Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Welcome to our August Reflections and Corrections episode. Let's start with the reflections.

We just finished our 29th book of the Bible, and we're currently working our way through

two others.

So let's get the 30,000-foot view on where we are in the chronological timeline of the Bible's

overall metanarrative.

The Bible is one unified story.

Way back in Genesis, God set out to build a relationship with one particular family, but

things go terribly wrong when they

fracture the relationship through sin. But their sin doesn't surprise God. He already had a plan in place

to restore this relationship even before it was broken, and he continues working out that plan

immediately undeterred and unhindered by their rebellion. He sets apart a man named Abraham to be

the patriarch of the family

God calls the Israelites. They're a bunch of sinners, just like all of us. God blesses them despite

their sin, but sin still has its consequences. One of the long storylines of consequence is of the

400 years they spent enslaved in Egypt. God sends a man named Moses to demonstrate his power to the Egyptian ruler,

who reluctantly agrees to let the Israelite slaves go. They flee to the desert, led by God and his

servant Moses, and then little by little, God gives these people the basic rules of how to have a

stable society. They're uncivilized, ungrateful people who have only just met God and Moses,

and they're not keen on obeying either of them. But in the midst of their sin and stubbornness, God knows that what

their hearts need is him. So he sets up camp among them in the desert. More than anything,

he wants them to remember who he is to them, the God who rescued them out of slavery. But they keep forgetting,

...