Video of the talk here from around 45 minutes 30
Audio of the talk here
One way I once heard someone describe the Bible story was as a journey between two trees.
In Genesis 2 we read of God making a garden and putting two trees in the midst of it. Often the focus is on the Tree of the Knowledge of God and evil. But the main one if the tree of life.
Cos this tree reappears at the very end in Revelation 22. Not sure how this works, but on either side of a river is the tree of life, producing lots of varieties of fruit and it’s leaves are for the healing of the nations. The Bible might be seen as a journey between those two trees.
The Community Bible Experience unpacks the big story of the Bible in six acts…
God’s Intention: God creates the world. Christians will have many different views on how that happened, but at the heart of our faith is the belief that all things ultimately come from God. That includes our own life. We are placed in God’s world to care for the world, to nurture it, to guide it and cause it to thrive. We are made for a network of relationships.
We are created to live in relationship with God, in community with others, in relationship to creation, which we care for, and with ourselves. And the world is a gift from God and it is good.
Exile: But the world is not as God intended it to be. One of the first stories is of a couple, Adam and Eve, who listen to seductive wisdom apart from God, choose to rely on their own wisdom and not in relationship with God. The point of this story is not that someone way back when ate something they shouldn’t and we were doomed to repeat it. It’s about the choices we all make. In our own way, at different times, we make the same choices they did.
This has devastating consequences for the all this network of relationships.
Our relationship with God is damaged.
Our relations with one another are damaged, as we seek our own ends, without fully appreciating the needs of others.
Our relationship with creation is broken, which we see right down to today in the way our planet is under threat, and humanity and how we have treated the world is a significant part of that.
And our relationships even with ourselves is broken. We live with shame, we feel cut off from others…
Even we try to collaborate, such as we get in the story of Babel, it is often at the expense of others, and our own ambitions and interests get in the way.
The Bible has a word for this experience. It is exile. We live cut off from the things that make life most meaningful and precious. The big question the Bible deals with is are we destined to be that way forever, or is there a way that these relationships can be restored and things get back to their good intention.
Israel’s Mission: The Bible maintains that even with all that is wrong in the world, it is still God’s good world, God loves the world and God hasn’t given up on it.
But God still takes seriously the calling he has placed on humans to care for the world and be his image bearers, or to care for it as he would. He doesn’t force a top down approach. He works bottom up.
He starts small and builds. He starts with one family, Abraham, and promises to bless him and through them to bless the whole world. The Old Testament follows that story.
It’s a real up and down story. For a people who are supposed to bless the world, they’re not very good at blessing each other. But God keeps plugging away, often working through their failure. One of Abraham’s descendants is sold into slavery by his brothers. He is taken down to Egypt, but God uses him to preserve the people of the earth in a great famine.
This leads to the family going down to Egypt, but they end up in slavery. God uses a very flawed person, Moses, to bring them out of Egypt. They spend time in the wilderness, where God instructs them how to live, he promises if they live his way, they will thrive, but if not, it will not end well, they will experience exile – there’s that word again.
They get the land promised to Abraham and develop a Kingdom, but even at their best they keep falling into the same old traps, with the same old sins just talking on new and often worse forms, and they end up in exile. Even when a small chunk of them return to the land things are not what they feel they ought to be. The Old Testament ends with the people still feeling in exile and wondering if anything can be done to break that experience
Surprising Victory of Jesus: That’s where we will pick up the story from September 10. God hasn’t given up on the world. He sends Jesus into the world. But not as a big leader, but as a teacher, prophet and healer, born under occupation, raised in the backside of nowhere, kept hidden for 30 years of the 33 he will live on earth.
In his world the Romans are the rulers. Caesar is said be God made manifest, the universal saviour of human life. The one who brings peace and prosperity to the world. There is no other name under heaven, given to us, by which we may be saved, than the name of Caesar. That was his good news. His Gospel.
And right under his nose, in a cave with animals, there is a little baby of whom all those things are really true.
And when he hits about 30, Jesus goes out teaching his good news or Gospel about how God has finally come to end the exile which has haunted humanity down through the ages, to fix these broken relations, to bring us back into relationship with God, others, creation, even ourselves.
He forgives sins, he heals people, he teaches about the immense, unfailing love of God, not just to the good guys and girls, but the whole world.
He teaches a very radical way to live, often undermining all that they thought their Bibles had been telling them, way beyond the goodness even of their best, yet welcomes even the worst of those whom the good folk of his day would have looked down on.
He even calls 12 disciples, as an echo of the 12 tribes of Israel. It’s like God is saying he’s reforming the band, getting the whole gang back together again. Reforming a people through whom God will bless the whole world.
But his message is not universally popular. Especially, sadly, amongst the religious types. They feel threatened by Jesus and from very early on, look to get rid of him. So at Passover, as they celebrated God rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, they have Jesus put to death by the Romans… and he looks defeated.
But this is God’s surprising victory. Jesus takes on the full force of the evil of the world and empties of its power. Even as humanity does its worst to God, God pronounced forgiveness. The worst they could do to Jesus was kill him. But God raises Jesus from the dead. The resurrection is the sign that nothing can stop God fulfilling his purposes for his world.
Church: But Jesus doesn’t walk out of the tomb and immediately announce himself as the world’s true king. He doesn’t raise up an army and wipe out those who killed him.
As God seems to have done throughout the story, he starts small, with a band of people, most of whom people would overlook, and uses them to spread the message of his love. It begins in Jerusalem and spread outwards to Judea and Samaria, then on into their world. They pledge their allegiance to God as the true ruler in the world.
They face lots of opposition and ridicule, but God uses that to be the way the message spreads. God sends his Holy Spirit to them to empower them for the task, and they speak of God’s love which breaks all the barriers humanity has erected. Race, class, tribe and nation. They declare that God has made us right with God, with each other and we can be free from guilt and shame.
And this part of the story is still going. It has been a word of mouth campaign for 2000 years. We are invited to be part of it.
God comes home: But we live in a period where God has won the victory but the power of evil still continues. Brokenness, wrongdoing, sickness and death are very much part of our world. We still live in a time of invitation. But our world still often runs rejecting God’s rule or even God’s existence.
But the promise is that one day God will come home and make his home amongst us. He will finally heal and restore all that is broken in the world. He will wipe every tear from our eyes and bring an end to death and mourning and crying and pain. He will bring unity to all these relationships, restoring things to how he created to be. And we will be made new with the indestructible life of God coursing through our bodies. Having been made fully new, we will share in ruling his new creation, his new heaven and new earth.
That’s the big story we will be exploring as we read the scriptures together over the coming weeks and months.
We live in age of what are called immersive experiences. I encourage you to immerse yourself in the big story of the scriptures.
Let it soak into our lives, like water soaking into a sponge. May we know that we were created in God’s image and even though that image can be hidden or tarnished by sin, both our own and others, God does not give up on us.
Though we live in this network of broken relationships, our sins can be forgiving and we can accept God’s invitation to live in relationship to him, to turn away from evil, to offer our hearts to Jesus, and become part of God’s story of new creation.
And to live our part. To be a people who not only soak in the Bible but through the Holy Spirit pour God’s love out to our community, our city, wherever we happen to be in the other 166 hours of the week, carrying the story forward, being a part of God putting the whole thing back together again.
paper dolls 