On Sunday evenings at Beaver Baptist Church I am teaching a survey of the Bible. I got the idea from The Story of a Kingdom, a survey of the Bible using principles of biblical theology. The author, Jonathan Gibson, credits a number of books on biblical theology, including Graeme Goldworthy’s According to Plan, William Dumbrell’s The Faith of Israel, and Tim Chester’s From Creation to New Creation, all of which are excellent. You can particularly tell the influence of Goldsworthy. The only shortcoming for my purposes is that his course is designed for students of English as a second language, thus the lesson outlines are somewhat simple. So I decided that I would supplement the lessons with my own reading.
One resource that I have found to be quite helpful is book that I feel deserves a wider reputation: Yesterday, Today and Forever: The Continuing Relevance of the Old Testament , by Larry Helyer. It is not a comprehensive survey, but it treats a number of key periods in the OT and key themes. The Table of Contents will give you the idea:
- An Overview of the Old Testament
- The Old Testament Teaching on Creation
- The Fall and the Flood
- The Promise to the Patriarchs
- The Exodus from Egypt and the Sinai Covenant
- The Kingdom of God: Part One
- The Kingdom of God: Part Two
- The Word and the Spirit: Prophesy in Israel
- Eschatology of the Old Testament
- The Way of Wisdom and Worship
- Epilogue: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments
This post hardly qualifies as book review, since I am currently reading chapter 5 on the Exodus. But I can testify to the book’s helpfulness. For example, in chapter 2 on the Creation, Helyer has a very even-handed discussion of the various approaches to the issue of Genesis chs. 1 & 2 and modern science. (For the record, I am an “Old Earth Creationist”). I like a number of his charts and tables, which I have utilized in my handouts, and each chapter has a useful bibliography for further study. Helyer is familiar with the scholarly literature, and yet incorporates it with a very accessible style. It’s a book I will recommend to anyone wanting to get a grasp of the Old Testament.
