The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Page 7
Here’s the question the Story asks us, and it reveals what we mean by a wiki-story: Is Jesus’s temptation the reliving of Adam and Eve’s experience in Eden? (Jesus is then cast as the second Adam, only this time perfectly obedient, and thereby the pioneer of a new Adamic line.) Or, which is more probable, is Jesus’s temptation by Satan the reliving of Israel’s wilderness testings? (Jesus is then recast as the second Moses or a second Israel leading his people to a new promised land.) In either case, Matthew casts the story of Jesus’s temptations as an updated version, a wiki-story, of an older story—either the Eden story or the wilderness story.
Many New Testament specialists will tell you that nearly every page of the New Testament is a wiki-story on an Old Testament wiki-story. In fact, the Old Testament scholar John Goldingay says the New Testament is nothing but footnotes on the Old Testament!6 He adds that “one cannot produce a theology out of footnotes.” That is, if you don’t have the Old Testament in your head, you can’t grasp what the New Testament authors are saying. (Goldingay, as is typical with him, exaggerates to make a point—only he might not think he’s exaggerating.)
Here’s where we are:
• The Bible is a Story.
• The Story is made up of a series of wiki-stories.
• The wiki-stories are held together by the Story.
• The only way to make sense of the blue parakeets in the Bible is to set each in the context of the Bible’s Story.
None of the wiki-stories is final; none of them is comprehensive; none of them is absolute; none of them is exhaustive. Each of them tells a true story of that Story. In our next chapter I want to sketch what the Story looks like.
CHAPTER 5
THE PLOT OF THE WIKI-STORIES
How Does the Bible Work?
Saying the Bible is Story is not saying it is make-believe or a fib or fiction or myth, nor is it to assert that gobs of the stories didn’t happen. We say the Bible is Story because if we read it from beginning to end, we discover that it has three features: it has a plot (creation to consummation), it has characters (God—Father, Son, and Spirit—and God’s people and the world and creation around them), and it also has many authors who together tell the story. So to discover the basics of the Story, I will ask you to sit back and imagine something with me.
Imagine Jesus reclining at the head of a table at a writers’ banquet. To his right are more than thirty authors, the authors of Old Testament books.1 To his left are more than ten authors of New Testament books. Each of these authors has his (or her) hand raised—not to ask a question but for permission to tell their story of the Story. Each one has a story to tell, or perhaps even better, each one has a way of telling the Story. Before they are given permission, however, Jesus gives them some instructions in the form of a plot to which they are to conform their story. We are only imagining Jesus at the head of this table, of course, and one can find theological reasons to put the Father or the Holy Spirit at the head of the table. Our point is that God directs the Bible along the line of the Story.
Where to Begin?
But where do we begin? One of the adventures of Bible reading is that it all depends on what questions you are asking. Yes, there is an overarching plot to the Bible—God’s creating the heavens and earth to completing his creation work in the new heavens and new earth. But our Bible has so many themes and so many characters and twists and turns that we are suddenly confronted with an abundance of riches. We could tell the history of Israel and focus on events; we could tell a history of Big Influencers, beginning with Adam and Abraham and skipping to Moses and Isaiah before we get to Jesus, who eclipses the apostles. We could tell a history of culture making from Genesis to Revelation, as Andy Crouch has recently done.2 We can tell the Bible’s story of ongoing justice and liberation or the Bible’s story about human nature or social organizations or politics. As a Bible professor, I’ve seen dozens of approaches to the Bible’s Story, and nearly every one of them has something to offer to the Bible reader.
There is not just one and only one story in the Bible. But there are two nonnegotiables in the Bible’s Story. First, there is a general plot from the creation of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1–2 to the establishment of the new heaven and the new earth in Revelation 20–22. Second, there are redemptive benefits for those who participate in that “general plot” by declaring allegiance to the God of that plot. Before I get to the redemptive benefits (the story of the Eikon, the image of God, below), I want to sketch briefly the General Plot,3 which I will call the King and His Kingdom Story.
The King and His Kingdom Story
What our parents and our grade school teachers taught us was true, but for a moment we have to go against their wisdom. To comprehend the Bible’s King and His Kingdom Story, we have to go to the end of the Story, to the book of Revelation, to understand which direction we need to point ourselves as we navigate through the Bible itself. What we discover in Revelation 20–22 is that God’s plan for creation is the kingdom of God. God’s final kingdom here is called “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). Descending down from God’s dwelling place, this new city over the new Jerusalem has a king, the Lamb of God, who is not only king but the temple itself! God will be the people’s God and the people will be God’s people. There is something profoundly important in beginning with the end: we see that the plan of God is not just my personal salvation (I will discuss benefits below) but all of creation’s benefits! Evil will be defeated, goodness will be finally established for all time, all jewels and glittery items will be donated to the glory of God, the Lamb is all the light the new Jerusalem will need, peace and safety and open doors will be the way of life, and all God’s people will worship the one true God.
Knowing this end teaches us how to read the Bible’s King and His Kingdom Story. I suggest there are three chapters in this Story:
1. Theocracy: The Creator God who makes a covenant with Abraham rules, no humans are to rule, and all humans are to trust and obey this one true God. This Story is found from Genesis 1 to 1 Samuel 8. Thus, the story extends from Adam and Abraham to Moses and Samuel, but a noticeable feature of this story is that humans constantly resist the will of God, God makes a covenant to redeem them, gives the law to guide them, and provides a sacrificial system to reconcile them to himself. But most importantly, God turns his gracious and guiding attention especially to one family, Abraham’s, and to one nation, Israel. From Genesis on, the core of the Bible’s Story is Israel, and in the New Testament it is the church. Noticeably, unlike the nations all around Israel, there is no king among the one true God’s people. God alone is their king.
2. Monarchy: God permits, but only permits, his people Israel to have a king, a monarch. Why? Because as Samuel says to God, Israel wants a king so that they can be like the other nations. This extends from 1 Samuel 8 to Matthew 1:1. This can be called the monarchical concession of God in order to discipline Israel to see that God’s original way—theocracy—is the best way. God remains the one true God and King, but Israel gets a human king who is to be under God the King. Yet again, the kings act like the humans under Theocracy: they resist the will of God; God’s covenant provides a way of reconciliation and restoration; the sages of Israel develop wisdom for the people of God so they will learn how to live well and flourish; the prophets become more central to announce God’s will, to predict the future, and to declare that someday God will bring Israel back into a theocracy again. In the monarchy chapter, law, wisdom, and prophecy mature and become central to the community of God, Israel.
3. Christocracy: God calls a halt to the human rule of a monarchy, sends his royal Son—Jesus the King, the Messiah, the Son of God and Son of Man, and Wisdom incarnate. He lives with us, shows us how to live, teaches us the way of God, and then he dies for us, he is buried, he is raised for us, and he ascends to the right hand of the Father to rule. The Christocracy period extends from Matthew 1:1 to the end of Revelation, where the Lamb who is the Lion w
ho is the Son rules with the Father over the new heaven and the new earth. Once again, God rules (Christocracy is the theocracy), but now the people of God expand from Israel to include gentiles in the one people of God, the church. This people too are not perfect. Church people sin, but forgiveness is now granted through the cross of Christ. This Christocracy, the church age, will be completed when Christ returns, all evil is defeated, and the ways of God are established forever. Christocracy will then turn, as 1 Corinthians 15:20–28 shows, back into theocracy.
This is the Bible’s General Plot: from God creating the heavens and the earth to the completion of creation by establishing the new heaven and the new earth. I call this three-chapter Story the King and His Kingdom Story. This King and His Kingdom Story shapes every other story that can be told from the Bible, and stories that ignore the King and His Kingdom Story—any story where Jesus and his redemptive benefits are not central—fail to be consistent with the Bible’s General Plot.
Once we know the King and His Kingdom Story, we can learn to read the Theocracy chapter and the Monarchy chapter in light of the Christocracy chapter. We learn to see that Adam and Eve, made in the “image of God” according to Genesis 1:27, were fashioned after the True Image of God, Christ (Colossians 1:15–20). We learn in the King and His Kingdom Story that every king and prophet and priest were anticipations of Jesus—Prophet, Priest, and King. We learn that Israel’s wisdom in Proverbs and elsewhere points us to Jesus, the Wisdom of God incarnate, and that the way to live is to live in a Christlike way. We learn that the Passover and the sacrificial system of Exodus and Leviticus anticipate and are fulfilled in the death of Jesus on the cross. We learn that the exodus and the exile are fulfilled in Jesus’s own death, and that the exile is ended by the return of King Jesus to the temple. We learn that Jesus absorbed that exile in his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. God’s law for Israel anticipates following Jesus in the New Testament: those who follow Jesus are the realization of following the law of Moses. It is then profoundly Christian Bible reading to read the whole Bible as fulfilled in King Jesus and His Kingdom. Each wiki-story in the Bible has its place in its time, but it also has its place in the King and His Kingdom Story.
The Gospel
The Bible calls the Christocracy chapter of the King and His Kingdom Story the gospel. The gospel, however, has too often been reduced to its benefits. That is, it is reduced to what we get out of it and to salvation itself. How is it reduced? When we say the gospel is about our salvation, we make the Story’s benefits the whole Story, and in so doing a major mistake is made: the Story is no longer about the King but about us, about me. When we keep focused on the King and His Kingdom Story, Jesus (the King) remains central. But when we make the redemption central, it becomes about us, and Jesus becomes not the subject of the Story but the means of our redemption. This is why the Christocracy chapter of the Story is described as Paul transmits it to us in 1 Corinthians 15:1–5 as a Story first and foremost about Jesus:
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.
That is also why the gospel sermons in the book of Acts, preached by the apostles Peter and Paul, are so uniformly focused first on the story of Jesus and then, only after we focus on the King, can we talk about the redemptive benefits that the King offers to us. Here is one example, from Peter’s sermon in Acts 10:34–43:
Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached—how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.
“We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
For Peter, to preach the gospel is to tell the Story of the King and His Kingdom, and after he has told the Story of Jesus he tells his audience the redemptive benefits of salvation, which we will discuss in the next section.
There are many approaches to the Bible’s Story, but we need to keep the General Plot—the King and His Kingdom—in mind for each approach. When focusing here on the redemptive benefits, the approach needs to recognize that the redemptive benefits come to us through this King, the benefits are designed for us to respond in faith and obedience with thanksgiving to the King, and these benefits are to become a blessing we share with others. God’s grand Story graciously includes us and draws us into redemption and glory to God alone. The Story is not about us, it is about God. This God is the Redeemer and this King is the Agent of Redemption and His Kingdom Story is a story about those who are redeemed.
Redemptive Benefit Story
Here are the basic elements of the redemptive benefit plot inside the King and His Kingdom Story to which all Bible writers have been asked to conform, whether or not they choose to bring up each specific element. The elements of the redemption plot revolve around five themes.
Plot Theme
Creating Eikons (Genesis 1–2) Oneness
Cracked Eikons (Genesis 3–11) Otherness
Covenant Community (Genesis 12–Malachi) Otherness expands
Christ, the Perfect Eikon, redeems (Matthew–Revelation 20) One in Christ
Consummation (Revelation 21–22) Perfectly One
Each author must write their story within this redemption plot, but they are given considerable freedom to tell the Story in their own way. Whether you turn to Exodus or Ezra, Malachi or Mark, or Acts or Hebrews, you must read each book as a variation on this Story.
One of the most exciting findings of those who learn to read the Bible as Story is to see how each book or author shapes the various elements of this plot, emphasizing one element or another. We cannot do this for each book of the Bible in this book, but a good place for you to begin is with one of the minor prophets, say Micah or Haggai, and see what you think each writer does with each of these elements of the plot. Once you get the hang of reading the Bible this way, you can then map the story of each author. Before long you will have a notebook full of ideas about each of these points . . . but especially the ones in the middle.
The most important thing I have to say here is this: The unity of the Bible is the King and His Kingdom Story that brings redemption. It is this Story that puts the Bible together. Our grand systems of theology, however helpful they are, do not form the unity of the Bible; the Story that God tells forms and frames that unity. The plot I sketch below is not simply mine, though I have put my own stamp on it here and there. Essentially, this is the plot the church has always used to understand the narrative flow of the Bible’s redemptive story. Recently I read a book called On the Apostolic Preaching by a second-century saint, Irenaeus of Lyons (in France). His book is the oldest commentary on how to read the Bible, and the plot I sketch below is essentially the same as the one Irenaeus sketches.4
It is the only plot the church has ever had. The Bible’s plot is the King and His Kingdom Story that brings redemption.
CREATING EIKONS : Designed for Oneness
We begin at the beginning (Genesis 1–2), which begins with God, who creates everything. The instant someone uses the word “create” in the Christian world, however, we face a problem: evolution and creation, faith and science. These debates have made it enormously difficult for modern readers to see what these two chapters are really about.5 If we drop that concern so we can engage this text, we will discover a window onto the whole Bible.
The pinnacle of God’s speaking things into existence was creating human beings. To clarify what God says about this event, I will translate two important words in Genesis 1:26–27 with unfamiliar words to grab our attention and lead us to the heart of what creation is all about. “Let us make The Adam [human beings] in our Eikon [image, likeness of God].”6 Here are the verses set out in full:
Then God said, “Let us make The Adam in our Eikon, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created The Adam in his own Eikon, in the Eikon of God he created them.