The Bible is available all in one book. However, it is many books, all put together under one cover. It is really impossible to say, ‘The Bible says..’. It is more helpful to say something like ‘In the Book of…’ in the Bible it says.

Bible (Greek word biblos ) means book – we get biblical, bibliography, French bibliotheque, meaning a library, from this Greek word

The Bible is divided into 2 main sections, or Testaments. The other word for Testament is Covenant, but we might nowadays use the word ‘Promise’. In some bibles a third group of  writings is included between the two Testaments, which we call the Apocrypha (these writings do not carry the same authority for the church)

The Bible is made up of a series of scriptures or documents, some of which were written in Hebrew (The Old Testament), some in Greek (the New Testament). Jesus spoke a language which was a dialect used in Galilee called Aramaic, but his words are recorded in history for us in Greek because it was the educated language of his day.

The Old Testament tells us all about God’s chosen people – the Jews, sometimes called the Hebrews or the People of Israel. In this phrase Israel is not a country, but the name given to the son of Abraham. His name was Jacob, but a story tells us that he wrestled with God, and for this reason he was re-named Israel, which means in Hebrew ‘He who wrestled with God’.

The New Testament tells us about the life of Jesus; it contains letters written by a convert to Christianity called Paul, and other Christian writings.

Remember that Jesus was a Jew – and that he was an Arab!

Christians believe of course that he was also ‘the Son of God’. So we believe that the Old Testament is all about the build up to the birth of Jesus – to the coming of the Son of God – and that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is present in God even before the beginning of time, with the Spirit of God.

Read Genesis Ch 1 and compare it with John 1

There is a season we call Advent – you will know that we can buy Advent calendars and Advent candles for our homes and children. In this Advent season we read passages from the Old Testament that clearly look forward to the message and truth of the New Testament.

We refer to the Bible as the word of God. This is because we consider these writings to be holy and they hold a special truth about God and Jesus, who is the Word made flesh. At the end of readings in church you will hear us say, ‘This is the word of the Lord’ and everyone replies ‘Thanks be to God’.

So did God speak these words? Did he write them down? No. These various books in the Bible are written by humans, by people who were believers. The Christian Bible is not like the Koran. Muslims believe that Mohammed uttered words from God and others wrote them down as he said them. The Christian Bible is not like that. The writings cover a period of about 900 years, and are a collection of religious writings that are considered to be of value in our understanding of the relationship between God and humanity.

At the time of Jesus books did not exist

Read Luke 4, Jesus in the synagogue

When Paul wrote his letters to the church in Rome, Ephesus, Corinth etc, he certainly did not think that they would all be put together into something called a ‘bible’. They were letters written to be read in those churches

There are 4 different accounts of the life of Jesus – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They have much in common about Jesus, but they also have matters of difference – like 4 commentators at a sports game. Each has his own way of expressing how they understood Jesus.

The importance about the Bible is that over the very early years of the existence of the church certain books and writings were agreed as being of essential importance for Christians to read, to learn about God, and to understand how to be disciples or followers of Jesus. They were also important is deciding what the church believed and taught. We cannot teach something as being essential for Christians unless we can show in a writing of the Bible that you can justify it.

There are different approaches to the Bible.

Some Christians would use the Bible as if it was the instructions from Ikea about constructing a piece of furniture, or the instructions for an Airfix kit. In other words, if you don’t follow the Bible to the exact letter then you will not be able to build a Christian life.

Other people will use the Bible rather more like a companion to help you on a journey through life – you need a map, sign posts, food for the journey, companionship to travel with you.

These two approaches are quite different, and this causes tensions and problems among Christians, especially over such matters as the place of women, or homosexuality. Some follow the words of the Bible literally, others take wider themes for forming Christian lives.

Both of these views however require that the Bible – the Scriptures – are at the very heart of the Christian life. You cannot be a Christian without valuing the Bible, and reading it!

Lots of houses will have a Bible. It might be in a pile of books somewhere, or in a drawer. It might be an old family Bible passed through generations but never opened. It might be an old version that can’t be understood too well, so it's far better never to look at it.

In a Muslim household, the Koran is kept as the highest book in the house – literally! So it will never have books higher than it anywhere in the room. This is to give the book the respect it requires in the faith of the believer.

In a Christian household the Bible should be given this respect – but the greatest respect you can give to the bible is not to wrap it up safely, put it as the highest book on a bookshelf, but to open it and to read it.

Because of the size of the Bible you need to take care how you begin to read it. In church on a Sunday we read little sections of the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul, and a section of one of the Gospels, so that we get a theme running through the readings, and we can reflect on the theme. Just reading a book of the Bible is quite a different, but good experience.

In church a special place is always given to the Gospel book – after all it is here that we read about Jesus, and remember that for many centuries people didn’t have books, so the only way they could learn about Jesus was to ‘Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ’. It was so precious that the deacon or priest would kiss the gospel book, just like we would kiss the person we love, or our son or daughter.