From Garden to Glory: 10 Days Through the Bible's Grand StoryНамуна

Day 1: The Greatest Drama of All Time

If you’ve seen The Passion of the Christ, you know that it evokes strong emotions. This movie tells the story of the brutal 24 hours surrounding Jesus’s crucifixion. When it was first released, most people were so moved by the depiction of Christ’s sufferings that they left the theater either in silence or tears—or both. Some said that they didn’t (or couldn’t) talk to anyone until the next day.

But not everyone felt that way. One young man, when interviewed and asked about his reaction to the movie, reflected sincerely and said, “I guess it was okay, but it didn’t have much of a plot.” That might strike some of us as funny at first, and as tragic once we let his comment sink in. But he has a point.

If you grew up in the church or went to Sunday school as a child, when you saw The Passion, you sat down in the theater knowing the movie was picking up a storyline that was already underway. You knew most of the back story. But for this young man, it was like going to see Tangled (Disney’s version of the Rapunzel story) and only viewing the part where Rapunzel was rescued from the tower. If you didn’t know why she was in the tower in the first place or what was going to happen to her now that she was out, your understanding would be diminished.

Maybe you didn’t grow up hearing what Paul Harvey called “the rest of the story,” and, like the young moviegoer, wonder what difference the horrible and gruesome death of a man on a cross more than 2,000 years ago could possibly make to you. Well, if that is the case, have I got a story for you!

But for those of us who did grow up hearing the backstory, before we either chuckle or roll our eyes at this young man, we need to stop and think about how, so often, we explain our Christian faith to others in a way that perpetuates this truncated version of the story. If you are like me, you have probably been taught to share your faith by explaining, “Jesus died on the cross to forgive us of our sins and take us to live with him in heaven for all eternity.” And that is true. But it’s far from all! We are living in the middle of the greatest drama of all time, and the Bible is the recording of how this great story began—as well as how it will end.

Herman Bavinck, a Dutch theologian in the 1800s, summed it up this way: “The essence of the Christian religion is this, that the creation of the Father, devastated by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the Holy Spirit into the kingdom of God.”* Do you see what Bavinck did? He started with creation and ended with the consummated kingdom of God; he started in the garden and ended in glory. He was saying that this great story involves God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. He showed that the original creation was very good, and the final re-creation will be very, very good—but that something, namely sin, has devastated that good creation. We can see that something had to happen in order to rescue and restore that original good creation. And that is the story of redemption—God working through real events and real people for the salvation of his people!

Before we begin, let me offer a word of warning: Please don’t think that by calling this a story that I mean it’s not true. Sometimes the word story is used to refer to something that is made up or make-believe. Sometimes it is used to mean a lie (Did you just tell a story?). But story can also be used to mean an accurate account of something that happened (Have I told you the story of our crazy summer vacation?). It is in this last sense that I call the grand drama of redemption a story—not just a story, but the story, the one in which our very lives are anchored. However, don’t for a minute think that you can just sit back and enjoy the show.

This drama invites you in, calls you onto the stage, and transforms you into one of its innumerable participants. So, without further ado, let the lights dim and the curtain go up. Get ready for the greatest drama of all time.

* Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008), 112.