In our last episode, we started a series diving into how we can find a deep assurance of our purpose. And just a confidence, not necessarily looking for our passions, but just like this settledness of why we exist and a grid to help us make decisions and so forth.

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We also combine that with the struggle that people feel they want more in their faith, they want more authenticity with God, and yet they feel it lacking. They look around them and it feels monotonous or maybe they’re reading scripture and it’s just like what they see in the world or in the church around them is not lining up. And they want more.

They want to live out their faith more effectively. And so the title of the last episode was Connect With God and Your Purpose through His Story. And so we’re diving into the story of God. I made the statement that part of why we struggle to have this flowing relationship with God, where we just, we know what our purpose is.

Sometimes we have highs and everything is going well, and other times we have lows and we know what our purpose is. Even when we’re struggling through decision making processes, even when there’s trials in life that are difficult and we don’t enjoy going through them, we have a deep settled assuredness of what our purpose is. We struggle to feel that or a connection with God. 

Sometimes we are reading scripture and we feel like we’re not getting anything out of it. Or maybe life is in a busy season and we don’t have time to spend with God, to have a relationship that just flows even through the ups and the downs and the dry and the wet times.

We struggle to have that kind of relationship because we engage the medium, the Bible, in a way that it was never intended to be engaged.

Most of us have grown up with this understanding that the way you engage God is through the Bible, and yet we’re using the Bible in a way it wasn’t intended to be used.

And I told the illustration of the cookbook, trying to go shopping with a cookbook as though the cookbook was the shopping list and how that could be a frustrating experience In a similar way, we tend to engage scripture as though it’s a reference book. And there’s a few ways in which we do that.

We might use it as a theological dictionary where we’re looking for answers about God and about man and about life in this world. And so when we’re going along or as we’re having conversations with people, we’re asked, so how old is the earth? You know? Or maybe what is the purpose of man? 

We have these questions and we go to scripture to find answers for that. That’s like a theological dictionary. 

What is the nature of hell? What is the purpose of the church? What rules should we have in church? Like that approach is using the Bible as a theological dictionary. It’s a sort of reference book. 

Another approach might be a moral handbook. So should Christians vote? Should a Christian drink alcohol? Should a Christian work at a restaurant that serves alcohol? Should Christians wear certain clothes? What areas of society should Christians serve? You know, all those questions or more specifically maybe what do we do about abortion? Or what do we do about certain bills that are in place that are gonna affect the way we interact with society?

Should Christians use vaccines? Like all of these things are ethical questions that we have, and when we have this ethical question and we engage scripture solely through, I need an answer to this ethical question. That’s like using it as a moral handbook, as a sort of reference book. 

Another way we might use scripture as a reference book is by using it as a devotional grab bag. I gotta teach Sunday school this weekend at church, and so I better study scripture so that I have something to present. Or something I wrestle with a lot is I do a lot of Bible teaching. and is my only engagement with scripture through preparing for teaching lessons?

More specifically, do I think scripture should be this sort of inspirational genie. I wake up and I’ve gotta get something out of scripture so that I feel better in the morning. Is that the primary way in which I’m engaging scripture? 

All three of these, the theological dictionary, the moral handbook and the devotional grab bag are ways that we approach scripture as though it’s a reference book.

But the Bible is a story. 

It’s a story about God. The Bible is the story of God and his creation. It’s the story of man and the reason God put man in his creation. This story reveals what God is doing through man and creation. So if you missed the last episode, I strongly recommend that you go back and listen to that one.

But in this episode we’re gonna dive into reading the Bible as story. This may be a new concept to you. 

What do you mean by reading the Bible as story? 

Are you saying that the Bible doesn’t give us answers to theological questions? Are you saying that it doesn’t help us know what to do in moral situations? Or to deal with ethical struggles? Are you suggesting the Bible doesn’t provide inspiration for us? 

Absolutely not. 

Yes, the Bible does give answers to theological questions. Yes, the Bible does provide guidance for moral issues. Yes, the Bible wants to connect us with God Almighty. 

But the way it does that is not through a reference book mentality. Here’s my question, here’s the issue, or, Ooh, I’m dry and I need inspiration. So I go to the Bible, sort of like a vending machine. It doesn’t do it that way. 

It does it through story. And so what do we mean by that? That’s what we’re gonna get into in this lesson. 

Now, I just wanna. Be clear upfront, I am about to open enrollment for my course, finding my place in God’s story. This is the flagship course for me personally. It’s a passion project. If you’ve read my book, Live Free, it kind of ends in this section of discovering purpose. True freedom, sexual freedom as man or woman, is discovering why you exist and how you fit into what God is doing in the world.

This really is probably everything that I write, everything that I teach, everything that I say, even a few years ago when I dove into issues of race and more recently as I sort through issues of sexuality and gender. Like all of that has to do with fleshing out how we live in God’s story today.

So I’m gonna be opening enrollment for that. In a little bit. Probably within the next week, if you stay tuned, you’ll find out about that. 

But as a part of prepping for that I wanted to just share some teaching with you from the course. And so in this episode specifically, I’m gonna be sharing some blurbs from an interview that I did with one of my professors. Also some blurbs from specific lessons that you will get in the course, Finding my Place in God’s Story. 

So we’re just gonna kinda walk through. It’s gonna be a deep dive. I’m recording this. I’m aiming for a half hour to 40 minutes and I have no clue how long it’s gonna go. I may have to have Jaron edit some things down for me here. 

But this is, I can’t tell you how much sometimes it burdens me, I’m passionate, like this excites me too. The more I see God’s story and the more I discover God’s story, I long for other people to see their place in God’s story. 

I would say the single most significant piece of helping me process times of grief in life. And I specifically point back to the loss of my mom just a few days before our wedding. What has helped me make sense of all of that is seeing God’s story at a whole new level. 

Before that experience, I had very much a reference book mentality of engaging scripture. And it’s been since that experience that I’ve dove into the story of God, but even more specifically, I would say it started by just my comfort came in knowing the gist of the story, like knowing where it’s gonna go.

There are a lot of explanations for life from different religions, different world views, different perspectives, and sure, maybe there’s a bias that I have because I grew up in a Christian home, but literally the most comforting and hopeful and beautiful answer is found in the story of Jesus.

That’s why I’m a Christian. And so I think that’s why this is the single most passionate thing. It’s like there’s a lot of things that don’t necessarily make sense. And I want you to understand, first of all, even today, I still find myself slipping and defaulting into a reference book mentality. So, just because you discover that the Bible is a story, doesn’t mean you’re just gonna automatically just live in this story of God.

But the more we come back to that, when we find ourselves slipping into a reference book mentality, come back to the story of God. What is true? What is God communicating through this story? That gives us the grounded guidance, the confidence to help us course correct, to bring us back through those dark, rough times through the monotonous and just dry blah times.

I’m not even thinking about how I’m going through life or whatever. Also, I still face a lot of situations in life that I don’t have the answers for. I still face decisions that I waffle back and forth because I’m not sure I. Which way is right or wrong. And so there, there are some very practical elements of life that understanding God’s story doesn’t fully answer for us.

And I think that’s intentional. But if you’re here, you’re struggling with something, depression, darkness, you have that low time and you’re just wanting hope and you’re wanting to make sense of things in the sense of oh, I see how this all fits together, even though I’m still dealing with the emotions.

If you’re looking for a rod to guide you through the wilderness, you still gotta go through the wilderness. But at least now you have a rod to lean on. If you’re looking for a raft to cling to in the rapid of life, and you still gotta sail through the rapid. But at least now you have a raft to cling to.

If you’re looking for a soft, gentle place to lay your head at night after long, hard days of work, you still gotta work hard and put in that long effort in the journey of life in your faith. But to have that soft, gentle place to lay your head, that’s what this series, these few episodes, are intended to do.

It’s what it has done for me. It’s why I wanna share it with you.

1. The Bible Is Story 

So what does it look like? 

What do we mean by the Bible is story? It’s not a reference book, it’s story. 

I don’t have a Bible to hold up for you here, but the 66 books that we know of as the Bible. First of all, sometimes I think when we hear God’s word we think, “oh we’re supposed to obey God’s word”. Sometimes we equate that with the Bible, and I think that’s a mistake. 

I’m quite certain that’s a mistake first of all. Very rarely in scripture itself, when it uses the phrase God’s word or Word of God, very rarely is that referring to the written books that we have.

In fact, if you’re reading it in scripture, the written collection of books that we have would not have existed at the time. Maybe the Torah, the Old Testament canon would’ve been as scrolls, but they may have had that all collected together where you could go and read that. 

But the word of God throughout scripture, we see it being used as a verbal. Declares the Lord. This is the word obviously with the prophets. We see that a lot. We see the word of God incarnated in Jesus Christ. 

So when referencing, particularly when you think of in the Book of John and first and second, third John, like the word is very much interconnected with Jesus himself. The word becomes flesh. Well, that kind of gets us to something.

What is the word? And the word is a message. The word is a message. So that message is in the Bible? Yes. But the Bible is not the word of God. The word of God existed before the Bible existed. 

And the reason this is important is because the Bible has incredible intentionality to its structure, to the way the books are organized, even within the books to how they’re written.

There’s a particular thrust, a particular story being communicated through the construct of the Bible. 

The Bible has editors, the Bible has the scribes put, not only did they edit the Bible, and as they’re writing down what Moses is declaring to them, or as they’re copying manuscripts later, throughout life, sometimes they make editorial notes and they help readers understand how to read this because these scrolls, these written pieces are going. Not just years down the road, but they’re being passed on generation to generation. 

And so just if you found a letter from your grandpa, your great-great grandpa in the attic of your grandpa’s house, you’re not necessarily gonna know everything. What is he talking about? You know, there’s gonna be some references, maybe some names that you recognize oh, I know who that was. Or, oh, they’re talking about when grandpa was born, you know, but they might reference places, or there may be an insinuation that I wonder what that refers to. At the time, they probably didn’t think anything of it. 

Well, let’s say your grandma found this letter many years ago and they were reading through it to her kids and they were asking questions, what is this referring to? She may have explained like, oh, this has to do with that, or this has to do with that, and let’s pretend, I don’t know of any grandmas who do this to letters, but let’s pretend that she jotted that in, stuck it back in the box and left it for her grandkids to discover down the road, and they’re opening the box and then they’re reading this. Great grandpa has written a letter. Grandma resurrected it, made some editorial notes, and now we’re reading it many generations later.

The Bible has that component to it. The letters that make up the text have that component to it. 

That’s an example of how there is incredible intentional human intentionality to the construct of the message of the Bible. But the intention is that it communicates the word of God, the message of God. The Bible tells a story. There was a reason certain books were included in the canon. There’s a reason certain books were excluded from the canon because they did not participate in communicating the message of the Bible that is fully culminated and manifested in Jesus Christ. 

And so that’s part of what we mean by the Bible’s story. It’s expertly crafted to tell a cohesive message from beginning to end, just like we don’t open the pilgrim’s progress to any random chapter and just start there. You know, you open to Chapter 11, I’m gonna dive into chapter 11, like that. 

We start stories at the beginning if we wanna understand it, at least. Now somebody might skim through a story, they might start at the very end. I’ve heard of people like this. I. I’m, I’ve never been one. If I read the end of the book, then it’s what’s the point of reading the rest of the book?

But some people start at the end and then if this is interesting, they go back and read beginning to end. But typically, if we want to grasp a story, we’re gonna go to the beginning in the same way the Bible is designed for us to understand it, we’re gonna go to the beginning. 

And this is just a slight little caveat, but some of us are incredibly infatuated with revelation and end times prophecy. We’ve spent more time in end times prophecy than we have in the Torah. We’ve spent more time in end times prophecy than we have immersing ourselves over and over again in the Old Testament stories in the Old Testament as a whole. And that’s part of how we can end up creating some. Fantastical ideas of what Revelation means.

If we wanna understand revelation, if we wanna understand the end time’s prophecy, we’ve got to know very well this, all the parts that come before it, because it is a conclusion to an overarching story. Does that make sense? So it’s meant to be read from beginning to end. It’s a unified story. It all culminates in and points to Jesus, even the Old Testament.

Now, if you’re like me, you grew up in an Anabaptist church and Anabaptist theology is heavy on Jesus and we focus on Jesus. The downside of that is that we may not have seen as clearly. Now, I’ve spoken with some Anabaptist who received good training about the Old Testament, good teaching about the Old Testament, even in their growing up life.

So I’m not gonna say this. As a declarative statement, but I do think there tends to be a trend that we sort of neglect the Old Testament. There are some other church denominations that might be totally infatuated with the Old Testament and neglect the teachings of Jesus, but all of it, old Testament, the gospels, new Testament letters, revelation, all of it, points to and culminates in Jesus because Jesus is the incarnated message or word of God.

It’s a story. The Bible is a story about how God appoints humanity as his partners to oversee the amazing creation, how humans ruined that partnership and how God is restoring us and our world through Jesus Christ. It’s not a surprise that many of us miss the larger story because there’s a lot going on.

Just like in, if you think of Pilgrim’s Progress, you have the main character, the protagonist Christian, who has this yearning desire from wherein he sets out on this journey to make it to the celestial city. And there are many difficulties that he has to overcome. One of the biggest, at least for the first section of the story, is this huge and massive burden that he’s carrying and weighing on him.

What is that burden? Like the whole story of Pilgrim’s Progress is, and oh, it’s slipping my mind, a metaphor and analogy of the Christian life, right? So the main character is Christian, interestingly enough, but Christians have this burden, well that, that. Not all Christians have this gigantic pack on the back of their bodies, right?

They’re not carrying that around in life, but they’re burdened. We as humans are burdened down with baggage, and that’s something we read about in scripture. Interestingly enough, I’m using the PIL progress just as a way of demonstrating the pieces of story, but it’s also a story that kind of mirrors the biblical story in many ways because we read about the weight and the baggage that we take on, whether it’s sin.

We even have in Paul’s writings, this notion that there can be good things that actually work for us personally as baggage. And so there, there’s this continual struggle that someone might face. That’s what that burden represents. Well, in a very similar way, the Bible has a protagonist. The Bible has obstacles that have to be overcome.

It has. These pieces that are specific within the story that are actually working. Yes, it’s a specific, like that actually is a burden. Christian needs to lose the burden in order to make it up through or over the mountain and into the celestial city. But that burden also represents something more that is happening in Christian’s life.

And in the same way, there are specific pieces throughout the Bible that are representing deeper things for us to learn from and to grow from In the pilgrim’s progress, there are many antagonists that come across Christian’s paths. Some are aggressive and fighting and warring against them. Others are very, they look like they’re headed to the same place, right?

And they’re gonna take shortcuts or they’re gonna, Hey, you, we can head to the celestial city and live our best life and be plush and all this. And we see through this story how that distracts from what Christian is supposed to do. And the calling and purpose that he has, and sometimes he stumbles with them and he gets, begins to drown in the marsh or gets locked up in, in the town.

I’m sorry, I should have rehearsed my story of Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m trying to, all I can think of is Celestial City right now, but the town where they’re having the big parade and the party and everything and they get distracted by all the fun events that are happening and they end up in jail, I think for a while in the same way the Bible has different movie pieces, different movie parts to the story, main plot, and then a bunch of subplots that reinforce the main plot that’s being told sometimes through positive reinforcement, other times through a negative, like it reinforced the truth of the main point because of this negative.

Plot that took place. So just like we read any other book that is clearly a story, we ought to read the Bible as story. There’s a lot going on. Once you see every book has a careful literary design, you’ll be able to see how they all fit into the overall storyline. So a great example to this is the book of judges.

How many of you know what judges is about? Maybe I should ask you, what do you, when I say judges, what do you think about? What are some. You I’m guessing that most of you bringing up the book of judges, most of you, if you thought of anything, you might be like, wait, okay, what is judges? Well, but most of us think of particular Bible stories.

It’s where we get Gideon. It’s where we get that Jeff, the guy and whatever happened with his daughter. It’s where we get Sampson. We know these stories that make great Sunday school lessons, great vacation Bible School events and themes and stories. But if I asked you, what is the Book of Judges about what are each of those stories doing in communicating?

Could you tell me, could you answer that? What is a common theme that you hear throughout judges? One is that Israel does what is right in their own eyes, right? So there’s a theme. It’s repeated throughout the book of judges. Another piece is that all of these negative judges, Because that’s, we see that happening.

Here’s judges. There’s supposed to be appointed leaders of God, but they end up not doing very well, actually. So Gideon saves Israel on one hand, but then he goes and he goes farther. He takes vengeance into his own hands, which then leads to a future problem that Israel faces. Well, then a new judge rises up, does what God says, but then takes some things into his own hands.

There’s this cycle throughout the book of Judges. So on one hand these are good men. On the other hand, they’re not good men, like they’re actually causing problems. There’s a lesson in there for us. Part of it is that even though we may be filling and living into God’s calling for our lives, we still have the full capacity of taking things into our own hands and perverting what God wants to do, but all ultimately judges serves.

It’s a bunch of captivating little stories that serve. As a way of warming people up to the idea that nothing good comes from the tribe of Benjamin, and something good comes from the tribe of Judah. You particularly see that in chapter 17 through 21 of judges that kind of the epilogue that ties together the whole thing.

So this is setting us up in the whole overarching story because it is through David The Messiah is gonna come think of Chronicles. The Book of Chronicles gives a drastically different impression of some of Israel’s kings and the Book of kings. Perhaps the most obvious is that King Manasa in the book of Chronicles is actually framed as a good king in kings.

He’s listed as like one of the worst, perhaps the worst of all of Israel’s kings. Well, Chronicles serves to communicate a totally different message than the Book of Kings. So in the Hebrew Bible, it’s called the TaNaK. It’s made up of three distinct sections. So the Torah, which is the books of law, the book of instructions, then the Ne Deim, which is the Books of Prophecy, and then the Vem, which is the writings.

And so the way these serve is you have the Torah, the law, God’s instruction, and then prophecy. Ancient Hebrew prophecy is all about how faithful are God’s people to the law that was given. And then the writings are poetry stories. Particular, well in Chronicles is a part of writings. So it’s framing things to reflect on how God’s people interact, in particularly in exile.

And are they faithful? How do they flesh out living faithful to the Torah in foreign lands or in nations that do not honor Yahweh as God and Chronicles? Actually, the way the Hebrew cannon is organized, Chronicles is the very end of it. So in the English canon, it’s the, it’s Malachi. Malachi, I believe that ends the Old Testament in Chronicles comes right after Kings, and so we read Kings, then we read Chronicles, and we’re bored, and it’s you know, it feels like same old.

What’s really interesting is you notice if you pay attention, like now that you know this, go read those four books. It’s split up into each one is split up into two. You have First and Second Kings, first and second Chronicles. Go read those. You’ll notice there’s difference. Point out the difference between Kings and Chronicles.

However, Chronicles came alive to me when I read it according to the Hebrew cannon. And I read, you have the Torah, then you have all the books of Prophecy, which Kings is a book of prophecy because it’s reflecting on how faithful are the kings to the Torah. Manasa was not faithful. Chronicles is communicating a different message.

It’s communicating. It’s the very end of the Hebrew cannon, the very end of the Old Testament before we get to Jesus. And so what Chronicles is communicating is how even the Godliest King can have a moment of self-centered unfaithfulness to God and that king will reap death, even the most wicked king.

It can have a moment of repentance and turning to God and that king will reap life. And I think we all know that verse, the spirit of God searches to and fro throughout the whole earth looking for a man whose eyes are fixed on him, whom he can show himself strong through. That’s a paraphrase of the verse, but that’s the thrust of Chronicles.

Regardless of how good or bad you are, you take your eyes off of God, you will fall into death. You fix your eyes onto God. No matter how wicked or evil you are, you will experience life and that is the last and final message before going into the story of Jesus. And so these are examples of how the Bible is story. 

There are important and repeated themes that weave through the entire biblical story that help us make sense of the bigger narrative. 

Along the way, we find strange words and we don’t use in normal language. When we take the time to understand these strange words, we can discover profound ideas that contribute to the overall story, and perhaps a good word.

This is just I’m randomly picking the word righteousness. Well, how many of you ever talk about that’s not righteous. Don’t do that. Well, righteousness is a R rich, vibrant word that actually in our English language, we cannot capture it very well because it means both this sense of morality and the sense of justice.

And so we are living rightly, reflecting God’s design. That’s righteousness. It does take work. To know how to read the Bible, how to read the different types of literature in the Bible, because there’s poetry, there’s narrative, there’s apocalyptic literature, there’s prophecy, there’s writing letter letters that are New Testament letters are interesting because it’s like listening to one side of a phone conversation, right?

The New Testament author is responding to specific issues or questions that churches are facing, and so I’ve actually heard it said that the story of the Bible is Genesis through acts. And then the New Testament letters after acts are like appendices of that story. So you get the main message Genesis through acts, and then what does that look like in specific situations?

Well, then that’s the New Testament letters. Obviously, the Bible never says that it’s not actually even organized oh, these are appendices. But it is sort of a helpful way to think about interacting with the letters, keeping our main focus fixed on that genesis through Acts portion. And then the letters are really practical wrestling through of what does this look like to live faithfully in the land, in the world that we have today.

The Bible is a book that is meant to be studied for life. 

It’s rich with details. Once you learn to see them, you’ll discover The Bible is a work of literary genius that can transform how you live and how you think about everything. Did you catch that? The Bible wants to transform us, the word of God. It does transform us.

And the Bible is a collection of writings that is organized to communicate that message, which is fully manifested in Jesus to communicate it to us so that we are transformed from the inside out. So I would like, I’m gonna show a little clip of an interview that I had with my professor, Ernesto Duke.

He was my Old Testament prof. And just flesh this out a little bit further of reading the Bible as story. And then we’ll come back and we’ll look at another aspect of how to read the Bible as story. 

INTERVIEW with Professor Ernesto Duke

If the purpose of scripture is to introduce you to a Messiah who has given his life for you, who has de defeated the powers of evil, and who offers you an invitation to be a part of his kingdom, then any person who is literate in the language that they’re reading the story of scripture and can get that right.

It’s very, and he probably said it more eloquently than that, and maybe I said something theoretical just now, so I wasn’t trying to, but you can get that. But, Can you really understand? You know, one of my favorite books, the Old Testament is judges. And it’s because of this idea that judges is davidic propaganda literature, like it’s written in order for its readers to recognize that a descendant of Benjamin, someone from the tribe of Benjamin, who is tall and howdy.

I don’t ever use that word in real English, but a, you know, Saul is not a good leader and that actually the Benjamin Knights have some corruption going on, and that Yahweh has chosen the house of Judah to lead his people to restore peace in Shalom amongst his amongst his nation. Right. And that the whole purpose of judges is doing that.

It’s not like this weird story with Samsung or you know, killing somebody with a goat bone or something like that. Those are all stories that are really leading to this bigger thing of being Yeah. Davidic propaganda literature. Yeah. Like it’s trying to move the audience in a way to speak.

David supportive and not Saul supportive. And are you gonna get that the first, second, third, fourth, 75th time that you read scripture all on your own? No way. There’s no way you’re gonna get there. But is that necessary to be a part of the kingdom? Absolutely not. Right? But is it necessary to understand what’s happening in judges and why the book of Judges is written and how it fits in the bigger story and how it how it teaches us about different ways that the Bible communicates truth?

Like I think it’s all necessary for that, right? Is it necessary to in order for someone to be saved? Well, I mean, this is a controversial statement, but like you have to define what that means, right? Cuz the Bible. It doesn’t seem like scripture’s super concerned about getting people to heaven, like basic instructions before leaving Earth.

Like that idea. It seems like scripture’s super concerned with people giving their allegiance to Jesus and becoming part of the kingdom and not as heavily concerned on that other thing. So Yeah. But even just see that whole thing we were talking about with judges, I think it’s. You’d have to be a genius to see that the first time you read judges, but you read it four or five times and you have people who dedicated their life to reading and understanding this book.

Kind of give you some keys and hints and well, do you see what’s happening here and where’s all from and what happens in the last chapters? And where’s the tribe that’s really messing things up and what’s going on with that Levi in her concubine, and she wants to stay in a pagan city, but he wants to stay in Gia.

And people just start asking these questions. Yeah. And you realize oh yeah, there’s a lot more going on here that I never got. You know? And that kind of goes back to that, what you were saying at the very beginning, where if you knew a lot of Bible stories, but you didn’t necessarily understand the story of the Bible and how it all fits together.

So Yeah. In this discussion of like how to read scripture, how do we approach the Old Testament That if nothing else, just start with the conviction. Then I’m gonna read the whole thing. Whatever it is. Whatever you’re reading, read the whole thing. I do these Bible assessments where I’m like assessing biblical literacy for potential missionaries.

And 95% of the time when we talk about the book of judges, when I ask them, what is Judges 17 through 21 about, you know, judges, the story of Samson ends in chapter 16, so what’s 17 through 21? About? Nothing. Like they’ve never read it, right? They’ve only experienced judges through the individual stories of the judges and the little arcs, the story arcs of the judges.

But never realized like, oh, this thing has an epilogue and it’s, you know, it’s It’s through narrative tying like the whole message of the judges together or whatever. And that, and I truly do think it’s cuz their experience with judges is like a bible study where they read the story of Deborah and Barack or of Ehud or of Samon and they’ve never sat and like just went judges one through 21 and let me. Like really digest the whole thing. 

2. The New Testament Tells the Climax of the Story

So a second aspect of reading the Bible a story and how to read the Bible story is that the New Testament tells the climax of the story. So we’ve already mentioned how the Bible is a story. It communicates a message that is fully manifested in Jesus, but what do we mean by the New Testament tells the climax of this story? Well, if you think of Pilgrim’s progress, if you think of the climax of that story, what is it?

The climax is really Christian getting to the celestial city and crossing the river and entering into the gates and meeting his maker there. And then we have the whole story of his wife and kids taking their journey and coming to meet him there as well. And so, just like every good story you have the main story, the main narrative, and then you have the climax of that narrative, which is the main narrative is a.

Main character that has something he wants, he’s pursuing. But he faces all kinds of conflict in his pursuit. And the climax is when he finally has that realization, he finally gets that thing he’s been pursuing this whole time. And then there’s also resolution after the climax. And so in this similar way, the Bible is organized, there’s a main story.

The New Testament tells the climax of the story. It also shows the resolution. But I would. Center, the climax around Jesus. Jesus is the climax. And then again, like we said before, the New Testament letters are more the resolution. Well, here’s what it looks like to live like Jesus. So specifically, I think it’s important for us to understand, there’s a few approaches to biblical interpretation.

You may have heard like systematic theology. You may have heard like a Jesus centric view of the Bible, which is somewhat confusing sometimes because I think everybody agrees that the Bible tells a story of Jesus. But there’s this view where it’s like we focus on Jesus and whatever Jesus does, we do that whatever Jesus says, we try to emulate that in our life today. I would suggest that’s actually not even how Jesus intended himself to be interacted with. 

And I’m partial to what is known as biblical theology, and that is first finding our place in the story of God. So the biblical. 

Theology or biblical approach to reading scripture is understanding its story and then working specifically with what is in the text.

We’re not gonna bring our questions to the text just yet. We’re gonna, we’re gonna ground ourselves in what is communicated there, so we’re not gonna bring in questions that the Bible’s not trying to answer. Instead, we’re gonna work with what the Bible is seeking to answer. And then what sort of information and wisdom does that give us for knowing how to navigate things that we are bumping into that the Bible doesn’t specifically address.

That’s a biblical theology approach, and here’s why I personally embrace and hold to that approach even more strongly than a Jesus centric hermeneutic, because Jesus himself saw himself as embedded within the story of the Hebrew scriptures. He was a continuation and fulfillment of the Hebrew story.

So I think it’s problematic to start with Jesus when Jesus started in Genesis. So all of Jesus’s teachings are grounded in creation in Torah and what we see throughout the old, the Hebrew canon. So it’s important for us to know that part of the story as well. But I absolutely agree and I think we all agree that the culmination of that, the fulfillment of that story, of the message is Jesus Christ.

To expound on that a little bit further, I’m gonna share just a few, a couple minutes of one of the lessons from the course finding my place in God’s story that specifically talks about the New Testament being the climax of the story. We spent about 20 minutes in a lesson kind of sorting through some questions about the New Testament and about how it fits in, into the overarching theme of the story.

But we’re just gonna take a couple minutes here and flesh that out a little bit further. 

Excerpt from Lesson

In order to understand even Jesus himself, it’s important that we see that he pictures himself as a part of this overarching message, this overarching narrative. And so let’s just dive in here and look how that is.

The Bible is a unified literature. That climax is in the New Testament, and specifically the climax is with Jesus. So he is the fulfillment, he is. Everything that the story’s been communicating is pointing to Jesus. But Jesus views everything leading up to him as important and necessary for his disciples to be able to understand him.

Some of the ways that we see this is that in the titles that he used of himself, I think of the title that Jesus used most often of himself and let others use of himself is the title of the Son of Man. And if you’re like me growing up, you read the Son of Man, like why does he say Son of man?

Isn’t he the son of God? And part of my confusion came from the fact that I had no clue how the son of man fit with this overarching story. In Daniel seven, there is a vision that Daniel sees Daniel seven 13 through 14, where the son of man or I’ll just read it for you here. I saw in the night vision and behold the clouds of heaven.

With the clouds of heaven. There came one like a son of man and he came to the ancient of days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all people’s nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

So this is a very distinct reference to the Messiah to come. And when Jesus claims the title, the son of Man, he’s expecting that his hearers know this prophecy from Daniel, this vision, and so, He is saying that he is this divine being who comes down and reigns on an earthly throne. He is the son of man.

He is one like a son of man. He sees himself, so he’s a, not only is he appealing to Daniel for the title, but he sees him himself as fulfilling that and then continuing the story where he’s setting up a kingdom of all peoples in all languages and who serve him and his kingdom is everlasting. The culmination of this is the new covenant that Jesus establishes in Luke 22, 14 through 23, where he institutes the Lord’s supper and he says, this is the new covenant, my new covenant in blood, which is a direct harking back to Jeremiah 31, where God says, I will make a new covenant.

With the House of Israel, I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people. So Jesus himself, when he comes, he sees himself as the culmination of everything that has been said before. And not only that, he sees himself as embedded within the story.

He’s now inaugurating something new, pushing something forward in this new covenant with God’s people. So the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, which were written in Greek or Aramaic, a lot of the language in conversation would’ve been in Aramaic, but the New Testament was written in Greek.

Even though they’re years apart, different authors, different settings, in many ways, they tell a unified story. They have unity in their origin and how they came to be. Both the editorial approach as well as the collecting and whether or not their authors knew God, knew Jesus, and they’re unified with the overarching story that they tell.

So don’t see them as two separate things juxtaposed to each other. Sometimes we think that the God of the Old Testament is significantly different than the God of the New Testament. This is all working together to communicate something about God, about us, about creation, and so if something looks drastically different in one particular place, it’s probably serving a point to help us.

See a more holistic picture of something. And so that isn’t a key aspect to reading the Bible as story, understanding how the two covenants or the two main sections of the biblical text fit together.

The third aspect, now I’m just gonna be frank with you, when the first module of finding my place in God’s story is all about, How do we approach the Bible? How do we see this? And there are eight specific lessons that dive into this. I’m giving you three of them. The Bible is story, the New Testament tells the climax.

And then the third one is the Bible as wisdom literature. There are eight more that we go into in the course, but these are probably I looked at the eight and we’re like what could I yank out and yet feel like they go together, but also what is the gist or like the most important pieces that could help you help revolution revolutionize your understanding of scripture and your engagement with scripture.

3. The Bible as Wisdom Literature

And so the third one is the Bible is wisdom literature. So many of us, this comes back again to the whole reference book mentality. Many of us have this question of okay, so are women supposed to wear head coverings or not? Or don’t they have to wear head coverings? Well, actually like the Bible, and if you dive into First Corinthians, it’s not even.

Actually entirely framed that way as though you are not gonna go to heaven if you don’t wear head covering. There’s very little of the Bible that is framed to that degree. When something is, it’s pretty clear, right? There’s no multiple ways of looking at or understanding whether Jesus is the way the truth and the life to the Father Is.

Is that the way to experience the Father, to experience his life? Is Jesus just one of many, the Bible’s incredibly plain and clear on that over and over again, right? But there’s many other things that we zero in on and try to what’s right or what’s wrong. And actually, if that’s the question we’re asking, what’s right or what’s wrong about this specific thing, we are going to mishandle scripture and we’re gonna misunderstand.

What God is doing through the story. Rather the Bible is wisdom, literature, all of the diverse literary styles. So we’ve got poetry, we’ve got historical narrative, we’ve got prophecy, we’ve got New Testament letters and exposition. We’ve got new Testament narrative and telling history, which is somewhat different than the Old Testament.

We’ve got apocalyptic literature, we’ve got similes, we’ve got metaphors, we’ve got imagery that are comparing and contrasting things. 

All of these different literary styles reveal God’s wisdom and invite us into a journey of character transformation. 

So there is a very real sense of when it comes to practical application and living out the Bible actually doesn’t give us specifics.

And that seems to be on purpose because so many of us would, oh, if it said to do this, we’d just do that. If it said not to do that, we just would not do that. Right. And there are areas of the Bible that are that way, fairly plain, but even in those areas, it’s less to do. And you catch up on this when you read the Old Testament, it has less to do with the specific things you’re doing or not doing because there are people who do them sometimes, right?

They do it well, they still miss Jesus. Or if you jump to the New Testament, you think of the two sons, the prodigal father, and he has this rebellious way where it’s on you all. He also has this son that looks really obedient. Good. Well, they’re actually both sinners and they’re in need of the father’s presence.

That’s the whole point. And so when we engage scriptures like. What do I do? Oh, it says to do this, or it says not to do this. We end up not engaging the author of Scripture, and the whole point of the incarnate word of God through text is to lead us into the inner Word of God, Jesus, Yahweh, the Father, and to cause us to wrestle and engage with him, with our questions, with our burdens, with our desires, with our wanderings in our applications.

The Bible doesn’t just answer our questions for us. It provides wisdom for us. Part of the goal is to be filled with the wisdom of God so that we can then be transformed into the people God wants us to be. 

If all we have is answers to specific questions, we’re gonna bump into new questions we don’t have answers for.

But when we get the wisdom of God, then we’re gonna be able to navigate all kinds of different questions and problems. Leaning on not our own understanding, but on the wisdom of God. What we’re saying is that the message of the Bible the whole story and the particular stories within this whole story, give wisdom for life as the Bible Project has put it, all of the diverse literary styles in the Bible reveal God’s wisdom and invite us into a journey of character transformation.

So yes, there’s a genre, there’s a literary style of wisdom literature, but even more than that, all the diverse styles. So, the historical narrative, the wisdom literature, poetry, the apocalyptic, the prophecy, the expositional kind of teachings, the New Testament letters, all of this reveals the wisdom, God’s wisdom, and invites us into a journey of character transformation. 

This is particularly in contrast to the Bible being a theology dictionary or a Christian reference book, A Moral Handbook. So instead of reading the Bible, because I wanna learn facts, read the Bible to glean wisdom for life, instead of reading the Bible to look up what I must do in a particular moral situation, read the Bible for wisdom for life, because there’s gonna be a lot of situations in life that the Bible doesn’t specifically address.

And so can I glean wisdom? Yes, the Bible has theological facts. Yes, the Bible has moral guidance, moral compass, but more than that, the whole story that it’s revealing is wanting to do a character transformation in you and I. That gives us wisdom as we traverse through the world where there’s a lot of things that happen that we don’t know how to respond to. We don’t know what to do. And just to bring this out a little bit more, well, something that could be really helpful literally is just to use a Bible software to do a Bible search, a word, search for the word wisdom, and just take note of how it’s used.

Throughout the scriptures, we learned that Jesus, in Luke 2, grew. The boy became strong and he was filled with wisdom, and God’s grace was upon him. A few verses later, it says, Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and people. And so even Jesus needed wisdom, needed the wisdom of God poured out on his life.

In Luke. In Luke 1149, we read that Jesus is, this is where he’s going through. Woe verse 47, woe to you. You build monuments to the prophets and your fathers killed them. Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers for they killed them and you build their monuments.

Because of this, the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles and some of them they will kill and persecute so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world. So I’m reading from Luke 11 47 through 50 roughly.

So notice Jesus quotes a prophecy, what we would’ve traditionally called a prophecy, but he says, because of this, the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets. And so there’s something about this sending them prophets, they will be killed and persecuted. That’s. The wisdom of God. The wisdom of God is doing.

This is just another example is that in Acts when people came and the gentile widows were not being fed, the apostles said, we need to select for ourselves, men, or not the apostles. He says, select for yourselves men of good reputation, full of the spirit and wisdom. So as we seek to be leaders in God’s household, and we saw this in Moses way back in the Old Testament, Moses was given the wisdom of God, was filled with wisdom, a spirit of wisdom.

And we see in, even in Exodus, the craftsmen whom I have. So you are to instruct all the skilled craftsmen whom I have filled with a spirit of wisdom to make Aaron’s garments. And so there is a need as we serve God, as we lead in God’s kingdom, there’s a need for wisdom. Romans 1133 says, oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.

So, we are to mind the riches, the wisdom, and the knowledge of God. Ephesians chapter three points out that the church is to reveal to the cosmo, to the cosmos, God’s multifaceted wisdom. Ephesians three 10 go up in chapter one, Ephesians one verse eight. God lavished his grace with all wisdom and understanding.

Verse 17 of chapter one, I pray that God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious father, would give you a spirit of wisdom. So we need all the treasure. Colossians two, three. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him. Jesus Christ. We need wisdom. We need to. Be transformed by the wisdom of God.

And so that’s what the book, the Bible is the collection of writings. The diverse literary styles reveal God’s wisdom and invite us into character transformation that help us know how to navigate in the world. Now, what’s interesting is if you study the word wisdom, you’ll notice that it’s used interchangeably sometimes with the word knowledge.

So if you think of the story of Solomon, and I’m assuming most of us are familiar with it, but if we’re not, go look in the book of First Kings and look at the story of Solomon. God comes to him and says, I will give you anything that you ask. So what? What would you like to be given? And Solomon asks for wisdom, and God is pleased by that and blessed, and he pours out wisdom on Solomon.

There’s a story from the very beginning of the biblical narrative where someone. Sought wisdom. Adam and Eve took for themselves the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. And as you read through the biblical narrative, and as you, if you do a word search on wisdom, you’ll notice that sometimes the pursuit of wisdom is folly.

It leads to the pursuit of knowledge leads to corruption sometimes. And there, there is this dichotomy being given, or I don’t, maybe dichotomy is not a very good word, but when we see something able to make us wise and we go and take it, then that leads to corruption. That is a beastly nature for us to take on ourselves, to have our own wisdom.

But when God has offered wisdom or come to us what would you like? And we ask God for wisdom. There’s blessing with that. That’s the kind of wisdom that God wants us to pursue is wisdom that is in accordance with his design. So, and that’s consistent with the whole issue in Genesis three, is trust.

Can we trust God’s wisdom? Can we trust God to call something good and evil and accept that for ourselves? Or are we gonna try to define that for ourselves? That’s the cosmic struggle is do we work within God’s wisdom or are we trying to have wisdom for ourselves and be able to define things on our own?

Understanding that the biblical narrative reveals the wisdom of God invites us into character transformation, is to acknowledge that God is the source of all wisdom. 

God is the source of all truth, and I want. His wisdom. I don’t want to just pump my head, my brain full of knowledge so that I can arbitrarily start executing wisdom, but I want to walk in love and in humility, seeking and gleaning the wisdom of God.

The Story Overview

Well, this episode is quite a bit longer than I thought it would be, but I’d like to give us an overview before we wrap it up and end here. I would like us to just look at what is the story, because that’s a question I often get and in the finding my place in God’s story course, it’s actually there’s five modules, but I don’t walk through the story until module four.

And part of the reason is, the reason I have it shaped that way is because there’s a lot of things that we need to think through and learn about studying the Bible in order to see the story. Because some of us approach the Bible as a reference book boom. Oh, it says this, that means this.

And we’re not understanding, like one aspect that we go into a little bit is the fact that the Bible wasn’t written in English and it was written by many different authors. Right? So how does that affect the way we read it and understand it? We gotta work through those so that we can, as we’re going through the story, understand like what is intended to be communicated here.

Also, gotta understand, we gotta learn how to observe so many people. How many times have you sat down in a Bible study and there’s eight of you there, and you sit down, you read the passage, and then the next question is, what does this mean? Wait. Like you’re not ready to discuss what does it mean yet?

You should spend it most of your time and energy observing what it says. Observe. And then the meaning portion actually is significantly simple. There, there is still a certain level of work, especially depending on the difference of background. You know, if I’m diving into something in the Old Testament, there’s gonna be a much more drastic cultural difference between me and the Old Testament, even though there’s still a drastic cultural difference between me and New Testament.

But there are pieces, language that is used that I might wanna study and observe that’s a part of observation, so that then I can say, oh, this is what the author was saying and here’s how it probably would’ve landed on his audience. And then we have this section called application. What does it mean for us in our particular context?

So we walk through that. Before we get into the story, what is the story? But a lot of a question that I’ll often get is, so you talk about the Bible as story. What is the story I’d like to. Wrap up our time. It’s just gonna take a few minutes here, but to walk through the story of the Bible so that we can see God’s story and kind of place our moment in time in that storyline.

Creation – Gen 1-2

So Genesis one through two, I get this from empty Wright. Let me say this real quick. The Bible, if you summarize the story of scripture, you can place it into five main movements. If you think of a play you have, act one, act two, act three of a play you could, if you think about the message of scripture as a play, there are five main acts.

It’s creation the fall. Israel, Jesus and the church, the era of the church. So we’re gonna walk through this. Genesis one and two is the first part of that story and its creation at creation in these first two chapters, this sets the stage. If you’ve ever read a book I’m sorry. If you’ve ever read a book, how many of you have read a book?

If you’ve ever read like a tome or a massive novel that’s telling a story, you will know. You’ll notice some modern stories aren’t quite the same way, so it’s a little bit different. That’s why I’m particularly talking about large works, where there’s, you’re gonna dive into massive subplots and you’re gonna have chapter after chapter that are building characters that work or maybe show up on the scene later on down the road.

And then we get back after all these chapters of character building, we get back to. The main plot in those types of books, you have what might be termed as the prologue or kind of the foreshadowing of the whole thing of what’s gonna come. There’s this, it sets the stage. So here’s where everything starts, and that’s what Genesis one, two serves as.

It is the prologue of sorts. It is the stage that has been set moment and in creation. There’s a lot of questions that we can wrestle through and ask and talk about origins of earth, origins of humanity, and all of this. And we can get into debates over that. 

But let’s step back and be like, what is really simply observed in Genesis one and two? Who gives life and purpose? 

That’s very simple, right? When you look at the days of creation, you have God, Speaking things into existence. And then he comes back and he places them in their role of purpose and function. And so we see that God gives life and purpose. What is good that is throughout Genesis one, that concept of it is good, is repeated over and over again.

Why? Why is that repeated? Well, these different things that are being created are good. Not only that, when he comes back and gives function and design and purpose, that is good. So this creation, the per particular players of creation are good, and what they’re appointed to do is good. Well, if we’re looking at what is good, there’s no place in Genesis one that says God is good, but that is strongly insinuated as he’s the one creating.

He’s the one giving purpose. And so who is good? God is good. He made a good creation, good design. He gives life and purpose. Another question is, what is man commissioned to do? Genesis 1 26 through 27, we see that man is made in the image of God and then he’s told to go out, be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth.

Now, some of us, we point to that as reason for hunting. Man’s supposed to have dominion over the earth. Dominion is not conquest. It’s not war, it’s not language of war. Dominion is language of kingdom and taken care of. You don’t go out and conquest your kingdom. You rule over and care for your kingdom.

And so man is to rule and reign. We might say, according to the image of God. That is a clear. Peace communicated in creation. Now, here’s the thing, as we progress throughout the biblical story and as we’re looking, reading through the Old Testament, reading into the New Testament, there are things actually pretty frequently where the biblical author, whether it’s a prophet, whether it’s Moses, whether it’s Paul in the New Testament, or Peter, John where they, or Luke, where they point back to creation.

And there are particular things about creation that they frequently bring out. And if you pause and reflect and think about, okay, so what was the last time you had a conversation with somebody about Genesis? What were you talking about? And then ask yourself the question, do the biblical authors talk about what we were talking about?

Because some of us come from a space or a background where all we got from Genesis one and two is that God created the Earth in six days. And so then we have this thing about the Earth is 6,000 years old, right? Or 8,000, maybe at most 10,000 years old. And that’s what the bulk of our conversation about Genesis is about.

And that may be, I’m not here to argue for old Earth or young earth creation. I’m saying when we get into those debates and that’s our only engagement with Genesis, we’re missing the stage that’s being set because the biblical authors never come back and repeat and be like, oh, see, this is 8,000 years old.

But they frequently come back and repeat. Certain aspects of God’s design. Jesus comes back and repeats like the union between man and woman that is communicated in Genesis. There are things that are frequently hearkened back on from Genesis one and two. And so if you’re from a from just as simply observing what’s going on here, how, what is the story that’s being communicated?

Well, one of the way, what should I grasp from all of this? Because Genesis is full. There’s a lot of things being revealed like, wow, God spoke these things into existence and it was so right and he orders the fish and the birds. That’s amazing. But what should I really grasp from this? First of all, stick with what’s written because some of our conversations about Genesis actually talk about things that aren’t even mentioned or written in Genesis.

But then also what do the biblical authors harken back to? As we progress throughout the story, you’re not gonna necessarily know that right away you’re gonna, it’s gonna take time as you read through and you begin to observe. But now that you hear this in your Bible reading, pay attention May, it might be helpful just to go pause and go read Genesis one and two and then pick back up in your Bible reading wherever you’re at.

Maybe you’re in Amos or Habakkuk, or maybe you’re in Joel, Jude or Titus. You know, just start noticing, observing what is recreational language being used here, or what imagery actually hearkens back to those first two chapters. Because it happens frequently, but it doesn’t necessarily happen, at least not that frequently about some of the questions and talking points that we have tended to often center our conversations of Genesis around.

And I think that’s sad because we, I’m not saying those conversations aren’t important or aren’t a part of. Of learning about God and about creation, but it reveals our reference book mentality as opposed to just grasping like this message, this story, this good and beautiful story that God has created.

And I do think, this is totally caveat, I’m going off script here.

Some of us really wrestle with the goodness of God and the goodness of God is grounded in Genesis one and two. 

And most of us, when we bump into conflicts and tragedies and issues and we say, wait, why does this happen? Our answers start at Genesis three.

And that’s sad. And going back to my original comment about how the story of God has been the greatest comfort and hope in times of grief and darkness, for me it’s not the fall that’s a key part of making sense. But for me, the most comforting part is remembering the beginning. The creation.

When I have a question about life or about something, I go back to Genesis one and I start all over immersing myself in the story. 

Fall – Gen 3-11

So the next part, the next act of this story is the fall, Genesis three through 11. So it’s not just Genesis three through 11, because we see there’s this good creation, good design, man’s commission to image God throughout creation.

Well, what happens in Genesis three?

There’s this fall and we then see a cycle of chaos begin. 

That continues through Genesis 11. So in this section, Genesis three through 11, very simply, again, there’s a lot of stuff like what in the world is happening in, in Genesis six where you have these men of God who’s look on daughters of man, and there’s some sort of interaction that happens and th this mysterious thing there.

There’s a variety of elements throughout these chapters that are like that, and it’s just the beginning because there’s gonna be all kinds of stuff like that as we progress throughout the biblical story. Those are things we can dive into deeper there, like deeper layers of the onion that we unpack. But very simply, what can we observe at a high level view from these chapters?

We discover that there is an antagonist to God, right? So God is the protagonist. You may not have caught that God is the protagonist of the biblical story. He’s the main character and it’s not just God. He’s working through man. And that’s something that is interesting. It’s fascinating to me to discover within the biblical story, God works.

God doesn’t need man, he doesn’t need anybody. He’s not reliant on anything. But for whatever reason he does, to create a text for people to read his word, his instructions for men and women to know. If you think of the people of Israel, those people never heard God speak directly, but Moses spoke face-to-face with God.

Prophets would hear God directly and then speak to his people. God uses man, why doesn’t God just show up and declare to the Canaanites that he is God? Why is Israel supposed to be and image God and shine his light among the nations? Why? Why is Israel called to do that? I don’t really know. God is a protagonist, but he’s very closely working in and through mankind to image him.

And we discover in Genesis three through 11 that there’s an antagonist to all of this. We discover deception. 

We discover that man sees something that seems good in their eyes, it looks wise, but it actually brings death and separation. And that’s a theme I mentioned it already in relation to judges.

The theme is man looking and seeing what is wise in their eyes. 

That shows up frequently throughout the biblical story, and it always brings a negative result. And so there’s this cosmic struggle that ensues. Will I trust God’s design? That what he calls good is actually good, and what he calls evil is truly evil.

Or am I gonna try to decide for myself what is good and evil instead of imaging? God man. Images themselves, they’re gonna be like God themselves. They’re gonna do what is right in their own eyes. What’s interesting is it usually ends up looking like the beast, like the serpent. So they’re not actually imaging themselves.

They end up typically imaging the beast. Some examples of this are Kane Laic, the people in Noah’s day, where you have Kane, who’s an elder son, who could model what it looks like to follow Yahweh, but instead he kills his brother. Laic is a man of poetry. He could write. Songs and music that reflect the goodness of God.

Instead, he writes a poem about men. He is killed and the people who know his day very depraved, very wicked people. 

Israel – Gen 12-Mal 4

The third act of this story is Israel, the story of Israel. It’s a sub subplot that is communicating something, teaching us something about the main plot that is fully manifested in Jesus Israel.

Their story begins in Genesis 12 where God calls Abraham and it continues through Malachi four. If we’re reading as we, most of us have in our English or Sbn, SB K J V Bibles 

Yahweh covenants with the family to bring about blessing by setting them among the nations. 

Now some of us wonder why Israel. Why not the Canaanites? There’s not an answer for the question of why God covenanted with that family. But through the story of Israel, we see that God cares just as much about the Canaanites as he does about the Israelites. 

The problem is the Israelites did not reflect the image of God. They did not reflect, they did not live out their commission. 

Trusting God’s way is good and not leaning on their own understanding, and it as a result that not only hurts them, but it also hurts the nations that they’re placed among. 

We see God’s instruction through the story of Israel. We see instruction for life both wise and good design. It’s just good hygiene, good way of taking care about care of yourself, good eating, good diet, but also instruction for righteous and just behavior.

We get that through the story of Israel. So what does it look like to image God Well, Read the Torah, read the instructions given to Israel. We see this continued cosmic struggle, however, of mankind doing what is right in their own eyes and not trusting that God’s good actually is good. And what he calls evil actually is evil.

We see God’s faithfulness and his heart for all peoples through the story of Israel, and we see man’s need for a Messiah. I don’t know about you, but if we would just go Genesis one, two, and three, maybe even through 11, and then get to Jesus, it would sort of be like, oh, cool. This is a cool story, right?

But when you sit in the story of Israel and generation after generation and God’s faithfulness and they continue to just walk away from him, And then you get to this place of this utter need where in, in Isaiah, where the people are saying, we have sinned. Woe to us, burst through the heavens and come down.

That’s where it get. God wants to bring mankind to that place. You cannot do it. I have told you how to live according to my design, but you cannot do it because you are set in your way of deciding for yourselves what is good and evil. You’re not trusting me, and you need my divine help to be restored back into relationship with me and the world to function rightly again.

And so by the time we get to the end of Malachi, we are desperate for a messiah.

And what’s really interesting is every book of prophecy that ends with judgment for Judah and Israel ends with the continued hope of a remnant that a Messiah is coming. And we get that reinforced throughout the writings.

We talked about the three sections of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, the prophecy, the prophets, and then the writings. The writings communicate. The Messiah’s coming and we’re ready for the Messiah. 

Jesus – The Gospels

Jesus is the fourth act of this magnificent story, and this is the Gospels. Matthew, mark, Luke, John, we see God in person.

What does God look like? Look at Jesus. 

That is God. He showed up on the scene. He’s burst through the heavens, come down and he is here in flesh and blood eating with us sinners. That’s radical in a cultural context. Where to eat with someone was to communicate equality like I am one with you. We have a holy and perfect God bursting through the heavens, coming down and communicating that he’s one with us of broken people.

But that’s the only way we can be redeemed, is to become one with Yahweh. And that’s the thrust of the New Testament as we’ll discover.

The whole goal of Jesus on earth is to show us what God looks like, what it looks like to image God, and to set us free from our sin and inaugurate a new covenant with humanity.

And so any one of us, not just Israel, any one of us can enter that new covenant through faith in Jesus Christ and through the circumcision of our hearts. Where we allow our whole being to be penetrated by the spirit and person of God so that we can be transformed into people, surrendered to him and living out his design.

Creational Restoration (the era of the Church) – Acts-Revelation

And then the last, the fifth act is, and NT Wright calls it the church. I call it creation restoration. And this is Acts through Revelation. 

God continues His story through us, through the church. 

Not just the New Testament Church, but the church here today. The church in America in 2023. The church in India in 2023, the church in Russia in 2023, the church in Ukraine in 2023.

The church in Zambia in 2023, the church in New Zealand in 2023. The church in Chile in 2023. God continues his story through you and I. Today. He restores creation through a covenant kingdom that is the church. The Kingdom of God is at hand within the hearts of people whose eyes have been fixed on him through repentance.

They have turned away from doing what is right in their own eyes to fully fixing on God through Jesus Christ. Entrusting that his design is best. And what he says is good. What he says is evil. That’s the kingdom of God. And this kingdom functions not through coercion like the kingdoms of this earth.

The kingdom functions through covenant covenanting together. We who are sinful now become righteous and reflect God’s image as we were intended to all along. 

That’s us. That’s where we live. That’s our part of the story right now. But this creation restoration, we also catch a glimpse that Jesus is victorious.

So we’re living out in chaotic times, in difficult circumstances, in tumultuous national settings. We clinging to the fact that Jesus is victorious, God’s will is accomplished in being accomplished throughout the earth. We get to participate in that and the very end of this story ends in a garden city dwelling, in God’s presence again, and the T Tree of Life is there and we who have been faithful will be united and get to experience this sweet fellowship face to face with Yahweh again.

So it starts in a garden, it ends in a garden city, starts a couple in a garden, it ends a city of people in the garden. It’s a beautiful story. So that’s the overarching theme. 

Some lingering questions

And it’ll help you kinda reframe how you read through this again, but we might have some lingering questions as we progress through this, as you’ve listened to this episode.

So what do we do with ethical struggles that we face? How do we know what is right and wrong? Are you saying we don’t Oh, the Bible’s just this thing. There’s just a story that we read through and it’s fascinating and it’s exciting, it’s beautiful. I’ve got issues I’m dealing with right now.

What do I do with that? Are you saying it’s wrong for me to go to scripture to find guidance for that? What do we do with various beliefs about God and doctrines and so forth? Is it not true that like you’re saying that we should not go to scripture to, to better understand what is the nature of hell, right.

What about all these debates that the church has dealt with for years? Like, how do you know what exists within the cannon or how do you know the nature of the spirit’s work among believers? Are we not to dive into scripture to, to understand that and discover that? Or what about times where we don’t feel very inspired?

In fact, something I hear a lot of from folks is, Asher, that sounds great, but it also sounds overwhelming. Like how now I, and now I can’t just sit down and read Matthew again, right? I gotta know, how does it fit in with the overarching story? I want to be connected with God. I sit down with scripture and it, I just, it’s like talking to a brick wall.

It’s like nothing’s there and there’s this struggle and this desire. We want inspiration. We want connection with Yahweh. What do we do with these things? That’s exactly what we’re gonna get into in the next episode, so I’m not gonna go on. I’ve taken enough of your time. Now we’re gonna dive into those questions because those are very good and legitimate questions.

We’ll get into that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that. Thank you for coming on this with me, this series, and diving into, I would love to hear what questions do you have or how does this impact you have? Have you ever seen the Bible as story before and hearing some of these approaches, like how I should reframe how I read the text?

Okay. What impact does that have on you? Do you have questions specifically related to that, or do you have an observation that you’ve noticed has it helped you or blessed you in any way? I would love to hear your feedback. You can send it to podcast asher whitman.com, or if you’re watching this on YouTube or on the blog, you can drop it in the comment section below.

If you got this as an email, you could reply to the email. Either way, I’d love to hear from you. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

How does seeing God’s story and understanding the Bible as wisdom literature change the way you’ve viewed scripture? What questions do you have about God’s story and about connecting it with yours? You can share in the comments below.

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