What’s The Point | Biblical Genres and Apocalyptic Literature - Hebrews 4:11-13 | September 1

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The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship.

Day after day, they continue to speak.

Night after night, they make him known. They speak without a sound or word.

Their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth

and their words to all the world.

God has made a home in the heavens for the son. says.

Are perfect, reviving the soul. The decrees of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.

The commandments of the Lord are right, bringing joy to the heart.

The commands of the Lord are clear, giving insight for living.

Reverence for the Lord is pure, lasting forever. The laws of the Lord are true, each one is fair.

They are more desirable than gold, even the finest gold. They are sweeter than

honey, even honey dripping from the comb.

They are a warning to your servant, a great reward for those who obey them.

How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart?

Cleanse me from this hidden faults. Keep your servant from deliberate sins.

Don't let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you,

O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Beautiful words. So what is that psalm about?

The law of the Lord is perfect. It's about the Word of God, perhaps.

We are in a series talking about the Word of God. So it's natural to believe

that this psalm is about the Word of God, right?

It's about how, talking about how the Bible is the Word of God,

how do we read it, and the profound ways in which it shapes our lives as we

seek the revelation of God and His Word.

That these are the family stories of Jesus that shaped His life and the world

that He lived in. We talked about that last week.

And so, these are our family stories as well that shape us into His image.

And so, yes, that psalm is about the Word of God.

And how it is, the Bible is a story about God. He is the hero, not us.

He's the main character, not us. It's all about him. It's not about us.

So, the Bible is a story about God. You'd be correct in assuming that.

We read that the laws of the Lord are true, that they are wisdom,

that give insight for living.

We talk about in Hebrews 4, right, that they cut to the depths of our heart

to show us what's really there, to reveal the truth of what is there.

So, So this is definitely about the revelation of God word that,

that it goes out and reaches everyone the same way that the sun rises and shines

its light on the whole earth says someone, someone 19, right?

But what else is this Psalm about?

What's another thing that the Psalm is about?

His message going out. Yeah. Through what?

Yeah, through creation, right? So we see that the second half focuses on God's

revelation about himself through his word, his revealed word.

Then we see in the first half how God has revealed himself to the world through his creation, right?

How it all declares, the heavens declare the glory of God.

The creations declare who God is. It's about creation.

It's about how the details of creation serve as evidence for God's existence,

for his character, for his strength, for his great and mighty design.

So it's all evidence of God's majesty is what we see.

In a fashion in Psalm 19, we see a creation account, isn't it?

This is a creation account.

This is telling the story of creation in a way.

God has made a home in the heavens for the son. It bursts forth like a radiant

bridegroom after his wedding.

It rejoices is like a great athlete eager to run the race. This is a creation story.

So how come it looks so different than Genesis chapter one?

They're telling the same story, aren't they? Genesis chapter one,

verse 14 also says, then God said, let lights appear in the sky to separate the dark from the night.

Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years.

Let these lights in the sky shine down on you on the earth.

And this is what happened. God made two great lights, the larger one to govern

the day and the smaller one to govern the night.

He also made the stars and God set these lights in the sky to light the earth,

to govern the day and night, to separate the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was good.

So the creation account, Genesis one, God created two lights.

Essentially the literal word that he's using is lamps and,

Our Bibles translated to sun and moon eventually, some of them.

Some of them just have changed it to great lights, right?

But God created these two lamps to serve as signposts, it says.

That the lamps serve as signs to point to the creation, to the creator of all that is.

So, this is what Psalm 19 says as well. So, how come Psalm 19 and Genesis 1 look so, so different?

Different. And we're talking about, as we wrap up this brief series about how to read the Bible,

setting ourselves up for Daniel, is the idea of the importance of understanding

the genres of the Bible, which you didn't realize you signed up for like an

English lit course, but genres in the Bible are very important.

Don't get worried. This is a huge topic.

We're not going to cover all of it. We're just going to hit the high level stuff today.

It deserves much more time than we can and dedicated to it.

But although it seems daunting, the reality is, is that all of us correctly

and successfully navigate genres and the complexity that they bring every single day.

We do this all the time. We just have to get used to ancient literature,

ancient genres a little bit.

Brent and I went and saw Shaun of the Dead this past Tuesday.

Movie I shouldn't recommend in church, but we went to the app theater and you

know, there's, there's a genre that we correctly interpreted.

Imagine, imagine if we had gone in expecting, so it's a dark comedy.

If you've never seen it, not probably again, the best movie you should be watching,

but imagine if we had gone in to watch that movie, expecting it to be a documentary,

like that would have completely changed the experience, right?

We would have wondered why everyone else was so calm and how come they could be laughing?

It's a different genre and we expected the correct genre. This does trip us up sometimes, right?

There are plenty of beloved movies that have not performed well in the box office

all because the movie trailer presented the incorrect genre.

The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, love that movie. The movie trailer kind of shows

it to be like a horror flick, which if you've seen it, it is definitely a comedy.

There might be some scary parts, but it's mostly... It's Brendan Fraser.

He's George of the Jungle. What do you expect it to be?

Another one is The Fifth Element, another great movie. But the trailer,

the preview for that presented it to be more of a serious, high-action sci-fi

drama, which it's, again, more akin to a comedy than a thriller.

So, there are these beloved movies that have become cult classics in their own

right that did poorly in the box office because it miscommunicated the genre

of what people were expecting.

But even though this can confuse us, this is still, it's still natural to us.

We still do this every single day. We just have to learn, relearn it a bit when

it comes to ancient literature.

Because the genres in the Bible, though very similar to what we experience,

they are also quite different in the way that we interact with them.

The authors write them for us to interact with them in different ways,

even though they may be similar in some forms. And so, we have to adapt a new

set of tools to interpret biblical literature, biblical genres.

And so, we have to adapt these tools. We're going to talk about some of those tools today.

But here's how I want you to think about it. Because as you all know by now,

the Bible is not a book, a single book.

It is a collection of books. It is a collection of stories. It is a library,

you could say. Bible is a library.

And you might hear people ask for, at times, you might have encounter people

who ask for evidence outside of the Bible that points to Jesus's life and his,

existence or God and all of these things.

But that is kind of an incorrect way of thinking about it. That is an incorrect

way of thinking of the Bible as just a book, a source.

But in reality, it is a collection of sources.

And they're all telling one story, but it's not a single source.

So, it's unfair to treat the Bible as if it were one book with one genre.

But we do that all the the time, but that's, that's unfair to the Bible.

In reality, the Bible is a collection of 66 books, 39 in the old Testament, 27 in the new Testament.

They're all telling one beautiful unified story. It is a library of different

types of books that are communicating, expressing truth in different packaging,

essentially that it's one story,

but it's not one book and packaging the packaging of something matters.

We all have experienced unboxing a product that is extremely satisfying,

that has really high quality, well-packaged material.

Apple's really good at creating experience with their unboxing, right?

And while there are high quality products that can come in humble packaging,

just brown cardboard or whatnot, when we experience that, it communicates to

us that the manufacturer,

when they put thought into how they package their product, that they're probably

going going to put even more thought into the quality of the product that they're producing.

The packaging communicates something about what's inside, the meaning of the content.

And so, a genre is packaging.

And that genre, that packaging is communicating to us something important,

the meaning of the content.

And again, you might already be thinking this is far too complicated for me.

But even in that statement, genre is packaging, you correctly understood what

I was trying to communicate it

without falsely believing that a genre is cardboard or styrofoam, right?

Like you're already doing this as I speak to you. It's not something that is

going to prove to be difficult. You can do this. I promise you.

We just have to put in a little bit of work, understand the cultural context,

and it will become natural to us just as we can naturally and successfully do this every single day.

What does it matter? Why do genres matter?

Most of us have been reading the Bible for years and years, and perhaps you've

never thought about genre.

So maybe you don't think it's important at this point, but it does matter.

And it matters in, let me use, let me use a story.

In September of 1999, some of you are like, yeah, I remember that.

Others of you are like, I wasn't born yet. In September of 1999,

after nearly 10 months of traveling to Mars, the Mars climate orbiter,

it burned and broke up in its descent.

The NASA, the climate orbiter, was supposed to orbit around Mars and relay information

back to NASA about the climate and things like that.

That's why it's called the Mars Climate Orbiter. It's a very obvious name, right?

And in a time and a day where the NASA engineers expected to be celebrating,

the reality was far different than what they expected, right?

And so now I'm talking about NASA, and that's even more confusing.

So what does that matter?

It was an interpretation error that caused the malfunction.

Function but they did an investigation they found out that the

the spacecraft burned up because it

entered into orbit too low and when

they what they found is that it was due to a measurement

mismatch between the units the

metric units that nasa used because apparently nasa's european

and the standard u.s customary units that the spacecraft builder lockheed martin

used so the it was an interpretation Interpretation error of the builder of

the right units all because someone failed to interpret the right units So what

we're talking about with genre is interpretation.

We're talking about how genre is fundamental to our interpretation of Scripture. It's fundamental.

And the fancy word here is, if you're familiar with it, is hermeneutics,

which is essentially just how we study and understand the Bible.

It's actually more general than that, but that's how we apply it in our studies in Christianity.

In 2 Timothy 2.15, it says, Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved,

a worker who has no need to be ashamed, named rightly handling the word of truth.

So we have to be a people who know how to correctly handle God's word.

We have to be a people who correctly handle God's word.

And the false assumption here that we encounter as Christians and we encounter

in our churches is that the Bible is a collection of ideas and that the different

books are just vehicles to deliver those ideas to us.

And the reality is that the Bible is far more complex than that.

It's not that there is a secret that's hidden and you have to be clever enough to find it.

That's not the intention of the authors, but there is wisdom and treasure to

dig for in the Bible as we've talked about.

And so the goal here is that we would be careful and faithful readers of the

word of God, that all of these messages have had goals.

I want you to fall in love with the word of God. I want you to be saturated with the word of God.

I want you to carefully read the

word of God and we would be faithful and careful readers of God's word.

And so let's begin our conversation a little bit.

There are a number of genres in the Bible. Anybody want to throw out a genre?

What's a genre of the Bible?

What's a genre in general? What is it? Poetry. Perfect example.

Poetry. Any others you can think of? History. Yeah. Yeah. Poetry.

What'd you say? Prophecy for sure. Yeah.

So here's a list of a bunch of genres that could be found in the Bible.

That's not an exhaustive list. So if you were to ask how many genres are in

the Bible, the answer is depends on who you ask.

Because the reality is, is that there's genres and there's sub genres.

And then some people believe that sub genres are unique enough to be counted as their own genre.

And it gets pretty confusing because humans love to over or complicate things.

So, here are the five genres that we're going to focus on.

These are what I believe to be the fundamental foundational core genres of the Bible.

And then we're going to add apocalypse as well, even though that's a sub-genre

of prophecy in many regards, because it is directly applicable to where we're

headed next week as we get into Daniel.

But generally speaking, each book of the Bible has a dominant genre.

They have one dominant genre. And then as you you read through it,

you're probably going to encounter many other genres in your reading.

You read through the Torah in Genesis, you're going to encounter poetry,

you're going to encounter songs, you're going to encounter wisdom,

you're going to encounter law, you're going to encounter lots of different genres,

but the main genre is narrative.

So, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Torah is a story.

The Torah is a story. These are all narrative. Joshua, Judges,

Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.

These are all narratives. These are a story.

The Gospels are a narrative. Acts is a story.

These are all stories and each genre has their own set of rules for understanding,

for understanding them.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that narrative was the bulk of the Bible.

And I said something like two thirds of the Bible is narrative.

Some people will say almost half of the Bible is narrative.

It really depends on what they call narrative and what they call a subgenre

of narrative and how they build up.

So let's just say 60% of the Bible is narrative and we'll meet in the middle. right?

This is, the Bible is a story and it is expansive and epic narrative.

The Bible is a story. This means that there is a plot, that there are characters,

that this takes place in some setting and these form design patterns that happen over and over again.

These are the basic building blocks, the basic tools of narrative.

You can essentially make the

statement, I am fill in the blank so that you may know fill in the blank.

This is kind of how narrative works. It's one of the more simpler genres for

sure, but it is placed in a context for a purpose.

It's not just history alone, but it's communicating a message.

Narrative is communicating a message. It tells us what happened and it tells

us what happened according to the purposes of the author.

It has a subjective view to it. There is an intent behind the author of what

he's trying to communicate through history.

Sometimes there's spiritual lessons from events. Sometimes we're just gaining

context about the history of God's people.

I mean, I mentioned Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,

Joshua, Joseph, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah,

Esther. All of these are narratives. The gospel acts.

These are all full of narrative. The Bible is a story.

So Genesis, let's just summarize a story real quick.

Genesis tells the story of creation, of how God created everything,

how it created humanity, and he blessed them with a beautiful garden full of

purpose and living in his presence.

That's the story of the first chapter, couple chapters of Genesis, right?

But instead of accepting that, humanity decided to redefine or to decide for

themselves God's, what blessing and curse was according to their own desires, right?

They wanted to determine for themselves blessing and curse.

That's the story of the beginning of Genesis. It's one story, but then it's repeated.

It's a repeated story that happens over and over again. Abraham and Sarah,

they wanted the blessing that God promised them, but instead of waiting patiently

for God's promise, they took Hagar and they did what seemed good in their own eyes.

It's a repeating theme in the book of judges.

We see time and time again, the phrase that everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

Even David took Bathsheba because she was, he desired her in his eyes that she

was desirable to his eyes.

And all of this repeats and repeats and builds and builds this narrative,

this story until Jesus arrives and.

And then in the wilderness, we see him in his temptation, that he is presented

with every opportunity to see, to desire, to want, and to have.

And instead of giving into those

desires and doing what seemed good in his eyes, he decided to trust God.

That all of this is repeating and building until the climax, until Jesus arrives.

That man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Do not put the Lord, your God to the test. Worship the Lord,

your God, and serve him only.

The story of the Bible is leading us to trust in the one who is trustworthy.

There is a purpose in narrative. It's all leading us to Jesus.

There's poetry in the Bible. Sam mentioned poetry, beautiful poetry that is

designed to make you feel something.

It is communicating ideas as well, yes, but it's primarily, especially expressing

emotion is what poetry is doing.

It shows us the fullness of life.

So, poems in the Bible don't work in the same way that the poetry we're used

to works. They have different patterns.

Most of the time, they don't even rhyme, for what that's worth. That's a shame.

But what they do often do is form form repetitive patterns of two groupings of two lines.

So, couplets is the term for that in poetry, right?

They form repetitive groupings of two lines and they use acrostic and they use chiasm.

They use all of these things to communicate truth to us as we meditate on the

beautiful language of metaphor and symbolism.

This is what poetry is and does. We can look at Psalm 24.

You can turn and do your Bibles if you want. Psalm 24 begins,

the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.

For he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what

is false and does not swear deceitfully.

He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from God of his salvation.

Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob, Selah.

So this is a repetition of building these groupings of two lines that the earth,

the phrase, The phrase, the earth and all it contains is amplified by the phrase,

the world and all who live in it.

The phrase, he sets it foundations upon the seas is rephrased,

established it upon the ocean currents.

The question of who is allowed to ascend the mountain of the Lord is restated,

who may go up to his holy dwelling place.

It's very repetitive. It's asking this question. This is a design pattern common in Hebrew poetry.

And so this passage leads us to a beautiful truth. Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who doesn't lift up his soul to another.

And while we can seek to be that person, we can dedicate our lives to being that person.

The beautiful reality is, is that Jesus has become that person for us.

Now we are identified in him by trusting him through faith.

There's poetry in the Bible. There is wisdom, wonderful wisdom in the Bible.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Job, even the book of James in the

New Testament has a lot of wisdom leanings to it.

And so what wisdom literature in the Bible, the book of Proverbs,

for example, what it's actually doing is giving you general truth that is made from observations.

So what it's not doing is not giving you guarantees of what is to come.

It's not saying these are promises

that will happen. It's not absolute truth, but it's general truth.

And it's even when I live by God's wisdom, I will still experience hardship.

I will still experience disappointment.

So these are not absolute truths. These are not promises of what will always happen.

These are general truths that are designed to shape the moral and ethical lives

of those who are reading it, that we are being shaped to live this way,

that the wisdom of the Bible,

the wisdom literature of the Bible presents us all with an opportunity.

That we all individually, each and every day, have to stand before the tree

of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of knowing stuff,

and we all have our choices to make each day. Are we going to choose to trust?

Are we going to choose to live in the wisdom of God? Are we going to choose

to follow in His instruction, in His God?

That these are all designed, all the wisdom literature is designed to lead us

into how how God has designed us to rule the world by his wisdom so that we

might find what true life is, and we might find real life.

This is the point of wisdom literature in the Bible. And there's prophecy.

And these, as you well know, have certainly the greatest potential for confusion

and misunderstanding in any genre of scripture.

They are filled with strange imagery. they can often be very poetic for sure.

But in reality, what they're doing is communicating God's word to his people.

That's essentially in as simple as it is. He's warning them. He's encouraging them.

He's strengthening them for increased times of spiritual and national danger.

And the prophets in the Bible are always most concerned about.

With bringing God's people back to his covenant. That's their intention.

People tend to think of prophecy as telling the future or prediction.

And while there is a small portion of that in the prophetic books of the Bible,

the reality is that it is God's sharing his heart with his people.

It's God sharing his voice with his people.

And so it's not for all time necessarily. He's sharing his voice with his people

for that time. Not for all time necessarily.

That's where we get ourselves in trouble. as Christians, we try and interpret prophecy for us.

And the reality is, is that these are most readily, first and foremost,

for God's people at that time and not God's people for all time.

Although that does happen.

The best thing we can do is let the Bible interpret the Bible rather than trying

to figure out where those opportunities are for ourselves.

The Bible is not, prophecy in the Bible is not designed for us to watch out

for signs, minds, to wait for them to be fulfilled.

Just to trust God in the waiting. So, it's God's faithfulness and it's his desires to make things right.

That's what prophecy is all about. It says in Isaiah, this is what the Lord says.

That's what prophecy is. This is what the Lord says. He who made you,

who formed you in the womb and who will help you, do not be afraid.

Prophecy is designed to encourage and give us hope. Then there's epistles or the letters.

So, when you think of genres in the Bible, this is one that is always amongst

the most favorite for people.

Typically this is most favorite letters are the most favorite because as modern

readers, they are a bit more obvious and comfortable to our modern understanding.

The fact that the New Testament letters, the epistles, are directed to churches

and individual and churches means that they are also the most directly applicable to us today.

That the commands given in the epistles are general enough that we need to follow them.

Or the promises, for example, we can claim them because they are for God's church,

which includes us today.

So, even with the letters, context is most important. written.

Context of the overarching story of the Bible, the main storyline.

Context of the Roman Empire. How often do you think about that?

Context that fits the occasion and purpose that the letter was written.

These are occasioned texts.

The letters of the Bible are occasioned texts. And so, we need to get at the

circumstances that led them to being written.

In the letters, we pay pay attention to logical connections.

There's generally a flow because the author is making a point.

So, there's a flow to the argument.

So, words like therefore become very important.

And so, those kind of connector words become very important to the flow to tell

us why something is being written.

If we add another verse to our passage in Hebrews, Hebrews chapter four,

we back up one more verse, start in verse 11.

It says, let us therefore strive to enter that rest So that no one may fall

by the same sort of disobedience.

So, verse 11 gives another level of meaning to our understanding of this passage,

that the aim of life is to enter into God's rest, that we can be saved from

our sin and joyfully spend eternity in God's restful presence.

And that's the goal of life. And also along with that, to bring as many people with us in love.

So if you look around at the chair, if you have an empty chair next to us,

the desire of God is that we would enter into his rest and that those chairs

would be filled with people who are being changed by him as well.

So that's the point, to spend eternity in God's restful presence and to bring

as many people in love with us as we possibly can.

So to enter into this great and joyful rest, there's a question. So what must we do?

Of course, we must trust God. I've already mentioned that. But if we look,

there's this flow again to Hebrews.

So verse three says, we who have believed into the rest, we must believe to trust God.

Verse two tells us that what they believed, what we should believe,

what we are to believe is the word of God, the good news that was preached to us.

And then verse six tells us that if we fail to enter the rest,

it's because of disobedience.

So there's this natural logical conclusion that if we didn't have the good news

preached to us, then we wouldn't not be able to believe the word of God and

we couldn't enter into his rest.

So the book of Hebrews, another context for this is that it is steeped in Old Testament narrative.

It is drawing from all the stories of the Old Testament as the author composes this work.

And so, if we consider the overarching context, the larger story,

what Israel failed to trust,

he's writing about Israel here, what Israel failed to trust was the good news,

the word of God that was preached to them in the wilderness,

the promises of God that he would care for them, that he would give them victory

and forgive them and be merciful to him.

They didn't believe God at his word. They didn't believe God's word, his promises.

So, if we continue in that train of thought in Hebrews, what must we do? you.

Hebrews 2.1 says, therefore, pay much close attention to what you've heard.

You must pay attention to what we've heard.

Hebrews 3.1, consider Jesus. Therefore, consider Jesus.

Hebrews 3.12, therefore, take care lest there should be any one of us an evil, unbelieving heart.

That the reason the Bible is a two-edged sword that pierces to the division

of soul and spirit so that it might expose any unbelief in us,

that it might make judgments of what's down at the depths of our being.

Hebrews 3.15, therefore today, if we hear this voice, his word,

do not harden our hearts.

This is the natural flow of biblical letters, biblical epistle.

Finally, apocalypse, even though that's perhaps a sub-genre of prophecy.

So, this is the most confusing sub-genre of the most confusing genre in the Bible is apocalypse.

The revelation is apocalypse. The book of Daniel is, I would say a narrative,

but it is steeped in apocalypse.

Almost half of Daniel is apocalypse itself.

So this is, this is confusing because.

Some people think it's purely historical. Some people think it's purely future-centered, right?

So, nobody's really quite sure how to interpret apocalyptic literature.

Unlike the books of prophecy, there doesn't seem to be a conditional understanding.

In the books of the prophets, there's a conditional understanding of,

unless you do this, you will experience God's judgment.

Therefore, do this, return to the Lord, and He will be your God and you will

be His people. So, there's conditional elements usually in prophecy of what

will happen if people don't return to God.

In Apocalypse, it definitely has more of a melody of this is going to happen and nobody can stop it.

It is much more the idea that these are things that have come to pass or potentially

will come to pass that God has ordained.

And so, it is informing us in a way, but the difficulty is that it's veiled in very heavy

symbolic language and strange metaphors in this vibrant language isn't really

designed to communicate information to us in a way.

It's not really designed to communicate. Here's what's going to happen.

And here are the things that you you'll know when it happens is more designed to communicate.

This is how you should feel about this. It kind of is more of a cross between

prophecy and poetry in that way,

that it is very much designed to make us feel something deep as we hear these

very vibrant and heavy symbolic metaphors.

An apocalypse doesn't mean the end of the world. That's not what it means.

That's not what it's primarily about.

Apocalypse means to unveil or reveal. And so, apocalypse is when you suddenly

see the true nature of something that you couldn't see before.

You see something for what it truly is.

That's what apocalypse is trying to achieve. That we all have familiar ways of seeing things.

And these ways that we are familiar with can limit and blur our vision to what's

actually reality. That we need to see reality a bit more is what apocalypse is all about.

That apocalyptic literature, it provides a heavenly perspective on our earthly circumstances.

That despite its difficulty and despite all of its strangeness,

it exists to give us encouragement and hope for the future.

And this is what we're going to encounter with Daniel, that above all else,

in all of the stories of Daniel, in all of the crazy things that happened to

them and all of the visions that we're going to be told about,

what Daniel is communicating is no matter what the circumstances,

God is in control of the future.

And so, we can trust God with the future. This is what we're going to encounter in Daniel.

So, God's word is beautifully packaged.

It is a beautifully packaged library of so many books that are telling one unified story.

And I know this is just a brief introduction to genres, and perhaps it was less

about how the Bible could change you right now and more about how you can be changed as you read it.

But I want you to fall in love with this word. I want you to be saturated with

it. Let this be the voice that you hear most often.

I want you to be careful readers of this word. My prayer is that God would change

us, that God would change us as we consistently and faithfully seek Him in His Word.

Music.