For those who are not familiar with the author of this book, Mark Dever is the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and a theological conservative.  He has also written a number of other books in the Nine Marks series.  The book’s subtitle (A Quick Overview of the Whole Bible) is a more accurate assessment of its contents than the title, since it is not so much a list of the important commands of God as a summary of the message of the Bible.  

In addition to preaching chapter-by-chapter to his congregation on Sunday mornings, Dever has presented overview sermons on every book of the Bible and a series of three sermons with an even more lofty aerial view: outlines of the messages of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the whole Bible.  This book is a compilation of the last three.   (They have been published before in two volumes, both from Crossway, under the titles of The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made and The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept).

The first section deals with the central message of the whole Bible. Since the Bible is a collection of books by different writers and spans several thousand years of time, some people have difficulty seeing a dominant theme or even the connection between some of the books.  Dever calls the Bible “one great story of promises made and promises kept (15) .”   The Old Testament contains a history of God’s people, the revelation of His holiness, and His promise of hope.  The New Testament presents the fulfillment of this hope in the person of Christ and a new-covenant people who are made holy in Him.

In the next two sections, Dever enlarges upon the Old and New Testaments.  The Old Testament, he says, is “the basis and foundation” for the New; but he points out that even sincere Christian people tend to ignore it, except as a source of good stories for children, or be embarrassed by it.  Dividing the OT into historical narrative, writings, and prophets, he compares it to a multi-dimensional resume’ of God: it shows us what God is like, how He interacted with His people, and how they responded.   Dever frequently references the Bible’s major themes of sin, atonement, sacrifice, and redemption as seen in both covenants.

The New Testament begins with four books that focus on Jesus’ life, the epicenter of what Dever calls the “concentric circles” of the NT.  The rest of the NT teaches what it means to live as the church, God’s covenant people.  The Pauline and general epistles are categorized as letters showing early Christians what this looked like, whether addressed to churches with many problems (Corinth) or to pastoral apprentices (Timothy).   Dever does a masterful job of summarizing the book of Revelation without getting entangled in eschatological complexities, emphasizing the new creation rejoicing in holiness completed at last.          

Dever is accustomed to addressing people who are Biblically literate as well as the nearly or completely ignorant. Since the book is a compilation of sermons, its writing style is conversational and easily accessible; as Dever himself points out, there will be some overlap and repetition of themes and details. Questions for discussion conclude each section, making it useful for personal or group study, and resources for further research are suggested.

In the introduction, Dever proposes that the 1970s photographs of the whole earth taken from space “jelled our understanding of the earth as a whole (11).”  His aim in this small book is to contribute a similar view of the text of Scripture, which is in itself a condensed sequence of pictures of history. For those who converse with the Biblically illiterate, the book offers helpful material for concise answers on the average-person level of understanding.   Even if you have grown up with the Bible, these studies will provide you with a new sense of perspective and connection!