In The Beginning: Reading the Bible as a Story

In The Beginning...

What a great line.

The prelude to an epic story.

It's reminiscent of, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." From the moment we read those words, we know we are being invited on an adventure into a world larger than ourselves. We settle in, lean forward, and prepare for the journey.

I've spent most of my life telling stories in a multitude of different ways as a pastor, professor, performer, and writer. After all, that is what we are: storytellers. We tell stories around dinner tables, in classrooms, from pulpits, and around campfires. We tell stories because stories shape us. They help us make sense of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. Even more secular thinkers such as Jordan Peterson have observed that human beings understand themselves through narrative.  Before we are philosophers, we are storytellers. Before we analyze reality, we experience it. We inhabit it. 

But the story Christians tell is different.

C.S. Lewis, reflecting on a conversation with Tolkien, famously wrote, “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. By becoming fact, it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”[1]

That statement may sound strange to our modern ears.  After all, we often use the word myth to mean something that is untrue.  But literary scholars understand myth differently. The great myths of humanity often emerge from real longing, real fear, real love, and sometimes even real events remembered through fantastic imagination told in story.  Tolkien and Lewis both understood this. They believed that the stories humanity has told throughout history are filled with the echoes and fragments of a deeper truth which every single one of us longs to understand. 

While some would say the Jesus myth isn’t any different, Christians have always made a far more audacious claim.  We believe that what humanity saw through its myths and legends was not merely imagined. We believe that what poets longed for, what prophets anticipated, what heroes reflected, and what every great story hinted toward actually arrived in human history. We believe that the story of Scripture is rooted in real people, real places, and real moments in human history. Yet contained within it are all the wonder, beauty, longing, majesty, and meaning of the greatest myths because in Jesus, the Author wrote Himself into the story.  

The Bible does more than tell us what happened. It invites us into a world. It engages our imagination, stirs our emotions, and teaches us to see reality differently. As we journey through its pages, we discover something surprising: we are not merely readers. We are participants in a drama unfolding before us, whose Author and central Character is bringing all things toward their beautiful conclusion.

If we treat Scripture as anything less, we lose sight of what it was meant to be. We force it to answer questions it was never intended to answer and insist that it become something it was never designed to be. For some, that realization is frustrating.

The story the Bible tells demands that its audience travel slowly. It asks more of us than intellectual agreement or even curiosity. It invites us to listen carefully enough to hear the whispered truths drowned out under the incessant noise that dominates our hurried and chaotic world. We live in an age that wants theological McNuggets, those small, convenient, bite-sized truths we can consume on the run. But Scripture was never intended to be fast food. It is a feast. And feasts are not hurried. They are savored.

A lot of people are frustrated when they read the Bible. They don’t understand it. Even when it is written in their native language, it feels foreign. The more they read, the more distant it can seem. They listen to sermons, podcasts, and teachers explaining what they should believe, yet somehow, they walk away more frustrated than fulfilled, lamenting, “Why don’t I see what they see?”

I understand that frustration.

Perhaps one reason is that we often approach the Bible like a dictionary or encyclopedia. We come looking for answers to specific questions. We search for a word, a topic, or a problem and expect a direct entry explaining everything we want to know. When the answer is not what we were looking for, does not immediately appear, or when it seems buried beneath layers of narrative, poetry, history, and symbolism, we become impatient.

But the Bible communicates truth differently.

Centuries ago, Gregory the Great observed in his Homilies on Ezekial “Divina eloquia cum legente crescunt” or "Divine words grow with the one who reads them" He did not mean that God’s words change. He meant that as we mature, our ability to perceive its depth matures as well. The Bible is not a reference manual to be mastered. It is a divine story into which we are invited. 

We are not merely readers. 

We are participants. 

Part 2 coming soon…

[1] C.S. Lewis. “Myth Became Fact.” In God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper. Eerdmans, 1970.