The Bible is, by its very nature, a collection—a collection of histories, biographies, letters, prophecies, and poetry written across about 1,500 years in many different settings and many different cultures. You might wonder, why these books and why not others? What binds together the sixty-six books that together make up the book is that they are the complete and authoritative collection of inspired writings—writings that came to humanity from the mind of God.
This being the case, we would expect there to be a kind of unity even amid all the diversity of authors, settings, contexts, and cultures. And sure enough, this is exactly what we find and exactly what Alistair Begg wants us to understand when he says, “We find Christ in all the scriptures. In the Old Testament he is predicted, in the Gospels he is revealed, in Acts he is preached, in the Epistles he is explained, and in Revelation he is expected.”
The unifying theme of the Bible is Jesus Christ (Luke 24:27). In the Old Testament writings he is predicted and longed for. In the Gospels he is revealed and described. In the book of Acts he is preached, in the epistles (letters) he is explained, and in the final book, the book of Revelation, he is expected to make his grand return. In this way, Jesus is the theme of the Bible and is present on every page.
