Tag: book of revelation

The bible’s big story

The bible’s big story

In the last article in this series about Israel and the Millennium, we explained why good Christians disagree about the bible’s big story. Today, we sketch what we believe the true big story is.

The bible’s big story is God’s plan to remake the paradise that our first parents ruined in Genesis 3. It’s God’s plan to fix the world, to fix us, and to create a family he can love and which loves Him back. God promises to send His only Son, Jesus—our King—on a special mission. First, Jesus will defeat God’s great and evil adversary and schedule his destruction. Second, Jesus rescues and then transforms a special community to show and tell his Good News to the world and to themselves. Meanwhile we wait to be with him forever in his coming kingdom—when he makes all things new. We must read and interpret the bible in that light.

The simplest way to understand the bible’s big story is like a three-act play:

  • Paradise made (Genesis 1-2).
  • Paradise lost (Genesis 3).
  • Paradise regained (Genesis 4 to Revelation 22).

A better way to explain the bible’s story is to compare God’s covenant promises to individual “episodes” of an Amazon Prime or Netflix “season.” Together, these “episodes” string together to form a traceable and logical story—ending in a new creation paradise, where God’s people can worship him and exercise dominion over his good creation, where Satan and evil have been banished and defeated forever.

Let’s talk about these two ways to understand the bible’s story.

The “three-act play” way

At its simplest level, the bible’s “big story” in unfolds in three movements:

  • Paradise made. God made everything good and holy, as it was supposed to be. There was no sin, no rebellion, no imperfection. Our first parents and this world were wholesome and untainted. This is why Moses tell us: “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31).
  • Paradise lost. Everything falls apart. Satan tricked Eve into eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and she (in turn) persuaded her husband to do the same (Gen 3:1-7). “Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God.” As our representatives, their guilt was imputed and their corrupted nature conveyed to each of us—their descendants—by ordinary generation. And so, “death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body”[1] (see Rom 3, 5).
  • Paradise regained. God rescues a community of people, places them in a new land, and gives them a king to rule over them and be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Sin is banished. There is a new creation—a new heavens and a new earth, “and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). Some Christians imagine eternity as a vague spiritual existence in heaven, contemplating God. The truth is that paradise is a “new creation” existence where God’s people fulfill the creation mandate that went haywire in Genesis 3. Paradise is an “Eden 2.0” that will not fail, because Satan, the antichrist, and sin itself are gone forever.

The key is to see that the story is about God fixing what has gone wrong. It culminates in a new creation paradise, on a true new earth in a truly new creation, where righteousness dwells forever. That’s the goal. That’s the plot.

The “episodes in a season” way

But that’s the quick version of the bible’s story. We get a deeper sense of the story by following the plot though its various twists and turns. We do this through the different covenants God made with his people. A “covenant” is a formal agreement God makes that has binding obligations. God always seals his covenants with an oath wherein he “solemnly swears” (as it were) to do what he promises to do. Each covenant also has a sign; a symbol that declares something about the covenant it represents. We should think of these covenants as “episodes” in God’s TV series. And, like every good show, it ends by resolving the issues that unfolded throughout the “season.”

Each covenant progressively sketches in what “paradise regained” will look like. Here’s how this deeper version of the bible “big story” shakes out:

Episode 1: The promise in the garden

Though this is not a covenant, it is the big event which follows right on the heels of “paradise lost.” God promises to send a man, descended from Eve, to destroy Satan (Gen 3:15). This descendant will be injured, but he will crush the serpent’s head. In other words, he will smash the snake and destroy the source of all evil. This promise is immediately in jeopardy when our first parent’s only two children are moved off the board—Cain murders Abel and is banished far away to the east (Gen 4). Where, then, are the children through whom this victorious son will come? God has grace and mercy to provide a new son—Seth.

Episode 2: The covenant with Noah and all creation

As generations pass, the growing human population ignores God’s special promise, and a moral darkness descends. God decides to act (Gen 6:5-8) and “reboots” creation with a dreadful flood that destroys all living creatures, except for a precious few. He orders a righteous man named Noah to build a lifeboat of sorts in which to rescue himself, his family, and various creatures (Gen 6:9-22). After this flood subsides, they exit the boat and the “reboot” begins (Gen 7-9). God makes a covenant to withhold another such judgment, so that there will be a people and a world for the Messiah to rescue (Gen 9:1-17; cp. Mt 1:21), according to the promise God made to Eve in the garden.

Episode 3: Covenant with Abraham and family

After the rebellion at Babel, God scatters men and women across the earth. He chooses one obscure man from nowhere to be the source of blessing to the world—the vehicle to make his promise in the darkness come true (Gen 12:1-3). God made three specific promises to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 and confirmed them by way of a covenant in Genesis 15; re-iterated in Genesis 17, and 22, and later to Isaac and Jacob.

This covenant is the fountainhead for all of God’s promises to come. It marks out the Jewish people (those descended from the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line) as God’s special people, who are promised a specific land of Canaan in which to live, so they can be a blessing to all the families of the earth. This is why the Messiah is the son of Abraham” (Mt 1:1 This covenant is the basis for Mary’s hope (Lk 1:55) and for Zechariah’s, too (Lk 1:72-75).

The raw shape of “paradise regained” is coming into focus—a people, in a land, being a blessing to all the families of the earth.

Episode 3.5: Covenant with Israel at Mt. Sinai

The Lord rescues His special people, Abraham’s descendants, from slavery in Egypt and brings them to their new home to wait for the promise. They agree to a covenant that will teach them how to love him and live holy lives until the Messiah comes (Ex 19:1-9; Deut 18:15-19). Unlike the others, this covenant doesn’t move the story forward. Like an airplane orbiting, waiting for permission to land, God’s people were in a holding pattern waiting for Jesus to arrive. So, God tells them how to live holy lives while they’re waiting.

It established rules and boundaries. Breaking the laws, in and of themselves, did not get you kicked out of the family, but disciplined within it. This covenant taught people about themselves—that they were sinful. It taught people about God—that he is holy and righteous and punishes sin. The ceremonial laws (the sacrifices and such) were object lessons to teach us about Christ. The civil laws (statutes about everyday life) were general principles of righteousness applied to their specific kingdom context. The moral laws were a mirror to show us our true nature, a general restraint on sin, and a vehicle for nudging his people towards greater holiness.

Episode 4: Covenant with David

The conquest and occupation of the Promised Land is haphazard. Many forsake God and go their way, and the High Priest and the judges cannot hold us together. God institutes a monarchy, and prophesies about a better King who will bring true holiness and justice to us and his world (2 Sam 7:1-17; 1 Chr 17:1-15). While they waited for God’s covenant promises to be fulfilled, God gave his people a king to rule over them. He established a dynastic line through a boy named David. He said a man from this line would rule over his people and be his royal representative on earth. God said this king would be like a son to him, and he’d be like a father to the king.

Now, our shape of paradise regained is a people, in a particular land, being a blessing to all the families of the earth, ruled over by a king whose reign would never end.

Episode 5: New covenant in Christ

This is the promise of a new shape to our relationship with God, and Jesus is the one who brings this new arrangement to pass.  Generations have passed. A civil war has torn God’s people in two, and the dual monarchies of Judah and Israel have betrayed God again and again. Sin abounds. Externalism reigns. Under the looming shadow of an impending exile, God sends word of a new and better hope, built on better promises—a suffering servant who will set everything right (Jer 31:31-40; Ezek 36-37; Isa 52:12-53:13).

This messenger will love God, lead the people in righteousness, and bring a new shape to God’s relationship with his people—one in which all his people have full legal pardon and an interior renovation of their hearts and minds. Our shape of “paradise regained” now looks like a people, in a particular land, being a blessing to all the families of the earth, ruled over by a king whose reign will never end—and all his people are fixed inside and out.

The polaroid analogy

The bible’s story ends in Revelation 21-22 with new people in a new world. Through Christ, God will have “reconcile[d] all things to Himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross” (Col 1:20). The core of this are the people + land + be a blessing promises God made to Abraham, augmented by the covenant with David (an eternal king) and the new covenant about Christ (legal pardon + interior renovation). Jesus is the domino which triggers the chain reaction of these covenant promises that he fulfills by the very end of the story—a people, in a real paradise land, ruled by a king, having been cleansed by an interior renovation and been given full legal pardon for their sins.

This fulfillment fades in starting at Matthew 1:1 and concludes at Revelation 22:21 in four main stages:

  1. Gospels. Jesus arrives and announces that he has come to fulfill all the covenant promises—this is the “good news” (Mk 1:15). The right response is to believe and trust in Jesus in order to be counted righteous by God.
  2. This present evil age. The Jesus family, the church, declares this good news to the world and works to gather a people for him, while promising full legal pardon and interior renovation for all who repent and trust in Jesus.
  3. Christ’s millennial reign. This is like a “spring training” version of eternal paradise, where Jesus will reign for 1,000 years. This will be a nearly paradise-like kingdom with its base in the land of Canaan, with a great nation of Jewish messengers and evangelists, who are a blessing to all the families of the earth as they preach the good news abroad, with Jesus ruling as king of the world. As we mentioned in the previous article, the millennium is a lengthy transition period between this present, evil age and the paradise to come.
  4. Paradise regained. In which the great nation + land + be a blessing covenant promises reach their ultimate fulfillment in the one great people of God, in the land of the new creation, with Jesus the “son of Abraham” as the blessing to the nations.

These four stages are like a Polaroid that slowly develops—the image becomes clearer as time goes on:

Of course, this is not a defense of this premillennial outline; it’s just a brief statement of it. Why do we believe all this—especially the bit about the millennium and God’s promises about Israel’s role in the bible’s “big story”? In the next article, we’ll discuss some basics about how to read the bible the right way, then look at some scripture passages that speak about Israel’s role in God’s plan for paradise regained.

[1] 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, Art(s) 8.2, 8.3.

Why Good Christians Disagree About Israel’s Future

Why Good Christians Disagree About Israel’s Future

This is the first in a series of articles about Israel and the Millennium. Good Christians disagree about whether the people of Israel have a future in God’s plan because they have very different ways of understanding the bible’s “big story.” Many Christians believe the people of Israel are important to the bible’s story. But not all of them know why, other than to correctly declare “Israel is special” or “they’re God’s chosen people.” These are incomplete answers.

There are at least two reasons why we believe the people of Israel are a key part of the bible’s “big story.”

  • To be a blessing. Israel is special because God plans to use her as a vehicle to preach the gospel to the world during Jesus’ 1,000-year millennial reign. It is during the millennium that God fulfills his three big covenant promises to Abraham (Gen 12:1-3)—a great nation, in a land of their own, being a blessing to the world by spreading the gospel about King Jesus. These covenant promises are about “a geographical platform, a land of promise, to serve as a base of operations for God’s kingdom program on earth.”[1]
  • Millennium as a microcosm of paradise. Israel is not an end in and of itself. The millennium is a microcosm or prototype of what the Lord will do in paradise in eternity[2]—sort of the “spring training” version of the new creation paradise to come. This millennium will feature a great nation of believers, in a new and perfect land, with Jesus (“the son of Abraham,” Mt 1:1) as the penultimate Abrahamic blessing to the world.

But other Christians disagree. They believe there will be no millennium, and a very different fulfillment of those three “big promises” to Abraham. They believe Israel no longer has a unique role to play in reconciling the world to King Jesus. So, rather than seeing the great nation + land + be a blessing promises as means God will use to reach the world for the Messiah, they see them as shadows pointing to the greater realities which Christ makes real, both now and in paradise. Although these good Christians arrive at the same place—Jesus will return to punish the wicked, reward the righteous, and usher in eternity—they take a very different route to get there.

Many Christians believe the New Testament sheds new light on God’s covenant promises. They say this so-called “new light” changes what these promises mean in a way the original audience wouldn’t have understood, and in a way that violates the normal sense of the words God used to make those promises. They believe the bible does this by one thing foreshadowing another—which  is when one thing points to another thing bigger than itself (this is also called “typology”).

  • For example, Adam (our first representative), Moses (the great prophet), and David (the king of Israel) each foreshadow Jesus in complementary ways.
  • The tabernacle is a figure of the real throne room in heaven.
  • Christ also fulfills larger old covenant events in scripture which the prophets heralded; the old Eden v. the new Eden, fall v. atonement; Exodus from Egypt v. exodus from Satan’s grasp, etc.[3]

This is a real thing in scripture. But is it a real thing when it comes to God’s covenant promises? Many Christians wrongly say it is.

  • Their argument is the big three covenant promises to Abraham (a great nation + in a land of their own + to be a blessing to the world; Gen 12:2-3) are signposts which point to a larger fulfillment.[4]
  • So, they say, God does not replace Israel. Instead, Christ fulfills her promises in a larger way.

So, these Christians interpret in a non-literal way old covenant passages that we believe plainly mean more than that. Many do this because they believe the bible’s whole story is all about God’s alleged “covenant of grace” with those chosen for salvation.[5] “In the New Testament all these types reach their fulfilment and therefore cease.”[6]

  • It’s true that God has a big plan to provide salvation to sinners through faith in Christ.
  • But it isn’t true that this means the bible’s “big story” is basically about you and your personal salvation. This viewpoint interprets everything through the lens of the gospel (Jesus’ life and death),[7] when the real “big story” is the new creation paradise God has been bringing about since Genesis 3:15. Yes, Jesus essentially defeats Satan on Easter morning, but the war is not over until Revelation 22.
  • This would be like interpreting the Allied victory in Europe during World War 2 entirely from the standpoint of D-Day on 06 Jun 1944. This would be a flattening of reality. Yes, D-Day was a triumph for the Allied cause that spelled the end for Nazi Germany, but the war in Europe didn’t end for another 10 months!
  • This popular and helpful (but incomplete) “gospel-centered” lens can lead to a tunnel-vision way of reading the bible that has the New Testament flattening many Old Testament covenant promises to fit the “Jesus and individual salvation” mold.

This is why many good Christians wrongly flatten and distort God’s covenant promises to mean only this:

  • Great nation = God’s people, whoever they are (1 Pet 1:9-10)
  • The land of Canaan = Paradise in eternity (Rev 21-22)
  • Israel will be a blessing = Christ will be a blessing (“son of Abraham,” Mt 1:1)
  • King over Israel in Canaan = Jesus over his people in paradise (Rev 21-22)

We agree that, by time we get to Revelation 21-22, all this is true—the endgame truly is paradise regained, in a new creation, with one body of believers in Christ consisting of two peoples: Israel and the church (see Rev 21:10-14).

And yet … suppose you describe the plot of the 1997 movie Titanic as being “a love story on a ship.” This is true, but very incomplete—you’ve flattened the story into a pancake. This makes Titanic= an episode of The Love Boat. What if you described Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as “a wizard kid goes to boarding school”? Or the book of Revelation as “Jesus wins”? These are all true, but really simplistic—so crude they’re wrong even though they’re technically right!

This is why the true disagreement is about the way we think the bible’s “big story” plays out. We believe God made those “big three” promises to Abraham because he determined that Israel will play a key role in reconciling people from all over the world to Jesus, and she will do this during the 1,000-year millennium. During that time, she will be a great nation, in the land of Canaan, being a blessing to the world by spreading the good news about Jesus the King. Here is one example passage from the prophet Micah that speaks of these events:

And it will come about in the last days That the mountain of the house of the LORD Will be established as the chief of the mountains. It will be raised above the hills, And the peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, “Come and let’s go up to the mountain of the LORD And to the house of the God of Jacob, So that He may teach us about His ways, And that we may walk in His paths.” For from Zion will go forth the law, And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem (Micah 4:1-2).

On our interpretation, Jesus’ millennial reign is a lengthy transition period between this present, evil age (Gal 1:4) and paradise to come. That is the disagreement about the big picture.[8] This is why good Christians often talk past one another about the end-times. The other side believes the New Testament, and the apostle Paul in particular,[9] provides new understanding of these old covenant promises, and so their shape of the bible’s “big story” does not include a future mission for the people of Israel, so they see no need for a millennium.

Again, all good Christians have the same finish line: Jesus returns, punishes the wicked, and rewards the righteous. But we have very different ideas about how the big story of the bible gets to the finish line.

In the next article, we’ll discuss how to rightly understand the bible’s “big story.”

[1] Michael Vlach, The Bible Storyline (Cary: Theological Studies Press, 2025), 101.

[2] Eugene Merrill, “A Theology of the Pentateuch,” in A Biblical Theology of the Old Testament, ed. Roy B. Zuck (Chicago: Moody, 1991), 27.

[3] See esp. Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006), 58-66; 245-57. The chart at pp. 253-56 is especially excellent.

[4] “These temporal blessings did not constitute an end in themselves, but served to symbolize and typify spiritual and heavenly things” (Berkhof, Systematic, 296).

[5] Berkhof argues that the second party to the so-called “covenant of grace” are the elect in Christ (Systematic, 272-76).

[6] Berkhof, Systematic, 293.

[7] “[T]he gospel is the hermeneutical norm for all of reality … For the student of the Bible, the gospel becomes the norm by which the whole Old Testament and all the exhortations and other non-gospel aspects of the New Testament are to be understood” (Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centered, 63; emphasis in original).

[8] “The basic issue is the way we understand the historical plan and the goal of that plan through which God will bring eternal glory to himself” (Saucy, Progressive Dispensationalism, 19).

[9] “The best Scriptural exposition of the Abrahamic covenant is contained in Rom. 3 and 4, and Gal. 3” (Berkhof, Systematic, 295-96).

A Word from the Apostle John

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven saying:

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.”

Then the twenty-four elders who are seated on their thrones before God threw themselves down with their faces to the ground and worshiped God with these words:

“We give you thanks, Lord God, the All-Powerful, the one who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations were enraged, but your wrath has come, and the time has come for the dead to be judged, and the time has come to give to your servants, the prophets, their reward, as well as to the saints and to those who revere your name, both small and great, and the time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth.”

Revelation 11:15-18 (NET)

Repent and believe the Gospel.

Jesus’ Message to the Church at Philadelphia

philadelphia
The modern city of Alasehir, where the ancient church at Philadelphia was located

This is my own translation of Revelation 3:8-12 from the Textus Receptus, plus a few changes from the UBS-5 text:

8I know your deeds. (Pay attention! I have put an opened door in front of you, and no one ever has [the] power to shut it.) I know you have a little strength, and yet you have obeyed my message and have not disowned my name.

9Pay attention! I will make those from the congregation of Satan who say they are Jews (yet they are not; rather, they are lying) . . . Pay attention! I will compel them, so that they will come and pay homage at your feet and realize that I have always loved you.

10Because you have obeyed my message about perseverance, I, in turn, will keep you from the time of the temptation which is about to come upon the whole inhabited world to put to the test those who are dwelling on the earth.

11I am going to come soon! You must keep on holding fast [to] what you have, so that no one will take your crown. 12The one who will be victorious, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God and he will never go out again, and I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of my God’s city (that is, the New Jerusalem, which will come down from the heaven, from my God), and my new name.

My Pastor will be covering this text in his sermon this coming Sunday, so I thought I’d translate it myself for a bit of fun. My detailed translation is available here.