This is for session 3 of a study on "God Speaks To/Through His People, the story of the Bible as a drama in five acts" for the Koinonia Class at Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, CO. Session 3 is Act I, Scenes 2 & 3 (Genesis 3-11)
Earlier (in the Prologue, Part 1) I called our experience of living in a world of ultimate questions, problems, evil, sin, and eventually death as “The Human Condition”. The subject is not original—many have written on it; and every religion treats it in one way or another.
My use of this term situates chapters 3 through 11 of Genesis as Act II in the 5-Act Drama of the story of the Bible. Act I is creation—of the world and finally of humans as those who are created “in the image of God”. Act II shows what happens when the actors don’t follow the Director’s directions.
In Genesis 3 Eve is tempted by the personification of evil to disobey God. She ate the forbidden fruit and then tempted Adam to join her. He did, and life has not been the same since.
Apparently, being created “in the image of God” included having the ability to choose and to be responsible for one’s choices. Free Will it is sometimes called. It’s not just that we are free to choose whatever we desire. Choices result in actions. Actions bring (sometimes unforeseen) consequences. Having the ability to choose also means being responsible for the consequences.
In biblical terms, Adam and Eve sinned against God. They chose to put themselves and their will ahead of their Creator and his will. In essence they said, “I want to be in charge of my life. I want to be a god myself.” The consequence was that God let them have their wish.
The paradise in which God had placed them was now off limits to them. They wanted to be their own god and create their own paradise. We know how successful they and all their descendants have been. The consequence of their sin (and ours) can be seen in the news every day.
Fortunately, the play does not end at Act II. God may have let us have our own way, but He has not left us alone. God’s desire for a loving fellowship with His creatures did not change. Act II, Scene 2 introduces the subplot of a covenant which continues throughout the rest of the drama. Even in the worst of times there is good news. We are not alone—God loves us and wants to reconcile us to Himself. Moreover, God provides the means for that reconciliation.
More about covenants next week.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
God Speaks Session 2: Purpose in Life
This is for session 2 of a study on "God Speaks To/Through His People, the story of the Bible as a drama in five acts" for the Koinonia Class at Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, CO.
Recently I’ve seen several things which bring to mind the complexity and miraculous nature of Creation: NASA photos taken with the Hubble Telescope—sights so beautiful, awesome, and inspiring that it’s difficult to believe they are really of galaxies so many light-years away; a program about how the Rocky Mountains were formed by some tectonic plates subducting under others and pushing up the mantle of the earth; and another program about archeological discoveries giving evidence of people over 15,000 years ago inhabiting what is now America.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in the Prologue, Part 1 of this Bible study entitled “God Speaks To/Through His People” that we seek answers to the questions Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when this life is over? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil? Why do I do things which I know are evil? Is there any hope for forgiveness and for a happy future? Is there a solution for this human condition that I myself am in?
This week we are looking at two of those questions—the one that asks Where did I come from? and another one, Why am I here? From astronomy we might get an answer that tells us something about all matter on Earth having come from exploding stars. Even that fact is predated by the formation of the stars from the Big Bang billions of years ago. Biology might say we are here because of our ancestors having evolved over millennia to produce the species homo sapiens.
A number of the sciences might together be able to piece together a partial explanation of how we physically got here. It can only be a partial explanation, though, because none of them can get prior to the theoretical Big Bang. That, they say, is for metaphysics (or religion) to propose. One theologian/philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, offered five “proofs” for the existence of God, one of which (expanding Aristotle’s concept of an “unmoved mover” is that since there is motion, there had to be a prime mover (that is, something or some being that started it all in motion), and he said that the One we call God was that prime mover.
None of these arguments answers the “why” question though. That answer we can find in the Bible. Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, tells us that God created all that is, including us; and that He created us for fellowship with Himself. Being created “in the image of God”, we find our ultimate happiness and purpose relating to and working in partnership with God.
If you’ve been wondering why you are here, perhaps a re-reading of Scripture can give some clues—especially if you ask God to show you what He wants of you. God didn’t create us in His image without a reason for doing so.
Recently I’ve seen several things which bring to mind the complexity and miraculous nature of Creation: NASA photos taken with the Hubble Telescope—sights so beautiful, awesome, and inspiring that it’s difficult to believe they are really of galaxies so many light-years away; a program about how the Rocky Mountains were formed by some tectonic plates subducting under others and pushing up the mantle of the earth; and another program about archeological discoveries giving evidence of people over 15,000 years ago inhabiting what is now America.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote in the Prologue, Part 1 of this Bible study entitled “God Speaks To/Through His People” that we seek answers to the questions Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when this life is over? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil? Why do I do things which I know are evil? Is there any hope for forgiveness and for a happy future? Is there a solution for this human condition that I myself am in?
This week we are looking at two of those questions—the one that asks Where did I come from? and another one, Why am I here? From astronomy we might get an answer that tells us something about all matter on Earth having come from exploding stars. Even that fact is predated by the formation of the stars from the Big Bang billions of years ago. Biology might say we are here because of our ancestors having evolved over millennia to produce the species homo sapiens.
A number of the sciences might together be able to piece together a partial explanation of how we physically got here. It can only be a partial explanation, though, because none of them can get prior to the theoretical Big Bang. That, they say, is for metaphysics (or religion) to propose. One theologian/philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, offered five “proofs” for the existence of God, one of which (expanding Aristotle’s concept of an “unmoved mover” is that since there is motion, there had to be a prime mover (that is, something or some being that started it all in motion), and he said that the One we call God was that prime mover.
None of these arguments answers the “why” question though. That answer we can find in the Bible. Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, tells us that God created all that is, including us; and that He created us for fellowship with Himself. Being created “in the image of God”, we find our ultimate happiness and purpose relating to and working in partnership with God.
If you’ve been wondering why you are here, perhaps a re-reading of Scripture can give some clues—especially if you ask God to show you what He wants of you. God didn’t create us in His image without a reason for doing so.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Prologue, Part 2: The Story of the Bible in Five Acts
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.
_________________________________
[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
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.
_________________________________
[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
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Prologue: The Story of the Bible as a Drama in Five Acts, Part 1.
From where I sit every morning I can look out and see my wife’s flower garden and the tops of some mountains. I’m reminded daily of the beauty in this world. Life is good.
I’m also reminded of something else every morning—my body is not as fit and flexible as it was. The warranty on this body seems to have expired, and one by one its parts are wearing out. Some day it will need to be turned in for an upgraded version.
It’s not only my body that seems to be falling apart. I see or hear the news and note that most of it is bad. Local television news operates on the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads”. National and world news focuses on war, weather, political fights, and scandals.
Since I’ve read some history, I know that it’s the same “news” that has been recycled in every generation. Every now and then, though, we read or hear of heroic and inspiring actions. Blessedly, some good news is included or we would despair.
Good and bad. Beauty and ugliness. Inspiring truths and depressing “news”. What’s going on? Is there any way to make sense of all this?
This is The Human Condition. We experience what every generation has experienced. We seek answers to the same questions everyone else asks: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when this life is over? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil? Why do I do things which I know are evil? Is there any hope for forgiveness and for a happy future? Is there a solution for this human condition that I myself am in?
Fortunately, there is a solution. And, there is a source to which we can go for answers to all of these “ultimate questions”.[i] The source which has provided answers for millennia is the Bible. The answers we seek are there. Sometimes they are explicitly stated. Sometimes they are imbedded in stories, and we have to discern them as we read and re-read those stories at different stages of life. Sometimes the answers are hidden from plain sight, and can only be found with careful study and reflection.
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.
This theme has been communicated in many different ways over the centuries. We will borrow a device from a modern scholar, N.T. Wright, and look at the Bible as if it is a play—a drama in five acts.
----------------------------
[i] They are “ultimate questions” because they are the questions everyone ultimately asks. They are the foundational questions for our philosophy of life, our “worldview”, or more simply, “How we look at life.”
I’m also reminded of something else every morning—my body is not as fit and flexible as it was. The warranty on this body seems to have expired, and one by one its parts are wearing out. Some day it will need to be turned in for an upgraded version.
It’s not only my body that seems to be falling apart. I see or hear the news and note that most of it is bad. Local television news operates on the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads”. National and world news focuses on war, weather, political fights, and scandals.
Since I’ve read some history, I know that it’s the same “news” that has been recycled in every generation. Every now and then, though, we read or hear of heroic and inspiring actions. Blessedly, some good news is included or we would despair.
Good and bad. Beauty and ugliness. Inspiring truths and depressing “news”. What’s going on? Is there any way to make sense of all this?
This is The Human Condition. We experience what every generation has experienced. We seek answers to the same questions everyone else asks: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going when this life is over? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil? Why do I do things which I know are evil? Is there any hope for forgiveness and for a happy future? Is there a solution for this human condition that I myself am in?
Fortunately, there is a solution. And, there is a source to which we can go for answers to all of these “ultimate questions”.[i] The source which has provided answers for millennia is the Bible. The answers we seek are there. Sometimes they are explicitly stated. Sometimes they are imbedded in stories, and we have to discern them as we read and re-read those stories at different stages of life. Sometimes the answers are hidden from plain sight, and can only be found with careful study and reflection.
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.
This theme has been communicated in many different ways over the centuries. We will borrow a device from a modern scholar, N.T. Wright, and look at the Bible as if it is a play—a drama in five acts.
----------------------------
[i] They are “ultimate questions” because they are the questions everyone ultimately asks. They are the foundational questions for our philosophy of life, our “worldview”, or more simply, “How we look at life.”
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