Thirty-One Thousand Pieces: How to “Piece-Together” Your Bible

Imagine you and I are sitting side by side, on the side of an enormous table. And I mean enormous — a hundred feet by a hundred feet. It’s the biggest table you’ve ever laid eyes on, and it is holding thirty-one thousand pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle. We are there for one reason: to put that puzzle together.

We start the way everybody starts. We hunt down the edge pieces. We sort them out, cluster them by color, and we put together the easiest part of the whole project — the border. And there it is. The frame is finished. It’s clean, it’s square, it’s beautiful. And we have still got thirty thousand pieces to go. This is where the real work begins.

Once again, we cluster the pieces by color and by pattern. Little islands of maybe-this-goes-here start forming all over the table. And one at a time, patiently, we find a way to begin building this enormous puzzle. Every single one of these pieces belongs somewhere. Not just anywhere — one specific place, doing it’s one specific job, holding up its little corner of the one great image the finished puzzle is going to show us.

And thankfully, most puzzles come in a box, and the box has the picture on the cover. That picture is a tremendous aid. It tells you where you’re going before you get there.

Now here’s what I want you to picture. You and I are supposed to find pieces and put them together. But suppose that every single time you picked up a piece, instead of asking, “Where does this fit?” you held it up to the light and just… stared at it. Turned it over. Analyzed the little swirl of color on it, the way the edges curve. And suppose you spent a whole afternoon studying that one solitary piece out of thirty-one thousand.

And then suppose you kept stopping to lean over and tell me what you thought that one piece meant. And then you wanted to argue with me about it — about what that single piece was or wasn’t saying about the nature of the entire puzzle. About the whole picture. From one piece.

The physicist in me feels compelled to weigh in and add something to this metaphor that takes place in science, specifically, quantum mechanics. There’s a phrase that gets bantered around in physics a lot, and it’s the right thing to say in a moment like that, a moment where your fellow scientist or puzzle-builder wants to spend all this precious time on one piece. The phrase is: shut up and calculate. One scientist says it to another when the other one starts trying to explain the deep philosophy of quantum mechanics — which, by the way, nobody has ever actually managed to do. Nobody understands what it means. But if you stop philosophizing and just use the equations and run the numbers, you can solve all kinds of real problems in the real world. Hence the phrase. Shut up and calculate.

When it comes to our puzzle, the phrase would be something like: Stop holding up individual pieces. Find out where they fit. And then — only then — step back and look at the whole image. Especially since, remember, we’ve got the picture right there on the front of the box the entire time. That’s the analogy. Now let me tell you what I’m really talking about.

The Bible has right around thirty-one thousand verses. Every one of them is a piece of the puzzle. The edge pieces — the easy ones, the ones we build first — those are the canon of Scripture. What belongs in the Bible and what doesn’t. And here’s the good news: that border has already been built for us. The saints who came before us framed it out many centuries ago. We inherit a finished edge. That was the easy part. But what about the picture on the front of the box? What is the image we are actually trying to assemble?

The Bible tells us. Explicitly, and over and over again. The image on the box is Jesus. Every last piece — Genesis to Revelation — is a picture of Christ, and specifically of the crucified Christ, the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. Moses wrote about Jesus. Isaiah wrote about Jesus. The Psalms as well. Jesus himself said so. He stood in front of the religious experts of his day and told them, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.” And then, a few breaths later: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.”

The interpretive key to understanding everything in the Bible is the Man who is every word in the book, the face on its cover.

Think about the road to Emmaus. Two heartbroken disciples are trudging home, and a stranger falls in beside them, and it’s the risen Christ. And Luke tells us that “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning himself.” Can you imagine? That was the greatest sermon ever preached. Too bad we don’t have a transcript. Jesus walked the whole Old Testament and showed them: this is about me, and this is about me, and this one right here — this is about me too. No wonder their hearts were burning within them. He was grabbing every single piece and putting it right where it went, first time with no trial and error.

So here is the discipline I want to hand you tonight. Instead of grabbing a single verse and squeezing it in isolation, trying to wring meaning out of it all by itself, we ask a different question. We ask, “Where does this piece fit in the one great overarching story — the story of the crucified God, planned before the foundation of the world?” And we set the piece down in its right spot. That’s the work.

Now, somebody will push back on me here, and it’s a fair question. They’ll say, “But Frank, Jesus quotes individual verses all the time. And so do the apostles. They pull single lines out of the Hebrew Bible constantly.” Yes. They absolutely do. And here is the crucial difference.

When Jesus quotes a single verse, he already holds the entire picture in his mind, because he is the picture. He is the image on the box. And when the apostles quote a single verse, they are being carried along by the Holy Spirit — Peter tells us that’s exactly how it works: “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” So, whether it’s the Lord himself or a man under that inspiration, that person is looking at the one verse while the whole finished image is already glowing in their mind. They’ve got the box lid memorized. They have, as Paul dares to put it, “the mind of Christ.”

We do not have that. Not the way they had it. And I say that not to discourage you but to make you humble and careful. We are always, always in the middle of the process — grabbing a piece off the table, holding up a verse, and working out, prayerfully, where it fits into the story of Christ crucified. That is a very different posture than announcing, from one piece, what the whole puzzle must mean.

There are hundreds of places in the New Testament where the Greek Scriptures reach back and quote the Hebrew Scriptures and say, in effect, this has always been about the Man Jesus. Those cross-references are the closest thing we have to peeking at the picture on the box. They tell us ahead of time what we’re building. Treasure them.

Don’t study the Bible by hoisting up one verse, hunting for a proof text that props up an agenda of your own, and then swinging it around like a weapon. Every single text is quietly proving the same thing: that God has been crucified from before the foundation of the world, that in Christ all things hold together, that we preach Christ, and him crucified.

And here’s the pastoral part: When you meet someone who does study that way — someone who wants to isolate one piece and argue the whole cosmos from it — don’t take the bait. Don’t just lob your own interpretation of that puzzle piece back across the table so the two of you can duel it out. That’s not building anything. That’s just two people flinging pieces. As a scientist I just quietly say “Shut up and calculate.”

Find a way to gently, lovingly, and with real patience, show them the box. Rightly handle the word of truth. Restore in a spirit of gentleness. Give an answer with all the authority you’ve been given and all the empathy you can muster, and with all the love and wisdom of Christ that you, by the grace of God, possess in that moment. Handle it that way. Handle them that way. Because the goal was never to win the argument. The goal was always to see the picture — and to help somebody else see it too.

Here endeth today’s lesson.

God bless, and good night.