It’s amazing to consider that the entire plan of God for mankind can fit in the palm of your hand. We’re not talking about the Bible in a cellphone app. The Bible itself, printed on paper and bound in a book, can be held in one hand.

In contrast, the Cambridge World History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, is a seven-part work in nine volumes. Other sets take eight, nine, or 10 volumes to tell the world’s story.

Let’s take a minuscule slice of a smaller segment of world history: Philip Schaff’s The Creeds of Christendom  — three volumes. You can’t hold those in one hand. (Yet another mark against creeds.)

The Bible contains nothing superfluous and lacks nothing. It is complete, sufficient, and compact. All the works mentioned above are now incomplete. History has moved on, events have overtaken the perspectives, years have accumulated. But the Bible still stands unmoved, unaffected by social or political events, scientific knowledge, philosophical speculation, or technological advances.

The Bible covers the work of God from creation. We even get a glimpse of his mind before he said, “Let there be light.” And the Lord gives us a view of life beyond the grave and into eternity. No other book does that, no multi-volume set offers these before and after peeks.

Much is left out, of course. God has all the details in his mind. But we don’t need them all.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those that are revealed belong to us and our descendants forever, so that we might obey all the words of this law. Dt 29.29.

To satisfy curiosity, the Bible is an unhappy volume. It doesn’t answer many of our whys and whens and hows. But it was given us for another reason.

Not everything about Jesus is recorded. Maybe John uses hyperbole in his statement and we’ll excuse him for that, but he admits his record is not exhaustive.

Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. … There are many other things that Jesus did. If every one of them were written down, I suppose the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. Jn 20.30-31.

He wrote enough for us to get the idea and to find faith in Christ. He was selective, as is the entire volume of Holy Scripture.

Someone said that the secret of writing is in knowing what to leave out. That makes God the perfect writer.

If ever we begin to think that the Bible is such a big book and that there are so many details — names, events, places, lists, etc. — we ought to do a bit of comparison with human works. We’ll soon come to see that the Bible’s compactness is yet another sign of its inspiration.

So why is the Bible so compact?

The Bible is compact so that every single person can know the wonderful story of redemption that was traced out before creation, led to fulfillment in Jesus Christ in the days of the Roman Empire, and will be consummated at the second coming of the Lord in glory.

The simplest soul, the most humble person, the little people of this world can read the whole Bible, understand its message, capture the vision of God’s great project to bring every possible individual back to him.

God delights in simplicity, for the sake of the simple person. One marvelous example of his simplicity is making his Word fit in the palm of your hand.

Make sure it is often open in your hand.