Have you ever noticed how the serpent in the garden of Eden didn’t actually tell any lies? Have you ever thought about the implications of God’s statement that Job had told the truth about him and that his friends had not? Did you spot the huge flaw in Joseph’s plan to save Egypt from the famine?
Have you noticed that despite how much the Bible tries to make him look bad, the guy with the talking donkey was a consistently obedient servant of God? Did you catch the fact that the story of Jonah is about God forcing someone to tell a lie? Or that when Daniel’s friends are disobeying the king so they won’t have to disobey God, the Bible suspiciously fails to mention what Daniel was doing at the time, and vice versa?
Probably not. Maybe you’ve never read the Bible. Maybe you’ve only read “sanitized” versions of the Bible that left out all the awkward parts. Maybe you’ve read the Bible, but you had preconceived ideas of how the stories were supposed to go and what the characters were supposed to be like, which got in the way of seeing what the Bible actually says.
Maybe you’re so familiar with certain passages that when you see them, you just recognize-and-ignore them, instead of thinking about what they’re saying. Maybe the relevant passages were just so far apart in the Bible that you forgot about one by the time you got to another, so you never realized what they imply if you put them together.
It’s easy to miss a lot of surprising things like these in the Bible, for one reason or another. In this monthly series of summarized Bible stories, I’m going to be making those things a lot harder to miss.
I will include a moral at the end of each story. Not all of them are good morals, and not all of them are ideas that Christians are likely to agree with, but they are all lessons that can be learned from the Bible’s stories. For the Parables, I will also include an interpretation at the end, so you can easily see what everything in the story represents.
Below is a list of the Bible stories I’ve published on this blog so far, as well as the rest of the stories I’ll be posting in the future. If you like these stories, you can subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get to read more stories as they come out each month. There are several ways you can stay updated, so find something that works for you:
- Get push notifications on this device by clicking the bell icon in the lower-right corner of the screen.1
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Or if you don’t want to wait a month for each new story, you can read more of my Bible stories right now on Patreon.
Continue reading Bible stories