Episode Details

Prayer

Dear Lord, Heavenly Father, praise and thank you for your word. Thank you for the life that you give us. Lord, please renew our minds, and give us understanding and insight. Please lead us and guide us in your ways. Please equip us for every good work. Correct us, rebuke us, encourage us, comfort us according to our need. Lord, we look to you. May you be glorified as you speak to us through your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Reading

Genesis 2:16-17.

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, (17) but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Meditation

Stories have a way of captivating us and drawing us in don’t they? They have a way of absorbing us. In general, we tend rather to enjoy stories than to analyse them, but there is such a thing as story-craft. There are good and bad stories. One of the things about stories is that they are always about something, you only need to look at some of the best known stories to see what I mean. What is Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet all about? It’s about conflict and young love. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens circles around the theme of generosity. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis is, fundamentally, about redemption and salvation. One of my favourite stories is Pilgrim’s Progress by the puritan John Bunyan. Like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it too is about salvation and the journey of one man seeking to reach the celestial city.

Stories are always about something. Now that’s true whether you’re looking at history or fiction. The Autobiography of Charles Spurgeon is the life story of a gospel preacher. The Story of Ned Kelly is the story of an Australian Outlaw from colonial times. When you read a history of World War 2, it’s the story of the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Allied Forces. Stories, whether true or fantastic, resonate with us. We are story telling beings.

One of the reasons why stories are so powerful to us is because we ourselves live in a story. History itself is a story, the true story that God himself is telling. There are a number of ways we could prove this, but not the least among them is the fact that the majority of the Bible itself is given to us as a narrative. History, according to the Bible, is a story with a definite beginning, middle, and end.

Now here is something interesting that we need to understand. Just as all the great stories are about something, and revolve around grand and central themes, so too it is with God’s story. The Bible is not just a random recollection of events pulled together into a hodge-podge of stories. But what is God’s story of history all about? What story is God telling? It is the story of stories, the story against which every other story is measured and valued.

In these studies we’ve been tracing the biblical narrative through Genesis 1 and 2 in minute detail. You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been trying to keep us focused on this question. As we’ve studied these passages of scripture, we’ve seen a definite shape to the story. We’ve seen that God’s purpose in history, the thing that his story is all about, is filling his creation with life – with his life.

In reformed theology, we all know the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s first question: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer, of course, is: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The glory of God is the goal of history. But how is that going to happen? The big picture answer is that God is going to give life. John’s gospel, perhaps the most obviously evangelistic of the four gospels, iterates this in John 17:3 “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The