Lesson 3: The Bible as a Story about a Kingdom
All of us feel connection to stories. From childhood and beyond, we never stop appreciating a plot where a hero rescues his people and restores the place they call home. Whether we are talking about Harry Potter, Star Wars, or the Lord of the Rings, we feel pulled in by a similar pattern that guides these narratives forward.
This is no accident. Like all great stories, these echo the great story God told through the world he made and the book he wrote. If you want to understand the grand story of the Bible, you have to comprehend it’s beginning, middle, and end as well as the key themes that move it forward.
Review
You have now learned two important skills in the first two weeks of this curriculum:
Discerning the author’s intention (week 1)
The law of proximity and context in determining meaning (week 2)
You could think of these as “small skills,” that is, they apply most directly to the immediate passage you are studying paragraph.
You could think of the skill this week, Reading the Bible as Story, as a “large skill” in that it takes the entire Biblical canon into account- it zooms out to the whole Bible rather than focusing on the more immediate details in the passage. Both small skills and large skills are important to reading the Bible well.
The Bible as Story
What do you think I mean when I say that “the Bible is a story”? Several distinct narratives fill the pages of the Bible- stories about David, Jesus, and others. Yet, the focus of this lesson is not on reading any of these individual stories, but on reading the whole of the Bible as one big story. In other words, each of these individual stories (as well as the other parts of Scripture) all fit together in one large plot line from Genesis to Revelation that’s ultimately about Jesus.
You may ask, Where are you getting the idea that the Bible is one large story? I was astonished when I first learned that the most similar chapters in the Bible to Genesis 1 and 2 are Revelation 21 and 22 (the last two chapters of the Bible). Think of it, in each of these passages there are trees (including the tree of life), rivers, precious stones, light, stars and suns, and dominion.
The biggest difference is that there has been substantial progression from Genesis’s description of the garden to Revelation’s New Creation. The garden has become a garden city and God’s presence is forever immediate and available to his people (Rev 22:4). Like any great story, the Bible has developed the same themes it introduced in the beginning, and over the course of its narrative, those same things have developed and escalated to their fitting conclusion.
At the center of this narrative is the main character Jesus who has no less than four separate narratives about his life, death, and resurrection and who also claims that the Old Testament Scriptures “bear witness” about him (John 5:39).
When you put these ideas together, you arrive at Tim Mackey’s helpful summary that, “the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus.”
The Story the Bible Tells
So, we know the Bible tells one large story and that one large story leading to Jesus. Now, what is this story that the Bible tells?
The Bible is a complex book, and different scholars will give different answers. Yet, one answer that has captured my attention is by Pastor Doug Wilson,
Scripture tells us the story of how a Garden is transformed into a Garden City, but only after a dragon had turned that Garden into a howling wilderness, a haunt of owls and jackals, which lasted until an appointed warrior came to slay the dragon, giving up his life in the process, but with his blood effecting the transformation of the wilderness into the Garden City.[1]
This definition points to what Tom Schreiner says in his book The King in his Beauty is the central theme in Scripture: The Kingdom of God.[2] The Bible is a story about a king and his kingdom.
The Kingdom of God
What does it mean that the Bible is a story about the kingdom of God? Mostly that the pattern of kingdom shapes the different narratives in the Bible. What is that pattern? Graeme Goldsworthy summarizes it this way, “the kingdom is God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.” [3]
This definition includes the three basic elements of a kingdom:
A people
A place
A rule
You can find each of these things beginning in the first narrative in Genesis.The people are Adam and Eve; the place they inhabit is a garden in Eden; and the rule they live under is God’s. Yet, when the snake tempts the people to rebel against God’s rule, God removes them from the place of life and blessing and the people face death.
The biblical narratives that follow is largely a renewal of God’s rule over his people, a return to a place of blessing and life, and a resurrection from death to life of God’s people.
In any part of the story of the Bible, you can always ask the following questions to orient yourself:
Who are God’s people? Some examples are Adam and Eve; the Israelites later; then Jesus and his disciples; then the redeemed nations.
What is the place God has provided for them? Some examples are the garden; the Promised Land; the church community; and the new creation.
Who is God ruling through? Some examples are Adam, Moses, David, Jesus, and God’s Word.
The Progression of the Kingdom
Your Bible consists of two major sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, God begins to reveal his restored kingdom, yet because of human disobedience it was “never fully realized.” Therefore, the Old Testament largely consists of pictures that anticipate what God’s kingdom should look like or examples of failure that leave us wanting for more.
For example, when king David shows mercy to the descendants of Saul (2 Sam 9:7), he anticipates the kind of love Jesus will shows to his enemies (Luke 23:24).
In the New Testament, Jesus arrives and begins proclaiming “the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15), he has come to recreate the pattern of God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule in a full and final way.
In the end, when Jesus returns, he will redeem the nations, usherer them into the new creation, and reign over them and with them as king (Rev 1:5). He will fulfill the pattern of Eden, only it will be better and never end.
[1] https://dogmadoxa.blogspot.com/2011/01/whats-message-of-bible-in-one-sentence.html
[2] Thomas R. Schreiner, The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), xii–xiii.
[3] Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, 87.
[4] Ibid, 89.
