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 story lines of storylines 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.

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