#GodsStory ft. Ghai Yein: Navigating The Bible Using Biblical Theology

Waking up on a ship all alone, in the middle of the sea, with no land or lighthouse in sight and no GPS to tell you where you are. This, friends, is a visual representation of me trying to navigate the Bible without biblical theology. When I say I feel lost, I don’t mean it in terms of not knowing what the books after Genesis are or what books come before Revelation. To figure that out, I could simply look up the table of contents in a physical Bible or in a Bible app. What I am trying to say is:

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Biblical theology functions like a map – it helps me see where and how a particular Bible passage would fit into the larger narrative of the Bible.

This is because biblical theology sees the movement from the Old Testament to the New Testament as God’s progressive revelation of His plan. 

Without biblical theology, I would not know how to piece together the events that were recorded in the Bible to form a cohesive picture. I would have treated the occurrences in the Bible as individual events and tried to figure out the morals of each story. Thankfully, having a grasp of biblical theology prevented me from perceiving the Bible this way. Biblical theology opened my eyes to see that God has one plan all along; that He has the end in mind even before He created the world. Everything that took place happened according to this master plan of His.

If I did not understand the Bible this way, I would not find the answer to some of my questions such as: What is God’s purpose for man? In what way did Jesus fulfill the Scriptures? and What is the significance and relevance of the Old Testament to Christians today?

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Biblical theology is able to answer these questions because it understands that all things were created in Christ, through Christ and for Christ and it interprets the Bible as the redemptive activity of God through Christ.

I am not going to pretend that the Bible is a lot easier to read now just because I was introduced to biblical theology, but it has undoubtedly helped me make more sense of the Bible. It tells me what God is doing at each point of redemptive history, where I stand in God’s “project timeline” and what will happen at the end of the age. By putting on a biblical-theological lens, I have come to appreciate God more and found assurance in Him. I see a God who is faithful to His promises and committed to His plan of redeeming a people for Himself. I must also say that I can no longer pretend that my life is my own to live, for God has before time laid out the plan for man to live for Him.