God's Big Picture

Here's a brilliant paragraph to open a book with. Here's a man who really gets the "big picture" of the Bible. This is an introduction to a theological survey of the Old Testament by William J Dumbrell ("The Faith of Israel"):

"Israel presented her revelation in terms of Law, Prophets, and Writings, the order in which her faith was informed. The Pentateuch - the Law - embraces the first five books of the Old Testament and contains the substance of Israel's gospel. God, who created the world with a New Creation in ultimate view, to be achieved ideally by human cooperation, had given Israel a model in the Eden narrative of what the world was to be. Dominion, in terms of service to God's creation, needed to be exercised over the world outside the garden. Within this dominion, the model of Genesis 2 was extended over all creation. The failure of representative humanity to rise to this task in Genesis 3 meant the call of Israel as the world's evangelist; Israel would be the nation calling the world to the new model of God's government.. This was to happen as Israel endorsed kingdom-of-God values in her Promised Land, the new Eden." (p9)

It's hard for modern Westerners to think in terms of God's story. It's hard for modern Africans too. Each has their own narrative. It's so much easier just to bolt "Jesus gets us into heaven after this is all over" onto our present narrative, rather than to let the Bible totally re-write our story.

But that's what the Bible does. The Bible begins to tell us a story. We need the Bible's story to progressively displace our own faulty stories with its infinitely more glorious one. What Adam and Israel did not do, Christ is doing and shall do. Hallelujah!