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

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

We just finished our 66th book of the Bible and the 27th book of the New Testament,

which means you've either finished reading the whole Bible or the whole New Testament.

Congratulations.

So here's a brief summary of what we've seen in the Bible's overall meta-narrative.

The Bible is one unified story.

In Genesis, God sets 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 Abraham to be the patriarch of

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

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

400 years they spent enslaved in Egypt. God sends Moses to set the Israelites free from slavery. They flee

to the desert where little by little, God gives them the basic rules of how to have a stable

society. They're uncivilized people who have only just met God and Moses, and they're not keen on

obeying either of them. 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, and every time they forget, they either

get fearful and disobey, or they get prideful and disobey. Forty years after he rescues them from

...