Act 1: God's Plan for All People (which is finished in the first week of reading)
Act 2: God's Covenant People (the story of Israel)
Act 3: God's New Covenant People (the New Testament)
Reading the Bible as one large, cohesive story helps us to become more familiar with the larger purposes of God. (remember our key line from Gregory the Great about learning the heart of God.) We see that God's actions as recorded in Scripture aren't random; they have a purpose behind them. The major purpose of God in creation was to enjoy and bless his creation and to give it freedom to grow and multiply and fill the earth. God has a fundamental appreciation for life and for abundance. In fact, the late theologian Colin Gunton says that if there is "one single leading idea in Scripture," it is probably the word LIFE. I love that, because I think that is so unexpected, so counter to the common idea that the Bible is an old musty book or is focused on sin and judgment. It's about LIFE! And yet as we saw on Week 1, Day 2 of our reading, death crept in so quickly. We don't have a crystal clear explanation for this in Scripture; we still have questions about reading Genesis 2, like: If God made his world good, where did evil come from? Where did the serpent's wily attitude come from? Why didn't God prevent things from going wrong? None of those questions are answered fully by the text itself, though we can speculate on that based on other aspects of Scripture or theology (such as that creation needed to have freedom to turn away from God in order for abiding by God's ways to have any meaning). (Plus I would also say, keep in mind that in Genesis 1, God said his creation was "good", not "perfect.")
Last week, we saw how God's grief over the corruption of his creation resulted in the flood. After the flood, though, God committed to never destroy his creation on that level again. Now God's major purpose is to find another means to deal with that corruption. If we think of God as the author of the grand story of the Scripture, this means that he won't try to scrap the story again; he won't crumple the papers up, toss them in the wastebasket and start with a clean sheet of paper. Instead, God will keep writing the story until it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Here at the beginning of Act 2, God's efforts to redeem his work turn to Abram. It is so interesting to me how God chooses to redeem his creation. He doesn't snap his fingers and just fix everything. Perhaps that would dishonor the integrity and reality of his creation, which is more than just a puppet he is manipulating. Instead, he chooses one man and calls him out "to a land that I will show you" (Gen 12:1). God starts really small. And as Genesis 12 unfolds, we see that God picked an unlikely character to star in his play. He picked a guy who in verse 4 is gutsy enough to leave his city and home and go to an unknown land, and yet by verse 11 is wimpy enough to throw his wife and her honor under the bus to escape Pharaoh's envy (which, by the way, is entirely imagined by Abram! When Pharaoh discovers Abram's lie, he gives Sarah back to him with a touch of righteous disgust. The pagan ruler is shown to have character here where Abram does not. Keep an eye out for that theme; it'll crop up again). Whereas before God chose a righteous man Noah, immediately after being chosen, Abram strikes out big time. Plus, as we have already discovered, Abram and his wife have no children, and Sarai is barren. This ought to rule them out from being the progenitors of anything, and yet they are God's choice to be father and mother of his people.
I think this is an important and encouraging detail for us. God doesn't choose Abram because of his virtue or his righteousness. In fact, God's reason for choosing Abram is a mystery. There is no hint given in the text for why God chooses him. Perhaps it's because God knew that Abram would say yes to packing up and leaving Ur, but again, the text doesn't say that explicitly. As you read the Bible, keep an eye out for this theme of God giving unlikely characters a chance to star in his play. God loves to surprise us and to overthrow our expectations of who's righteous and who's not, who's in and who's out. Abram will not be the last unlikely character!
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Sadly, there is no way to do footnotes in blogger, so I'm just going to include references at the bottom of my posts:
> Colin Gunton writes about life as the central idea of Scripture in his book The Christian Faith in the "Front Matter" (ie Introduction).
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Bonus Material!
1. John Stott's fourfold scheme of biblical history that outlines 4 major events in the Bible, each of which reveal an important reality:
Creation ("the good")
Fall ("the evil")
Redemption ("the new")
Consummation ("the perfect")
Stott says that "this fourfold biblical reality enables Christians to survey the historical landscape within its proper horizons." This can be found in Stott's book Issues Facing Christians Today, starting on page 62.
2. NT Wright's analogy of the Bible being like a 5 Act Play:
Act 1: Creation
Act 2: Fall
Act 3: Israel
Act 4: Jesus
Act 5: Church (this act is unfinished and is still being written in the world today)
This is from a lecture Wright gave in 1989, which is happily available online here. Scroll down until you see the heading "The Authority of a Story."
3. And then, to go all patristic on you, Augustine's 4 fold description of the state of humankind in the 4 phases of Scripture:
(a) at Creation: humankind is able to sin, able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare)
(b) after the Fall: humankind is not able not to sin (non posse non peccare)
(c) through Christ: humankind is able not to sin (posse non peccare)
(d) in heaven: humankind is unable to sin (non posse peccare)
Good times, huh? I love Latin!
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