The Jewish teaching story above (a)   how important a story can be in communicating truth.

Another factor in the success of storytelling is the hearer. If you as the hearer aren’t (a)   —focusing and looking for the next turn of events—the most energetic and dynamic storyteller in the universe may not get your attention.

Given how much we enjoy stories, it should come as no surprise that God chose story as one of the prime means by which He would (a)   Himself to us.

There are plenty of people who want to identify the Bible using titles such as God’s Little Instruction Book, God’s Deep Book of Theology, or God’s Big Book of Boring Sermon Material. But the reality is, the Bible is (a)   . It is truth as story.

That’s right, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible tells one big story of God’s (a)   .

But also throughout this story, you see a main character acting with purpose and for specific reasons. That character is (a)   Himself

He is both the (a)   and the main character of this story.

The story told by the (a)   was the story by which people understood the meaning of their lives, and for several centuries, even after the invention of printing in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, it was the only book most households had

The Bible is a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the (a)   race.

every good story has a ____ or heroine. The Bible has a hero and that _____ is God, because the Bible interprets the whole of reality and the whole of history in terms of the actions, the doings, the speakings, the promises of God.

(a)  

The Bible tells the story of the whole human race in terms of a particular story of one race—that of Israel—and of one person within that race— (a)   of Nazareth

God makes himself (a)   to us in the context of our shared life as human beings.

The Bible story is told from the point of view of the people whom God (a)   to be the bearers of his purpose, because God does not wish to make himself known to us in the isolation of our own individual souls.

To be those chosen people, to be the place where God is made known in history, is to be chosen for suffering, for agony, for conflict—and that is the story that the (a)   tells.

“The purpose for which we were made is to (a)   God and enjoy him for ever.”

But as we know it is not like that now. What has gone wrong? Here we come to the Bible’s unique insight. The thing we don’t like to talk about. The thing that New Age spirituality tries to hide. The thing theologians call “the (a)   .”

Because now we have to depend upon ourselves to decide what is good and what is (a)   , and because we know we are not capable of this, we are anxious, and because we are anxious, we become aggressive.