The Story

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek. Are we wrapping up this little preliminary series or are we just starting this little preliminary series?

It depends on what you mean by preliminary. I think we’re wrapping up and beginning the long trudge through 6,000 years of human history.

Right. As you know, or as I hope you know if you’re listening to this podcast, this is a world history podcast. But before we can talk about world history per se, we have to talk about how we do history. What is this history thing? What rules govern the way we do it, etc? So we’ve been talking about that, and we’ve been talking about how we view the fall, the beginning events of world history and how that shapes the way we interact with history, and now we’re getting to the meat of it, I think.

Just like any good mystery novel or any other really good kind of book, there’s always something in the beginning that, if you finish the work, you read it all through, and then you go back to the beginning, you see the end right there in the beginning. That in the Bible is the protoevangelium, which is where we’re going to start today.

So I guess that means I read it.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Adam and Eve didn’t say, “What?” because that’s called imagery and prophecy. There’s a lot going on there and they probably never during their lifetimes wholly understood what it all meant. There was something that’s connected. We’re told that about the same time he gave them the promise.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins and clothed them.

I have been surprised to discover how many Christians and theologians don’t see that as the beginning of sacrifice. In chapter 4 we find Abel bringing a sacrifice in no uncertain terms. Where did that come from? Well, God must have revealed it in there someplace. The major act of worship that is going to percolate along through all the covenant renewals for 4,000 years, and we’re not told how it started? That’s a little weird.

In fact, I knew one pastor after a fashion who insisted on, “If the Bible doesn’t say it, you can’t believe it,” so he looked at this and said, “God never instituted sacrifice because it doesn’t say so. So Abel just came up with this great idea for a lamb and that’s why God accepted it. It was his own faith, not anything that God had ever told him.” We go downhill from there real fast.

For any number of reasons that would involve us in all kinds of theological and exegetical discussion, suffice it to say that God killed animals, because that’s how you get skins off animals.

They don’t just give them up.

No. I actually heard about somebody who suggested that. “Well, maybe God had made some animals that just shed their skins naturally.” No, he killed them.

You mean like snakes?

There you go. That would work.

I was thinking of sheep, but that’s quite a lot of work.

And with sheep it’s not their skin, it’s their outer wool, which is different. And if we look forward to all the sacrifices, it repeatedly says it’s for a covering so that they may be covered, and that’s that sense. And those sacrifices are skinned and there are specific things to do with them.

Yeah, God used a lot of sheep in sacrifice, and he never specified shearing, in fact.

But he does specify for the whole burnt offering is that the one thing you don’t burn up is the skin, the leather, which presumably you take and make clothes out of, which is what’s happening here.

Anyway, that’s kind of a side issue. The point is that Adam and Eve had this promise about the seed of the woman person, about God moving to create warfare/hostility/enmity between the serpent and the woman, and somehow wraps it all up with this visual image of killing a sheep or goat or bull or whatever it is. It’s killing this animal and taking its skin to yourself for clothes.

Those are not obvious connections, and sometimes we slight the really intense training we got in Sunday School, at least some of us got in Sunday School, that taught us about these things, at least at some level.

We’re not told that God explained any of this, that the seed of the woman and the sacrificed lamb are the same person, and that the crushing of the heel is the same as the lamb dying. And that the lamb ascending in flames to God is somehow akin to getting over the bruised heel. And that all of this together somehow deals with the problem of sin which brought about the curse.

Especially when the sin came in as food, as eating the forbidden fruit. The solution is not to un-eat the fruit. That’s bizarre.

You can’t un-eat it.

Yeah, why didn’t he give them something to make them throw it up? Because it’s not the food, it’s the violation of God’s law. Even if you could un-eat the food, you still couldn’t undo the voluntary act of breaking God’s law.

So that’s what we’ve got and that’s what they had, but God did give them around 900+ years to meditate on it and think about it and say, “Okay, so we bring the sheep and we kill it, and this was connected with us not dying somehow. It’s like it died in our place?”

“You mean as a substitute?”

“Yeah, kind of like that,” and they would go on talking this over for 900 years, trying to come up with some clarity. “So this seed of yours, Eve, it wasn’t Cain. It was kind of Abel, but he’s kind of dead now. Oh, we have this new boy named Seth. He’s the seed, kind of? But he’s not going out and tackling serpents and wringing their heads off or anything. How’s he going to help us?”

“Maybe it’s the seed keeps going – the seed of the seed of the seed?”

They did not know. We look at this and say, “Yeah, it’s the first promise of Jesus.” Yes, but the old covenant moved in shadow and darkness and riddles and types and rituals, and God’s people did not understand what was going on. Even at their best they still were groping in the darkness to understand, to search what or what manner of time the spirit of Messiah which was in them did signify when it spoke of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.

So they’re with us right now. They’re standing and looking forward to however many generations, however many hundreds or thousands or ten thousands years of history lie ahead, and scratching their heads and saying, “What is God going to do?” So that’s where we are for the next – who knows, a dozen or so episodes.

We’ve done the Old Testament in the first two seasons of the podcast so we’re not going to repeat all of that. You should go check it out, but we are going to see something of the promise unfolding and becoming clearer, and how God orchestrated political, social, economic, and military issues all around the people who carried the promise, to preserve it, to bring it out clear, and to get the world ready for the beginning of the fulfillment.

Then once we’ve gone through 4,000 years of human history, which you will note is 2/3 of human history, then we have, strangely enough, the long part because we know more details. We have 2,000 years of human history to go through. No, we’re not going to go year-by-year or decade-by-decade or even century-by-century. We’re going to kind of “feel the vibe,” as my daughters would say and go with things that we know well, that we think you would find interesting, that highlight what God did and what God is doing after the coming of Christ.

The Old Testament points forward to the coming of Christ and clears the ground and gets ready the landing pad, as it were, for Jesus to come. But then when he’s crucified and risen, the dimensions of history change. It’s no longer about preserving one special people to get the Messiah here. It’s about Messiah now overthrowing the works of Satan and subduing all nations and bringing back humanity to the kingdom of God, so that at the end of everything that New Jerusalem that we’ve been talking about so much begins to be manifested in history and finally in eternity with the second coming when it comes and is the final reality. So there you go. That’s where we’re going.

Those of you who say, “This has been all about theology. I want to know about history,” beginning next week there will be more history. In fact, I think next time we’re going to go about 2,000 years in one gallop because we know so little about those 2,000 years. But right now we need to talk some more about the promise.

We’ve looked at the humanist approach, which is to say pan-spiritism, Hinduism, God is all and all is God – there’s no meaning to history because there’s no way to make any kind of valid real distinctions. Reality itself as we perceive it is mere appearance. Materialism says we’ve got a bunch of atoms in motion. Yay. Why do we care?

And so we come to Christianity, which says that God made the world and God has a plan. Apparently that plan got derailed by what happened in the garden, by Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve, and yet as it turns out there was a deeper plan, deeper magic from before the dawn of time, as Lewis says, and that’s what we’re talking about. So what was God’s plan?

Rachel, you’ve taught this I’m sure more times than you can count, but let’s say you were talking to high school students again and were telling them, “Here’s where this is going.” What would you say?

God is promising to Adam and Eve that things aren’t over, for one thing. They’re clearly going to be having children, because there’s going to be a seed, and therefore what went before hasn’t gone away. They’re still married and from that is going to come their children. But also that there will be people who are God’s people and those who aren’t, and there will be this thing called enmity, fighting, war. Because of sin, human history is a story of war, of conflict, but it’s a conflict that God put there. He says, “I’m going to put enmity between…” The reason there is conflict is because there are people who are his and those that aren’t.

Now, it’s interesting because if you left all sinners to themselves they would still fight each other, but God is choosing a particular war because he is going to send his Warrior to win his people. He’s planning to win the conflict that he has started for himself, but it is all his doing, not theirs, because one of the things they can see from the beginning is it’s the woman’s seed, not the man’s seed.

If you ask somebody who’s a biologist, they would say women don’t have seed in the same way that men do, so it’s not going to be by natural generation. There’s something miraculous in what God is promising to them. He’s promising that sin doesn’t get to win, that Satan didn’t win, that their sin didn’t destroy everything, that they are not more powerful than God. Instead, he’s going to show through a mystery that they can’t understand at that point even more of who he is and his ability to win through this conflict that he is setting up. So as history moves forward, they should be looking for the two sides and attempting to understand which side they are on and which side everybody else is on.

As we say, there’s not going to be any neutral place to stand. You’re either on one side of the conflict or the other. If you’re on God’s side, it’s because he brought you to that side. You didn’t just happen upon it or choose it for yourself because you’re so amazing.

They can see that there’s something that’s going to be going on with blood, and there’s something to do with death that is going to continue, but God seems to still be able to work even with them dying, so they have to. Obviously, they’ll wait and see how all this comes together. For us, we go “Oh yeah, I can see. All those lines come together.” I think the core of the promise for them is that God wasn’t defeated.

Speaking in those terms, you’ve described it as a war story, an action story, an adventure story. You’ve implicitly described it as a romance. You’ve used the words mystery story. Every good story has a conflict, and we look here and say, “Satan, villain, antagonist,” so the problem must be how does God deal with Satan. That’s going to really be vexing God, and how does he deal with sinful people?

As we look at scripture and look at the gospels, is that where the apparent conflict really is found? Are we afraid that Satan is going to win this and that we’re just rooting for God and hoping somehow it works out?

No. If I were to characterize Satan in the story, he’s the guy that tries to steal the show, who actually isn’t supposed to be a part of it. He’s the one that pushed his way on and said, “I am doing this.” We’re not going to focus on Milton’s view and let Satan be a primary character. He is obviously a real character and a real adversary, but the real conflict is how God can continue the things he promised before there was sin, how he can build all these things we talked about – a city, a people.

How can sin not defeat him? Not the sin of Satan, but the sin of Adam and then all the rest of us through Adam.

Can I go out on a limb here and draw a connection to Much Ado About Nothing? What’s the name of the brother who’s the bad brother?

Don John.

Yeah, he’s not a cool part of the party that’s happening in that story. He’s there and he causes trouble because he’s caddy and wants to cause trouble, but what we really care about is Benedick and Beatrice getting together. And we should take a moment to clarify why our literary theory has any bearing on history.

Proceed.

If we believe that God is telling a story here, that history is in fact the telling of stories, there are some unifying principles to how we tell that story. That’s what it means to have a narrative. It’s not quite fair to either history or literature to put them in two separate boxes and say, “Never the twain shall meet.” If we are telling history, we are telling a story. We’re choosing what facts to include and how to frame them. That’s what we’re doing.

We have a very convenient example in the Bible, that God wrote this book that contains history. In terms of genre it’s not all history, but it is our primary source of history, especially as we’re starting with world history that we don’t have a lot of other documentation for. Is that adequate?

Yes, thank you. Back to the idea that we have a love story. We have God coming to rescue his people, the Bridegroom to save his Bride. We have a mystery story. How is God going to pull this off, because he’s a holy and just and righteous God and we’re sinful. How is he going to get past that one? And how is he going to overcome our native rebellion? We are a stubborn foolish lot and we do not want to be ruled and subdued and play nice with others. How is God going to deal with that?

And it’s an action adventure story, so we should expect lots of really cool action and battles and enmity and wars and fire from heaven and all kinds of cool things along the way, for people who prefer action adventure stories.

The point I was making earlier kind of congeals here, that we don’t know where any of these are going. There are books you can pick up and in the first chapter you know where this book is going. You may not know all the details, but “This is a British cozy,” so we’re going to have five people together in some old Victorian or Elizabethan manor. One of them is going to die by some strange kind of poison, and everyone is going to have an alibi, and there’s going to be a detective who’s going to come in and by careful questioning and making some kind of huge assumptions that we never really are privy to, awe us all with this wonderful solution. That’s the way those stories work.

You can do the same thing with most adventure stories and even most romances – certainly with most romances. But when God started history, his was not only the first bestseller, but his was the first book. There were no stories predating his creation and providential rule over history. Adam and Eve and the generations that followed really did not know where this was going. They got bits and pieces. They got hints.

You mentioned blood and death. We could talk substitution. We can talk warfare. “Seed of the woman” – that’s weird, and you said miracle, supernatural. Okay, we should be expecting something like that. And Adam’s not going to contribute anything positive because human nature is fallen and Adam just doesn’t and can’t. But where does this go and how does this go?

People can sit up late at night coming up with weird what we would call fantasy stories, myths, trying to suggest how God might restore paradise and restore people to fellowship with him. And even as the prophets wrote the prophecies, they got a little here and a little there, but when Jesus came people didn’t say, “Oh look! That baby over there in the manger. He’s the Messiah. He’s the eternal son of God – God of God, light of light, all that. He’s going to go to a cross and he’s going to die. Let’s keep track of him every day so that we can follow the story in-depth.”

Mostly they said, “There’s a baby shivering in the cold. He’s cool. Bye. Going back to our sheep.”

“Where is he that’s born King of the Jews? Because we’re going to give him stuff and then run like everything.”

“Oh, he’s born king of the Jews? We must kill him now.” Once you realize it’s God, that’s kind of really dumb.

God’s people, both saints and sinners, didn’t know what was coming, so God is revealing it. We’re not going to spend a lot of time with it because we’ve done it already, but we will see in part how God clarifies this picture of the coming Messiah as we get closer and closer and closer. Things like time elements become pretty clear, and location/geography, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Galilee. But what’s he going to do and why is he going to do it?

That wasn’t so clear to anybody, not so much because God hadn’t said it, but because we couldn’t conceive that God would do that because, you know, if I were God I wouldn’t become a man, become a creature, die for the sins of people who hate me and want to kill me. Blowing them away sounds like a better solution, honestly.

Of course, lots of people have come up with other ideas of what God coulda woulda shoulda done. “Oh, he just forgives everybody because he’s love.” We can go down the list of all the theological heresies, and as we go past the cross the amazing thing is that people who name the name of Christ will point back and still not get it and still come up with horrible answers as to who the Messiah really is.

“Yeah, he was this man who became God because they hung out, kind of,” or “He was a phantom, a spirit, not really real,” or “He’s the prime example, and if we all just did good like he did, we’d all go to heaven,” and so on. “What did he accomplish in his death? Well, not much. It’s the example. It’s the love.”

Just by getting historically to the cross and the empty tomb doesn’t mean we’re done dealing with theological issues, and those theological issues continue to shape history. God’s people didn’t get it, and unfortunately a lot of people still don’t.

So as we go into the years marked AD we’re still going to be talking about who Jesus is and why it matters, both because he’s alive and living and reigns, but also because how we think about him affects the choices we make and the cultures we create.

I think it’s important to say when you think about the study of history from beginning to end that the point of history, the focus of history is Jesus. Because he is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, that means the plan was already there at the foundation of the world. And just as all of scripture is about him, so is everything in this world. It’s upheld by him and it is for him, so if we ever in some way can’t see Jesus in our study of history we’ve gone astray.

And we’re not outside of history yet. We’re still in it, so our talking about it can actually change what comes next, which is interesting if you think about it. It’s almost like a really long-running TV show like Stargate SG-1. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. At the beginning of the show they don’t know what’s through the Stargate, so of course everything is a surprise, like everything was a surprise to Adam and Eve and Abraham.

There’s so much unknown, so it’s only because we’re in Season 6,000 that we’re like, “Oh yeah, there’s all these different star systems, and here’s how you communicate with these.” We have all this data that they didn’t have, but we’re still part of the same story in our lives. It’s not like we’re standing outside of the story that’s been written. It’s the story that God is writing right now as we speak.

And to go back to my point, because of the very temporal distance, we look back through what can often be the mists of time, and look back and not understand what’s gone before. “Why do we need to study history?” the children ask. “Because we’re in a war and it might be a good idea if you knew whose side you were on and what the course of the battle has been to this point, and what we’ve conquered and what they’re holding, and what weapons they’ve used in the past and what strategies they’re prone to, and when we lost and why we lost. There’s all kinds of things that you need to know because the battle is not over yet.”

I always complain about Bible people, Bible times, Bible stories, Bible lands and such, but you can do the same thing with the history of the world since Christ. “Well, that’s olden days, olden times, olden people, back when you were a kid, Mr. Uttinger.”

“Yeah, we don’t think that way anymore.”

“We don’t do that anymore.” Yeah, you kind of do because human nature doesn’t change and the gospel doesn’t change and God hasn’t changed, but the battle does change. It changes in that there is progress. The king has come and he is waging a successful war.

It’s at this point we have to start talking both missiology and eschatology. For the first 4,000 years, from the garden gate to Calvary, God was preserving a promise, a people, his word, and a form of worship that was acceptable to him, and they all hung together. It was all a package deal.

As we look at Old Testament history and the history of the ancient world and classical world, we’re going to see that a lot of what was going on was God on the one hand protecting his people from these pagan influences, whether they be the subtleties of idolatry and philosophy, or the very violent attacks of nations trying to conquer Israel and wipe them out, but at the same time he’s using all of that to prepare the groundwork for the coming of his son. But once his son comes and does what he’s supposed to do, then everything changes and there’s an outward advance.

In the book of Revelation chapter 12, the first half is a woman in travail. She’s clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, 12 stars on her head. She was trying to bring forth the baby, and there’s the dragon ready to devour the child as soon as it’s born. That’s the Old Testament. That’s the protoevangelium in tableau, waiting for Messiah, God’s people travailing to bring forth the Messiah, with the dragon always there ready to snap up anybody who looks like he might be the Messiah or anyone leading to Messiah, if he can.

But once Christ comes, then things change. Christ now becomes the hero on the white horse riding through history, slaying his enemies with the sword of his mouth and achieving victory – not just holding a line, not just maintaining a balance, but actually making a difference – and that’s how New Testament history is different from Old Testament history.

In the Old Testament, God was content to let all nations walk after the blindness of their own heart. Now he commands all men everywhere to repent, so that’s the new thing. God is the same. Human nature is the same. Sin is the same. The gospel is the same. But now the gospel is out clear and the gospel has the power to change human hearts and, in changing human hearts, the power to change people, cultures, nations, and ultimately a world.

It’s one thing to say, “Well, yes, God could…because he’s kind of sovereign and all that, but the Bible’s all about the antichrist and the beast and how bad things are going to get, and Jesus is coming back real soon. So those are nice thoughts and I’m sure you mean well thinking them, but have you looked around lately? The world is horrible and I cannot conceive of how it could get any better.”

The world was pretty horrible when the son of God was in the tomb and his apostles were scattered. That was pretty bad, but Sunday was just a day or two away.

So as we look at history from here on out, we’re looking at a Messiah who was coming, then a Messiah who will have come, and we’re going to trace the history of the world to the coming of Messiah and all that God is orchestrating to protect his people and to use their very enemies to forward the coming of Messiah. Then we’re going to begin looking at the spread of his kingdom in the face of opposition. We’re not downplaying the opposition. There’s a lot of opposition.

Mrs. Voytek (Rachel) is a teacher of church history. I think the case could be made that a lot of church history is simply a discussion of all of the heresies that people have ever committed, punctuated by an occasional revival.

Definitely a lot of, “Oh, you want to say that? I may need to kill you now, or punish you or exile you.” And yet I think in teaching church history that’s one of the things I have slowly come to be encouraged by, to see that our age is in many ways no different than many others in seeing lots of sin, but you can also see the progress in what the church learns and does each time.

When there are those revivals you see progress. We lose ground often afterwards, but I think of the 1600s and you see the awfulness of somebody like James I, who I honestly tell the kids about him and he was completely wicked and awful.

Shamie Jamie?

Yes, but it’s so important to say, “Look at this. Some of the things in our time that everybody is so horrified by with homosexuality and everything, they’ve been there before, they’ll be there again. This isn’t new. But look at the Puritans who are there at the same time. Look at their devotion to the Word. Look at the ways that they were able to spread the gospel further in the New World.”

So history should be encouraging, so long as we don’t get our eyes totally focused on what the other side is doing so that we can’t see what our side is doing.

And victory might not look like what we expect it to look like.

Just like everything in the Bible.

Right. It’s the sword of Jesus’ mouth, not the sword in his hand.

Yes, it’s not what people expected at all – the sword from his mouth, the gospel. And because we default so easily to the flesh, we are all as Christians constantly tempted back to, “Well, if we just kill them all, if we just drop a couple atomic bombs, if we just made a law.” We keep appealing to outward things – force, basically. “If I were dictator for a day…”

Well, let’s praise God you’re not. Jesus knows what he’s doing. Yes, he does smite the nations both with a rod of iron but also primarily with the sword of his mouth. He smashes nations so that the gospel can come in and have fruit in the midst of all that.

So we don’t have a rosy-eyed “Oh, we’re just drifting toward the millennium.” No, we know all about failures and sins and persecution and heresies. Sometimes all of that makes the best stories. As the children in Narnia say, “Have you ever noticed that every time we show up, really bad things are happening?” I think the response is, “Yeah, why don’t we get to see all the good times in-between?” “Because we’re not needed then.” The stories often are about really horrible things where God reaches in and pulls something incredibly beautiful out of the midst of it.

If it were all about, “And there was this little village and it had three churches, and all the people, despite their minor theological differences, loved each other and worked together and funded mission societies. There was not an illegitimate birth. There was not a drunkard in town, and this continued for 100 years…”

Great, we’ve got the whole story now.

Yeah, we’re done. There’s no story there, but that would be good. Yeah, it would be great.

It would be really nice to live there.

Yes. The town where I lived in my last two years of college was not far from that. It was one of those places where people don’t lock their doors. There were three or four Reformed churches in town and I think one Baptist church. There was one atheist and everyone knew who he was. Sunday morning you saw people en masse walking to the closest church, and yet these were the people who told me that God’s kingdom could not possibly have any significant cultural impact on society. These are also the people who said, “You’re going back to California? I can’t imagine trying to raise a family there.” Well, right now I have trouble imagining it, too.

Let us be thankful for the times where there’s no story, but there are lots of times when there are many stories. We tell stories about the martyrs. We don’t tell stories about Aunt Tessie who lived in the same town, did good works of charity, and died at a ripe old age surrounded by her family.

Now the thing is, one day when Jesus comes back and ends sin, the nature of storytelling will change. It has to, because there will be no more sin, and conflict generated by sin and by the curse – which is to say almost all conflict – will not be an issue anymore, certainly not in the same way.

But I think there is a sense in which we do want to honor the story of Aunt Tessie.

Yes, and one day we will because of our ability to appreciate it.

To understand it fully. Also, every life has conflict. Even Aunt Tessie has conflict, and part of telling her story is bringing out the hidden conflict.

Right. And here’s something else that goes with this. “Won’t that mean that as the church fills the world and becomes more and more sanctified that basically you’re saying sin won’t be a problem anymore?”

Oh no. Sin just goes deeper. It becomes more secretive. It hides in the shadows. That’s the way of things. Most of us who have walked with the Lord for any length of time have had the joy and the chagrin of overcoming some huge sin in our life and thinking, “Wow, that was such a victory! Everything’s going to be so much better!” and we move that sin out of the way and guess what we find behind it?

Another sin.

Other little sins that have been sitting there laughing at us and hiding and we’re like, “Uh-oh,” and now the battle begins afresh. Someone may come along and say, “But you escaped drug addiction, sexual addiction. What’s a little pride and vanity and arrogance compared to that?”

And look at the people around you who have been crushed by pride and vanity.

Exactly. It wasn’t the drug addicts and the prostitutes who sent Jesus to the cross.

You can see this in the life of Paul, “…touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” And then, “Oh wait, I struggle. Oh wait, I am the chiefest of sinners,” as he came to know himself better in terms of who Jesus is, in terms of the holiness of God.

He did not have a consistently higher opinion of himself even as he walked longer with God. He began to see more clearly. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin,” because the light keeps showing us more and more sin, so the battle is not going to end.

We’ll find out that there’s a lot of stuff going on with Aunt Tessie that we didn’t know about, and she faced struggles we can’t conceive of, because although she was more mature in some areas and in a different kind of environment, there was still sin. There will always be sin. It won’t always be all out there, but the biggest fight we have with sin is in our own hearts. That’s a basic lesson of history.

When we start looking to merely human heroes and saying, “Oh look, he can save us,” that’s the flesh. There’s lots of dangers and lots of traps there, and sometimes they’re not all Nazi stormtroopers. Sometimes they’re sweet little old ladies who smile at you and say one or two words that destroy your universe, so the battle continues, but Jesus wins.

He wins in time and in history, and when he has brought his church that he’s bought to himself and sanctified her to the point where he’s ready for the next step, then he comes again and he wipes away sin forever. Then the new mode of storytelling takes place that we can only anticipate. We can’t anticipate what that will be like, except to recognize that a change has to come.

There’s that pseudo-story of Narnia that never really happened. Some people call it the 7th book.

Oh, the last anon book, the one where Lewis asked his fans to write fan fiction, where Susan comes back to the Lord. I wish she would. One should write that story.

I thought about that myself at one point, although I would have set it wholly on earth.

So that was the end of that story and this is the first chapter of the new story. I forget how he phrases it because I haven’t read that particular book in a very, very long time, but it’s a story where each chapter is better than the last. In other words, the mode of storytelling itself keeps developing and growing, and we’re able to appreciate the wonders that are in God, without us having to become sinners saved by grace to get it.

That’s always going to be there and it’s always going to be the operating assumption, but there are new things that God can do for us that don’t involve his Son going to the cross. Yes, they rest on that. I’m not saying we get rid of the gospel and all of that, but I’m saying there’s a lot about God, and we’re so concentrated on grace and mercy and forgiveness that we miss splendor, infinity, sense of humor, imagination in God, his creative power, the beautiful things he can create that we haven’t seen yet. There will be more time for those things once sin is finally dealt with, but that’s not history. That’s beyond eschatology.

History is seeing Jesus win and that’s what we’re going to be looking at for the next – as long as it takes, as long as we have, and as long as people stay with us.

Let’s wrap up this installment with some recommendations.

I’m going to recommend David Chilton’s Paradise Restored. It’s out of print and you might have trouble finding a copy, but it’s a good introduction to biblical theology, imagery and all that, and also to an optimistic view of eschatology, and it’s pretty easy reading.

I’m going to recommend something not historical or theological. It’s a book called Poetic Designs. I was going to recommend writing bad poetry because I think it’s very good for the soul, but this is a book to help you identify what is good poetry, so that maybe after you’ve written some bad poetry you can think about writing some good poetry.

The book is called Poetic Designs and it’s just a list of all sorts of poetic devices and gives you an idea of what makes poetry work. The author is Stephen Adams.

I am going to recommend a book I found recently that’s just been published a couple months ago. It is Digital Liturgies by Samuel James. I got it as an audiobook to try it out, and I’ve already listened to half of it in two days and I find it very fascinating.

Samuel James is looking at how the internet as an actual platform and tool, the way that it’s actually built, prevents us from thinking in terms of biblical wisdom. It’s reshaping the way that we think so that we can’t think deeply and we can’t think in the ways that God would have us think, and come therefore to the conclusions He would have us come to. He’s taking a different approach. Most people just want to talk about the content on the internet, but he’s actually saying the internet itself has changed us.

The internet existing?

The way that it works. The medium is actually changing us. He talks about Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but he takes it to the internet instead of the television, and he talks about basically the way that it’s a place of alternative worship that’s creating different ways of seeing the world, a different worldview, and he goes through what he calls the liturgies of the online world.

He doesn’t say to throw out the online world – in case you were thinking that – but that we need to understand more than just, “Oh, it’s a tool and it’s all about how you use it.” No, the tool itself actually talks to you and therefore is more than just a hammer that you pick up and use. It’s been very interesting to read, and anybody – which is almost everybody – who deals with the internet probably would appreciate it.

Thank you. That sounds exceedingly interesting, especially since my class is finishing Amusing Ourselves to Death right now, so that would be the next step.

Yes. It was actually one I found and went, “Oh, I bet the kids would really benefit from this,” but it’s something I think anybody would appreciate, and it’s short.

Great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our transcriptionist. We have a generous transcriptionist who donates her time to make sure that these episodes are available to read. If you’d like to read them, you can get them in your inbox by subscribing to our Substack, which is Halting Toward Zion.

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