Threads of Meaning in the Scriptures
What's the Bible really about?
What is the Bible fundamentally about?1
My three favorite relatively short attempts to answer are …
To live under God’s rule means to enjoy God’s blessing; the two go together. That is what we see at the creation in the garden of Eden until the fall. But then human beings disobey God and forgo his blessing. The consequence are devastating not just for humanity but for the whole creation; everything is spoilt. But in his great love God promises to put things right again and re-establish his kingdom on earth. The rest of the Bible tells the story of the fulfillment of that promise: partially in Israel’s history in the Old Testament period, and then perfectly through Jesus Christ. So the Bible is about God’s plan of salvation – his promise to restore his kingdom, and then the fulfilment of that promise through his Son Jesus. (Vaughan Roberts, God’s Big Picture, 23)
This video from The Bible Project
This video from Tim Keller
If you read/watch each carefully, you’ll notice a difference in emphasis.
The Roberts quote emphasizes God acting in history: God guiding the events of the world toward the purpose of bringing his kingdom to earth.
The Bible Project video emphasizes wisdom before God – the call to trust God and live by the terms of his covenant.
The Keller clip emphasizes God preparing the world for Christ – that God has always been guiding history toward the saving events that come through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension.
I’m fairly sure each would agree that the themes emphasized by the others are important, too; but each picks a different “unifying theme” as their focus when explaining what the Bible’s story is about.
We might be tempted to say, “Well, it’s really this one, and not those others.” But we’re better served by seeing them as three threads braided together through the story of the Bible.
Let’s use the story of David and Goliath (read it here!) as an example:
When I was a kid, I was taught this as a wisdom story: where Saul (and everyone else) looked at the monstrous Goliath and were too afraid to face him, David trusted God’s strength, fought him, and God gave him victory. It’s a story about the wisdom of trusting God’s strength instead of our own.
Sometime in college, I was taught it as a Christological story: that David, as the king who conquers God’s enemies on behalf of his people, is a type of Jesus, God’s true king who conquers the enemies of death and sin for us.
And sometime after, I learned it as a redemptive-historical story, where Goliath – whose armor is described as “scales” (we’re meant to think “serpentine” in Hebrew – represents the serpent threatening God’s people, and David is a “seed” who crushes the serpent’s head and brings deliverance. The whole thing echoes a promise God made to the original serpent, Satan, way back in Genesis 3:15:
I will put enmity between you[, serpent,] and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
So which is it?
The cool thing is, it’s all of them! Each level of meaning is present in the text:
And just like looking at the Grand Canyon or Guernica from multiple perspectives enriches our understanding of it, tracing each of these threads in a Bible text leads to a richer knowledge of the whole meaning. We don’t read “just a good story” or “for the moral” or “to find Jesus under a rock,” as the different approaches can be caricatured; we build this layered appreciation for God, understanding of what it means to be human, and awe at the power and grace of Jesus.
I’ll likely do future pieces on how to read for each thread more deeply, but let’s look at what happens when you read David and Goliath each way:
Redemptive History: The Drama of God Bringing the Kingdom
The redemptive history thread looks at the grand drama of God bringing his kingdom into the world through history. It starts all the way back in Genesis 1 with the creation of the world and “ends,” if you could call an eternal new creation an “end,” with God re-creating the world and living forever with his people in Revelation 22. It encompasses the joys, tragedies, and complications that come from sin and evil, and our lives today are just as much part of the drama as David’s and Abraham’s were. Here’s one way to visualize it like a five-act play:2
When we read for redemptive history, we look for how the same God is orchestrating history to bring about the same kingdom in the same broken world. Each new act brings a new development in God’s redemptive plan, but the underlying story is one. Not only can we wonder at the majesty of the God who is authoring the events of history to his glory, but we can also marvel that God has woven our story into his.
In David’s case, we worship the same serpent-crushing God who delivered his people from oppression. We know who the true serpent is and what its true power is (Satan, and the powers of sin and death), and we have battles we win and battles we lose, but we know that God is at war on our behalf (and we know how the war ends!).
Wisdom: How People Live Out the Drama
The wisdom thread looks at how the human characters live in God’s drama with wisdom, folly, or confusion. In the biblical vision, the wise person recognizes God’s authority and seeks his way in every aspect of life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10), while “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). When we live by God’s wisdom, we are being fully human and on his path of life; when we neglect his wisdom, we degrade our humanity and live in death.
Reading for wisdom is not merely “always be like the main character,” because the main characters (even David) sometimes don’t know what to do, and sometimes know exactly what to do and do wrong. But reading both how the people in the stories live and how God’s other words interpret or comment on how they live shows us what wisdom looks like.
When we read for the wisdom thread, we look for how people show us what it does (or doesn’t) mean to live faithfully under God. Saul, who has already been described as kingly from a human perspective (tall, handsome, a strong warrior), sees a warrior who’s taller and stronger and functionally abandons his kingship – he quails like the rest of his people.
David is no shrinking violet, but he’s so small that the standard-issue men’s armor encumbers him. But “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. … The Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand” (1 Samuel 17:45, 47). He trusts God’s strength, where Saul was trusting his own.3 The story contrasts their responses and obviously commends David’s as more fully human.
Christological: Jesus as the Crux of the Drama
The Christological thread reads the Bible in light of the knowledge that God’s ultimate purpose for the world is found in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. If the story of the world is a drama, Jesus is the crux:
The Old Testament era was preparing the world for Jesus to come; and the New Testament era is about celebrating what he’s done. It’s all about the gospel: the good news of the salvation God earned for us through Jesus.
Reading this way involves following the word Jesus gave his disciples:
“Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Lk 24:26-27)
…
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms [i.e., the Old Testament] must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. (Lk 24:44-45)
Christocentric reading looks for ways that Old Testament events (like the Passover or Exodus), leaders (kings, priests, prophets), and institutions (like the Tabernacle or Temple) give us a deeper understanding of who Jesus is and what he has done, so we can have a deeper appreciation of the gospel.
When we read David and Goliath with this lens, we don’t just thank God that he crushed a serpentine threat then; we think about Jesus, the “true and better” serpent-crusher who makes a final end of sin and death for his people. And David becomes (in this story, not in all!) a sign deepening our understanding of and gratitude for the gospel.
Each of these threads is active in most of the Bible, and each deepens our understanding of and worship of God. So each one is a fruitful way to read and meditate on the Scriptures!
Image: Peter Paul Rubens, “David Slaying Goliath”
If you’ve been following the meditation project for a while, this is an expansion of the “Choice and Christ” piece I wrote a way back, but it’s such an expansion and improvement I’m replacing the old piece.
It’s important to note that “trusting God’s strength” doesn’t always lead to “God giving the desired outcome,” which is a misreading of the David story and a way that this kind of reading is caricatured. Stephen (Acts 6-7) had incredible trust in Jesus, and it resulted in his martyrdom.