The Story
This
summer at Risen Life Church
we are doing a special sermon series entitled “The
Story.” If you have been involved
in recent evangelical conversations on theology then you have probably heard
about “The Story” or maybe you have heard it called something like the metanarrative of the Bible,
or a narrative approach to Scripture.
The goal of this recent interest in the big picture story of the Bible
has come from a resurgence in biblical theology which seeks to let the Bible
speak for itself, using its own language and terms to define and interpret
itself. Biblical theology takes
the Bible at its word and reads the narrative of scripture through the faithful
eye that the Bible demands, exploring its metaphors, themes, and illusions
throughout the entire narrative of scripture. Biblical theology is concerned with putting the Bible
together into a cohesive unit. For
so long liberal scholarship has sought to deconstruct and pick apart every
aspect of the biblical text until the unified whole was obscured by its parts. While I do not agree with many of
the conclusions of liberal scholarship, its work on the Bible at a microscopic level
has laid the foundation for biblical theology to reconstruct the continuity of
the Bible piece by piece. The
result has been an amazing picture of God’s voice speaking throughout roughly
forty different human authors over two thousand years. This summer in our church we will tell
the story through four different preachers over ten weeks.
So
what is the Story? The basic story
of the Bible is God’s redemption of humanity through the person and work of
Christ, but there is no better way to understand the story than to have it told
to you. Below I have included a
video that we are using to introduce the story to our church. I want to thank Trevin Wax of Lifeway
for putting together this fantastic video and allowing us to use a version of
it in our church. Trevin has also
been the editor of a great Sunday school series called the Gospel Project that explores the story of scripture week by week.
The Story of the Bible can be told in many different ways depending on the time one has to tell the story. For our sermon series this summer we are using the following outline that I have put together as a by-product of the influence of many of my professors at SBTS (Including Drs Jim Hamilton, Jonathan Pennington, & Charles Halton) as well as lots of reading. I believe this outline gives us a framework to talk about what God is doing in humanity and how he has revealed his plan to us in His word the Bible. Think of this outline as a closet with dividers for different color shirts, pants, dress clothes, etc. Whenever you open your Bible you should be able to place the selection of scripture you are reading somewhere in this framework. This framework helps us to understand the context of what we are reading within the overall story of the Bible and more aptly apply God’s word to our heart.
I.
Creation
II.
Fall
III.
Redemption
A.
A People
B.
A Nation
C.
A Kingdom and Divided Kingdom
D.
Exile and Expectant Waiting
E.
Christ and the Gospel
F.
The Church
IV.
Restoration and New Creation
The
four major movements of scripture are Creation, Fall, Redemption,
Restoration. While these are the
major movements they actually take up far less scripture than all the
subdivisions of redemption. This
is because God wants to communicate to us a worldview to live in, yet wants us
to focus on the most important part of his epic which is the redemption of
humanity in Christ.
Creation
lays the foundation of our story with the major point that God speaks. In fact it is this reason alone that
anything we know exists. In
addition it is this reason alone that we live life, do church, and strive to
follow Jesus. The Fall gives an answer
to the problem we all see and feel everyday. There is something wrong in this world and the Bible
recounts the problem as our sin.
It is the rebellion of each and every human heart, just like our father
Adam, against the rule of God. In
an attempt to write our own story instead of taking on God’s story as our own
we have alienated ourselves from God and placeed ourselves in subjection to the
very creation we were meant to rule.
But God does not leave us there.
He begins his plan of redemption.
This is prefigured in the flood as a story of salvation that will come
through judgment. The next major
piece is God’s choice of a people.
This comes through the choice of Abram as the seed of a new people that
will have God as their king and no one else. God makes good on his promise and multiplies this people
into a great nation that is led out of Egyptian captivity and takes on the
promises and covenants of God in the Exodus. They are to be God’s holy people living under His divine
theocracy. But this nation rejects
God as their king and wants a human king like all the other nations. God relents and gives them their
desires. Yet even in this judgment
God will use the picture of human kings, particularly David and Solomon, to
prefigure His coming perfect king Christ.
The people and the kings rebel against God and the kingdom is
divided. More than half the
kingdom and people are lost forever, but God preserves a remnant that is sent
into exile. There they realize
their sin and return to their God.
God brings his people back into their land, yet everything is not as
good as it once was. They are
awaiting this new king, this perfect and just king to come and rule His
people. Then God is silent. He stops speaking through his
prophets. His word still speaks
but the people are left waiting until the coming of Christ. But God is not idle, He is preparing a
world to receive redemption.
Christ is an unlikely hero, but to those with the eye of faith He is God
incarnate. He will live the
perfect life and die on behalf of His people. Everyone who believes in Him will become His and will be
saved through God’s judgment upon Christ.
Christ births the church through the twelve and they begin to tell
everyone in the world about God’s plan of redemption. Those that believe are also included in Christ as God’s
people in the church. And all of
God’s people wait, some alive, some in tombs and graves, for the glorious
restoration of all things, the new heavens and new earth, God remaking the
world, dealing out justice, and ultimately dwelling with his people.
Knowing
the story is so important because it gives us the only true view of the world
and all things. While it does not
answer all of our questions about the world it gives us the most important
details about our world; God is God, we have rebelled against God, and there is forgiveness
in Christ. Knowing the story also
helps us to identify those things and beliefs that don’t fit in. It is easy to be a Christian apologist
if you know your story well. Cults,
evangelical fads, and heretical theology, can all easily be identified if you
know the story God has revealed.
I
encourage you to join us as we walk through the story. You can listen to the sermon series
here or you can go to the resources page on my blog to hear the sermons as
well. Bryan Catherman of
SaltyBeliever.com and I also did a podcasts series on the story that can also
be accessed on my resources page.
Here
is also a list of books that helped me understand the story:
Popular Level:
The Explicit Gospel, Matt Chandler with Jared
Wilson, Crossway, 2012.
Biblical Theology in the
Life of the Church, Michael Lawrence, Crossway, 2010.
According to Plan, Graeme Goldsworthy,
Intervarsity, 1991.
Creation Regained, Albert M. Wolters, Eerdmans, 1985, 2005.
Biblical
Theologies:
God’s Glory in Salvation
through Judgment, James M. Hamilton Jr., Crossway, 2010.
Kingdom through Covenant, Peter J. Gentry and
Stephen J. Wellum, Crossway, 2012.
More
Themematic Explorations in Biblical Theology:
From Eden to the New
Jerusalem,
T. Desmond Alexander, Kregel 2009.
New Studies in Biblical
Theology,
D. A. Carson, Intervarsity - Series
– This is a whole series that is very good,
particularly:
-The Temple and the Church’s Mission, G.
K. Beale.
-Sheperds After My Own Heart, Timothy S.
Laniak.
Leave a Comment