Telling God's Story - Chapter 10: Jesus (Scene One and Scene Two)

We've reached the final chapter of Telling God's Story by Peter Enns, in which he presents Act 5 of the Biblical redemption story: Jesus.

The five acts of the Biblical story as the author proposes are the following:

• Act 1:  Creation and Fall
• Act 2:  Redemption - Abraham and Moses
• Act 3:  Redemption - David and Kingship
• Act 4:  Redemption - Return from Babylon
• Act 5:  Redemption - Jesus

Act 5 has two stages: Jesus' first coming and His second coming. Much of the Gospels and Epistles focus on His first coming. Jesus, like the kings that came before Him, was God's earthly representative and came to reveal God in His fullness. The difference in His connection with the heavenly Father was that He had a more direct connection, a "genetic connection." He is divine and yet fully human. "Jesus lived his life in a state of double humiliation: he was God become man, and as a man he was nothing much to look at." (Phil. 2:6-8)

Jesus' messiahship, though carried out in lowliness, was far more sweeping than previous "messiahs"/kings. In Him all people, Jews and Gentiles, would "together be made whole, forgiven of their sins" through His own death and resurrection. Jesus did what no person nor the nation of Israel could do - He was a blessing to all nations, restoring humanity to God by His death and raising all God's people to new life by His resurrection.

"Jesus actually fulfills Israel's story thus far. Through Jesus, all the nations are truly and finally blessed, as promised through Abraham. Jesus is the new and improved Moses, who leads his people out of a different kind of slavery...Like David, Jesus is anointed by God to lead his people. And when God delivers his people from Babylon, this is a foreshadowing in the Old Testament storyline of the time when God will bring his people home...Jesus died and was raised to life to allow all of us to be part of Israel's grand story."

The author begins Scene Two of Act 5 saying, "By being raised from the dead, Jesus became the 'firstfruit' of the future resurrection of all believers...When Jesus rose from the dead, the future invaded the present." Right now we who follow Jesus are living in the "last days" which began when He was resurrected, but the final installment of the last days is yet to come. "In the meantime, what defines us as God's people is being united to God by faith."

Because we are united with God in Christ, the future is built into us. Our children should grasp the New Testament message: "You are 'in Christ' people, and that means you already have one foot in the future. You have a high calling. The power of the Spirit of Christ is at work in you, teaching you, loving you, rebuking you, carrying you...so that in every area of life you can be more like Jesus...Therefore, by God's mercy, stop living in such a way that is opposite to that high calling."

Put another way, our children should not get the message "Do these things so that God will be pleased with you", but rather "God has made you brothers and sisters with Christ; he is pleased with you, now go and live it."

The book concludes with this final word: "Our greatest task in teaching the Bible to our children is to bring them to a point where they join us 'in Christ.' And this is what the Bible is here to do: to tell, ultimately, the one big story of who God is and what he does to restore his world."