I love stories! If you ever went to Sunday School as a small child, you heard Bible stories. They were often accompanied by ancient pictures hung so high around the classroom that you must tilt your head way back to see them. I guess that was to keep our grimy fingers off of them. The lucky ones of us attended a church where they had a flannel-graph of the characters and the child who was most trusted got to stick the character on the flannel board when the teacher gave them the ok.

Then at some point we aged out of Bible stories and flannel-graphs. I don’t know who decided this. Maybe they just ran out of G-rated stories for littles since most Bible stories are definitely of the rougher variety. When I was a teen going to church, I loved it when I got to listen to an animated version of a Bible story told by an inspired youth director. They were so enthusiastic that they often included choreography which was frowned upon in my church. As an adult, I must admit that I still love an artfully told Bible story in the sermon. It takes me back to the time and place in which it was written and gives me a new understanding of a story I have heard a hundred times before.

As you can tell, I was privileged to hear the Bible through many different folks. In my daddy’s final years of life he told me that it was Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible by Dr. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut that led him to know Christ. Dad later became a minister. He told me that his mom used the scant money she had to buy this book from a door-to-door salesman. This would have been in the 1930’s(almost 100 years ago!). Dad said he devoured that book. It contained 168 stories of a continuous narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

Sometimes I feel that we ruined the Bible when we divided it into chapters and verses that can be quickly plucked out of time and cultural setting and posted on social media. The essence is lost and it becomes a weapon to reinforce our point of view. I believe the Bible was meant to be read as stories and not as a rule book or as history lessons and definitely not in individual verses plucked out of context, although I have been guilty of all of this.

Knowing the setting of a story is vital, yet somehow these stories transcend time and place and touch our hearts today. They take us into worlds we can never know and teach us lessons from other cultures and timeframes. Just as every book or movie must first introduce us to the cultural mores before it tells us the story, so must those Bible stories. And I can’t help but think that this is the correct way to read the Bible. We must step back into the strange traditions and rituals of the time when the story took place to truly understand it. For example, look at the ever-popular story of Daniel in the lion’s den. If we did not understand Daniel’s backstory and his heritage and the traumatizing events that took him to this strange land, we would not be getting the full story. And if we didn’t get the full story we would be missing out on much of the application to our own lives.

Reading the Bible without any knowledge of the culture is not really reading for understanding. It is an eyeball exercise in piety. The Bible is uniquely recorded by people from different centuries, cultures, socio-economic status and careers; including everything from kings to fishermen and felons to prophets. And the various characters include slaves, beautiful queens, hookers, virgins and eunuchs. The attitudes encompass everything from gratitude to bitterness and anger. The stories are so riveting that they are the stuff of movies like The Ten Commandments and the beautifully inspired stories in the series called The Chosen. Maybe it is time for us to take a trip through time and re-visit those ancient stories. And we need to do this in a most delightful way. Enjoy the journey.