I assume that you desire many of the same things that most humans desire. I assume you often have an unquenchable thirst for things like happiness, to be attractive, to be celebrated, to have sex and to feel good, to be care-free, to be secure (health, own a home, money, etc.), to have healthy relationships (family, friends, etc.), to make your life “count”, and other things like this. These desires are about as human as you can get. So here we are, a bunch of humans, wanting to be human. For thousands of years folks have been saying that full humanity is found in the posture of being in full alignment with the things of God. To be in alignment with the things of God is to say “amen” to the things of God, and in doing so we are saying “yes” to optimal humanity and “yes” to what humanity is intended to be. For optimal humanity, there is a need for rightly ordering, and emphasizing, all the very real and very human desires listed above.
Christianity isn’t an invitation into sin-management and “trying harder,” and it’s not an invitation to “Christian” busyness and “spiritual” activity. Christianity is an invitation to life. Life! Some use the phrases of “flourishing,” or “shalom,” or “the good life” – but you get the picture, and you have before you a hearty invitation! One Christian of old, St. Augustine, bears testimony, when he prays for all to hear that “our hearts are restless, O God, until they find their rest in you.” Ahhh – “rest”. Rest (for we are weary)! Life (because we are all dying and feel already half-dead)! Humanity (because this existence of ours feels truncated)! Yes! Yes! Yes, to this glimpse humanity! “But”, you might be thinking, “this sounds good but I’m just not really sure that the ‘things of God’ (‘Christianity’) can really scratch all my human itches” – Ok, ok, let’s tease these things out then (because mere hype never does the trick). Let’s go forest and let’s go trees, let’s get the big picture as well as some fine strokes. Let me give you some things-of-God realities to hang your human hat on.
The first part of your human story is just that – YOU ARE A PART OF A STORY! This fact that you are part of a “story” might sound a little foreign and maybe a little new-agey, a little trendy, or a little forced, but, if you slow down to think about it, I think you will see this governing reference point of “story” resonates with your own lived-reality.
Think, for example, when you meet someone new and you begin the process of “getting to know” that person, you will find that “getting to know” that person is you getting to know their story. So, they might say, for example, “I’m Jamie, I live down the street with my sister, but I’m originally from Bakersfield – that’s why I dress like this despite living in an East Coast city… I’ve always loved riding horses and singing with my family, I just love a good Buck Owens song but, at the same time, I’m not opposed to a little Taylor Swift here and there… Since I’ve lived here, though, it’s been rough. We live right above this grouchy old couple and almost as soon as I get to strumming any chords, they are banging the broom up against my floor (their roof).” Did you see that?! Did you catch what just happened? To begin to “know” Jamie was to begin to know her “story” that she unfolded for you (the places, geography, relationships, influences, delights, and other narrative components that have shaped, and are shaping Jamie into the person that she is and is becoming). To know Jamie is to know her story. To know Jamie better is to better know her story. But to really know Jamie in a significant and relational way is to be a part of her story. To know you is to know your story. So, what is your story? What made you and shaped you to be who you are today? What is the story of YOU?
Actually, before we get in this further, let me pump the breaks. I think, instead, the better place to start is to ask, as Michael Goheen asks, “What is the true story of the whole world?” because, as it turns out, we are ALL a part of a story. Indeed, as Rowe put it “Once one understands that the story of everything encompasses everything… transformational living is easy to see. You live according to the story that tells you how to live.”[1]
Your story, and my story, began in the very heart of our invisible God. Long before you were born, and long before this wonderful (painful yet precious and deplorable yet dreamy) existence and cosmos was sung into being, you, and humanity, were a target of mutual delight in the emotions of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. Here, again, we must hold off on the pressing question of “what is your story?” to first answer the foundational starting questions of: who is the narrator of this great story? Who is the author? Who will rehearse to us the truth of the ages and our innermost being? This great narrator is none other than the Author Himself. It is Him: The Alpha and the Omega, the A and the Z, the One who has been pleased to not be far off, but to make Himself known. This is the one who calls all people to their role in the story of true humanity – the One who calls all people to Himself so that He might give Himself. You might think I’m getting carried away, but we mustn’t wontonly rush into holy realities lest they become “common” to us. There is a kindness and long suffering that beckons you in at this very moment. Even before a newborn child can speak or connect ideas and stories, they first “know” the one to whom they belong. Indeed, we are not our own but belong to God. If we know nothing, let us at least know to whom we belong—the one in whom we live and move and have our being and grope after. So then, in reverence, I proclaim unto you that it is none other than God Himself who is the narrator and author of your story, because of a promise, or Covenant, that He swore by Himself (because there was no one greater by whom he could swear), that He would call a people to Himself, that He would be their God and they would be His people Ok, back to your Bible.
The Bible, contrary to what many folks think, has a primary function (among other things) of communicating this story; it is the unfolding story of God’s ways with humanity (and humanity’s ways with God). Here, again, Goheen is calling a spade a spade: “We have fragmented the Bible into bits—moral bits, systematic-theological bits, devotional bits, historical-critical bits, narrative bits, and homiletical bits. When the Bible is broken up in this way there is no comprehensive grand narrative…”[2] The thing is, though: this “story of God” is not just an easy-breezy novella with a few movements and chapters, the Bible is more of a saga – a multi-volume nuanced story with twists, and types, and shadows, and scandals, bizarreness, and covenants, and promises and fulfillments along the way. From beginning to end, it is, just like your life, nuanced with overlapping touchpoints all along the way. Your story is fully true, but complex and rich and no event is necessarily isolated from the others (they all sort of build upon the previous components), and so is God’s story with humanity in scripture (perhaps this is why the Spirit reminds us in 2 Peter 3:16, “There are some things in [the Bible that are] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.”) Sandra Richter said “This narrative begins with Eden and does not conclude until the New Jerusalem is firmly in place. It is all one story. And if you are a believer, it is all your story.”[3] That means a few things then: it means these are your 66 books of truth – of true North. It means that now (that you acknowledge this story to be the basis of yours), suddenly, it’s on you to acquaint yourself with “Eden,” with “the New Jerusalem,” and with the Bible all the nuances and complexities of the Bible because it is, indeed, “your story.” You are now a “man of the Book.” The Bible is to be read by people who seek the “truth” and “life” of humanity, and how to find the “Way” therein. The Bible is the book for humans, it is your book. But, what does this book say? What is the story? Since it is nuanced and spans thousands of years, allow me to just paint a few specific broad strokes with key themes/elements of the story.
The story of God in scripture begins with, first, a relational, creative, and poetic God who enjoys and celebrates the same things you and I enjoy and celebrate. He is our kind of God – a relational creator and purveyor of the good and the beautiful. All our best stuff came from the mind of this God (by the way, let’s now call Him “our God” because, indeed, He is our God, and we are His people! He is no concept or abstraction, no code to be cracked, but our own living God!). Our God put in place the dispositions and abilities in humanity, and the raw materials in creation, for us to act upon and cultivate. We’re talking the glories and gifts of sex (of the highest order!), romance, families! We’re talking the ingredients and the raw-material for the best carne asada tacos and root beer floats that only the mind of God could conjure (and allow us, and desires for us, to unearth and actualize). Our God (O how good He is – such a giver of good-gifts!) has built into us the ability to create and enjoy works of, for example, the most goosebump-inducing dances and chants (think the “Haka” of the image-bearers known of the Maori people), all the songs you want to sing-along to (or slow dance, or raise a fist, or slam dance, or whatever consummation the genre and your personality necessitates)! Who is this creator-God?! This fount of every blessing! This God is so properly legit! So agreeable! Such a source of good! It’s as if He speaks the language of our hearts that we ourselves don’t even know how to fully translate. That we might know Him more! That we might have the strength to comprehend with all the other humans what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God!
Some would say the story of God unfolds in the “4 acts” of Creation > Fall > Redemption > Consummation. In this “Act 1” of “Creation” the Triune God, for reasons that belong to His own hidden council, was pleased to create humanity. Humans, singled-out and identified as “Image-bearers,” became the object of His Trinitarian affection. This creation wasn’t a pious mist of disembodied souls and spirts, rather, it was flesh and bone, male and female, grounded in place and time with task and telos (hence, the ingredients of “Story”!). The first man, Adam, like our God (and like you and I) too, was a relational creator poet (or should we say “co-creator”) and purveyor of the good and the beautiful. Like a father who presents his child with a birthday present of an easel, canvas, and paints, God has presented us with this world – a blank canvas to cultivate and beautify and enjoy. A garden in Eden was to spread through all this world – it was to progress further and higher. Cultivating, dividing, filling, naming, and enjoying/resting: a most-blessed vocation given to humanity. This is the task of imaging our God. He, too, is a dividing, filling, naming, and relational, enjoying/resting creative poet. Sherman, in the book Kingdom Calling, said “Human beings are made in the image of God, and God is a worker. Human labor has intrinsic value because in it we ‘image,’ or reflect, our Creator.”[4] And Dorothy Sayers, on speaking of the image-bearer who is creator and purveyor, sees this when she says, “Work is the measure of his life, and his satisfaction is found in the fulfillment of his own nature, and in contemplation of the perfection of his work.”[5]
This task was done in the “presence” of God. I don’t know in what capacity, or how often, God would physically be present with His people, but there is a sense that the earth was like a temple (see Richter, Beale, Walton). If a temple is the dwelling place of the presence of God with human persons, then we might say the garden was a garden-temple, and the task was unto a telos of a garden-city-temple (cultivated, named, and enjoyed with the full presence of God. This, by the way, is “Act 4” consummation: See Revelation 21).
Please know this task and telos, since the fall, has not been lost or reduced or replaced (it has, however, been expanded in the task of making disciples). Humanity still bears God’s image but no matter how marred it has not been lost. Creation is still “good” and image-bearing is still our task. This is, in large part, what it means to be human. As you come to better know the story of God, and your place within the story, please never lose site of the fact that the pious and sacred tasks of naming, working, separating, enjoying (as they are rightly ordered) are a calling of humans. Dorothy Sayers is worth quoting at length:
What the Church should be telling [the Christian carpenters at church] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.[6]
Again, to drive the point home (because the point does need driving home since we Christians are so dualistic, and so de-formed in what we think is “piety” and we have fallen views of what we think is “sacred” activity. We need to, as Jamie Smith encourages us, be “re-formed” from all the “de-formed” traits we’ve inherited from within and without the church. In like manner Paul encourages us to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds”). This sacred task and telos is such a vital part of the role of the Church that Sherman calls pastors “to inspire their flock about their daily work” and that “congregational leaders need to start with the vital truth that work preceded the Fall. This truth is foundational for faithful vocational stewardship.”
Here I have shared but a page from the chronicles of God, and there is so much more that need be said. Yet, I have used this time to open to you, what I hope, are some key aspects of what it means to be human as informed by the story of God (found in the Bible). I have come to find that in having a right and robust doctrine/understanding of “Act 1”/creation, and what our task and telos is as humans, helps us to best make sense of the rest of the story and our human desires. So, I bid, you, do come! Come unto life and humanity! This is not an invitation to a life of vapid “Christian busyness” or mere self-improvement, but an invitation to all who are weary and heavy laden, to all who will listen, to all who are weak, to all who are thirsty. A call to “the true story of the whole world.” This is a call to full humanity with a rightly ordered life of self and God. Truly, truly, as Irenaeus said, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
[1] C Kavin Rowe, Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2020), [retrieved from my Logos library. No page listed]
[2] Michael Goheen, The Biblical Drama of Redemption: Starting with the Gospel, Class Handout
[3] Sandra Richter, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 15
[4] Amy L. Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2011), 102
[5] Dorothy Sayers, Why Work?, Class Handout
[6] Sayers, Why Work?