The task of reducing the Bible’s message to a neat, three-hour presentation may seem daunting, if not impossible. But one minister in Sydney has taken on that task in the hope of helping others to understand how the message of the entire Bible fits together.

Ben Shaw, lay assistant minister at St Andrew’s, Roseville, is the author of The Bible in Three Hours, a multimedia course which, as the name suggests, seeks to take its audience from Genesis to Revelation and everything in between in the space of a few short hours.

The course also covers the history of the Bible itself, including how it was put together, its original languages, and key discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ben says the ‘embryo of the idea’ came several years ago when he was leading a Bible study and mentioned the Old Testament tabernacle. One of the group members, despite being a committed Christian, had never heard of the tabernacle. “It suddenly dawned on me that there’s a lot of things in the Old Testament that many Christians just don’t know,” he says.

The next week he took that group through a one-hour overview of the Old Testament, and began to think about how to flesh out the concept. When he started at Roseville in 1999, he began writing the course – mostly in his spare time – and 18 months later had the finished product.

Since then he has run the course at several churches around Sydney, as well as at schools, churches in Melbourne, Brisbane and Wollongong, and church house parties. He is also in the process of co-authoring a book based around the material he has developed for the course.

Ben says that while many ‘Bible overview’ books and courses already existed, he saw a gap for one that would combine historical and thematic elements. The length and format of this course, which is generally run on a single Saturday morning, makes it accessible to most people.

“A lot of the courses are either a whole day or ten weeks. There are a lot of people out there who don’t have that kind of time,” he says. “Those courses are great for the people that can set aside ten nights over ten weeks, but what about a mum who can only spare three hours on a Saturday morning, or three Wednesday nights in a row? It’s found a niche in that it’s short and just an overview of the Bible.”

Ben says Christians are often surprised by how much they don’t know. Many participants have renewed their commitment to read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. “That delights my heart – when people say they are going to sit down and read all of God’s word,” he says.

With the well-documented rise in biblical illiteracy, Ben believes it is vital for all Christians to understand how the Bible holds together. “You can get by on a diet of the New Testament, but you will never fully appreciate the significance of who Jesus is, what he has done, and what he says, without understanding the Old Testament context.”

The course has also been written with an ‘apologetic edge’, making it suitable for believers or non-believers. “My father, who is not a Christian, came along. I was really aware that he was there as a non-Christian and someone very close to me, and that he was finally seeing the Bible as a credible document,” Ben says.

“One of the things I try to hammer home is that there are 66 books written by about 40 different authors, yet they are all on about the same thing and it all links together. You see that once you do the whole course – the whole Bible fits together so amazingly. There’s something more to this than a few guys getting together to write something about the supernatural.”

For more information on running the course contact Ben Shaw on (02) 9880 8527.