Last Sunday, we finished our sixty-six Sunday overview of the sixty-six books of the Bible, conveniently titled Route 66. Before we move into Thanksgiving and Advent, I thought I might pause for one Sunday and try to summarize what the Bible is all about in one sermon. That’s a big task, I know. But many years ago, I read an analogy provided by Bible scholar, Tom Wright, that I think will greatly help us in our task for today. Wright compares the Bible to a five-act play. Using Wright’s idea as my starting point, I have expanded his idea of the five-act play into one with six acts. I think you will see why when we get to the final act…
Act I: Creation
Act I is Creation. In Genesis 1:1 we read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The Apostles’ Creed begins with the same truth emphasized in Genesis 1… “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”
The debate continues to rage in our day between creationists, those who believe that God created the universe, and evolutionists, many of whom believe that the universe began with some kind of impersonal force. The interesting thing to me about the biblical account of the beginning of the universe is that it tends to focus on “who” not “how”, whereas science focuses on “how” not “who”. In the end, along with Francis Schaeffer and many others, I do not believe there is any final conflict between the Bible and science. I am what you might call a theistic evolutionist, though I know far more about theism, belief in God, than I do about evolution.
Theologians talk about God creating the universe “ex nihilo” which means “out of nothing.” By that statement theologians mean that God created the universe out of nothing outside of himself, like an author creating a story “out of his own head”. Hebrews 11:3 says, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Psalm 33:6 says, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.” Pastor Stuart Briscoe once said, “The alternative to God creating something out of nothing is nothing creating something out of nothing.” You tell me which alternative seems more logical.
Another thing that the Bible makes clear about the origin of the universe is that God was not under any necessity to create. God is the only being who is truly self-sufficient. As Paul said to the Athenians, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” (Acts 17:24-25)
God did not create out of any necessity. He created because he is love. God does not need us. But we do need him. And as Augustine wrote in his Confessions… “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”
Perhaps the most important point made in the first two chapters of Genesis is that God’s creation, in the beginning, was perfect. It was beautiful. There was nothing left out of God’s creation that human beings needed. The picture painted by Genesis is one of total human satisfaction and flourishing; human beings were given the perfect environment in which to live in the Garden of Eden.
Act II: The Fall
But that perfection did not last long. Act II begins in Genesis 3:1…
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
We call Act II… the Fall. Human beings fell from their original perfection when tempted by the serpent in the Garden. Adam and Eve used their free will, their freedom of choice, to turn away from God. In fact, they chose to become their own gods. And that choice has affected the rest of human history.
One does not have to believe that what we have in Genesis 3 is an historical account. In fact, I believe that what we have in the early chapters of Genesis is something akin to myth, saga, folk tale. The important thing to me is not how the story is told. The essential thing is what the story teaches: the truth to which it points. And that truth is two-fold: (1) God created the universe perfect. (2) Human beings have messed up that original perfection. And the rest of the Bible shows us how human beings have been messing things up ever since.
Paul puts the truth this way in Romans 5:12…
… sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
Act III: Israel
So, what did God do about the mess that human beings made of his creation? God began his work of redemption and recreation with one person, a person who became the father of a great family and a great nation. Act III of the Bible begins in Genesis 12…
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
C. S. Lewis summarizes the first three acts of this biblical play in his book Mere Christianity…
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—civilisations are built up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.
And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.
Lewis summarizes the whole Old Testament in three paragraphs, and he summarizes the entire history of Israel in two sentences. I love that!
So, the first three acts of the biblical human and divine drama are summarized in the Old Testament. Now, for the last three acts, we must turn to the New Testament.
Act IV: Jesus
Act IV is all about Jesus, and it is detailed in all four Gospels. In fact, Act IV is summed up in one sentence, what I call the “twenty-five words that changed the world”. We read those words in John 3:16…
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
The Gospels are all about God putting himself as a character into the human drama, this wonderful six-act play we have been talking about.
Viewed from a strictly human perspective, C. S. Lewis says that Act IV comes as a shock…
Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.
When we see what Jesus is doing and saying in the Gospels, what are we to conclude about who he was? Lewis insists there are only three possibilities. Either Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or he was Lord and God. Some people say, “Well maybe the first Christians made up all these stories about Jesus.” Lewis’s response is that this conclusion saddles you with twelve lunatics instead of one. Why would the first disciples make up these stories about Jesus, put these extraordinary claims upon his lips, and then turn around and give up their lives for something they knew was a lie? It simply does not make sense. The conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that Jesus was neither a liar, nor a lunatic, nor a legend. I believe he was and is Lord and God.
And that is the conclusion of the entire New Testament. The unified contention of the 27 books of the New Testament is that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus came to show us what God is like. He came as a teacher, a healer, and a miracle worker. The New Testament also holds that Jesus lived a perfect life, something none of us have ever done. Jesus lived the life we were meant to live when God created us. In the words of St. Irenaeus, Jesus recapitulated the human story in his own life.
Now, not only did Jesus live a perfect life for us; he died our death on the cross, the death that was due to us for our sin. And he rose again on the third day to give us everlasting life, eternal life that can begin now as we put our faith in him, a life that will never end.
That is Act IV, and it is the central Act of the human-divine drama. It is the Act that makes sense of the rest of the play. Jesus is like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle; he makes sense out of the puzzle of life itself.
Act V: The Church
This leads us to Act V which is all about the Church, it’s all about you and me. What Act V is supposed to be about is summarized by Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. In Matthew 28:19-20 Jesus says to his first disciples and to us…
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Act V covers all the books of the New Testament after the Gospels; Act V is detailed in everything from the book of Acts to the book of Revelation. Even more importantly, Act V is the act we are still in right now. I believe God calls each of us to play our part in this act, to the best of our ability, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and consistent with all four acts that have gone before us.
You may remember that when we studied the Gospel of Mark, we saw how that Gospel was unfinished, probably because the original ending was lost. But the unfinished ending of Mark suggests to me an interesting idea. Perhaps we are called to finish the Gospel in our own lives. Perhaps we are called to continue fleshing out Jesus—his person, his message, and his works—for the whole world to see, and to be won to him.
Once again, I think Lewis does the best job of summarizing what Act V is all about. He says in Mere Christianity…
…the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him.
Act VI: Re-creation
If I was only following Tom Wright’s outline of the Bible, I would end with Act V. But then it occurred to me that the Bible foretells a sixth act, something that is still future, when heaven and earth will be joined together as one, and the whole of God’s creation is returned to the original perfection which God designed us to enjoy.
This sixth act is hinted at in many places throughout the Bible, but it is perhaps best foretold in Revelation 21, a chapter that bears the header in our NIV pew Bibles: “Eden Restored”. The chapter itself begins like this…
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
The tale told by the six-act drama of the Bible is that just as Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again, so also, we will be raised. One day, at the end of time as we know it, we will receive resurrection bodies that will be joined to our souls. They will be new bodies just like Jesus’ risen body, bodies that will never grow old, never get sick, never die. Tom Wright calls this new life: “Life after Life after death”!
But that is only part of the story of Act VI. Along with redeeming us and our bodies, God is going to redeem the whole universe. God is going to recreate it all. Or, if you like, God is going to restore all of creation to its original Edenic perfection.
Given this prophecy of future perfection, the book of Revelation, and the Bible as a whole, end on an appropriate note. In Revelation 22:20-21 we read…
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.
Those final words of Revelation contain the prayer that should often, even now, be upon our lips: Come, Lord Jesus. And the Bible ends on the note so often sounded throughout its pages: the note of grace.
As a child, I loved the way C. S. Lewis foretold this last act in the last of his Narnia stories, appropriately titled The Last Battle. The children from our world who have been the chief characters in the Narnian story suddenly enter a new Narnia, and they meet the great lion Aslan, who is the Christ figure of the story…
Then Aslan turned to them and said: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.” Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.” “No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?” Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. “There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
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