The Greatest Story
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When I was a boy, I was an inveterate reader. I never went anywhere without a book.
Today, I want to talk to you about a story.
I kept a book in the car for trips, I kept another in my bedroom for nighttime reading, I had one in my hands as we watched television, and there was always at least one in that little library with all the plumbing fixtures.
There’s someth
I loved books, because I loved stories. I loved the places they took me and the people I met within those stories.
I still love stories, though these days I don’t get to read like I used to.
Like many of you, though, I have a Netflix account that allows me to enjoy any number of visual stories told by talented (and often untalented) directors and actors.
Which is not to say I don’t still love stories. Like many of you, I have a Netflix account that allows me to enjoy any number of visual stories told by talented (and often untalented) directors and actors.
In fact, I can think of no time in my life when the shared experience of story has been such a unifying force for mankind.
Flash your lights if you’ve heard of Joe Exotic, the Tiger King.
This has been the No. 1-viewed series on Netflix for the past couple of weeks, and it’s a great example of how people love stories.
This series has been the No. 1-viewed series on Netflix for the past couple of weeks, and it’s a great example of how people love stories. In this particular case, it’s a train-wreck of a story about a train-wreck of a man who was involved in the train-wreck industry of private zoos.
In this particular case, it’s a train-wreck of a story about a train-wreck of a man who was involved in the train-wreck industry of private zoos and wound up in prison for plotting to kill a woman.
The fact is that we love stories, even if they’re about train wrecks. Stories about a galaxy far, far away in a time long ago. Stories about little women gathered in the drawing room of an old English estate, talking about husbands and boyfriends. Stories about love and adventure and and dreams and hopes.
Today, as we celebrate Jesus Christ rising from the dead after sacrificing Himself on a cross for the sins of mankind, you might expect that my message would be about the story surrounding His crucifixion and resurrection.
In a sense, it is, but there’s a mistake that we often make that I do NOT want to make today. And that mistake is when we pull specific events out of the Bible without recognizing their context within the greater Story of the Bible.
You see, I think that God wired us to love stories, at least in part because He knew that He would reveal Himself to us through the story of the Bible.
So if we want to understand who God is and what He wants from us, then we have to understand Him in the context of the story He tells us in Scripture.
There is an added benefit when we look at His story from this kind of holistic perspective: When we see how the Bible fits together as perfectly as it does, it becomes very hard for us to dismiss it as anything other than divinely inspired.
When you see that the Bible was written by more than 35 men over the course of thousands of years and often without access to all the other writings and yet still contributing to a unified whole, you simply must conclude that something more is going on here than a bunch of different stories cobbled together to provide some moral framework to govern our lives.
Today, what I want to do is to give you a perspective on the cross and the resurrection that puts those events within the Bible’s greater context, within the story as a whole.
This will necessarily be a compacted and fast-moving presentation, so buckle your seatbelts and prepare for the ride.
Let’s start with a little math.
We have 66 books of Scripture, divided into two parts. The first part, which we know as the Old Testament, includes 39 books, and the second, the New Testament, includes 27 books.
Let’s look at the Old Testament: 5, 12, 5, 5, 12.
Say that with me: 5, 12, 5, 5, 12. Say it again: 5, 12, 5, 5, 12.
Flash your lights if you’ve got that: 5, 12, 5, 5, 12.
You see, we can break the Old Testament into parts.
There are five books of history to start; they’re called the Pentateuch, which is a Greek word meaning — brace yourself — “five books.” These are the five books of the Jewish Torah — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
These five books detail a history prior to the Jewish people going into the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land.
After the Pentateuch, we’ve got 12 more books of history, and this is the history of the Jewish people after they entered the Land of Canaan.
These are Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the firsts and seconds — the Samuels, the Kings and the Chronicles — along with Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther.
Then we’ve got five books of Poetry — Job, Psalms, Proverbs Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon.
And then we get into the Prophets; there are 5 Major Prophets; they’re called major prophets, because they’re long books. The 12 Minor Prophets that follow are no less important; they’re just shorter.
And that’s the Old Testament. It would be useful for you to remember that all of the Poetry and Prophets can be picked up and then dropped into the History sections, because they were written at various times during the history of Israel, and mostly after the Jewish people had moved into the Promised Land.
Looking over at the New Testament, we’ve got another set of book types.
Here’s the breakdown: 4, 1, 21, and 1.
OK, say it with me: 4, 1, 21, 1. Say it again: 4, 1, 21, 1.
Flash your lights if you’ve got it: 4, 1, 21, 1.
OK, the first four are easy. They’re the gospels, which means good news, and the good news is that God Himself came in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ, to save mankind from its sins.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Four gospels. One History — the Book of , , , .
Four gospels, one history, 21 letters (sometimes we call them epistles — when’s the last time you got an epistle from a friend?).
4, 1, 21, 1. Four gospels, one history, 21 letters (sometimes we call them epistles — when’s the last time you got an epistle from a friend?).
Much as we did in the Old Testament, we can drop most of those 21 letters into the Book of Acts, because most of them are letters written by apostles we meet in that book to churches that we see established in that book.
And finally, one more. What is it? That’s right; the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse — the story of the end times.
So from Genesis to Revelation, we’ve got what? 5, 12, 5, 5, 12; 4, 1, 21, 1.
And what I want you to see this morning is that all of these 66 books are related to one another. Each of them is part of one grand story that God has shared with us to help us know Him and to bring us into relationship with Him.
This grand narrative starts out like this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
He creates birds and trees and fish and even tigers. And it’s all good. And then He creates a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, in his very image, and God says this is VERY good.
Over and over again, we see that God creates something, and it is good. God is telling us something about Himself here. He is the creator of everything, and everything He makes is good.
And Adam and Eve live in the garden that God has created for them, and they have a perfect relationship with God, who walks in the garden and talks to them personally.
One thing I want you to understand here is that this garden represents perfect peace — shalom — and that we all, whether we look at it this way or not, long for this garden.
We long for peace; we long for a place and a time in which there is no hunger, no sickness, no war, no hatred, no division.
But then we move into Chapter 3 of Genesis, and things take a turn.
Remember this? God gave Adam and Eve everything in this peaceful place to delight them, and He told them they could eat any of the fruit they found, except the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
This tree represented the authority to determine what was good and what was evil, and God had retained that authority for Himself.
He had given mankind dominion — authority — over everything else. But God kept the authority to decide what was good and what was evil for Himself. After all, He is the God who makes only good things, so He is the one who knows what is good and what is not.
Now, you know the story. Adam and Eve were deceived by the serpent, and they gave in to the temptation to eat from that one forbidden tree.
And this changed everything. Suddenly in this perfect place of peace, there was a problem. Suddenly the man and the woman found that their perfect relationship with the God who had made them in His image was broken.
God had warned them that if they sinned against Him — if they ate from the one forbidden tree — that their sin would result in death.
Now Adam and Eve did not die immediately, so there is a two-fold sense to this word “death.” There’s a spiritual separation from God, a sort of spiritual death, and then there’s a physical death that comes much later.
But as we move into Chapter 4, after Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, we see that both senses of death are in play. Cain killed his brother, Abel (where there’s sin, there’s always death).
And then we move into chapter 5, and we get a long genealogy down from Adam.
So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.
Gen
So all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.
So all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years, and he died.
And it goes on from there. He lived, and he died. He lived and he died. He lived, and he died.
God is showing us a pattern here. Where there is sin, there is death.
his is what God had said would happen. Sin has broken everything. The whole world has been cursed because of sin. And the curse of sin is death, both in a physical sense and in a spiritual sense.
This is what God had said would happen. Sin has broken everything. The whole world has been cursed because of sin. And the curse of sin is death, both in a physical sense and in a spiritual sense.
So these early chapters of the Book of Genesis set up the problem for us. The whole earth is cursed with death because of the sin of mankind.
And then we see things get much worse, and God sends a flood, but He saves Noah and his family because of Noah’s faith in Him.
And they go out into the new world, and the next thing we see is the tower of Babel, and now people are trying to build a name for themselves to replace the name of God; they are trying to make themselves gods. So God scatters the people and confuses their language.
The world has a big problem, and it’s not one that it can solve for itself.
But God has a solution, and His solution is in the fact that He is a covenant God; He is a God who keeps His promises.
And we see God make an unconditional promise to an old man named Abram (we’ll know Him as Abraham later on). God promised Abram that He and his barren wife would have a son through whom a nation would come, that He would give this nation a land, and and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through the seed of Abraham.
The people of Babel wanted to make their name great by building a tower into heaven. But God would make His name great by bringing heaven to earth.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One of the ways we know that God’s promise to Abraham was unconditional is that we know Abraham was disobedient right from the start. God had said for him to leave his country and his family and to go to a place that God would show him. But Abraham took his nephew, Lot, with Him.
The point is that every one of us is unfaithful. Every one of us breaks faith with God. Every one of us is disobedient. Every one of us sins.
But God is faithful, and so He did what He had promised, and He gave Abraham and Sarah a son when they were very old. He gave them Isaac.
And here, we’re going to speed things up a bit, so tighten your seatbelts. Isaac has a son, Jacob, and Jacob has a son, Joseph, and God continues to restate the unconditional promise He made to Abraham.
Joseph finds himself in Egypt and his family joins him there, and at first it’s good, but then, over the course of several generations, things turn bad, and we find ourselves in the Book of Exodus, and the people of Israel — that’s the name that God gave Jacob — the people of Israel are enslaved.
You all know the story of how God rescued them from slavery in Egypt by bringing 10 plagues, and those plagues concluded with every firstborn of both man and animal in Egypt being killed, except for the firstborn of those people of Israel who had painted their door jambs and lintels with the blood of a sacrificial lamb.
Remember that sacrificial lamb, because it points to the Lamb of God who would be sacrificed to save mankind from the penalty for its sins.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
So in Exodus, which means “coming out of,” we have the people of Israel coming out of Egypt, coming out of bondage and heading toward the land that God had promised them.
But the people needed to know how to interact with this perfect and holy God who had rescued them, and so the Book of Leviticus describes God’s commands for how these people should worship Him and how they should live together as people who had been set apart for Him.
And then the Book Numbers begins with a census of the people who came out of Egypt. But they broke faith with God on the way to the Promised Land, and God said He would not allow that generation to go into the place He had prepared for them.
And then the Book Numbers begins with a census of the people who came out of Egypt. But they broke faith with God on the way to the Promised Land, and God said He would not allow that generation to go into the place He had prepared for them.
And Numbers ends with another census, this time of the next generation, the one that would go into the Land of Canaan.
Deuteronomy then recaps all that has happened before, and it reminds the people of the unconditional covenant God had made, as well as the conditional covenant He had made through Moses to bless them as long as they were faithful and obedient to Him.
Deuteronomy then gives us an recap of all that has happened before, and it reminds the people of the unconditional covenant God had made, as well as the conditional covenant He had made through Moses to bless them as long as they were faithful and obedient to Him.
We know that conditional covenant as the Mosaic Covenant. It’s conditional, because it is conditioned on their obedience to God’s law.
It’s like a parent telling a child, “If you are good when we are out today, you can have ice cream.” But if you’re bad, then you might get spanked, right?
And so we leave the Pentateuch behind just as the people of Israel are set to move into the Promised Land.
We see that happen in the Book of Joshua, and we begin to see evidence that this new generation is also not faithful to God, that they do not place their faith in He who had rescued His people from bondage in Egypt.
And by the time we get to Judges and Ruth, we see the people, and even the judges God put over them, sinking further and further into sin.
Then we get the firsts and seconds, and these are accounts of the nation’s kings, and what we see is that kings and priests and even some of the prophets were just as unfaithful to God as the people had been before them.
There is still the problem of sin.
Now, remember that the books of poetry were written during this time, as well, and what we see in these books is that there were some people — a remnant — who were seeking to follow God and who put their faith in Him, even as they struggled with their own sins.
It was faith in God that had brought people into a right relationship with Him all the way back to Abraham, even back to Noah. Scripture tells us that Abraham “believed in the Lord; and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.”
But the history of Israel as a NATION was one of faithlessness, and so God sent prophets to call His people to faith and obedience.
In the last 17 books of the Old Testament, we see those prophets pleading with Israel to turn to God with all their hearts or face the curses that God had warned would result from their disobedience. They could have the ice cream or they could have the spanking.
But they still had the problem of sin, and they could not solve that problem themselves, and even after their nation was overrun and destroyed and they were taken away as captives — even after God had returned a believing remnant to the Promised Land — even then, the problem of sin still meant that there was death, both spiritual and physical.
The Old Testament shows us over and again that God created everything good and brought life, but man created sin and brought death.
And so we enter a long period — 400 years — between the last words of God to Israel through the prophet Malachi and the next prophet, John the Baptist, in the gospels.
God was still working during this time, putting things and people into place to make the world ready for His Son, Jesus Christ.
During this period, we see the establishment of synagogues and the Pharisees and Sadducees. It’s important to recognize that these people were genuinely trying to understand how God would keep His promise to Abraham, since now they were living under Roman rule.
They believed He would do so, but they believed that they were part of God’s Kingdom because of their own righteousness, their own goodness.
The four Gospels — remember 4, 1, 21, 1? — tell the story of Jesus Christ, God’s eternal Son, who was sent to correct their understanding and point them back to all the promises of the Old Testament, promises that God would send a Redeemer who would save mankind, who would remove sinful hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh.
This redeemer, who is called God’s Son in , would be the suffering servant of , the Man of Sorrows who would be “pierced through for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities.”
Jesus said He offered eternal life for those who would follow Him in faith that only He could bring access to the Father. And He extended that offer to all mankind, making Him the blessing to the nations, the fulfillment of God’s third unconditional promise to Abraham.
And Jesus said that nobody could earn their way into heaven by their good deeds, because nobody could satisfy the debt they owed to God because of their sins.
Our sins create a problem that we cannot solve on our own.
But God always had a plan to solve this problem.
When Jesus hung on the cross at Calvary on that first Good Friday, He took on the punishment each of us deserves for our sins. He was the sacrificial Lamb of God whose blood can cleanse us from our sins.
Each of us can be forgiven, and each of us can be adopted into the family of God as sons and daughters if only we put our faith in His Son. Faith is the answer today, just as it was for Abraham.
As He died on the cross, Jesus solved the problem of sin, but death remained, and if not for his resurrection on that first Easter Sunday, we would all still be subject to that curse.
But when He arose from the dead, Jesus conquered death itself, and so now we who follow Him in faith know that even if we experience physical death, we have been promised eternal life in Christ.
We who follow Jesus will one day be raised just as He was raised, and we will spend eternity with Him.
That’s the story of the Gospels, and then we see in the Book of Acts the story of the church that Jesus founded to tell this good news to the world. And as I mentioned before, most of the 21 letters that follow come out of the context of that church.
What they reveal to us is that as the church grew, it began to show evidence of disobedience and faithlessness. Even those who have been saved and redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ still sin, and their sins harm the church’s witness.
But there is still one book remaining. Remember which one? Flash your lights if you do and if you’re still awake. That’s right. The Book of Revelation.
That’s right. The Book of Revelation.
This book tells us about the end times. It’s hard to understand, and it’s full of imagery and terrifying pictures of how the world will be judged for its rebellion against God, and even in the midst of that judgment, the world will once more rise up against God.
But Jesus, the Word through whom God created everything, will finally and completely crush this rebellion with the word of His mouth.
All who have chosen to ignore who He is and who have chosen to put their faith in their own righteousness, their own goodness, instead of in Him, will face eternal punishment in hell. But those who have followed Him in faith will spend eternity with Him and with His Father.
Scripture tells us that the final enemy to be defeated is death, which is ultimately thrown into the lake of fire. We brought death into the world, but God will take it out of the world. God will solve the problem that we created.
And then Jesus will create a new heaven and a new earth, one in which God dwells among His people, one in which there is no death and there is no mourning or crying or pain, a place of perfect peace and fellowship with God.
This will be a world without sin, because we who follow Jesus will have been raised and given new hearts that do not pursue sin.
This should sound familiar to you.
The Story of Scripture starts with the creative act of God, who made a man and a woman and placed them in a garden of peace. It ends with another creative act of God, another peaceful garden-like setting and another perfect relationship between God and man.
We have had a problem since , and it’s a problem that we could not solve. So God, who created us to be in fellowship with Him, has been working to solve it throughout history. And His work will continue right up through .
This is the story of Scripture.
And it’s a story whose climax follows what looks like its lowest moment.
Jesus Christ appeared to have been utterly defeated at the cross on Friday. But Sunday was coming.
On Sunday, the stone was rolled away from the mouth of the tomb. On Sunday, the risen Savior was alive again. On Sunday, his dejected disciples realized that there was true hope when Jesus stepped into their presence in a locked room.
Jesus Christ overcame sin at the cross, and He overcame death in the empty tomb.
This wasn’t Plan B. This was God’s plan from the very beginning. He knew that we would fail in our faithfulness. He knew that we would rebel against Him. He knew we would be sinners. And He knew we could not save ourselves.
So from the beginning, His plan was to redeem us Himself.
But the plan was even bigger than that, because the plan involved redeeming all of creation, making everything the way it was always intended to be.
That’s the Story of 66 books of Scripture. It’s a story of redemption. It’s a story of love. It’s a story of hope. It’s a story of a God who keeps His covenant.
And it all centers on the cross of Jesus Christ and on the tomb that now lies empty.
It all centers on a Savior who loved us so much that He gave His life for us.
It all centers on a God who loved us and a Savior who died for us when we were yet sinners.
It all centers on a God who loved us so much that He sent His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
That sort of God, and that sort of Savior, deserves all of our worship, all of our love, all of our adoration.
Have you turned to Jesus in faith? Have you given Him your heart, your soul and your life? Have you accepted the solution He offers to the problem of your sin?
You can do that today, right from your car.
Let’s pray.
(Thanks to Dallas Theological Seminary’s Dr. Mark Yarbrough, whose lecture on the story of scripture served as the basis for this message.)