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

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

We recently started in the New Testament and are currently working

our way through four books, so let's get the 30,000-foot view on where we are in the

chronological timeline of 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 God calls the

Israelites. There'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 spend enslaved in Egypt.

God sends Moses to set the Israelites free from slavery. They flee to the desert where, little by

little, God gives these people 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 Egypt, their new leader Joshua leads

them into the promised land and commands them to eradicate their enemies who live there, the Canaanites.

God has warned them repeatedly that if they don't drive out the Canaanites, they'll become a snare

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