God’s Story Is Our Story: From Genesis To JesusSample

Reflecting on the last week: God’s people interpret their national history theologically. They could have written a far more clinical version of past events, “There have been three major empires in the last 400 years. Each subjugated us, one after another because that’s just what empires do.” But this, for all its apparent objectivity, is inaccurate. God is at work in history. Their subjugation was his discipline for their idolatry and injustice. But this view is not without problems. If God is at work in history, then why were they still, despite their repentance and faithfulness, “slaves [to] this day” (Neh. 9:36)? They knew Israel’s history—God acted to save them from slavery in Egypt. The people obviously want the God who controls history to act today just as he did back then. The hard reality is that God chose to wait 400 more years before sending Jesus. During this time they are subjugated by two Greek empires (located in Syria and Egypt), and then the mega-empire Rome. By the time Jesus arrives, their collective sense of slavery has reached a pitch. Those Jews who violently fought against Roman occupation were called “lovers of freedom” by their contemporaries. 

So it is understandable that they expected the Messiah to be a military leader. God acts in history! Egypt fell, and now Rome must fall! But Jesus came to deal with the serpent—the dark power behind every Egypt, Babylon and Rome; the dark power behind the evil in every human heart. God’s kingdom comes crashing into a world enslaved by evil and overthrows it. But it is not by the means of the world, or the means of darkness. It is through the means of unmerited, undeserved, sacrificial love—through Jesus’ death and resurrection. The question for us is whether we share that longing for freedom. Do we believe that God acts in history? Do we trust that in Christ we have been set free from the powers of sin, evil and death (Rom. 6:1-14)? Do we live like it?