Living His WordSample

There are a lot of stories in the Bible. Added together, they form one grand narrative. This narrative is not fictional, but true. If you were asked what the grand narrative is all about, you would have to say that at bottom it is all about God and His relationship to His creation. In effect, it is the story of everything, because there is nothing other than God and His creation. It begins in Genesis 1 with the story of God’s creation of heaven and earth and it ends here in Revelation 21 with the story of a new heaven and a new earth. At the beginning of the grand narrative there is the Garden of Eden, but here at the end of the narrative there is a city, the new Jerusalem. The grand sweep of the narrative moves from a simple garden situation to a complex city. Genesis tells us that God’s manifest presence, his actual appearance, was there in the garden with Adam and Eve. He used to walk about in the garden (Genesis 3:8). Sin, of course, changed all that. Although God is omnipresent, after sin entered the earth His manifest presence was exclusively to be found in His dwelling in heaven. Revelation, in contrast, tells us at the end of the grand narrative that God’s manifest presence will return to earth with the new Jerusalem. The reason for God’s change of dwelling is that the sin problem will have been resolved. Through the work of Jesus Christ in his first and second comings, sin will have been totally removed from the earth. At that time, we will be able to fellowship with God face to face (Revelation 22:4), just as Adam and Eve once did.