We're starting a new theme study today.

It's the theme of the city.

Cities are where most humans in the world work and play.

We raise our families, we build businesses.

The Bible cares a lot about the city because cities are where loads and loads of human

images God are centralized.

If you've been following this project, you know we've done a lot of themes about a lot

of ideas in the Bible.

But it's not often we do a theme study on a setting, but this setting, the city, is critical.

They become little microcosms in the technical sense of that word.

Little mini-universes.

What's on display in the city is usually a barometer for what's happening in creation at

large.

Now, the ideal setting in the Bible on the first page is not a city.

It's a garden.

And when cities get introduced, they're entirely negative.

And they remain mostly negative throughout the biblical story.

But the story of the Bible has a surprise in store for us as it relates to the city.

By the time you reach the last page, the fact that God's heavenly realm that's going

to merge with Earth to be the new creation is depicted as a city, I think is surprising.

This is surprising because the city is introduced in the Bible as a tragic result of human

violence.

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