In the Prologue, Part 1, I wrote, “To get to specific answers to particular questions, it helps to get the big picture first—to see the overall theme in the Bible. There is a grand story or plot that will keep us on track as we look at the smaller sections.
Simply put, the theme of the Bible is that the same God who created us loves us, and keeps reaching out to us even though we rebel against Him. Having reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ (see II Cor. 5:18-21), God makes us partners in extending His love to others and in helping to make right what is wrong in the world.”
Today we start to see the details of how we will look at that theme. There are 66 books in the two major sections of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments. More than 50 different writers, inspired by God, wrote these books that cover a timeline from Creation to around 100 A.D. It helps to use some kind of mental device to pull all these diverse works together and see the thread that runs through all of them. We will borrow the device of a play, developed by N.T. Wright as seen below.
In his masterful work The New Testament and the People of God,[i] N. T. Wright details his concept of seeing the Bible as the foundational story of Judaism, and therefore of the early church. Here he expands on what he just outlined in his much smaller book, The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God--Getting Beyond the Bible Wars [ii], the big picture of the Bible can be seen if the Bible is presented as a five-act drama.[iii]
Those five acts are Creation, the Fall, Israel, Jesus, and The Church. As we get into our study, it might seem strange for the first Act to encompass only two chapters of Genesis and the second Act covering only nine chapters of Genesis while the third act encompasses the rest of the Old Testament. The drama is not balanced in length.
The power of the storyline in this drama is not dependent upon the number of scenes in each act, however. Without Act I, Act II doesn’t make sense. And without Acts I and II, the rest of the drama would be incomprehensible. In fact, without the foundation given in Acts I and II, we would have no way to understand the life we live or the universe we live in.
Those are bold claims, but they start to ring true when we see how Wright presents his concept of the story of the Bible as a drama.
Seen from the perspective of a first-century Jew…the basic story concerned the creator god and the world, and focused upon Israel’s place as the covenant people of the former placed in the midst of the latter.
Thus, the call of the patriarchs was set against the backcloth of creation and fall. Abraham was seen as the divine answer to the problem of Adam. The descent into Egypt and the dramatic rescue under the leadership of Moses formed the initial climax of the story, setting the theme of liberation as one of the major motifs for the whole, and posing a puzzle which later Jews would reflect on in new ways: if Israel was liberated from Egypt, and placed in her own land, why is everything not now perfect? (page 216, emphasis mine)
Here we see the key insight of the drama: the “backcloth” (Wright is British; we would say “backdrop”) of creation and fall set the scene for all that follows. Behind every scene in the drama is the Bible’s depiction of the human condition. We experience suffering, hatred, war, greed, death, and all the other problems of life because of rebellion against our Creator. However, in spite of our rebellion, that Creator loves us and wants to have a personal relationship with us. The Creator (the LORD or God, a single god who revealed himself to Moses and said his name is Yahweh) chose one faithful man (Abraham) to be the other party in a covenant so God could bless and restore the rest of His creation to Himself.
The rest of the drama, then, is the story of how God reaches out to restore His fallen world to a loving relationship with Himself. A covenant with Abraham and his descendants, and a new covenant later with the community of faith Jesus established as His “church”, would be the means by which God would effect that reconciliation.
What we will try to do over the next 30 weeks or so is to firmly grasp the storyline of the drama (get the big picture) so we can understand the smaller stories or subplots that give the Bible its richness and depth as the Word of God. The subplots are comprehensible when we look at them in the context of the overall story.
Our approach to getting the overall view will be to expand on N.T. Wright’s theme of the Bible as a drama in five acts. We will see the five acts as:
Act I Creation, and Made In God’s Image
Act II The Fall, and Fallout From The Fall
Act III Abraham And Israel—Chosen To Keep And Proclaim God’s Covenant
Act IV Jesus—The Word Incarnate Institutes A New Covenant
Act V The Church of Jesus Christ Spreads The Word
There is a lot more in each of these Acts than can be grasped in one week, of course; so we will further divide the longer Acts into several Scenes, one for each of the Sundays from September 16, 2007 through May 2008.
One more thing. God is the author, playwright, producer, director, and even takes roles on stage periodically—especially in the starring role.
We get to play a role of our own today. We will have opportunities to improvise that role; however our best performances are when we follow the script.
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[i] “The New Testament and the People of God”, by N. T. Wright, (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1992)
[ii] “The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God--Getting Beyond the Bible Wars”, by N.T. Wright (HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 2005)
[iii] For a lecture that briefly summarizes what's in his book, go to http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm
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