Scripture teaches with words, and those words carry a world behind them. A shepherd, a covenant, a mercy seat, a wilderness: each one meant something particular to the people who first heard it, and each one leads somewhere in the story that ends in Christ. Every concept here is explained from the text itself and then joined to the studies that go furthest with it.
The trades, tools, customs and objects a first reader already knew, taught as Israel knew them and followed through to Christ.
Professions and trades
What Israel asked for, what it cost them, and the King God promised.
The man who stood between a holy God and a guilty people.
The work David knew, and the picture God chose for Himself.
Objects and materials
Years of patient work, and God's picture of the people He planted.
Customs and daily life
Ordinary olive oil, and the act that set people apart for God.
What Israel brought to God, when they brought it, and what each offering was saying.
Sacrifices and offerings
What it actually cost to approach God, and why blood was required.
The land itself: the wilderness, the mountains, the cities and the roads Scripture keeps returning to.
Places and geography
The high places where God meets people, and where the story turns.
The house where God's presence dwelt, and what replaced it
The empty country where God repeatedly does His deepest work.
The Hebrew and Greek behind the words that carry the most weight, and the phrases built from them.
Words
Trust in God's character and word, shown by resting on it
God's undeserved favour, given freely in Christ
A change of mind and direction, turning from sin to God
Being right with God, and living rightly before him
Phrases
The unending life of the age to come, known now through Christ
The titles Scripture gives to the Son, and what each one claims about Him.
Titles of Christ
The sacrifice God provides, who takes away sin
The Anointed One, promised through the prophets
The unique Son who shares the Father's nature
Daniel's heavenly figure, the name Jesus used most for himself
The shepherd who knows his sheep and dies for them
God's self-expression, present before creation and personal
The great truths the Bible teaches, traced through the whole of Scripture rather than one verse.
Doctrines
A birth from above, worked by the Spirit, not by effort
A binding relationship God establishes and keeps
God declaring the guilty righteous through Christ
God's reign, announced by Christ and entered by new birth
Matthew's way of naming the same reign of God
Being bought out of slavery at a price
Bodily rising from the dead, first Christ and then his people
Being rescued by God from sin, judgement and death
Being set apart for God, and made holy over a lifetime
God himself present with and in his people
God the Son taking on real human flesh in Jesus Christ
God took a real human body and lived among us
Themes
Being led to believe what is not true about God or about oneself
Wanting, which Scripture treats as neither automatically sinful nor automatically safe
God making all things new, beginning inside his people
Each person answering for what they did, even when tempted or deceived
Being drawn toward evil, which Scripture never traces back to God
Bread, water, light, vine and rock: the images Scripture uses on purpose, read the way Scripture reads them.
Symbols
Daily sustenance, and the one who feeds the soul
Light that exposes, guides, and drives out darkness
Water that runs and never fails, given by Christ through the Spirit
The instrument of Christ's execution, and the centre of the gospel
Israel as God's planting, and Christ as the true vine
What God did at particular moments, and what He said before He did it.
Events
The night blood shielded Israel, kept every year afterwards
Prophecy and fulfilment
The appointed day when God acts openly in judgement and salvation
The Sunday Study
Verse-by-verse teaching with historical context, and a prayer to close. Nothing else in the email.