A comprehensive Bible study guide covering the entire narrative arc of Scripture — from Genesis through Malachi, the Inter-Testament period, and on into the New Testament.

Everything is listed below in the order it is meant to be read. You do not have to read it in order, and you do not have to read all of it. Click any title to open that study.

• Introduction — Why we study God's Story, and how this journey works

The Torah

Genesis

• Creation — The beginning of everything I need to know about life and salvation
• The Fall — Not the eating of a fruit — the claim to decide good and evil for ourselves
• Noah and the Flood — A rescue, a new world — and the same old heart walking off the boat
• The Patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph — God building a people out of ordinary men
• The Covenant: Old and New — How the promise made to Abraham grows into the fullness of the New Covenant
• World of the Patriarchs — A geographic overview of the ancient Near East and its modern setting
• Abraham — The Father of a Nation — Tracing the journeys of the man through whom every nation would be blessed
• The Covenant Cut with Abraham — Genesis 15 — the strangest scene in his life, and the one everything rests on
• Covenant Name: Infinite Supply — Yahweh Jireh — the God who sees, and therefore provides
• Isaac — The quiet one between two large men — and the proof that the promise survives a generation
• Jacob and Esau — Twins who could not both carry the promise — and the quarrel that outlived them by a thousand years
• Old Testament Timeline — A visual overview of the entire Old Testament period, from Adam to Malachi
• Lineage from Adam to Jacob — The genealogical thread through which God built the nation of Israel
• Nimrod & the Table of Nations — The post-flood world, the spirit of Babylon, and its shadow across Revelation
• Joseph — How the family of promise ended up in Egypt — and the sentence that explains it

Deliverance and the Law

• Exodus — The book of God's redemption — delivered from Egypt to worship at Sinai
• Exit from Egypt — The Passover, the route from Egypt to Sinai, and the covenant sealed at the mountain
• Parallels to the Journey of Faith — Israel's deliverance from Egypt as a map of every believer's walk with God
• Covenant Name: The Healer — Yahweh Rapha — the God who makes bitter water sweet
• Covenant Name: The Lord My Banner — Yahweh Nissi — the LORD is my banner, the One who fights for me
• Leviticus — A God who has opinions about your dinner, your clothes, and your quarrel with your neighbour
• The Day of Atonement — One day a year, one man goes in — and the whole book is explained by what he does
• Numbers — A detour of faith — and forty years summed up in five chapters
• Deuteronomy — Moses’ last three sermons, on the plains of Moab, to a generation about to cross without him

History

The Conquest & the Judges

• Joshua the Book — Israel enters the Promised Land, and learns to rest in a faithfulness that is not their own
• Joshua the Man — Who he was before he was the leader
• Crossing the Jordan
• Joshua’s Campaigns
• Cities of Refuge
• Tribal Boundaries — How the land was divided — Joshua 13–21
• Judges — Rebellion and rescue, in the years when Israel had no king
• Judges and Prophets of Israel
• Covenant Name: The God of Peace — Yahweh Shalom — Judges 6:22–24
• The Book of Ruth — A quiet story of redemption in the days of the Judges

The Kingdom

• I Samuel — Samuel, Saul, and the rise of David
• The Ark Captured
• II Samuel — David’s reign, his triumphs, and his fall
• Kingdom of David and Solomon
• The Kingdom Divided
• Kings and Prophets of Israel and Judah — How to read the timeline
• I and II Kings — Where the prophets will make sense
• I Kings — From Solomon to the divided kingdom
• II Kings — The slide of both kingdoms toward exile
• I Chronicles — David’s reign retold, with worship at the centre
• II Chronicles — One kingdom, one family, and the promise that outlasted them both
• The Neighbours — The small nations pressed against Israel, century after century
• The Empires — The great powers that arrived from far away and ended chapters

The Prophets

• Joel — A field stripped bare, and a Spirit poured out on everyone
• Jonah — The prophet who ran because he knew God would forgive
• Amos — A shepherd sent to a boom town, and the one thing prosperity cannot buy
• Hosea — A marriage lived out in public, because words were not enough
• Micah — A countryman with a lawsuit against the men at the top
• Isaiah 1–39 — Judgment and hope — from the throne room to the fall
• Isaiah 40–66 — Comfort, the Servant, and a new creation
• Nahum — The city that was spared once, and the mercy that was not permanent
• Zephaniah — Judgment with a purpose, and a God who sings over what is left
• Jeremiah — Forty years of telling the truth to people who would not hear it
• Lamentations — Jeremiah in the ruins — five poems from the fall of Jerusalem
• Habakkuk — A man arguing with God, and the answer he was given
• Obadiah — Twenty-one verses about a brother who stood and watched
• Daniel — Written from inside the palace of the empire that destroyed Jerusalem — and the one book in the Old Testament that gives a timetable for the coming of the Messiah.
• Ezekiel — What the glory of God was doing in Babylon
• Haggai — Four sermons in four months, about a building site nobody had touched in years
• Zechariah — Eight visions in one night, and more about the Messiah than any prophet but Isaiah
• Malachi — An argument in six disputations, and then four hundred years of silence
• The Prophets Speak — Where each prophet was sent — and how it lines up with the kings
• Covenant Name: Living in Righteousness
• Covenant Name: The God Who Is There — Yahweh Shammah — the God of the presence

Exile & Return

• Israel Goes into Exile — Two kingdoms, two empires, and a century between them
• Ezra — The decree, the foundation, and the man who saved a nation with a book
• Nehemiah — Doing God’s will in the face of constant harassment — and a wall built in fifty-two days
• Esther — The one book in the Bible that never mentions God — and He is on every page of it
• Who’s Who in the Exile

The Writings

• Job — Why do the righteous suffer — and the answer that is not an answer
• Psalms — The one book in the Bible written to God rather than about Him
• Psalm 23: The Lord, My Shepherd — Written by a man who had actually done the job
• Understanding David — The son who was not in the lineup
• Proverbs — Wisdom for the ordinary decisions of an ordinary week
• Ecclesiastes — God’s commentary on human life outside of Christ
• Song of Solomon — A love story, and what it says about being wanted

Between the Testaments

• The Four Hundred Years — What happened in the gap between Malachi and Matthew
• The Fullness of Time — One sentence holds the whole gap — and tells you how to read what comes next

The New Testament

The Life of Jesus

• The Gospel of John — The friend who stood closest — written so that you would come to know Him
• The Land in Jesus’ Day — Keep this open as you read — the geography explains a great deal
• The Birth — Two men wrote it down, from opposite sides of the same room
• The Women in the Line — Matthew opens the New Testament with a family tree, and puts the worst of it in writing
• Before the Ministry — The childhood glimpses, and the voice in the wilderness
• Year One: Baptism to the First Passover — The Jordan, the wilderness, Cana, and a scene in the temple
• Year One: Samaria to Tabernacles — The woman at the well, and the pool of Bethesda
• Year One: Galilee — Capernaum, the calling of the Twelve, and the Sermon on the Mount
• The Sermon on the Mount — Matthew 5–7 — the manifesto of an upside-down kingdom
• The Lord’s Prayer — Almost everyone can say it. Very few have read it.
• Year Two: The Second Tour — The five thousand fed, Caesarea Philippi, and the Transfiguration
• The Final Months — Tabernacles, Dedication, Perea, and Lazarus raised
• Passion Week — Seven days the Gospels slow down to tell almost hour by hour

Acts & the Letters

• The Church Begins — Forty days, an upstairs room, and a morning in Jerusalem
• Scattered — A killing in Jerusalem, and a message that travels because of it
• The Persecutor Converted — Damascus, Arabia, and years nobody writes about
• Antioch and the First Journey — A Roman soldier, a new name, and the first deliberate mission
• The Council and the Second Journey — The question that nearly split the church, and the first letters
• The Third Journey — Three years in Ephesus, a difficult church at Corinth, and the letter to Rome
• Arrest, Trial and Rome — Four years in custody, and the letters written from it
• The Last Letters — Fire in Rome, and the generation that had seen Him begins to die
• Jerusalem Falls — A.D. 70, and what it meant for a faith born in the temple courts
• The Last Apostle — John at Ephesus, and the closing of the eyewitness generation
• The Women — Phoebe, Junia, Prisca, Lydia — and the two passages that seem to say the opposite.
• Where the Letters Fall — Every letter in its place on the timeline

Begin with the Introduction.