Bible Summary

I think the best way to review this is actually going to be to simply recount the story, as I currently perceive it:

Accused of a murder he actually did commit, Moses goes on the run, exchanging his royal upbringing for a life of tending sheep.

40 years later, mild-mannered Moses is visited by a being of light who claims to be God. The duo form an unlikely partnership, dedicated to freeing Moses' people from the harsh regime of the tyrannical King of Egypt. With the being of light performing miracles and Moses humbly asking people to stop being so horrid, they break-out over a million people and lead them through the desert towards a new home.

Along the way, the being of light recounts the history of the world so far to Moses, who writes it down.

The being of light claims to have created the universe and everything in it, including humans.

The first man and woman were made perfect, but used their free will to choose to stop obeying God. Without their maker's instructions, they gradually corrupted and died. The first human died at the age of 930. Since then the human race has consistently counter-claimed everything God has said and done, even to the point of insisting that he doesn't exist, and making-up imaginary beings in his place. (and following their imagined instructions)

As life-spans have plummeted, God has been using the reward/punishment teaching system on humanity for centuries to prompt people to start following his instructions again, and reverse their corruption.

At one stage, he wiped-out the entire human race, preserving only the least-corrupted family. Later, to one good man, he promised countless descendants.

Ultimately an entire nation of good people – the good man's descendants – became enslaved in Egypt, from where God has just used Moses to save them, and prove God's existence and power in the process.

Hopefully, the miracles he's performed and the suffering he has saved them from will evoke a lasting choice to put God and his instructions ahead of everything else that might be more important to them, and keep them on the path to becoming fully restored again.

Sadly, this nation of good people also choose to reject God. Over the next forty years, God lets them slowly die in the desert, planning to ultimately bring their children into the new land instead. This he does, but without Moses. Moses, too, has rejected aspects of God, and dies quite old at 120, literally within sight of their long-awaited destination.

Through the subsequent generations, people turn towards and away from God, each according to their own will. Everyone dies though, some, apparently, terminated by God as a means of protecting those still living from their corrupting influence.

As humanity's original perfect spirit becomes progressively more corrupted down the generations, God has entire families taken out of the world. But it's not that simple. Every so often people repent, and turn back towards God, who with ever greater caution then attempts to teach them in order to restore them.

God's reward/punishment incentives work to a point, but real commitment to the healing instructions he offers becomes something of a rarity.

Finally, God creates a new human being from scratch. This one bears none of the corruption of the original human race – he's as good as new, and therefore perfect, like the original first human was.

However unlike the original first human, he uses his free will to choose to remain faithful to God, and never turns from any aspect of him, despite the tremendous pressure of everyone around him. He never starts to corrupt.

Bearing the perfection of God, and teaching everyone to do the exact same things that God has been teaching, he's rejected by them, just as they have been rejecting God.

But with one difference – unlike God, he is a human being, and can be bodily hurt.

As a result, the corrupted humans vent their rejection of God upon him physically. He quite literally bears it all in God's place, being punched, slashed, and having nails hammered into his skin to pin-up his body in public while he hangs there and slowly dies in agony.

And so he dies, too.

God's reward/punishment plan has well and truly failed. To continue with it now would require God to inflict at least an equal punishment upon the perfect human's murderers. Anything less couldn't be a strong enough deterrent.

Of course, the perfect human recovers from death, as he neither deserves it, nor is a bad influence on anyone. Humans only die because they choose to stop following the instructions of the being who made them. The perfect human continues to do this, and continues to live.

Some of the corrupted humans see this, and decide to follow his lifelong example. God places his instructions in their minds, and most of them choose to follow them. A ripple effect begins to take place, as some others follow their example, while some others follow their example, and so on.

People start to get better.

One man tries to stop all this – Paul.

A being of light visits him, and claims to be Jesus - the perfect human. Paul turns back towards God, believing Jesus to be God, and spends the rest of his life inciting others to follow God's instructions too.

Slowly, gradually, through the generations, the corrupted humans turn back towards following more and more of the being of light's instructions, many without even being aware of it.

In an epilogue, the end of the world is predicted, in which the being of light will restore all the dead humans to life. Finally, those who choose to follow God's restorative instructions will therefore become healed and live forever, just as they were originally made to. Those who refuse will deteriorate again, until they die a second, final, death.

God will place those who have chosen to be restored by his instructions on a new Earth, to live forever, just as planned.