The Story of the Bible

Heavenly Father, you have made your people to be a people of the book. We love your Holy Word. We read it, sing it, pray it, and inwardly digest it. Help us to hear the story of the Bible, and most importantly, help us to located ourselves within that story so that we can understand who we are, where we are, when we are, what’s gone wrong with the world, what you’re doing to fix it, and our role in that great salvific story. Give us eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand, and we ask all of this in the same of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Thank you all for coming. I’d like to officially welcome all of you to to the start of our new Adult Catechesis course:

The Story of the Bible

We’re going to get into that story, the Story of the Bible, in broad outline format before we close today, but for right now, to start our course off and before I start doing a bunch of talking, I want to hear from you. We don’t have time to hear everyone’s answer, but we’ll take a few minutes right now to hear a few replies to this question:

What is the one question that you want to ask about the Bible?

I’m not going to give any answers right now. I’m only going to listen, but I want to hear from you what kind of questions are on your mind. So let’s open this open. What is the one question you’d like to ask about the Bible?

Parking Lot

Okay! Thank you for those questions. Everything you’re asking will help me prepare for this course and gives me ideas about courses for the future. One thing in particular that we should talk about right now is the parking lot. And no, I’m not talking about the parking lot outside. I’m talking about the parking lot that we have in this class. In an effort to get me to stay focused on the topic and task at hand, if you ask a good question, but one that isn’t directly relevant to what we’re talking about in the moment, I’m going to say something like, “We’re going to put that question in the parking lot,” which means maybe I’ll answer it in weeks to come or maybe it will be in an entirely different course or context. I hope that you understand we’re doing this not to ignore your questions, but to keep us, and by us I mean me, focused on that week’s objective.

And this week’s objective is to introduce the course, to explain what we’re doing, and most importantly, why we’re doing it. As you might recall, this is fundamentally a course on:

Discipleship

That might not be apparently, so let me explain what I mean by that. Our Lord’s great commission to his church is found in Matt 28:19-20

Matthew 28:19–20 ESV

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Of everything that’s said here in these important verses, the emphasis falls on the word “make disciples.” In Greek, that’s the only imperative or command in these verses. Everything else is participles. Everything else is tangential to that command.

But what does it mean to make disciples?

For some people, making disciples is equal to evangelism. We preach the Gospel, someone believes, and we have made a disciple. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind. In that analogy, becoming a disciple is like crossing a line. On one side of the line you’re not a disciple, and on the other side you are. I suggest, on the contrary, that Jesus gives his church a much more difficult task. Getting across that line may be the start of discipleship, but a better analogy for what Jesus has in mind is the process of baking bread. Making a disciple is like making bread. All along the way as you gather ingredients, preheat the oven, mix the ingredients, knead the dough, and then finally place it in the oven (and I’m certainly leaving out some steps), you’re making bread. But this (and this is important):

You haven’t made bread until you’ve pulled the finished bread out of the oven.

The goal isn’t the process. The goal is the finished product. Crossing the line and praying the prayer is the beginning of the process of becoming a disciples, but that certainly isn’t all that Jesus had in mind. Jesus’ command that we make disciples isn’t merely about the beginning of the process, but the end and everything in between. It’s about making:

“Fully-Baked” Christians

So the question we have to ask ourselves is how we get from where we are to there, how we get where where we are to the goal. How do we help each other, and the nations outside our walls, become fully-baked disciples of Jesus Christ? There are lots of potential answers to that question, but at the foundation of them all is the question of identity.

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?

Or, how do we identify a disciple of Jesus Christ. What does a disciple of Jesus Christ do? What’s the goal? What problem is he or she trying to fix, and what’s the solution? That’s what this course is about. I want to teach you the story of the Bible in broad outline form so that you, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, can locate yourself in the story and have a better understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

This course isn’t like a course on the story of the Lord of the Rings. We’re not just telling a story, even a great story. And it is a great story. But the goal here is for you all to be able to locate yourselves in that story, to understand yourselves as participants in that story. We’ll get to this later, but the danger is that if we don’t know the story well, first, we won’t be able to share it with others, and second, if we get the story wrong, where it began, where it’s going, and what happened in between, we may misunderstand our role. We may misunderstand what it means to be disciples. So in terms of discipleship, this is at the foundation of everything.

Worldview

Another term for what we’re talking about here is worldview. I suspect most of you have probably heard this term before, but for those who haven’t, simply put, and you can see this in the term itself, our worldview is how we view the world around us. But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Our worldview isn’t simply how we view the world. Rather:

Our worldview is how we understand our place in the world.

A worldview can be charted or understood upon an axis with four points. You have this in your handout, but let me put it on the screen.

Our worldview is a combination of the stories we tell, the symbols that define us, the actions we take in the world (that’s that word praxis), and our answers to five specific questions.

We’ll come back to those questions in a minute, but for now, I want to look at each part of this axis, starting with story.

Story

We are the stories that we believe. We are the stories that we inhabit intentionally or unintentionally. Most of the stories that we believe and inhabit are told to us by other people whom we trust, whom we love, and we accept them and inhabit them. From our earliest days, we make sense of our lives based on the stories other people tell us. There’s a sense in which you could call this indoctrination, but put quite directly, there’s no other option. Stories are how we as human beings make sense of the world. And please note that I’m using story as a very broad term. I’m using story in such a way that even an individual word (and you might say, well, that’s just one word) has inherent in them stories. They have beginnings, ends, and inherent roles in those stories. Think about who are mom is. We’re simply told who are mother in since we’re little. We’re told to call her mom. We’re taught how to respond appropriately to our mother. In fact, we figure this our implicitly. We figure out what gets us positive responses from those around us, and we embrace those roles. Who our dad is. There’s a story there too. We don’t sit there at four years old and says, “Hey, before I call you dad, I’m going to need a paternity test,” because we’re inheriting a story told to us by other people. It may be true, it may be false, it may be somewhere in between. It may be a beautiful case of adoption. But until we’re presented with contradictory facts, someone gives us a story, we inherit that story, and we live our role in that story. There’s a story in who our family is. Not just who our parents are, but who there parents were, and the values and priorities they passed down to them and are now passed down to us. We have family values and family history. They are imposed on us, and we are expected to live out our role in that story. We inherit these stories, and more importantly we inherit our roles in these stories.

Let me help you wrap your heads around this. In the United States, we tell different stories than they do in Russia and different stories than they do in Germany or South America. In the United States, the North tells different stories than the South, which is why we have these heated arguments about what to do about statues of southern generals because we’re telling different stories. The same person plays different roles in two very different stories. Your family has it’s stories, and the family that lives next to you has different stories, and these stories are how we make sense of the world. They’re quite literally what it is that gives the world meaning for us as human beings.

Let me give you some examples.

“Just three more strikes.”

What does that mean? It means one thing when it’s said to a bowler, another when said to a pitcher, and something entirely different when said to a drone pilot. The roles that we play. The stories that we inhabit. They’re what give our actions and our words meaning.

If you’re a married couple, and you got engaged at a fancy restaurant. Now you’ve been married for 20 years, it’s the day of your anniversary, and the husband says to the wife, “Hey, do you want to go such-and-such restaurant (the place where you got engaged) for dinner tonight?” He’s saying way more than he’s actually saying with his words. He’s saying, “Today’s our anniversary and I remember.” He’s saying, “This place is important in our story, and I want to go back there and almost reenact this moment we lived out before.” In a sense, if the husband said to the wife all the details… if he said, “Hey, in case you forgot, today is our wedding anniversary, and we got engaged at such and such restaurant, so let’s go there tonight for dinner,” it’s demeaning. It cheapens it because the value comes from the fact that you both know what the day is. You both know what the place means because it’s part of your story; it’s part of your identity.

Let me give another example. Imagine someone shouts the word “four/fore.” It is a little kid who just figured out what 2+2 equals or is it John Hayes after hitting a bad gold shot?

The words we speak and the write make sense to us and to others because of the stories that we inhabit. We think in story form. We learn in story form. (There’s a very good reason that we don’t just tell kids, “Now don’t say you need help when you don’t actually need help or eventually you’ll call for help and no one will come. Instead, we tell them the story of the boy who cried wolf.) We tell fable and moralistic tales because stories are how we learn. We understand each other in story form. If I asked you to tell me about yourself, you could tell me a bunch of facts (I was born on this date. I was weighed this amount. I was born in this hospital in this town) or you could tell me a story, a story that defines you and makes sense of your life, of what you do and the things you say. If you want someone to understand who you are, what makes you tick, what makes you do the things you do, what do you do? You tell a story. “I was raised in church all my life, and I always knew I wanted to be a preacher. It’s why I went off to Bible college in California because I thought that was the best place I could go to learn the Bible.” And my story goes on from there. If you want to understand me the list of facts might help a little, but if you want truly to understand me, you need to know my story.

Praxis

Praxis is simply a fancy word for the things that we do. Our worldview, our understanding of the world, our understanding of the stories we inhabit and the roles we are meant to play determine how we behave. And if you say, “well, I don’t always behave the way I intend” or “my behavior isn’t always consistent,” that’s ok. Our worldview isn’t something static, nor is our behavior fixed. The stories in our heads are often muddled and contradictory, and our minds and bodies are fallen and broken, something we’ll talk about more next week. And besides, we’re not really talking about the day to day activities of our lives. We’re talking about the big actions. Why does one person spend their life pursuing acquiring wealth and another spend their life giving their money away to feed the homeless? Why does one person marry and another choose singleness? This one’s going to sting a bit. Why do kids go to church with their parents when they’re young but often stop when they’re older? Because when they’re younger their living somebody else’s story and somebody else’s worldview, and when they get older, they can start to decide for themselves which stories they want to inhabit and which they don’t, and that affects their praxis, the things that they do. Worldviews imply a way of being in the world, and that way of being is praxis, which is tied to the stories we tell and inhabit, the answers to the questions that we give, and the symbols that make sense of our reality. Right there with the stories that we tell and inhabit are the actions that we take in our lives, the actions that make sense of our lives. We need to have the right story in place in our minds so that we know what we’re supposed to do, so that we can make sense of our lives and know what the ultimate goal of all this is. If we listen to one story, we have one goal in mind. If we listen to another story, we have a different goal in mind. We need to know how we’re supposed to be in this world, and knowing the right story

Symbols

This is the third one. I’m not going to linger here for very long, except to say that for the purpose of this course, the Story of the Bible, symbol may be the least significant. Symbols for us are shorthand ways of hinting at greater stories. A wedding ring symbolizes a wedding, marriage, and a family. A cross symbolizes the death and resurrection of Jesus. A flag represents a nation, and as such must be treated with respect. In this country, we stand for somethings, we kneel for others, and if you get that wrong you better watch out because these symbols are deeply engrained in us. They are telling bigger and larger stories than the mere object. When our symbols are called into question, we get anxious, nervous, even fearful, because the symbol represents so much more than the object itself. Look at the symbols that define your life. Notice the things that point to something greater than themselves, and you’ll start to get a sense of your worldview, of what truly matters to you.

Questions

Lastly, there are at least five questions that all of us are asking, implicitly and explicitly, and our answers to those question help us understand our worldview. I’m going to go through them one by one.

Who are we?

Where are we?

When are we?

What’s wrong?

What’s the solution?

Who are we?

Where are we?

When are we?

What’s wrong?

What’s the solution?

You can already hear the narrative format to those questions. How did I get here? Why am I in this place? What happened before me? When am I? What’s wrong with the world? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with the way things are? And how do we fix it.

Let’s think about these questions.

Who are we? Was I created by God or was I created by chance? If I was created by God, was it a loving, heavenly Father God or a violent, power-obsessed god?

Where are we? Are we on a planet that was created and called good that our God intends to restore, redeem, and make new, or we on a planet that God intends to do away with at the end of all things? What does it mean to be an American instead of a Canadian or a Russian? What it mean to have been born here rather than in another country? What does it mean to be born in Florida rather than California, to be born to this family rather than the family next door or in another country?

When are we? When we think about who we are and where we are we have to wrestle with the linear nature of our reality? To be an American or Christian today is built upon what it has meant to be an American or Christian in the past. We don’t just come into a story brand new and start creating things brand new. To be a member of your family is built upon your family’s past history. If there’s a story being told, we’re asking ourselves where we are in this story. Are we at the beginning? At the end? Somewhere in between? The Bible goes from Genesis to Revelation. Are we still in Genesis 1 and 2? Are we still in Matthew and Mark? Where are we?

What’s wrong? Most worldviews have built into them some problem. Call it evil, call it the devil, call it chaos, call it socialism or capitalism or the big bad wolf, most if not all worldviews have an inherent problem with the way the world is, and that leads to the last question.

What is the solution? Along with an inherent problem in all worldviews, there is also an inherent solution, some answer as to how to best deal with the problem in the world.

To answer these questions, we’re going to need a story, a big story, a story that explains everything. And if we want others to believe us, to think like we do, to behave like we do, to give the same answers to those questions that we do, to make sense of their lives the way that we do, in what we could call a Christian worldview, then we need to know that story and be able to tell it to others. When we can answer these questions (who we are; where we are; when we are; what’s wrong; and what’s the solution), we’re going to be understand what we should be doing in the world, and our place in that story.

The claim of Christianity is not that we have some particularly clever ideas, some insightful spiritual reflections, some nifty tidbits that will help you balance your checkbook or be a better mom or whatever. All of that is true, but the Christian worldview, the big story that we tell, the symbols that we hold up, they are speaking, or they claim to be speaking, about the creator God and their world. And so as NTW puts it,

“The Christian claim in particular is committed to it own publicness.” - NTW

That is to say that we, in our Christian theology and our Christian storytelling, claim not to be offering one story among many. The pluralist might say, “hey, there are lots of stories, lots of metanarratives, lots of ways of defining reality,” and there may be lots of options, but every worldview, including Christianity, says, “Yes, but this is the true one.” We claim to be telling not one story among many, but as the book title says, telling:

That’s what this course is about. It’s not about a great work of fiction or a great narrative that you might find some moral wisdom in. We’re talking about the true story of the world. And where do we go to find that story? Where do we go to find the answers to the questions about who we are? where we are? when we are? what’s wrong? and what’s the solution? We turn to Scripture. We turn to the Bible. We turn to the one book that tells the true story of the whole world.

So much of our reading of the Bible is piecemeal and fragmented. We take individual verses and frame them and put them on our walls. We might read a chapter here or there or maybe even a book or two, but we often do so in isolation from the greater story, the larger narrative running from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of revelation. And because we miss this bigger story in all of it’s brilliance and complexity, when we try to answer those five basic questions…

Who are we?

Where are we?

When are we?

What’s wrong?

What’s the solution

… we get the answers wrong, which means we get our worldview wrong, which means we don’t understand what it means truly to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, if we don’t know our role in the story, if we don’t know that story well.

The Story of the Bible

So let’s talk about that story now in broad detail. This is the 30,000 foot view. The book you’re reading by Bartholomew and Goheen tell the story as a drama in six acts. I understand why they arrange the material like this, but I’m not a fan of this division. So, instead of a six act drama with an interlude, we’re going to talk about the Story of the Bible in 5 parts

Creation

Fall

Israel

Jesus

Church

These five acts or parts are going to help us answer the questions of who we are, where we are, when we are, what’s wrong, and what’s the solution. That’s what this course is about. We’re laying the foundation of a Christian worldview so that we can know our place in the story of the Bible, in the true story of the whole world, and understand the role that we have to play as disciples of Jesus Christ in that grand narrative. That’s what this course is about. That’s why it’s the foundation of discipleship because if we can’t answer who we are, where we are, when we are, what’s wrong, and what’s the solution, we’re not going to have any clue about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. The story you’re going to hear over the next five weeks, the story we’re going to tell is the true story of the whole world, from beginning to end. That’s claim of the Bible, and nothing less. It’s the story that gives meaning to everything, everything we do, everything we say, every goal we have. It gives meaning our lives, our families. our relationships. It’s the story that gives meaning to everything. It’s the story that explains why the world is the way it is and what’s happened to set it right. It’s the story that tells us what it truly means to be disciples of Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll all come back the next five weeks to hear this incredible story.

Let’s close in prayer.

Heavenly Father, you have put before us a grand narrative, and you have made us in such a way as human beings that we find our meaning, we find our reason for the things that we do and the actions that we take in that story. The world bombards us, Lord, the moment we walk out of here, with all kinds of different stories with different values with different problems with different solutions, but in your Holy World we hear the the true story of the whole world. We hear the foundation on which to build the house of our lives. Help us to hear that story truly and rightly and to build our lives, our worldview, our way of being in the world, wisely upon that foundation of your Holy Word. Amen.

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