Bible Stories

Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at the lives of David, Saul, and Solomon, but it’s worth a closer look.

There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and (as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest), we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” - George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans, we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.

Bible stories aren’t just history, but they are history, and they can help fulfill all of these roles.

Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm 95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb 11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of faith.

This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time. However, it’s possible to overdo this. In Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,

As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was because I had not preached Christ! (p. 16)

He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories only for moral lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.

Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.

This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate. Russell Moore writes,

New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”

Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level. Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.

Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a part of God’s people now.

Or, as Rich Mullins put it more poetically in “Sometimes by Step,”

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me

Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God himself. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes teaching a Bible college class.

This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian. “Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out, some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a relationship with Christ.”

We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit, but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.

1. A guy would have to get to know her.

I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)

To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk, and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him - through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with this relationship.

This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational, story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me more than any corporate training could.

And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God - much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories. Russell Moore, again:

When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad that’s over?”

It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.

And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.