What is the Bible about? Can you give me an overview of the Bible?

But is the present state of the world always to continue? Will there be no deliverance for a groaning creation? And if there be, when? and how? The Bible, in all the simplicity and majesty of truth, gives God's answer. There we learn His purpose before the world was made to manifest Himself, not only as a God that can create, and judge or destroy, but also as a God that can save. He who in Genesis is the Creator-God closes that wonderful book by declaring Himself the Saviour-God in all its fulness. This is His declared purpose. The means of accomplishing it is by the Son appearing on earth in the guise of a man, and so meeting all the claims of divine righteousness, and expressing in the highest degree God's love for the lost. And this is the subject of God's book. Every doctrine contained in it, every fact therein recorded, each and all are subservient to this one great unchanging purpose. God will be a Saviour-God. Creation could only bring out the fact of His eternal power and divinity. It displayed these divine attributes, but never could display His nature. God is light and love. There was a display of love in the circumstances and condition of the first man in the garden, as far as creation could show it; but that God is love, and could show it in the presence of sin, was not known, nor could be. Man's sin quickly brought out the fact that God is light, and no less quickly did death, the immediate offspring of sin, bring out the fact that God is love. And the cross is the divine proof of both. To be thus known and to receive the praises due from an intelligent responsible creature was His eternal purpose. Had there been no sin, with its resultant evils, we could not tell how He would have been worshipped as a Saviour-God. The infinite depths of His love would not have had this sphere for its display. But God would be known to a redeemed creation, so that all that He is might be known, and bring forth praises which are His due and delight.

I can only in such a paper as this take some special elements as showing this, after stating from Scripture what the divine purpose is, only noticing (what is of the last moment) that it is not a mere purpose as to facts to be accomplished, but that these involve the whole moral basis of man's relationship with God: innocence, loss of it, moral responsibility, the law given as a perfect measure of it with divine authority, man doubly guilty by breaking it, remedial means in the testimony of the prophets and in the coming of the Son of God Himself, all in vain, issuing in the judgment of the world, and every mouth stopped, and all the world guilty before God, and a perfect salvation by grace on God's part, according to His own nature and glory, laid hold of in promise throughout all ages, and then fully revealed; and finally heavenly glory, and a restored earth under Messiah and the new covenant, and then eternity; and, I may add, the church's special place in all this, which is peculiar, all made manifest and unfolded in the development of this purpose, and issuing in the fulness of the divine glory, and the infinite and eternal blessing of those who believe.

The Bible is the history of Satan's attempt to dishonour God while using man as his instrument for this purpose. The Old Testament records the complete failure of the First Adam, with promises and predictions of the triumph of the Second; while the New Testament reveals to us that the battle is over, and the victory won, and the Great Victor gives to those who believe in Him a share in the glory He has won, and power while here over the enemy He has conquered. Now the full results of that wondrous victory are not yet publicly manifested, though they most surely will be; and when the new creation is displayed in all its blessedness, the new heavens and the new earth, with the saints of every age in their glorified bodies, then will it be seen what was the infinite value of the blood of the Lamb, which has thus for ever secured God's glory and man's richest blessing. And first let it be observed that redemption was no afterthought, only proposed when failure and ruin had come in; but that this ruin had not only been provided for from all eternity - for 1 Peter 1:20 tells us that Christ, as the Lamb, was fore-ordained before the foundation of the world" - but, in the surpassing riches of the wisdom of God, was to be made the occasion of bringing out a larger blessing for man and a deeper glory to God. Up to this time man had been blessed here, and given dominion over this whole creation, while the Creator came down to hold converse with him in the garden; and here, if sin had not come in to interrupt it and to bring in all its attendant consequences of death and sorrow, here that holy converse might have gone on, and man would have ruled as the vicegerent of God upon earth. But how immediately did the fall alter all this. Man could no longer be at ease in the presence of God, but hid himself the moment he heard His voice. Satan had thus far succeeded in his effort: the creature had rebelled against the Creator, and, as the sad consequences, death was to be man's lot, sorrow was to be multiplied to the woman, toil to be the man's portion, while the curse was pronounced upon the earth and the serpent. But there was a bright light for faith to be hold and rejoice in, amid all the darkness of that dark and dreadful day; for the promise was there, that "the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head," that he who had caused all this sorrow, the author of all this misery, was himself to be completely vanquished by the promised seed; and what might have seemed to sight was the successful beginning of Satan's attempt against the power and glory of God, was to end in his complete and everlasting ruin in the lake of fire.

40 How could there have been so suited a close to such a volume as the Bible? The Bible sets forth all the ways of God, from the creation to the return of that creation (long fallen, rebellious, and miserable, but now redeemed) into the order and blessing in which it is securely set by the fulness of God's grace; nothing being excluded save that which is incompatible with the blessing itself. It reveals the eternal Son of God acting in the midst of this whole scene, glorifying His Father, and bringing everything into a more beautiful order than had been lost. One can understand that a book like this would not close without taking up again all the threads of this wondrous, divine process, and exhibiting those results which, when the work of the Son is perfected, and all things subdued, will bring in the full and perfect dominion of the eternal God: the blessing of that God, who has made Himself known in Jesus. This is what the Apocalypse sets before us.

Thus in Genesis, couched under the simplest forms of word or deed, are seen the great principles of divine action and relationship with man from the earliest days, which look on typically to the last: creation, human responsibility, sin, revelation of a Deliverer in grace, sacrifice in faith, the world in its worship and in its outward progress, translation to heaven, corruption and violence on earth, providential judgment and deliverance through it, covenant with the earth, human government ordained but of God, combination of men in pride, dispersion into nations, tribes, and tongues by divine judgment; calling by grace as a separate witness for the God of promise; the risen son and heir with the calling of the bride; the election for the earth cast out for a time, but after humbling experiences restored and blessed and a blessing; and this in connection with a holy sufferer rejected by his brethren, sold to the Gentiles, but by this very path of sorrow exalted over the world while unknown to Israel, and receiving a Gentile bride, but finally making himself known to his brethren preserved through their secret trouble, and now owning in him the grace and glory they had so long despised and hated.

Thus in Genesis, couched under the simplest forms of word or deed, are seen the great principles of divine action and relationship with man from the earliest days, which look on typically to the last: creation, human responsibility, sin, revelation of a Deliverer in grace, sacrifice in faith, the world in its worship and in its outward progress, translation to heaven, corruption and violence on earth, providential judgment and deliverance through it, covenant with the earth, human government ordained but of God, combination of men in pride, dispersion into nations, tribes, and tongues by divine judgment; calling by grace as a separate witness for the God of promise; the risen son and heir with the calling of the bride; the election for the earth cast out for a time, but after humbling experiences restored and blessed and a blessing; and this in connection with a holy sufferer rejected by his brethren, sold to the Gentiles, but by this very path of sorrow exalted over the world while unknown to Israel, and receiving a Gentile bride, but finally making himself known to his brethren preserved through their secret trouble, and now owning in him the grace and glory they had so long despised and hated.

Evidence to appear consecutively and in due time will be set before the reader, unstrained, clear, and abundant, that the Scriptures are ruled from first to last by a moral purpose which discloses the wisdom and goodness of God rising above the failure of the creature, and especially man's sin giving occasion to the resources and the triumph of His grace in Christ for heaven and earth, time and eternity, for man, Israel, the saints of old, the church, and the nations. Who but God could have intimated so vast and far-reaching an intention from the first writing that ushers in all the books which follow through many generations, not only those composed in Hebrew (with Aramaic in a small degree), but such as after a marked interval appeared in Greek, revealing in that one generation of the N. T. the Son of God come, the gospel, and the church, the latest book being the suited answer to the earliest, manifestly also closing the complete compass of inspiration?

It tells us of the beginning of all things, of the fall of the devil, of the fall of man, of God’s gracious dealings with the latter when fallen, of the love of God, of the death of Christ, of His resurrection, of His session at the right hand of God, of His coming again, and of the subjugation of everything to Himself.

It tells us of the beginning of all things, of the fall of the devil, of the fall of man, of God's gracious dealings with the latter when fallen, of the love of God, of the death of Christ, of His resurrection, of His session at the right hand of God, of His coming again, and of the subjugation of everything to Himself.

Now, dear Christian reader, having got to the historical close of the Old Testament, in which we have the sum of all history as connected with the Jews and as bearing upon the glory of Christ, let us briefly review the steps of this wonderful journey. As creatures, we necessarily commence with the enquiry — What about creation? Who created? What, too, are the salient features of the early ages of the world? We get a full and Divine answer in the book of Genesis. What next commands our attention? All nature is disturbed; there is agony in the depths and in the heights. Here hearts are broken, tears are shed, and a seething mass of human misery and sin calls aloud for redemption from Satan's grasp and slavery; yea, and from God's judgment, too, righteously pressing upon the ruined sinner. God in holiness and righteousness provides redemption in the person and by the work of His beloved Son — the grand theme of Exodus.