God's Story

God’s story, Understanding the Bible

It’s a common trope in our modern western society to dismiss the Bible as archaic and outdated. This idea is based on a typical western reading of the Bible and it assumes the Bible is primarily a book of rules. The truth is the Bible is a story, and while we have a supporting role, that story is about God.

Before dismissing the Bible outright, then, it behooves one to at least understand what it says. Far from being a book of regulations, most of the Bible is narrative. The non-narrative parts expand and comment on the underlying story. Despite being made up of different books, written by many different people in different eras, there is an underlying theme that all of the individual books amplify.

The Main Character

So let’s walk through this underlying story. Naturally we’ll start in the first and oldest book of the Bible, Genesis. Genesis opens with our main character, God. He creates the universe out of nothing, putting everything in order. Creating the world and populating it with all the plants and animals. Toward the end of creation, he creates us, humans. The Bible says that we are all, male and female, created in his image. This puts us apart from the rest of creation.

The Conflict and Solution

We see God interacting with humans directly, and there was nothing that separated us from relating to God. But God didn’t want automatons, he wanted us to choose to have this connection. He gave mankind a choice, to obey or to go our own way. In Genesis 3 we chose to go our own way. Under the influence of the serpent (the deceiver, Satan) we decided to try to become gods ourselves and thus broke that close connection with God. Sin, falling short of the standard, entered into the world. The whole rest of the Bible describes God’s plan to restore that fellowship. God reveals the first hint of the plan in Genesis 3:15 where he promises a hero, the “seed of the woman” who will be wounded by the serpent, but will ultimately crush the serpent.

The Abraham, Jacob, and Moses in the Solution

As the Bible continues in Genesis we see the result of man trying to be his own god. Finally in Genesis 12 we find a descendant of the woman, named Abraham, who was willing to trust in God. God promises to build a nation of God followers from Abraham, and through the nation he intends to make himself known to all the nations of the earth. The nation from Abraham is supposed to be a blessing to all nations.  

When there was a famine Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, takes his family to Egypt. God had already made that possible because he had made Joseph, Jacob’s son, second in command in Egypt. Jacob’s family ends up staying there for several centuries. Eventually the Egyptians made this family, which has grown into a nation, slaves. When they cry out to God, God gives them a hero, in the mold of the promised hero, but not the promised hero, Moses. Through Moses, with God reigning plagues down on Egypt, he secures the release of the Israelites (the descendants of Jacob).

The Role of the Law

Israel left Egypt and at Mount Sinai, God gave them a law and a covenant (contract). Israel has to fulfill the promise God made with Abraham. The law does a couple of things for Israel. 1) It sets them apart from their neighbors. 2) It showed them what God’s standard was. However, God knew that because of sin introduced in the beginning, it  would be impossible for Israel to obey the law perfectly. To cover over those sins, God instituted a system of animal sacrifice. This gave the principle that sin could only be dealt with by blood as a substitute for our own blood.

With this system God could dwell more closely with his people in the tabernacle. This restored a portion of the connection that was lost in Genesis 3.

Israel is Still Fallen

Israel’s track record in both obeying the law and the covenant was spotty. After they came into the land God promised them, they often ignored the law. God would bring other people against them. Israel would cry out for a savior. God would provide one. The enemy nation would be defeated. Then Israel would go back to “doing what was right in their own eyes”. The book of Joshua ends with a very disturbing story about what this statement really means.

David in the Solution

Finally Israel asks for a king, and God gives them one. The first king, Saul, doesn’t obey God well. But God raised up a new king who trusts and follows him, David. David wasn’t perfect, but he does follow and love God, and is willing to accept correction from God. He becomes another model for the Genesis 3 hero. God promised David that his descendant will always rule. This descendant will be the Genesis 3 hero  and will rule forever.

The Prophets Warn of Disaster and Promise the Solution.

David’s son, Solomon, starts well but starts adding worship of other gods. This led God to split the kingdom with David’s descendants ruling the southern nation, Judah, and a series of dynasties ruling the northern kingdom, Israel.  This pattern of mixing other gods and sometimes completely ignoring God, continued. God sends prophets to warn these kings that they are disobeying the law and heading to destruction. These prophets lay out a set of events , where other nations come and destroy the nations of Israel and Judah. They also promise that God will eventually restore the nation of Israel, as well as a time when God’s anointed will come and rule the entire earth, bringing all nations together. They promise a new earth and a new Jerusalem. This anointed one is our Genesis 3 hero. In the prophets he starts getting other titles: Anointed (in Hebrew: Messiah, in Greek: Christ), Servant (of God), Son of Man, Lamb of God. We find out he is not only a king who will bring order, but also a savior who will ultimately restore our relationship to God by giving himself up as the ultimate blood sacrifice.

The warnings of the prophets go unheeded, and Israel (the Northern Kingdom) is destroyed by Assyria. Judah falls later to Babylon. Judah, however, is restored by the King of Persia who conquered Babylon.  Jerusalem is rebuilt, the temple is restored, and the Jews are free to worship and self rule under the overall rule of Persia.

Jesus is the Solution

This is how the narrative to the Hebrew portion of the Bible ends. However the story continues. The Greek scriptures pick up the story again with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the Genesis 3 hero. The Gospels lay out how Jesus fulfills all the requirements of that Genesis 3 hero, explicitly giving him those titles. It tells how he heals the sick. How he refines the view of the law. It’s not just the actions that are important but the heart. How he taught us what it would be like to be back in a relationship to God. He calls this ‘the Kingdom of God’. He scolds religious leaders who make up tighter rules than what God gave, but ignored the more expansive heart rules. He eventually took on the role of the sacrificial Lamb and died, but then rose from the dead. His death gave the ultimate substitute for our own death. We no longer need to struggle to keep the law, instead we can depend on Jesus’s sacrifice when we fail, and his spirit to help us get closer to the ideal Kingdom of God in our actions to others. His resurrection shows us that he conquered death once and for all, and we can be confident that we, too, will be raised in the end.

The Greek scriptures end with an updated view of the New Earth that we saw in the Prophets. Revelations explain how Jesus will eventually fulfill the role of the eternal King that will put everything back into order.

Conclusion

There are lots of details in the Bible, but once you have the overview, you can see how portions amplify the overall Story of God. When you read the prophets and see weird dreams of Daniel or Ezekiel, you can see how they relate to the overall theme of the Genesis 3 hero who comes to restore the nations. You can read the law code and see how it was intended to be both a stop gap and a pointer to the ultimate restoration with God. You can read Isaiah and see that the early Christians didn’t invent a new gospel, but only refined what God had already revealed. You can now look at the individual themes of the individual books and see how they fit.

Why Do We Care Today?

What does this mean today? We have the beginning, some of the middle, and the end, but we have large chunks of the middle still being written. There was a 400 year period between the end of the historical narrative of the Hebrew scripture and the historical portion of the Greek narrative. God can be seen to work even in that period, even if he didn’t leave his writings. There’s a 2000 year period between the end of the historical narrative of the Greek scripture and today. Through that period, God continues to work his Story. Which brings us to the most important question. Where do you fit in the story? Do you know this Genesis 3 hero? Are you walking with Jesus, becoming a citizen of the Kingdom of God? Are working to be more like the Lord’s Servant, bringing his peace and forgiveness and character to those around you? Are you able to love your enemies? The bar is high, far higher than just following a set of rules. The only way to reach that bar is through the help of the one God promised in the beginning. Through him we can start to reclaim some of the close relationship to God we lost in the early days of creation.