The Old Testament in 10 DaysSample

What is the Bible?

Welcome to “The Old Testament in 10 Days.” This plan will be your guide over the next ten days as we walk through the overarching story of the Old Testament. Throughout our journey, you’ll be introduced to some of YouVersion’s favorite and most trusted guides through Scripture. These are YouVersion partners who provide free resources to help you grasp God’s Word and be transformed by it. We hope you find a guide or two that resonates with you. After this plan, you can use resources from these guides to take you deeper into God’s Word.

Today, we will zoom way out and cover the whole story of the Bible, seeing the Old Testament's central role in it. To do that, we will watch a short video from our friends at BibleProject. BibleProject exists to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. In this video, you will see how the whole Bible, beginning in the Old Testament, tells a connected story that is all about Jesus. Watch this!

As our friends at BibleProject have helped us see, God created humanity in the Garden of Eden. Since we were made in his image, we were meant to rule creation on his behalf, bringing more beauty and order out of God's beautiful and ordered world. Humans had a choice: to partner with God and do good, or to rebel from God and do evil. As we saw, all humanity redefined good and evil for themselves and ended up in the opposite of the Garden of Eden — represented by Babylon. That is the story that gets repeated and expanded throughout the Old Testament. And it makes us feel our deep need for Jesus. That’s because Jesus, being God in the flesh, is the perfect human who can reorder our evil and beautifully recreate us into his vision of what is good.

So today, you are invited to start your journey into this story. You will read the first three chapters of the Bible in the book of Genesis. It is the story of God creating and ordering a beautiful world and giving humanity the right to rule it as his image bearers. You will also see how humanity chose a disordered and evil life, as they are tempted by the serpent and exiled from the Garden.

We pray that God blesses your time in his Word and that you begin to see the story of the Old Testament take shape. You can now continue to today’s reading. When you’re ready, the next day in the plan will introduce you to a new guide who will walk you through our next phase of the story — how God will fix what is broken. Remember to visit the publisher page of this plan to explore more from the ministry partners and Bible guides being featured throughout this plan.