Basic Bible Concepts : Introduction

Below is the transcript of the video

I’m super-excited as always to be teaching this video series on the basic Bible concepts, and what that means is the underlying truths about the Scriptures. You may ask, why is that important? Well, in any subject that you learned, let’s take math for example, if you don’t learn the basic concepts like whole numbers, fractions, decimals, addition, subtraction, etc you’re not going to ever go on to learn algebra, calculus or geometry right? So the basic Bible concepts help us have a foundation to better understand the entire Bible. You may ask, Why does that even matter? Well, there’s a lot of reasons it matters. But first of all it’s to help us understand and explain a relationship to God. It gives us a foundational way of thinking and an understanding of the times that we live in.

In First Chronicles 12:32, it talks about “understanding the times” and how the word helps us do that. So this is very relevant to where we live today because so many people base their worldview on a slippery standard. If we are Christians and we believe the Bible, then we should at least know what it says and the very basic things, as well as the more complex ideas in the Bible that we are supposed to be living by. Because our understanding, or to use another word our orientation, gives us the basis for our worldview and our worldview is important because that is what gives us the reason for doing everything we do. Right? So for example when I say it gives us orientation for everything we do; it gives orientation for work, for our career, for who we marry, for the types of things we do, for pleasure, for everything. So, it’s very critical that we be oriented to life.

I don’t want to sound too esoteric but just to give you the example: If we wake up and we’re in a dark room the first thing we want to do is figure out where we’re at, where the floor is, where the door is, why we’re there, right? How did we happen to come to be in this room and how are we going to get out, right? Well, orientation for life also is the curiosity or the knowledge about these big questions: Like the universal questions are where do we come from? Why are we here? What’s right and wrong? Who gets to decide? And then where we go when we die, right?  So these basic concepts give us the biblical view for these questions. One of the things I also want to do in the study is to ask this question for the person who does not believe in God and who does not even believe in the Bible. Because we all need to challenge ourselves to answer those big questions. 

For Christians it is especially important because if you’re like I am you may have lived a secular Christian life for many years. What I mean by that is God’s Word never penetrated my heart enough to change my life. It never changed my orientation so to speak and you know we need to ask ourselves, why are we even here? Why do you believe or do we even believe the Bible? So these concepts of reality are what we’re going to talk about.

Let me explain the concepts of reality. You know, if you’re a secular humanist you may only believe in the physical realm, right?  Whereas the Bible talks about a spiritual realm and talks about God. It talks about angels and devils, talks of Heaven and Hell. So these are concepts of reality. It’s important to know what the concepts of reality are, what is real, right? And so this orientation gives us our worldview. You probably have heard that term and so for example in the biblical worldview when you ask where do we come from, the Bible says God created us, right? If you are humanist, your worldview is along the lines of we evolved or maybe there was a big bang, it’s a non God answer, right? 

We talked about purpose and that is so important. We have just the saddest number of suicides especially among our young people and it’s to a large degree because they do not have a purpose. So you know when we talk about purpose from a biblical standpoint the Bible says we were created for God’s glory. Well, what does that even mean? And that’s the things we’re going to talk about.  And who would want to live without purpose anyway, right? So we’ll talk about that. But if you’re a humanist, your purpose, well there’s not really one defined ultimate purpose. I think even people who are humanists would tell you that people have different purposes based on what they believe about themselves, right? 

Another very important question is morals: who gets to decide the rules, right? So if you’re a Christian and you know you are a biblical based Christian, you tell some stranger a Bible based moral standard derived from Bible based Christianity and you believe that God wrote the rules in the Bible. If you don’t believe that, if you’re secular humanist, you, I mean the rules are based on a lot of things. They change with time and if you look at the history even in the United States, our laws have changed over the 200 plus years that our nation has been in existence. There are things that used to be illegal that aren’t anymore and sometimes that’s good. But what’s not so good is there is no standard. It is a moving target and so again we’re coming back to these are the very basic worldview principles that we need to challenge ourselves to look at. Why do I believe this way? Why do I think this way?

And of course the other one of the worldviews is regarding the afterlife. Is there an afterlife? If you believe that the physical is all there is here now, then you don’t have to worry about it and does that satisfy you? Are you satisfied that that’s the truth, because what we’re really after here is to know that what we believe is in fact the truth. And the search for the truth is something that is a lifelong quest of course.

This study is going to give as much truth as we can cram into fifteen minute videos about the different basic Bible concepts and the reason this is so important. I mean I can speak from personal experience about why it’s important. You know the concept of reality that we develop is life-changing. It can be life-changing when our life is stressful. I mean we live in a stressful world. Our world does not produce a peaceful environment and so how we respond to the difficulties in life is based on what our resources are and what we perceive our resources to be. And so, is facing life’s difficulties with your own wisdom, your own human resources, is that good enough for you?  Is that satisfying to you?  Is that providing the answers that you want to live with?  Or is there something more? And then also, if you are a Bible-believing Christian, are you experiencing the wisdom and resources of God that he has available to you to meet life’s anxieties and life’s struggles? And so we’re going to address that as well.

It’s one thing to learn the Bible concepts, but it’s a quite another thing to have them so deeply embedded in your heart that they make a change in your life and they become the most important part of who you are and develop your lifestyle and your way of handling problems; your way of interacting with other people and even the the way that you plan for eternity.  Because really we can talk about our personal relationship with God, we can talk about group relationships, we can talk about love relationships with our children or with our significant other, we can talk about national relationships. But is what we’re doing as Christians making an eternal difference? 

And so when I prayed about making these videos with  this idea of  laying out the basic Bible concepts in short videos, that was kind of the bottom line. You know I want to be as succinct as possible to equip people with the knowledge to make a difference. Not only in the short time we have here on earth but also in eternity.  So, in the next video we’ll be talking about spiritual reality from a biblical standpoint and where it comes from in the Bible and what it’s based on and talking about some of God’s attributes. So I’ll look forward to presenting that in the next video. Thank you for listening.

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