- by Carrie Shaw
- on March 8, 2026
The Bible Is Really One. Big. Story.
Have you ever wondered: what is the Bible about anyway?
Like, what’s with all that Old Testament stuff, the strange stories, weird laws; no mixed garments, no shellfish, no pork? (and I do love me a good pork burrito).
Why is most of the Old Testament stuff about Israel, whoever they are? What have they got to do with Jesus or the Christian story?
And, talking about Jesus, was he, like, really real? Like, a proper historical figure? And even if he was real, surely he couldn’t have been resurrected? Like, for realzies? Isn’t that, well, a bit cap?
You’re not alone if you’ve ever thought this way. The Bible can feel like this massive, ancient jigsaw puzzle – random stories, strange rules, wild miracles – and it’s easy to miss how it all fits together or even wonder if it’s all true.
But here’s the thing: it does fit together. Every story, every law, every prophecy, every weird Old Testament moment points toward one massive, central idea – that God is rescuing and restoring His world through Jesus, who is King.
And it is true, even though parts of it are pretty weird. From the first page to the last, the Bible tells a single, unfolding story about God’s love, humanity’s mess, and the way back home.
First Things First, What’s God Up To?
Well, He starts by making the world, of course. Everything you see and everything you don’t see, right down to these weird little things called quarks. Weird because they have unique characteristics that go against everyday intuition, such as being the only fundamental particles with “colour-charge.” Google them, if you like – you’ll be fascinated.
Before we even get into the Bible story itself, it’s worth stopping to ask: why is there a story at all? Why does anything exist? Why are we sitting on a spinning rock surrounded by stars that somehow works perfectly for life?
Scientists call it the “fine-tuning” of the universe. Basically, there are a bunch of physical settings – around eight or nine big ones that we know of – that have to be exactly right for life to exist.
If even one of them was slightly off, we wouldn’t be here. And they’d have to all spontaneously spring into existence at the same time for life to kick off and keep doing its thing.
Here’s eight of them:
Gravity:
If it were a tiny bit stronger, the universe would’ve collapsed in on itself. If it were weaker, galaxies and planets would never have formed.
Oxygen levels:
If there was a little more or less in the air, we’d either suffocate or burn.
Distance from the sun:
Any closer, we’d fry; any further, we’d freeze.
Earth’s tilt and rotation: Perfectly balanced to give us seasons, day and night, and a stable climate.
The strength of the electromagnetic force:
Too strong or too weak, and atoms couldn’t form properly.
The amount of carbon and water:
Just right for life to exist and thrive.
The expansion rate of the universe:
Adjust it by even a fraction, and it would have torn apart or collapsed before life began.
The thickness of Earth’s atmosphere:
Thin enough for sunlight, thick enough to protect us.
It’s like walking into a room and finding every dial on a control panel perfectly set for life – not too high, not too low, all balanced just right.
You’d have to wonder who set the dials, right?
For Christians, that “who” isn’t random chance – it’s God. The Bible says the universe didn’t happen by accident. It was made on purpose and for a purpose.
One of my favourite worship artists puts it like this (thanks Brookie) – “who else would rocks cry out to worship, whose glory taught the stars to shine? Perhaps creation longs to have the words to sing, but this joy is mine.”
This amazing, incredible, blue and green globe spinning through the universe was made for us, to be our home, the place where we get to live in perfect relationship with the God who made us.
Where To Next?
This brand-new world, fresh and potent with possibility, was bursting with life. Everything worked exactly as it should. The air was clean, the water sparkled, and every creature had its place. The fishing spots were, well, spot-on. Filled to the brim, with bream (see what I did there?).
Humanity – that’s us – was created right in the middle of it all, made in God’s image.
That means we were designed to reflect what God is like. To love, create, care, build, imagine, laugh, explore, and bring beauty out of the world around us. We were meant to walk with God, not as robots or slaves, but as partners and friends.
But it didn’t stay that way for long. Something broke. Humanity wanted to run the world without God – to set our own rules, to decide what’s good and evil for ourselves.
That right there is what the Bible calls sin. It’s not just about doing bad stuff; it’s about trying to run life without the One who made it. Think of it like unplugging your phone from the charger and then wondering why it keeps going flat.
And from that moment, everything started to unravel.
Rescue Plan, Locked In
So, total disaster in Eden. God launches Plan B… except, since he’s God, it was probably always Plan A disguised as Plan B. Don’t think too hard about that right now…
The book of Genesis tells us a bunch of stuff – how languages started, Noah’s ark and the flood (because people got worse instead of better), a kind of global reno-slash-reset, and finally, the story of one man named Abraham.
See, even after the whole flood-and-fresh-start thing, humanity didn’t exactly turn into saints. People still chased their own power, built empires, and pretty much forgot about God. But instead of wiping the slate clean again, God chose a different approach – he decided to work with one man, a guy called Abraham.
Abraham was just an ordinary ordinary bloke, living in a place called Ur (modern-day Iraq), minding his own business when God shows up and says something wild:
“Pack up everything, leave your home, and I’ll show you where to go. I’m going to make you into a great nation, and through you, the whole world will be blessed.”
Basically, God’s like, I’m starting my rescue plan through you. Can you imagine that? Leaving everything you knew, not even knowing where you were going, and deciding just to trust God? (that’s the definition of faith, by the way – trusting your life to God).
This was The Plan – not just a random restart, but the beginning of a looooong, unfolding promise. God would work through Abraham’s family – (this is where the nation of Israel’s story comes in) – to show the world who He is, what He’s like, and how humanity could be restored to that perfect relationship from the beginning.
Abraham & His Family
Abraham’s like a Bible Main Character. You can read more about his story starting in Genesis 12. I’ll also link a super cool Bible Project video about him and his family at the bottom of this article.
From Abraham came Isaac, then from Isaac came Jacob, then from Jacob came twelve sons who became the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel, yada yada (you can learn their names in Genesis 35:22-26, and find out more about them in the first five books of the Bible).
Through all their victories, bad decisions, and second chances, God kept reminding Israel of the promise: “A king will come. A rescuer. Someone who’ll fix what was broken back in Eden.”
It was the same promise God had made to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, actually – check out Genesis 3:15 – and He continued to make it, right down through Israel’s history.
The nation of Israel ended up waiting a long time. Like, really long. In fact, the Old Testament is really the story of all that waiting. By the time of the last of the books of the Old Testament – Malachi – was written, the people of Israel hadn’t heard from God in over 400 years.
No prophets. No visions. No fresh messages. Just silence. Generations had lived and died and still no rescuer.
And then, just when it seemed like God had gone completely quiet and maybe even forgotten His promise, a baby’s cry was heard in a small town called Bethlehem, inside a humble little house tucked beneath a brightly burning star.
Jesus had arrived.
Jesus, The Hope Of The World
All that the long, painful saga of the Old Testament had basically shown was that humanity was pretty incompetent – unable to fix ourselves, keep promises, or stay close to God for very long.
Even the best people – leaders like Moses and Joshua and Deborah, kings like David and Solomon, prophets like Isaiah, or warriors like Samson – all ended up failing in one way or another.
So when Jesus showed up, it wasn’t just another chapter in the same old story. It was the turning point. A new day in an old story. The rescuer God had been hinting at since the beginning had finally arrived.
But here’s the weird thing – as least for those who were expecting and looking for the saviour, he didn’t come as a powerful ruler or a military hero, but as a carpenter’s son from a backwater town called Nazareth.
What the…?
So, Jesus grows up, pretty much under the radar for about 30 years. In fact, we know almost nothing about his early life, apart from a couple of stories in the gospels from when he was a boy.
We assume he had just a normal kind of life; learning his (supposed) dad’s trade – carpentry – being a good son to his parents and a helpful teen to his friends and neighbours.
It wasn’t until he was 30 years old that he is launched into the public space. John the Baptist – another totally cool but wild Bible Main Character – was baptising down at a river called Jordan, when he sees Jesus coming.
John had been telling everyone that someone greater was on the way, someone whose sandals he wasn’t even worthy to untie. And then, right there in front of the crowd, Jesus shows up. John points and says, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Jesus steps into the water to be baptised, even though he’s the one person who doesn’t need it. The heavens open, the Spirit of God comes down like a dove, and a voice says, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
It’s basically the big public announcement: the rescuer has arrived!
Jesus Announces The Kingdom & His Mission
So, now we’re in the New Testament and Jesus is going around everywhere, healing people, casting out demons, calming storms, feeding crowds and generally blowing everyone’s minds.
He also talked about the Kingdom of God. Like, a lot. It was pretty much the main thing he talked about, so it’s safe to say it’s the major message of the New Testament. He called it good news – and we call it the gospel (you can read more about it here: What is the gospel?). Although, spoiler alert, this is a new day in an old story, remember. The Kingdom of God isn’t starting – it’s simply nearer now.
He fulfilled a heap of Old Testament prophecies – things written hundreds of years before he was even born. Where he’d be born, how he’d live, the miracles he’d do, even the way he’d die. It was like the whole Old Testament had been setting up one massive “Previously on God’s Big Story” moment that all pointed to him.
Jesus basically kept going around preaching and healing and teaching people, in the end, for three and half years, showing people what life with God really looked like.
Not everyone’s happy about it all, of course. There’s a bunch of religious leaders – Pharisees and Sadducees, who consider themselves Pretty Important People. They’re kinda annoyed and kinda mad, and they really don’t like that Jesus is getting all the attention or that he claimed to be able to forgive sins (only God can do that).
Crowds follow him everywhere. The religious leaders fume. The tension builds. And finally, they’d had a gutsful.
They hatched a plan – an op so sneaky and deep it could’ve been straight out of a spy movie. They wanted to get rid of Jesus once and for all.
One of his own friends, Judas, agreed to betray him. Soldiers came in the night. There was a hasty in-the-middle-of-the-night sham trial, false witnesses were found and dragged in, and, finally, in the morning, a crowd gathered, totally crashing out and demanding his death.
Before the end of the Jewish great feast of Passover was over (and this is Another Important Detail, but a story for another time), Jesus was beaten, mocked, and crucified on a wooden cross – the punishment Rome reserved for the worst criminals.
And just like that, the man who healed the sick, fed the hungry, showed people what it looked like to live in God’s kingdom – and who was meant to be the saviour of the world – was dead.
Or so it seemed.
The Unbelievable Comeback Of All Comebacks.
Well, just to clarify: he really was dead. Like, properly dead.
There’s loads of historical evidence and first-century documents that confirm Jesus was a real person and that he really was executed. There’s no disputing that. The Romans were professionals at this sort of thing; no one walked away from a crucifixion.
But here’s where things get really weird.
Three days later, after taking him down off the cross, wrapping him in linen, placing him in a cave/tomb, having a heavy stone rolled over the mouth and guards placed at the entrance, Jesus’ disciples claim to have seen him alive. Not just a few of them, over 500 people in total, at one point.
The same twelve disciples who had been terrified and hiding since he was captured and killed were suddenly completely transformed into bold, fearless evangelists (preachers of the gospel – the good news of the kingdom). Many of them would eventually go to their deaths for preaching that Jesus was alive and was King.
The city was in an uproar, Rome didn’t know what to think, and the name of Jesus kept spreading.
The church was birthed and, despite heavy persecution and impossible odds, it grew like wildfire! By around 350AD, the number of Christians throughout the world had reached an estimated thirty-three million.
The only logical explanation for the empty tomb, the changed disciples, the missing body, the unstoppable explosion of faith…is that the resurrection of Jesus really happened, just like the Bible said it did.
Plenty of people have found the idea of the resurrection hard to believe and have set out to disprove it. Frank Morison is one such person and he describes the process of moving from skeptic to believer in his classic apologetic ‘Who Moved The Stone’.
Lee Strobel, a former American investigative journalist, is another. He set out to disprove the resurrection of Jesus, kinda cranky his wife had recently become a Christian, and, to his surprise, finds that there is far more evidence for the resurrection than against. He writes about his experience in his book ‘The Case For Christ‘ which, spoiler alert, ends with his conversion to Christianity.
In the end, he said it actually took more faith to believe the weaker alternative explanations than to accept the truth – that Jesus really did rise from the dead.
He’s Alive!
So. This is the part where, Indiana Jones-like – a person steps out over the yawning chasm onto the invisible bridge stretching across to the other side.
It takes a leap of faith – not faith without evidence – but faith, nonetheless, that asks a person to believe something they feel, logically, must be impossible.
But as Sherlock Holmes famously said, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however, improbable, must be the truth.”
And that’s the hinge of the whole story – the moment everything changed.
If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then death isn’t the end, evil doesn’t win, and the world really does have a Saviour.
The resurrection isn’t just a miracle to marvel at; it’s the proof that God’s kingdom really has broken into our world and that Jesus is exactly who he said he was – the rightful King of everything.
Plan B, which is really Plan A, just came full circle. That Plan – that God is setting the world right through His Son, Jesus, who is King – is now fully in play.
From the very beginning – right back in Genesis 3:15 – God had promised that one day the offspring of the woman – the rescuer – would crush the serpent’s head. The resurrection is the moment that promise came good. Evil was dealt its fatal blow, and a new kind of life began breaking into the world.
This is the story the whole Bible has been leading to: the victory of Jesus, the renewal of creation, and the invitation for every person to step into God’s kingdom and live under the reign of the risen King.
So, even though there’s loads of side quests and second-tier hustles in God’s Big Story – kings and prophets, wars and exiles, miracles and mess-ups – the main storyline has always stayed the same:
The King is coming! The King is here! The King is coming back!
That’s what the Bible is all about.
And the best part? That same story is still unfolding – and you’re invited to be part of it!
(Want to learn more? You can head to this article: ‘So You Want To Follow Jesus?’)
