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

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

We just finished our 39th book of the Bible and have made our way through the whole Old Testament, 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 he 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 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 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

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