Contents

       Cover

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Introduction

      I The Old Testament

      The Maker’s Instructions

      1. Overview of the Old Testament

      2. Genesis

      3. Exodus

      4. Leviticus

      5. Numbers

      6. Deutronomy

      A Land and A Kingdom

      7. Joshua

      8. Judges and Ruth

      9. 1 and 2 Samuel

      10. 1 and 2 Kings

      Poems of Worship and Wisdom

      11. Introduction to Hebrew poetry

      12. Psalms

      13. Song of Songs

      14. Proverbs

      15. Ecclesiastes

      16. Job

      Decline and Fall of an Empire

      17. Introduction to prophecy

      18. Jonah

      19. Joel

      20. Amos and Hosea

      21. Isaiah

      22. Micah

      23. Nahum

      24. Zephaniah

      25. Habakkuk

      26. Jeremiah and Lamentations

      27. Obadiah

      The Struggle to Survive

      28. Ezekiel

      29. Daniel

      30. Esther

      31. Ezra and Nehemiah

      32. 1 and 2 Chronicles

      33. Haggai

      34. Zechariah

      35. Malachi

      II The New Testament

      The Hinge of History

      36. The Gospels

      37. Mark

      38. Matthew

      39. Luke and Acts

      40. Luke

      41. Acts

      42. John

      The Thirteenth Apostle

      43. Paul and his letters

      44. 1 and 2 Thessalonians

      45. 1 and 2 Corinthians

      46. Galatians

      47. Romans

      48. Colossians

      49. Ephesians

      50. Philippians

      51. Philemon

      52. 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus

      Through Suffering to Glory

      53. Hebrews

      54. James

      55. 1 and 2 Peter

      56. Jude

      57. 1, 2 and 3 John

      58. Revelation

      59. The Millennium

      About the Publisher

      Copyright

      Collins is a division of

       HarperCollinsPublishers

       1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in separate volumes in Great Britain in 1999–2001 by HarperCollinsPublishers

      The edition published in Great Britain in 2003 by HarperCollinsPublishers

      David Pawson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN 9780007166664

      Unlocking the Bible. Copyright © David Pawson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007378920

      Version: 2018-12-06

      

INTRODUCTION

      I suppose this all started in Arabia, in 1957. I was then a chaplain in the Royal Air Force, looking after the spiritual welfare of all those who were not C.E. (Church of England) or R.C. (Roman Catholic) but O.D. (other denominations – Methodist to Salvationist, Buddhist to atheist). I was responsible for a string of stations from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. In most there was not even a congregation to call a ‘church’, never mind a building.

      In civilian life I had been a Methodist minister working anywhere from the Shetland Islands to the Thames Valley. In that denomination it was only necessary to prepare a few sermons each quarter, which were hawked around a ‘circuit’ of chapels. Mine had mostly been of the ‘text’ type (talking about a single verse) or the ‘topic’ type (talking about a single subject with many verses from all over the Bible). In both I was as guilty as any of taking texts out of context before I realized that chapter and verse numbers were neither inspired nor intended by God and had done immense damage to Scripture, not least by changing the meaning of ‘text’ from a whole book to a single sentence. The Bible had become a compendium of ‘proof-texts’, picked out at will and used to support almost anything a preacher wanted to say.

      With a pocketful of sermons based on this questionable technique, I found myself in uniform, facing very different congregations – all male instead of the lifeboat-style gatherings I had been used to: women and children first. My meagre stock of messages soon ran out. Some of them had gone down like a lead balloon, especially in compulsory parade services in England before I was posted overseas.

      So here I was in Aden, virtually starting a church from scratch, from the Permanent Staff and temporary National Servicemen of Her Majesty’s youngest armed service. How could I get these men interested in the Christian faith and then committed to it?

      Something (I would now say: Someone) prompted me to announce that I would give a series of talks over a few months, which would take us right through the Bible (‘from