The Epic Story of the Bible is meant to help them not only learn what they are missing but also help them to set out and complete that epic, beautiful, and rewarding trek. And I am convinced it will serve well in accomplishing that very purpose. I highly recommend reading it—and highly recommend buying a few extra copies to give away to others so they, too, can embark on a life-changing journey.

The Bible can be an intimidating book. I suppose any book of the Bible’s size can be intimidating merely by virtue of its page count. But then there’s also the claims people make about the Bible—that it’s a book that transforms lives, that it’s a book that reveals the mind of God himself, that it’s a book that is without error. And beyond that, there’s the nature of the Bible as a collection of writings that span centuries, peoples, cultures, and genres, not to mention the outsized importance of the Bible in shaping the Western world as we know it. For these reasons and many others, the Bible can intimidate people to such a degree that they read it without confidence or perhaps fail to read it at all.

It’s little wonder than that Christians have often written books meant to help introduce people to the practice of reading the Bible and to help them read it profitably and in its entirety. New among them is The Epic Story of the Bible: How to Read and Understand God’s Word by Greg Gilbert. Using his own trek to Mount Everest (base camp, not summit) as a backdrop and illustration, Gilbert says his book is meant to “give you a briefing about what you’re going to see, what you’re going to experience, what you should look for and look out for as you set off on the long trek of reading the entire Bible.”

The key to reading the Bible well, he says, “is to understand that all of those authors and books—all 1,189 chapters of them—are actually working together to tell one overarching, mind-blowing story about God’s action to save human beings from their high-handed rebellion against him, and from the effects and consequences of that rebellion.”

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