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We have all but forgotten our story. The disillusionment of modernism and the emergence of postmodernism has led to a rejection of storylines and meta-narratives. It comes as no surprise that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (all of which are founded upon overarching storylines) have fallen out of vogue in the western world to be replaced with a new obsession with New Ageism and Eastern religions which deemphasize storylines and exalt a cyclical and transient understanding of the world. The message of the gospel is that history is going somewhere, and Christianity has its own framework, or meta-narrative, for understanding the world. The proclamation of the gospel is precisely the proclamation of this story, but many Christians retain, at best, a foggy understanding of this story.
The basic understanding of Christianity goes something like this: 'We are sinners and we need to be saved, so God sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins so that we won’t go to hell when we die.' An understanding of the Christian story is necessary for Christians for no less than two reasons: (1) by understanding the story, we can effectively proclaim it; and (b) by understanding the story, we can make more sense of Christian teachings. Perhaps one of the reasons many Christians struggle to grasp the 'ins-and-outs' of such teachings as justification, sanctification, redemption, etc. is because these teachings have been reduced to being parts of a systematic theology. They have a certain 'textbook feel' that detaches them from our real, run-of-the-mill lives.
Before plunging into the story, however, a note on these 'seven stages' is in order. A popular understanding of the Christian story is dispensationalism, the idea that biblical history is divided into seven self-contained dispensations, which are ways that God works out his purposes. When one dispensation is exhausted, a new one begins. Dispensationalism is erroneous for a variety of reasons, and the Story of God presented here should not be confused with that erroneous theological system. While dispensationalism obsesses over so-called dispensations, the story presented here obsesses over biblical covenants. The story of God is essentially the story of the Creator God making covenants with a wayward people and faithfully executing those covenants. These covenants throughout history build upon one another, culminating in the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. There are no dispensations but, rather, the Creator God working through history and with fallen man to execute his purposes and to bring healing to a broken world.
The Christian story is, at its heart, a story of rescue and renewal, and the main actor in this drama is a God who cares about His world, His creation, and especially His image-bearing creatures. Against the pantheistic notion of God, the Christian God is set over against creation, rules over creation, and is intimately involved with his creation while remaining other-than-it. Against the deistic view of God, the Christian God cares deeply about his creation and is actively at work within it; he isn’t distant nor remote but so close that at times it seems like the veil between heaven and earth is paper-thin.
This God’s ultimate concern isn’t our happiness and contentment, nor the flowering of our selfish pursuits and the realization of our silly dreams; rather, his ultimate concern is the blossoming of His own loving pursuits and the coming-to-birth of His own glorious dreams: in short, the full consummation of His kingdom. God’s care for human beings isn’t simply about having a sacred romance with us, or filling a void in our lives, or making our hearts flutter whenever we think about His. His desire is that we become the people He created us to be (His fully flourishing image-bearers) and that we co-labor with Him in his dream for the world. His great love and care for us is far richer and marvelous than we mere creatures can envisage. This God created a beautiful and good world, and evil marred it. The Bible accounts for both the goodness of God’s world (Genesis 1-2) and for its corruption (Genesis 3). The story doesn’t stop there, however: in a move radically different than we find with any pantheistic or deistic perspectives of God, the Christian God is doing something about it.
The Christian God has several names throughout the Old Testament, but the name He gives Himself is the key to understanding just who He is. When God called the pseudo-Egyptian refugee prince Moses to confront Pharaoh and demand that he let the enslaved Israelites go, Moses asked him, 'Who shall I say sent me?' God gave Himself a name: 'I Am Who I Am' or 'I Will Be Who I Will Be.' Because the Jewish people so revered the name of God, they referred to Him as 'He Who Is'. The Hebrew language of the ancient Israelites uses only consonants, so no one really knows how God’s self-revealed name is actually pronounced. The consonants for “He Who Is” (Y, H, W, and H again) lend to a best guess that his name was pronounced Yahweh. Strict orthodox Jews still refuse to speak his name even to this day, referring to him as 'The Name.' Some won’t even write His name, writing 'God' as 'G-d'. In order to prevent God’s name from being pronounced, later Israelites infused the consonants of YHWH with the Hebrew Adonai (meaning Lord, Master, or King). When the name of God (YHWH) came about in their texts, if they were reading it out loud, they would read Adonai. Modern translations often interpret this mingling of the two names as 'LORD' in all caps. Modern-day readers and interpreters have often taken this infusion and turned it into yet another name for God, the result being 'Jehovah.' No ancient Israelite, however, would have been familiar with that pronunciation.
All this aside, the name God gives Himself is identified with what He does, and His character is to be defined by His activities. Through the Exodus God showed that He is a God who hears the cries of His people and frees them from slavery. He is a deliverer, He is a rescuer. He is also a God who is faithful to His promises: He promised Abraham that, after a time of enslavement, he would lead Abraham’s descendants out of slavery and into the Promised Land. YHWH is a God who keeps His promises and remains faithful to His covenants; indeed, 'the righteousness of God' can adequately be understood precisely as His faithfulness to His promises. Deliverance and rescue is what the Christian God is all about, and thus the story of his dealings with his world can be seen in the light of his great desire to rescue it from the predicament in which it finds itself.
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