Story

I came across some interesting thoughts this evening whilst reading my love a story or two out of the Jesus Story Book Bible (a seeming simple and silly place for inspiration), the chief of which is this. All of the Bible is a story. We’ve talked about this much I think in times past but it struck me as particularly potent this evening. I think over the Bible often times as story, often with the exception of Leviticus, Deuteronomy and often much of the New Testament past Acts and up to Revelation.

But why do I do that? Exempt certain books from the story?

So many times we hear objections to Christianity or the Bible as a system/book of rules, and often times we make that excuse for those books I’ve listed above. “Oh, it’s not a list of rules, it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship. It’s a story… Except for these five books.” Yet I think that is a mischaracterization of what the Bible is doing, that to exempt any of the books from the idea of “telling a story” of what God created in this microcosm called life on earth, is a mistake. I realized that all of the Bible is told in a context of a people in the setting of time, going through events that are shaping what God has either foretold or is actively acting out. Thinking of the Law, it was given to a people at a specific time for a period of time to give direction, to give guidance, to set them apart from the rest of the world for a reason. It’s part of a narrative. It can be damn boring and not often read, but it is set in narrative to a people God is using for a purpose. Jesus comes along in the New Testament as part of a new chapter of that same story: “Then he began to speak to them. “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!”” Luke 4:21. Often the writers of the New Testament look back to the early story to show how Jesus came to fulfill, to carry on, to push the story onwards. With Jesus, the old story does not change, God does not become different, he does not become someone new. He simply continues on with the Story he’s been telling the world for centuries. The writers of many of the teachings of the New Testament, ones we so often take to build elaborate doctrines and weighty theologies around, they were not trying to give material to theologians in our time to build doctrine around, they are trying to explain the story to us. They so often look backwards at what God did, they tell of the recent past, at what Jesus did. They look deeply into how those events apply and shape how the people of their time ought to have been living out the story and lastly they look far forward to the time when God would resolve all that has happened and not simply end the story with paradise, but open a new chapter in the coming Kingdom on earth.

And IN all that story lies the story for us to continue in our own time and place. There is much to glean from how the Apostles and authors of the Bible taught their own generations to how we live today. It might not be in rules, regulations, perfectly structured doctrine, but rather in a story told of how God has worked in the world in times past, in who God has been to the people in times past, what he has done for the people in times past and to apply all those things to how God works in our lives now, who God is to us now, and to what he is doing in our lives every day now. Not to say that how He has acted in the past governs how He will act now, but I think we will not find Him so much different from all that the Bible illustrates when it tells the story of God. For the Bible is not the story of us. It is not the story of the world and it’s history. It is the story of God, of who He is, of His character, of what He has done in the world and His promises of what is to come. He is the only figure who exists from the first word of the story until the last. The Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End… who has no beginning or end. Without Him, there would be no story.