[Time: 7 minutes. Read below or listen here.]
The Bible is not a random collection of moral and ethical statements, of theological propositions, of personal promises. All these are to be found within the Bible by means of its overall Story, a story told through history. If you wonder why you must sift through all the events, the commands, the songs, the oracles, and the imagery just to find the occasional bit of blessing, you are missing the point of the Bible. You are missing what the Bible really is.
God desires to enter into life with us, to shape us, to fundamentally change us and to change the world in the end. It is a stepwise process, creating change through a series of events, each event related by cause and effect to what went before and what is to follow, both for individuals and for the human family.
Story is God’s most useful tool in working within us because stories create chains of events bound by cause and effect along a timeline within history. It is, of course, the Holy Spirit who effectively applies to our lives the changes necessary within us. But it is the Story that is the means for the changes.
We are story-oriented as human beings. Every human society lives out some story it regards as explaining its place in history. Our society’s story gives shape and meaning to our own personal story. We live our lives according to a narrative we believe fits us into the larger narrative of the world.
If we do not get our story from the Bible, we will end up trying to fit in certain bits of the Bible story into the rest of a story we have picked up somewhere else (political views, the civic religion, consumerism, nationalism, exceptionalism, or the merest superficialities of our chosen faith). If we do not allow the Bible’s Story to shape our lives and to provide the necessary links between our experiences, beliefs, and goals, then one of the other narratives surrounding us will take its place.
We are created in God’s image. In Jesus Christ we are re-created into agents of God’s new creation. We start living lives that are different from the narrative we had taken on from the world before we met Christ. Our new story is starkly better than the old one. It imposes meaning and purpose on every aspect of our life. It is the saving narrative of the Bible, its Story, that subverts every opposing narrative of the world around us, both today and in the distant past.
It is time that we love the Bible. The two most basic characteristics of loving are an active self-sacrifice of our time and being to the beloved and a radical acceptance of who the beloved truly is (not what we want to make of the beloved or what we hope the beloved may become). If we have been born anew in Jesus Christ, instead of regarding the Bible as a sourcebook for personal blessing, let’s love it for what it really is: God’s Story, a developing inspired narrative that chips away at all that is wrong in us and brings in the new, not all at once but gradually as we humbly submit to it, read it, and imbibe it. What we are asked to do is to sit still and pay attention, to behold the beloved. When we do this we begin to see the Story.
The development of the Bible’s Story proceeds by each step growing out of the previous step, each a richer and fuller disclosure of the knowledge of God, having been prepared by what preceded it and preparatory for what follows. As you read the individual books of the Bible, pay careful attention to how each expands your understanding of what God is doing in the world and where it all is headed. Watch for references in the current book you are reading to what you read in earlier books. The books of the Bible are like scenes in a developing drama, some rushing the story onward while other scenes slow things down for a contemplative moment.
The Bible’s Story starts with a couple, Adam and Eve, and soon develops to a crisis in the days of Noah. Then the Story focuses in on a single person, Abraham, and especially the descendants of his grandson, Israel. In large part, God’s story is the story of Israel. Anyone who tries to relate what God has been doing in the world without including Israel is just not telling God’s Story. The Story reveals the importance of this group of people and points to the surprising truth that the restoration of the world will come through a single member of that human tribe.
The Story moves through a series of promises or covenants that God uses to bind Himself to the human family. The covenants begin as quite general but become increasingly centered on the kingdom of Israel and start to point to a specific coming King. The Story, at every step, shows God’s intention for the world and includes echoes of events from much earlier in the Story, but the culmination is solely focused on that coming King, Jesus Christ.
If you still have not read or listened to Genesis (without chapter and verse divisions), make that your next step now. You have one more Step (8) before we will examine Genesis. Please do not cheat yourself by going on to Step 9 without reading Genesis.