Lesson 4: The Bible as a Story about a Kingdom
All of us feel a 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.
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. 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.”
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.
The Story is About Jesus
So far we have mostly seen that the Bible is a “unified story.” It traces the same themes of people, place, and authority across both testaments.
The final point I want to spend some more time meditating on is that this story “leads to Jesus.” That means he is going to be the ultimate interpretive key for any text. As mentioned earlier in this lesson, the whole Bible is a story about the victory of Jesus over the snake and the return of God’s people to a place of provision and life. So, it should not seem like too much of a stretch to think of the whole Bible as being about Jesus.
Also, we know we should read the Bible as being about Jesus because that’s how Jesus reads the Bible. Here is what Jesus said to some travelors on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection in Luke 24:
25 And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
The principle that every text is ultimately about Jesus is helpful for any text of Scripture, yet especially for Old Testament texts.You can even use this rule to make sense of Old Testament laws or other seemingly obscure sections.
You can take mostly any part of Scripture and ask two questions:
How does this fit into the progression of God’s kingdom- of his reign over a people in a place?
How does this text anticipate and find fulfillment in Jesus and his kingdom?
The second question is especially important and applicable with Old Testament texts. By way of reminder (or possibly for the first time for some of you), we are not under the Old Covenant as law for our lives in Jesus. That era of Jesus’s kingdom has given way to a new one Jesus calls the “New Covenant” (1 Cor 11:25). Yet, the Old Testament still exists as Scripture for us to interpret in light of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection (Rom 15:4). It continues to instruct us even though that era of redemptive history has passed.
Let me give you an example from Leviticus 19:9 - 10:
9 “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. 10 And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God.
Is this a law that New Testament believers must follow with their gardens or farms if they have them? No, we are not under this covenant any longer.
Yet, though the Old Covenant was temporary, the Old Testament always remains God’s Word for his people and reveals the character of God. Let’s ask and answer the two questions above to receive insight into how these verses apply to New Testament saints:
First, How does this fit into the progression of God’s kingdom- of his reign over a people in a place? In this verse, God’s people the Israelites live in the Promised Land under God’s rule. Living under God’s rule requires them to provide for their fellow Israelites and those who have joined God’s people who are poor and lack productive farm land.This practice reveals the character of the God of Israel. That’s why this section ends with the statement “I am the Lord your God.”
Next, How does this text anticipate and find fulfillment in Jesus and his kingdom? Jesus is the ultimate example of this verse- “though he was rich, yet for your sake he beame poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). He was the one who provided more than his left over gleanings- he gave his whole life so that his people could live. Now, God invites us to follow Jesus by acting out his own generous character in day to day life. Jesus fulfills this law by being its supreme example and we echo Jesus’s fulfillment by following his example in our own generosity.
And, for those who follow Jesus, we should look for ways to provide for fellow believers in our community (that is, God’s people in our own time) who financially lack the ability to survive and thrive. We can see a radical example of this practiced by the early church in Acts 2:44 - 45,
44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
By applying these questions to an obscure law about harvesting, we can see how this text fits in the story of God’s kingdom, is ultimately about Jesus, and shapes our own practice and generosity in day to day life. It is by reading Scripture as a unified story that leads to Jesus- that is, as literature with a main character- that we are able to take things from anywhere in Scripture, see how they fit into the pattern of the kingdom, ask how they relate to Jesus, and apply them to our own lives.
