People are curious. We have been created with an insatiable desire to know, to understand. From childhood we ask “What?” “Why?” and “How?” The answers come from our parents, our teachers, and our own investigation and experience. You could say that humanity is on a collective quest to know, to understand the world around us, and to find meaning in it. The results of this effort have been recorded in various ways, and have accumulated over the ages.
In addition to the physical world of God’s creation, we have another dimension to explore: the Bible, the inspired Word of God, that tells the ancient and eternal story of His love for us, and culminates in the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Just as we have searched out meaning in the physical world, so too have we sought to find the true meaning of the Bible, to understand its message, and thereby draw closer to Jesus.
In the past few hundred years there has been a flowering of fresh inquiry into the meaning of the Bible. It started with new discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology that questioned the traditional understanding of an earth created and populated in six 24-hour days, under a dome-shaped heaven from which God looks down upon us through the pinprick peepholes of stars. The inquiry continued with findings of anthropologists and archeologists who have been able to reconstruct towns and houses, and help us envision life in Bible times. These findings include the discovery of ancient manuscripts that in many ways confirm our understanding of the Scriptures, and in some ways challenge it.
We are living in a time like no other. Never before has the Bible been so available to humanity—spread across the globe in print and digital formats, translated into hundreds of languages, broadcast by radio and television, and carried wirelessly to tablet computers and cell phones. And never before has there been such a wide range of Biblical scholarship, where students, lay people, clergy, and theologians pore over the life-giving words of the Bible to find meaning for their lives, and for the future of mankind.