“Tell me a story! Tell me a story!” From the time we can put together syllables and comprehend what other people are saying, we are fascinated by stories. Children want to hear bedtime stories, even if they are the same adventures they have heard hundreds of times. Teenagers flock to the local movie theater to experience the latest stories coming out of Hollywood. Even adults enter the world of stories, curling up on the sofa with a good book, whether a biography of some famous person, a fictional drama, a romantic fling or the history of a nation. From kindergarten on, we live for stories. Something deep within the human soul hungers for narratives and the truths they convey.
But stories are not meant just to give us relaxation and entertainment in our free time. We do not only live for stories, we live by them also. The three major monotheistic religions of the world are each centered in a story, a grand narrative in which the modern-day adherent is expected to take part. Christians seek to live according to the biblical story as given in the Old and New Testaments. We cannot look to the Bible as simply an abstract treatise on systematic theology (even though it contains concepts that can be broken down and filed as such).
Scripture is above all else a collection of stories that make up the Story – the grand narrative that explains our world. God has chosen, through his Word, to tell his children the Story, not a bedtime story that rocks us into a gentle sleep, but the Story that we awake to in the morning that explains why we exist. God’s Story tells us who we are, what has gone wrong with the world, what God has done to redeem and restore his broken creation, and what the future holds for his people. The essential questions for the framing of a worldview find their answers in the biblical narrative. We live for stories because we live by stories.
Part 1 of 3.
