The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

by Craig G. Bartholomew

The Spirit is using the enemies of the church to scatter its members throughout the Roman Empire.

The message is clear: no human being, no opponent of any kind, can stand in the way of God’s redemptive work.

The first major move outward from Jerusalem has been an unplanned expansion of the gospel into Judea, Samaria, and certain gentile areas

But that is not quite accurate: the Spirit dominates this story, with Paul as his instrument.

His regular practice is to begin at the local synagogue, since he well knows the Old Testament prophecies that God’s renewal is to start with Israel and that the gentiles will then be drawn in (Rom. 1:16).

A group of these “Judaizers” even travels from place to place in Galatia, visiting churches planted there by Paul and attempting to convince gentile Christians that they should take on a Jewish form of the faith as laid out in the law.

To understand Paul we have to take seriously his missionary calling. As he evangelizes and pastors his newly formed gentile communities he contextualizes the gospel—employing pagan Greco-Roman terminology and filling it with the content of the gospel.

So it is two worlds that shape his letters: the Jewish world of the Old Testament fulfilled in Jesus and Paul’s missionary calling of communicating that message to gentiles and forming them to be faithful signs of the gospel in their pagan setting.

Furthermore, the kingdom of God has arrived in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For Paul, the gospel is not simply a record of historical events nor some new religious teaching or doctrine. It is the very power of God

First, the church is pictured as the new temple of God, where he now lives by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; Eph. 2:21–22).

As far as the Christian is concerned, God’s final judgment has already taken place!40 With our guilt removed, we stand in a right relationship to God.

Second, since we were once estranged from God by our sinful rebellion, we need to be reconciled to him. Reconciliation, long thought to become available only at the end of time with the coming of God’s kingdom, is a gift freely offered even now

Third, we who are born into the sinful race of Adam are restored to God by receiving his gift of adoption

And with this new life comes a call to a new kind of obedience to God’s law in every part of life, an obedience rooted in love.

Thus, all human life, including even the mundane activities like eating and drinking, should be lived to the glory of God

We must resist the temptation to read the Scriptures as if they were a religious flea market, with a basket of history and old doctrines here, a shelf full of pious stories there, promises and commands scattered from one end to the other.

The result may be that we lose sight of the Bible’s essential unity and instead find only those theological, moral, devotional, or historical fragments we are looking for.

It means that the way we live as citizens, consumers, students, husbands, mothers, and friends witnesses to the restoring power of God.

Heaven, the dwelling place of God (which had become separated from the creation because of sin), comes “down” to the earth in a dramatic image of restored unity and harmony between the Creator and what he has created.

The goal of biblical history is a renewed creation: healed, redeemed, and restored.

Though this vision of the new creation is the climactic conclusion of the last book of the Bible, most of Revelation is not concerned with the future. What it does give us is a glimpse into God’s purposes throughout history, purposes leading to this conclusion.

So to these frightened, faithful Christians comes the message of Revelation: God will triumph.