When Americans tell me they are heading to London for a week or ten days, they usually ask the same question: Where should we go? London is far too large a city to take in by wandering. My answer never changes. On your first day, find one of those red double-decker buses advertising a two-hour tour of the city, and get on it. You will not have to look hard. They are everywhere. Two hours sounds like a long time to sit still when you have only just arrived. It is the best two hours you will spend.

You have a local driver, and for two hours he is talking to everyone on board. That is the real gift. He knows things about the city that you could live there for years and never discover, and he keeps pointing out what you would otherwise drive straight past. Do you see that plaque above the shop? That is where such and such happened in 1682. Do you see that marker in the road? That commemorates an incident most Londoners have never heard of. Along the way, you pass Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, the Tower of London, the London Eye, Madame Tussauds, the Natural History Museum, and twenty other places besides. You have not really visited any of them. But you have seen all of them, and someone who knows has explained them to you.

That changes everything about the days that follow, because now you know what is there. You come off that bus with a list of seven or eight places you did not even know existed that morning, and you spend the rest of your trip exploring them properly.

Scripture works much the same way. The Bible is a magnificent book, and it is also a very large one. If we are going to plumb its depths, few things help more than seeing the whole first. We need a view of the whole map, a sense of how the story is shaped, so that we know where things fit. Then, whenever we open our Bibles, whether to Mark or Habakkuk or the Psalms or Exodus or 1 Chronicles or Galatians or Titus, we are not lost. We know where we are standing on the map.

That is precisely what Mitch Maher does in a video called Clarifying the Bible. It runs two hours and ten minutes and gives a general overview of the whole of Scripture. He does for the Bible what that driver does for London. He does not share our confessional position, though I found the overview itself sound and very helpful. His great gift is his grasp of the whole and his ability to communicate it clearly, so that you finish knowing where you are whenever you open the Book. Two hours and ten minutes is a small investment for a view of the whole. I would encourage you to take the ride.

Mitch Maher has made the full video freely available here. If two hours and ten minutes feels like more than you can manage in one sitting, do not let that put you off. Watch it in sections. The London tour buses are hop-on, hop-off for a reason, and you still see the whole city in the end.