Where Is Your Story Written?

Everyone Loves a Story (Part 1)

Everyone loves a story. Whether our taste runs to Michener or Grisham, Shakespeare or Tolkien, fiction or non-fiction, there’s something about a story well-told that draws us in.

But it’s not just the pull of narrative. A good story is peopled with characters whose lives become windows—windows into another world, and windows into our own interior world.

OUR OWN STORIES
I think that’s why we all love stories. Stories help us make sense of our world and ourselves. In fact, when I wanted my young bride to understand what it meant that she had married a Southerner who had left the South, but had not stopped being southern, I read her stories from William Faulkner, Ferrol Sams, and Joel Chandler Harris.

In our post-modern world, we’ve been encouraged to give up the search for a narrative that will make sense of our lives and instead get on with the business of living, however we decide to define it. What’s more, if we find a narrative that works, we’re told to keep it to ourselves. We shouldn’t oppress others with our vision of life, our sense of meaning, our meta-narrative.

Of course, the problem with this view of things is that it doesn’t work, nor does it square with our experience. Whether we’re from the East or the West, religious or non-religious, we all make sense of our lives not just by reading stories, but by telling them—stories about where we’re from, who we’re related to, and what we do. And our particular stories take on added significance as they are connected with the stories of others.

"I’m a white American who grew up in the post-civil rights South."
"I’m a Kenyan who grew up in post-colonial East Africa."
"I’m a former Muslim who has converted to Christianity."
"I’m a 3rd generation American-born Chinese."

Each of those summaries connect an individual’s story to an even bigger story—stories that define us, that shape us, that provide meaning and purpose and order to our lives.

GOD’S STORY
The biggest stories that any of us tell are the stories that connect us, not just with a family, a nation, or an ethnic group, but with God and the cosmos. After all, we’re not the only ones who tell a story that gives meaning to life. In the Bible, God tells a story.

Now when I refer to the story in the Bible, I don’t mean that it’s fictional, any more than the story of your life is fictional. What I mean is that the Bible provides us with a narrative that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s the narrative of God’s words and actions in history. And it’s not just one narrative among many. It’s the narrative of everything, because it begins in the "moments" before time itself begins, and it ends at the "moment" just after history draws to a conclusion. And though the narrative sometimes focuses in on a single family, or even an individual, along the way it sweeps into its story the totality of the human race. That means that my story and yours are caught up inside this narrative.

Far from being an ancient religious text, of interest only to antiquarians and scholars, the Bible is as contemporary as we are. What’s more, we will never make sense of our own stories without understanding how we fit into God’s.

THE TASK OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY
To understand the Bible as a single divinely-inspired narrative, a revelation of God’s purpose and plan for humanity that unfolds in time and space, is the task of biblical theology. More than just theology that is biblical, biblical theology attempts to understand God’s revelation as it progressively unfolds in history and culminates in the person of Jesus Christ. It tries to understand how the Old Testament points forward to and prepares us for the New, and how the New Testament is contained in the Old.

If I had to point to a single verse to justify these claims, I might point to Luke 24:27: "And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] explained to them what was said in all the ????ures concerning himself."

Or perhaps it would be 1 Corinthians 10:6, where Paul, referring to the events of Israel in the wilderness said, "Now these things occurred as types [examples; typos] to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did."

Or maybe it would be Hebrews 10:1, where the author says that the old covenant was a shadow pointing to a greater reality: "The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves."

You get the idea. Biblical theology is an attempt to understand the whole Bible as Christian ????ure telling the story of Christ.

Over the next few articles, we’re going to embark on an exploration of biblical theology and its application to the life of the church. By looking at five different themes of this narrative, beginning this issue with the theme of creation, my goal is to put the whole story of the Bible together, from Genesis to Revelation. In so doing, I hope we will not only understand the Bible and its message better, but also our place within it, and the future that awaits us—a story already written but not yet completed.