Far As the Curse Is Found | Michael Williams

Michael D. Williams. Far As the Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption. P&R, 2005. 319 pp.

Most people—believers as well as non-Christians—cannot give a credible answer to the question “What is Christianity about?”

How do we account for this state of affairs? Given the life-and-death urgency of Christianity, we stand desperately in need of a reversal of the damning disparity between the eternal importance of the Christian faith and the apprehension of it by its advocates. Christianity is a revelatory religion. This means that God has revealed himself, his ways, and his will most clearly and fully in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Christianity is, therefore, a religion of the book. Thus, if believers do not understand the core issues of the Christian religion, it is because they fail to grasp or appreciate the Bible in some fundamental way.

Why might people have failed to understand or appropriate the message of the Bible? It can be a confusing book. To the casual reader it might appear a perplexing mix of historical stories, legal codes, doctrinal discourses, apocalyptic tales, morality plays, and proverbial sayings. Yet we confess that the Bible is the Word of God. This implies that we expect it to comprise a coherent message within a unified whole. If not, we should not call it the Word of God but perhaps the words of God or an anthology of revelation. . . .

When we look a bit more closely at the Bible, we find that the majority of its content is narrative in character. It is a storied revelation. This fact suggests that the unifying, insight-producing feature that gives the Bible its coherence as revelation is the story it tells. Indeed, the Bible as a whole is best understood as a story or drama. To be sure, the Bible does more than tell a story. Scripture includes psalms and proverbs, songs and prayers, moral instruction and doctrinal reflection. But what holds all of it together, what makes it a unified revelation is the storyline, what theologians often call the drama of redemption. The non-narrative pieces fit into and make sense only within their appropriate contexts in the biblical storyline.

Every good story has at least four fundamental elements. The first element of a story or narrative drama is the prologue, an introduction to the principal characters and their starting relationships. The prologue also sets the stage for the unfolding drama, the context within which the story will transpire. Any good story will also include a conflict that arises and that the characters must face. The conflict forms the dramatic problem of the story. Third, the conflict must be resolved or dealt with in some fashion. And finally, there is a summing up or a conclusion in which the reader or listener is told how the original relationships were modified by the dramatic problem and its resolution.

In its most basic structure, the Bible follows this dramatic pattern. It has an introduction, a dramatic problem that arises, a resolution to the problem, and a summing up or conclusion. We might refer to these four elements within the biblical storyline as creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. The story that the Bible relates has a prologue that sets the context for the entire drama: God’s creation of a wonderful universe. It describes a conflict of cosmic proportions: our first parents’ fall into sin and God’s response to their sin in covenant curse. Yet the biblical story does not end there. In the midst of God’s judgment of sin, the Bible presents the resolution to the fall in God’s mighty acts that judge sin and bring redemption, deeds which culminate in God’s redemptive purpose in Jesus Christ. Finally, the Bible’s story ends with a summing up: God brings his creation and humankind to his promised consummation. . . . The triune God acts covenantally in history: the Father creates, the Son redeems, and the Holy Spirit recreates.

The creation-fall-redemption-consummation storyline is the central theme of Scripture, and it forms the Bible’s overarching literary structure. This storyline, in its given sequence, is fundamental to the drama Scripture relates. Each successive event in the story assumes the entire preceding sequence. Creation is the environment that the fall and redemptive events modify. Fall and redemption are meaningless outside of the context of God’s good creation. From what do we fall? God’s good creational intention. To what standard are we redeemed? God’s intention that his creatures glorify him, an intention given in creation. Creation is the presupposition of the fall story, and creation and fall together are the presupposition of the history of redemption centering in Jesus Christ.

As the story that Christians believe is the one true story that tells us the truth about God, ourselves, and our world, the Bible is a progressive revelation. God’s revelation of his response to sin and its effects upon humankind and the world takes place not in an instant but rather over centuries, through a series of redemptive historical acts. These special events in the biblical story are often characterized by covenant making or are otherwise typified as covenantal in character.

But what does history have to do with the covenant? And what is a covenant? While no single definition of covenant can do it justice, a covenant is nothing less than a historical relationship between persons. To say that a personal relationship is historical is to state the obvious, but it is this very reality that is so often overlooked when we talk about God’s ways and relationships. God works in history, which is to say that he works covenantally. God enters into relationship with his people, which is to say that he calls them into covenant.

God’s promises to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David find their culmination and definitive fulfillment in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:20). He is both the goal and the key to “the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12), for the entire biblical story pivots upon Jesus of Nazareth. Thus we will begin our discussion with Christ. Indeed we begin with the resurrection. While it might seem odd at first that our telling of the story begins at Easter morning, the empty tomb is the most fitting time and place to embark upon the drama of redemption and the covenantal purpose of God that undergirds it. All that comes before Christ’s victory in rising from the dead looks forward to it, and all that comes after the resurrection in the biblical story is an explication of it.

The theme that undergirds the first two chapters is that the Christian religion and its gospel are about God’s acts in our world on our behalf. . . .

Biblical religion holds that the central event in all human history was the execution of a wandering first-century Palestinian preacher and his rising from the dead two days later in fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. This is the gospel. To return to Lewis’s and Hooper’s question: What is the real issue of Christianity? We must answer that the biblical story is the message of the God who “so loved the world” as to enter into it, and ultimately to die for it. What was promised to Adam and Eve in the midst of their guilt and shame, what was prefigured over and over again throughout the Old Testament story of Israel (another story often characterized by guilt and shame) came to pass in a Judean backwater town when God “became flesh and made his dwelling with us.” . . .

All of this suggests that the Christian religion is not an ethereal or eternal doctrine about the nature of deity or a polite philosophical discussion about the relation of spirit to matter but the historical unfolding of God’s covenantal involvement in the world, the acme of which is God’s coming into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. It is unfortunate that when many believers think of revelation or doctrine, what comes to mind all too often is a somewhat sterile collection of eternal ideas and notions about a transcendent and unchanging realm of pure thought, a realm that is safely removed from this world and its vicissitudes, alterations, and complexities.

The saving events to which Scripture testifies, however, take place within our world. It is the history of this world—not some metaphysically timeless heaven—that is the sphere of God’s redemptive plan. It is in history that he triumphs over humanity’s sin through Christ and reconciles the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). It is in history that God acts to bring man to himself. To be sure, God is transcendent; he stands supremely above our world in immutable majesty. But the biblical story is that God is neither locked up in heaven nor remains there. He is ever the coming one, condescending to his creatures in order to forge relationship, judge sin, redeem his people, shower them with the benefits of Christ, and ultimately to bring them and his creation to the consummation of recreation. And God’s way in all this, his way in the historical drama, is the way of covenant. . . .

To tell it we must first hear it ourselves. And to tell it as it is—a dynamic historical drama of God’s creative and redemptive actions within our world—we must hear the unfolding story of the covenant.

Our goal is to tell the biblical story through the episodic unfolding of God’s covenant way in history. The first two chapters will concentrate on the two premier redemptive events in Scripture: the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the New Testament and God’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt in the Old. These two chapters of the redemptive drama were—and are—fundamental moments in God’s revelation of his true character, his historical purpose, and the destiny of his covenant people. We will then follow the covenant storyline of Scripture from creation to new creation by examining each of the biblical episodes in the developing drama. This will constitute the greater part of our study. Finally, we will examine the question of Christ’s relationship to each of the covenant episodes, and briefly reflect upon the post-biblical epoch in covenantal perspective by asking what significance the covenant has for those who live the contest of faith in what Lewis called “the cosmic spring” of the resurrection.

Reprinted from Far As the Curse Is Found by Michael D. Williams, © 2005 by Michael D. Williams. Used by permission of P & R Publishing, Phillipsburg, NJ. All rights reserved.

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