The Unity of Scripture

Most people familiar with the Bible have a favorite passage of Scripture. For me, that passage is Isaiah 40, which begins with the triumphant cry, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” and ends with the assurance that those who wait on the Lord “shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” It's a passage that has been very significant to me throughout my life, and I go back and reread often. 

But is it such a good passage that I could read it exclusively and never worry about reading any other?

The opening two verses of the passage are God telling the Jewish people that they would find forgiveness and redemption for their sins. But if I had never read Genesis and Exodus, how would I know who the Jewish people were or what connection they had to God? And without reading the books of Kings and the minor prophets I couldn't understand the sins that God was preparing to forgive.

Verse 8 says that God's word abides forever, unlike this transitory world. And we understand what that means as we look at the many words of the prophets that found fulfillment hundreds, even thousands of years later. Several verses talk about the wisdom of God—and to find out more about the wisdom by which God rules the world, you can read the books of wisdom. The final verses of the chapter talk of how God will empower and deliver those who wait on Him—and the entire rest of the Bible gives us pictures of how that happens.

Perhaps the most famous part of this chapter is verse 3 which pictures a voice crying in the wilderness announcing the coming of the day of the Lord. And in the New Testament, we see these verses take form in the person of John the Baptist. Verse 11 speaks of God coming and acting the part of a shepherd to his people. And we this expanded up in description of Jesus as the good shepherd.

There are many good passages in scripture, but no one can stand on its own. The Bible as a whole paints a picture of God and His work, and we cannot understand it by looking at individual brush strokes. James Orr wrote about the Bible: “It has one connected story to tell from beginning to end; we see something growing before our eyes; there is plan, purpose, progress; the end folds back on the beginning, and, when the whole is finished, we feel that here again, as in the primal creation, God has finished all His works, and, behold, they are very good.”