This is an excerpt from the introduction of Hitchhiking with Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament written by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2024). Now available for preorder.
Getting back home is what this book is all about. By “home,” I don’t mean your street address, your mom and dad’s house, or whatever place you think of as safe. Home is where our Father created us to dwell. And where our Father created us to dwell is in his Son, Jesus. He is our home, where we abide, where we are at peace, where we can finally look around and say, “Ah, now this is where God wants me to be.”
To get back home, to get to Jesus, is both a long way and a short way. It’s a short way because Jesus is not kicking it back in some faraway celestial resort, light years from Earth, staring at stars while serenaded by seraphim. He’s as near as your skin, as near as red is to the blood in your veins. As his apostle wrote, “He is actually not far from each of us, for ‘in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:28). He’s that close.
But, at the same time, to get to Jesus is a long way. By “a long way,” I mean that Christmas didn’t happen on the heels of creation. Noah didn’t log onto Amazon to purchase Christmas gifts for his three sons, nor did Abraham, David, Nehemiah, or any of the other folks we will talk about in this book. First there was creation, then the cosmos got jacked up by our first I-know-better-than-God parents. Then came a whole long and tattered line of murders, plagues, exiles, kings, and prostitutes, along with lots and lots of thumb-twiddling. We’re not talking years or centuries but millennia—thousands of years crawled by while the Lord’s people were waiting for that “long way” to come to its divinely ordained finale.
That “long way” is what this book will document, in as vivacious and colorful a way as possible. For the Bible is not some dusty and boring textbook. It’s a veritable circus of humanity, with clownish buffoons, high-soaring saints, back-talking donkeys, left-handed kingslayers, bewitching maidens, child-killing kings, naked preachers, and all the glory and gore you can fit inside the big top of this biblical tent. And everywhere in this story is God who, in his wild and passionate love for humanity, is shepherding history toward the birth and ministry of Jesus the Messiah.
The Bible is not some dusty and boring textbook. It’s a veritable circus of humanity.
Do you already have a good grasp of the Old Testament? Wonderful. This book will be an enjoyable review. Do you not know the difference between the Bible and The Hobbit? Also fine. This book will be a helpful map into unknown territory. By the time we’re done, you won’t know all the ins and outs of the story, but you will have a strong grasp of the major movers and shakers.
Our goal? To get home to Jesus. And to get there, we’re going to hitch rides with some gray-haired storytellers. Abraham will drive us from Haran to the promised land, down into Egypt and back again, and all the way onto a lonely mountaintop where God had told him to do the unthinkable. We’ll stick out our thumbs to the octogenarian Moses, who will pick us up near a fiery bush, steer us between ten plagues, race on dry soil between two walls of water, and finally drop us off in the Judean wilderness. With David, we’ll drive through the pentapolis of the Philistines and take on monstrous Goliath. With Isaiah, we’ll make some pit stops at prophetic oases. And with many other sages and preachers, we will sit shotgun and listen to them drop pearls of Hebrew wisdom into our open ears.
Each storyteller will take us a little farther down the Old Testament road. Each one will build on the stories of his predecessors. And each one, with a twinkle in his eye, will tell us to be on the lookout for the promised Seed. For at the end of the road, he is the one they—and we—have all been waiting on.
So, get in and buckle up. Let’s ride.
