

Lesson 1: Background & Overview

In order to have the right perspective as we read the Bible, we need to see the big picture behind it. The following links will be helpful as we explore the Big Picture behind the Bible:

Let’s take a look at what we mean by this:

Here is an overview of the milestones in God’s plan that we will examine:

The Big Picture Diagram

Lesson 2: Big Picture

Here are the details:

Creation

God created the world and, on several occasions during the days of creation, he commented that “it was good”. On the sixth and final day of creation, God created humans, male and female, in his image and declared that all that he had made was very good. The significance of human beings being created in God’s image is that we are his representatives in this world. God places Adam and Eve in a garden in Eden (Genesis 2) where they have access to the Tree of Life, but are warned not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Humans Rebel

Adam and Eve succumb to the serpent’s temptation and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3) thus choosing to know right and wrong independently from God. This will prove to be a “drug” that the human race can’t handle! As a result, God exiles them, but does not destroy them. This is our first hint that God’s creation project is not hopelessly ruined.

“Trial” Solutions

When we take lab courses in school, or even in college, the experiments we conduct aren’t designed to break new ground and add to the body of human knowledge. Instead, the experiments in the course duplicate classic experiments from the past so that the students can understand how and why our understanding of science developed. In a similar way, the rest of the Old Testament comprises a series of “trial” solutions to the problem of our broken world. These “trial” solutions are intended to teach human beings, God’s image-bearers, why the “solutions” we might come up with won’t work and what God actually had to do to permanently solve the problem.

God’s purpose in presenting these “trial” solutions is for us to:

  1. understand the depth of the problem we caused,
  2. understand God’s ultimate solution,
  3. understand the lifestyle that aligns with God’s solution,
  4. understand how that lifestyle solves the problem of our rebellion.

These “trial” solutions are as follows:

Noah’s Flood (Genesis 6-9)

Noah represents the first “trial” solution to the problem of human rebellion and our resulting broken world. We learn from Genesis 6 that the entire world has descended into depravity, but Noah finds favor with God. Essentially, God chooses the best man he can find and uses him and his family (three sons and their wives) to “reboot” humanity. He wipes out everyone else. After the earth recovers from the flood, Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and lies naked in his tent where his son Ham sees him and reports it to his other sons. Noah pronounces a curse on Canaan, one of Ham’s sons. The fact that the curse is pronounced on Canaan, rather than on Ham, may be a hint that something worse than exposure happened and that it may have been done by Canaan rather than by Ham. Whether this is the case or not, Noah’s offspring demonstrate that the problem of human perversity has not been solved.

Humanity continues its descent into rebellion – culminating in the Tower of Babel.

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