To imagine that God has a story is wonderful, to be a part of the story as it continues to unfold is incredible. For most followers of Jesus the story starts with the cross. Those who guide unbelievers into the faith begin the story with the cross and most who begin there never go too far from there. The simple version of this story states that Jesus was born and Jesus died on the cross to save people from their sins so that they can go to heaven. A few of Jesus' parables may be added to enlarge the story. But the story that Jesus came, Jesus died, accept him as Savior and go to heaven is the story that we have told. The really brave ones (or crazy depending on your beliefs) may venture into the Book of Revelation to help guide people into how the story ends, but most people stick with the simple story. But that is not the story; at least its not God's whole story. The story that belongs to God begins long before the cross.
The real story begins with God who is the Creator of a good creation that he revels in and enjoys. We are the most prized of all this creation as human beings and play a leading role in the story. The creation is altered in a most-horrible way by the rebellion of his most prized creature, but the Creator doesn't abandon his work or his creature made in his image. He seeks instead to fully restore his human creatures and then use them to fully restore the creation that they brought the darkest of consequences to. This is important to the story but very little space is actually given to it.
The bulk of the story is about how this plot to redeem and restore unfolds. It begins with a man named Abraham and quickly moves to his descendants called the people of Israel who are chosen through sovereign election to be God's people. These people were to be the Creator's treasured possession shining light to a darkened world and spreading salt to a decaying creation. These people were his hand-picked spiritual community through which he would show his gracious nature and restore his creation to its original glory and purpose. But just as the patriarch and matriarch of all humanity rebelled against its good and gracious Creator in the very beginning, Israel, miraculously created from the faith-filled heart and the barren womb of the new patriarch and matriarch of God's choosing, would also rebel and bring further deterioration to the already broken creation.
The story weaves its way through a miraculous emancipation from captivity, a wilderness journey, a code of conduct known as the Law, a Tabernacle and a priesthood, a Promised Land of plenty, Kings and Prophets, a Temple of glorious renown, tragic idolatry, and ultimately to a most dreaded state of exile and slavery. At the completion of the story's darkest chapter the whole creation is without hope because the creatures designed to care for it not only betrayed it, but refused to embrace the offer of the Creator to be his tools to fix it.
At its darkest point a light begins to be seen of God's new creation. The long awaited Messiah: the one who would come as the Promised Seed of Abraham, the Prophet spoken of by Moses, the King promised to David, and the Messenger of Isaiah, was introduced by the words of a young virgin and confirmed by a faithful old priest. The One who would fix everything was coming! God would visit his people with salvation and shalom would reign again!
This is where the chapter containing the simple version of the whole story gets written. The story we shared to begin this writing is in reality only a chapter, howbeit the most significant chapter, in the epic that is God's Story. The chapter containing Jesus coming and Jesus dying is incomplete without the story that has gone before it and that are to follow. And yet the chapters both before and after have no purpose without this amazing chapter. In trying to make the Jesus chapter the whole story we alter the story's plot and misrepresent the Author's intention for the story's ending. If we tell the story without the Jesus chapter it is only a tragedy of the worst kind with no hope or redemption whatsoever. Both what went on before and what transpires as a result of the chapter on Jesus are important to the story.
Jesus arrives on the pages of the story with the weight of centuries of Prophet-inspired expectations to restore Israel's fortunes and make her light shine once again. He would end injustice, wipe out poverty, set free her captives, heal hearts that had been broken, and restore Shalom to a people totally crushed by years of failed hope. He would shine a light in a world knowing only darkness. When he makes his first announcement, he embraces the Prophetic agenda with passion and determination and from his reading of Isaiah 61, boldly declares that He was the fulfillment of God's plan to heal his broken creation. He spoke of God's Kingdom, a Kingdom that would have no end, in terms that left no doubt of what God was up to. He demonstrated with power and authority that the Kingdom was now present in a new and dynamic way. He called without apology for everyone to reorient their lives to embrace this thing that God was doing and spoke of a day in which this Kingdom would take over all creation with the beauty, justice, peace, and joy that God had designed in the very beginning.
How would he do it? How would the Hero rescue the beloved creation and with it, the most prized of all its creatures, the ones who spoiled it to begin with? He would do it by being the One who would fully embrace the Creator's call to an obedience that would lead right up to death. He would do it by teaching, preaching, and demonstrating the radical elements of life as the Creator designed it (the Kingdom). He would do it by suffering. On something called a cross, where common criminals by the thousands faced death daily, the hero would suffer and die. In doing so, he would reconcile the creation to its Creator and set in motion the long awaited Kingdom. He would do it by being raised from death, the dreaded enemy introduced by the rebellion of the very first humans, and guaranteeing that the promise of the full restoration of all things spoken by all the prophets was now in motion. He would do it by sending the Holy Spirit in a dynamic way as a foretaste of this restoration, to empower his people to live in the Kingdom now and guarantee their life in it in the age to come.
The story continues on to the current day and beyond. The people of the story are still called Abraham's descendants, but they are his children by faith rather than blood. These people still experience the things that God's people have always experienced and still write chapters of triumph as well as failure. They still struggle in attempts to be faithful to the One and Only True Creator. They are still fascinated with idols and insist on doing things their own way. They still encounter amazing acts of grace and demonstrations of kindness from a faithful God. They are still endued with the responsibility to be light and salt to the world until the Kingdom is fully here.
The final chapter is yet to be written. How long the epic continues to unfold is known only to the Author. We do know however how it ends. The people of God, now fully restored with new bodies and sinless hearts, and God himself become united in this thing called the City of God and descend to the newly recreated earth with newly recreated heavens and experience life as the Creator originally intended. It is an amazing story of an Amazing God.
It is my story and I'm sticking to it.
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