Reading the Bible as Story Part 4
If we’re going to read Scripture well, let’s remember two things we’ve already discovered.
First, slow down. Scripture isn’t meant to be rushed. Take your time and enjoy the journey into which the story is inviting you.
Second, remember that the Bible isn’t a collection of disconnected stories. It is one unified story of God’s redeeming work in the world (Thanks Bible Project).
These two ideas are essential for those looking to understand Scripture better and are foundational to what comes next.
Let me invite you to try something that may be new to you. Try reading the Bible through three lenses.
In his book “How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth,” Gordon Fee suggests the Old Testament narratives can be read on 3 different levels. I prefer to think of them as lenses. [1]
The first lens is the story of the individual. What did God do in Joseph? What was going on between him and his brothers? When we read, we gain meaning and truth from the story at its base level. What does Joseph’s journey teach us about Joseph and the lessons he learns, or David and his journey? How is this person becoming who God has called them to be?
Jacob
Joseph
David
Ruth
The second lens is “God’s redeeming a people for his name.”[2] According to Fee and me, this happens twice. Once under the Old Covenant or the Old Testament and the other under a New Covenant or what we find in the New Testament. How is God setting aside a people to be His image bearers in the world, and how does He shape them into the people He wants them to be?
And the third lens, and this is what I’ve been talking about, is what we call the “meta-narrative,” or “the story of redemption,” or “redemptive history.” This is God’s story of how He is saving His good creation from the evil forces that seek to keep us from a life with God and oppose His work of love and salvation in the world. How is God saving the world and setting everything right?
There's a great scene in the movie National Treasure that has always stuck with me. Throughout the movie, Benjamin Gates follows a trail of clues left by the Founding Fathers, convinced they are leading him to an incredible treasure. Every clue ultimately points him to the back of the Declaration of Independence. He knows something is there; he just can't see it.
Sitting quietly in an old church, he carefully unrolls one of the most valuable documents in American history and puts on a remarkable pair of spectacles designed by Benjamin Franklin. They aren't ordinary glasses. Multiple colored lenses can be rotated and layered over one another.
He slowly adjusts them,
First the red… an image appears
Then the blue... another image
Then another combination
Each lens rotated and layered over one another, revealing something the others could not until, together, the full beauty of the image came into view.
Looking at it in quiet amazement, he simply says, "It's really quite something... It's really quite remarkable."
Before anyone misunderstands the illustration, I'm not allegorizing the Declaration of Independence. Nor am I suggesting that Scripture contains hidden messages waiting for the enlightened reader to discover them. The truth of Scripture is there for anyone willing to read it carefully and faithfully. While the text doesn't change, the way we see it does.
When we read only through the first lens, we do see something true. But when we add the second and third, we see even more. And when we finally look through all three together, the full beauty of God's story comes into view. Each lens is true, but none is complete by itself. Together, they don't create a new meaning; they help us see the fullness of the meaning that has been there all along.
Looking through all three lenses invites us to ask questions as we read, (remember our first tool: slow down).
What does this story have to say about this person, their relationship to God, and the other people around them?
What is this story telling me about how God is furthering the story of His chosen people (Abraham and his descendants in the Old Testament, God’s new covenant family, the church, in the New Testament)?
And finally, how does this story add to the overall story of how God is saving all of creation?
So, when we read those wonderful stories, we aren’t just reading about David or Abraham. We are reading about how God is redeeming a people for Himself and ultimately how God is saving the world. When we look at characters only through the first lens, we begin to moralize the story itself. While that isn’t always a problem, it isn’t the whole truth, and it often leads us to misinterpret the story, which can get us into all sorts of trouble.
Let’s see how this plays out practically by looking, once again, at David and Goliath.
If we look at this famous story through our second and third lenses, not just the first, we see not just a story about David but a grander story about God’s people, and, greater still, about God and his work to save humanity.
Maybe we aren’t David.
Maybe the Bible isn’t telling us that we must face our giants.
Maybe there’s a greater story here.
After all, David was a King and Messianic figure who served as a foreshadowing of the ultimate Messiah (Hebrew word meaning “anointed one”), even though he was very human and very flawed.
When we read the story of David and Goliath through all three lenses, we begin to recognize that perhaps, instead of David confronting Goliath, we are Saul or the Israelites hiding from the giant who is the personification of “the Satan,” the force opposing God and His purposes from being carried out in and through His chosen people.
So then, who is David representing? If we read through the lenses, the text tells us.
David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. (1 Sam 17:45,46 NIV)
The story may encourage us as we face our giants but viewing it through all three lenses reveals a different, much larger story. God is the deliverer. He delivered Israel, not David. If David overcoming Goliath shows us anything, it is that God will fulfill His promise and defeat the enemy. And, ultimately, that Jesus, the perfect Messiah and our shepherd, ran toward the very thing that was too great for us to overcome on our own: sin and death. And, in a way that looked different than what everyone expected (just as David rejected the armor and weapons of Saul), defeated the enemy and advanced God’s story of redeeming a people and restoring creation.
But what about our giants? Remember, God’s got them; they aren’t too big for Him. Let’s not make the text do something it was never intended to do. David was never pointing to us, he was always pointing to Jesus (even in rabbinic tradition, David points to the long-awaited Messiah).
The more I read Scripture, the more I’m convinced that these lenses reach beyond the Old Testament narratives. The Bible isn’t just a group of independent books. It is a unified story, and whether narrative, poetry, prophecy, Gospel, epistle, or apocalypse, every passage exists within the life of an individual, within the life of God's covenant people, and within God's larger work of redemption. The genres communicate it differently (we’ll talk about that later), but they all participate in the same story.
[1] He also points out the importance of the different genres of scripture and the need to read them differently but that is for another article.
[2] Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Fourth Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 95.
