Pastor Dave's Blog

Filter By:

More Wise Words on Kings

In last Sunday's sermon, I shared a video to help us get an overview of the book of Kings. I find the storyboard style really engaging. Based on post-sermon feedback, it seems many others concur. 

So I thought I'd make that video available here. We watched up until the 4:06 mark. But the rest of it is just as good. I've only just discovered The Bible Project, the producers of this video and a whole bunch more. I expect we'll use their videos again.

However, The Bible Project's mission makes me uneasy: "to show how the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus." Yes, as Christians -- those who follow God in the way of Jesus -- we read all of scripture through the lens of Jesus. But that doesn't make the bible univocal. As we have often said, the bible is, in actual fact, multi-vocal. It was written by scores of people over hundreds of years -- it can't help but be multi-vocal. We don't have to read any farther than the first two chapters of Genesis to see this. Our four, very different gospels also make it clear that multi-vocality is necessary -- is a strength of the biblical witness.

I hope their mission doesn't mean The Bible Project people think the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures had Jesus in mind as they wrote and edited hundreds of years before Jesus was born. For instance, looking back from our vantage point as Christians in 2018, we can see that Jesus filled (and transformed) the role of the suffering servant as presented in Isaiah. But we can also see that when that part of the book of Isaiah was written in the 6th century BCE , the author did not have Jesus of Nazareth in mind. Both those understandings are true. We can hold them in tension.

I haven't seen enough of The Bible Project's products to say for sure if their mission taints their product. Still, I think both these things can also be true simultaneously: this video is really good, truly edifying AND their overall goal may be flawed.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Here's the video: