Chapter Three: The Story From Below

Thanks again for all the helpful feedback on these chapters. Here’s the next one.

Chapter One: Let Me Tell You a Story
Chapter Two: The Story from Above

Chapter Three: The Story from Below

In the Ancient Near East–the time and place out of which much of the Bible was written–kings often erected statues of themselves in far flung corners of their empires. These statues were intended to represent the king in his absence. The statue continually reminded the people who was in charge. In a similar way, our creator left us, made in his image, to rule the earth on his behalf and carry forward his creative intent in the world.

In the beginning God created the world and saw that it was very good. We were created to live in harmony with God, each other, the world, and ourselves. (Scot McKnight?s categories: Embracing Grace)

We started out with so much potential.

Then we messed up everything. Our desire to live independently of God screws us up in all directions. Creation comes under a curse. The impact of our rebellion impairs our ability to experience meaningful relationships in all areas of life. (Read Genesis 3 to get the details)

Our sin, which is a religious word for our rebellion against God, alienated us from God. A relationship once held together by intimacy, trust, and friendship is shattered by fear, anxiety, and misunderstanding. In shame, we hide from the one knows us best and loves us the most.

Our sin also alienated us from each other. We can?t seem to relate to each in positive ways even when we want to. Several years ago, just after the holidays, David Letterman said something like the following in his monologue:

Family. It?s the bedrock, the backbone… You can’t get enough time with them, you can’t ever get them all together. So why is it that when you finally do get them all together, things go haywire? And I mean (snap) immediately haywire. I don’t mean to bore anyone with details about my holiday, but by the end of the time I was ready to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean.

We were created to live in community with others and yet we end up sabotaging it every time we get within sniffing distance of anything resembling a healthy relationship. One of our greatest fears is to be left alone, but at the same time we can?t stand the thought of someone getting too close.

Our sin has also alienated us from the rest of creation. God entrusted his world–the rivers, oceans, mountains, prairies, forests, deserts and all that lives within them–to us and we have not done well with it. Instead of taking care of God’s world we?ve exploited, polluted, and destroyed beautiful chunks of it.

We’ve managed to take everything that’s good about creation and pervert, abuse, and misuse it. Food is good, but we eat ourselves to death. Creativity is good, but we?ve created just as many ways to kill each other as to help each other. Sex is good, but we find it almost impossible to experience its goodness without being consumed by it.

Finally, our sin brought about self-alienation or shame. Shame should not be confused with guilt. We feel guilty because we do something wrong. We experience shame when we believe that there is something wrong with us. Most of us have in our minds an ideal of what it means to be a ?good? person and we consistently fall short of our own standards. Our consistent inconsistency compounds our shame. Our shame usually resides in levels so deep that we are unaware of how it affects our ability to relate with others. It?s hard to imagine that we?re loved by God or other people, and it?s hard to show love to others, when deep inside we hate ourselves.

Of course, we?re still capable of goodness because the image of God has not completely left us. But we find it impossible to be consistently good. We can do something beautiful in a flash of inspiration and then ten minutes later do something awful. We can do good while harboring terrible feelings inside about the good we’re doing and we can do terrible things while at the same time thinking about how much we?d love to be doing something good. We are walking contradictions.

So we find ourselves in a big mess that we?ve helped create. The harder we try to make things better, the worse they seem to get. Even when we do the right thing we do it in the wrong way for the wrong reason at the wrong time and end up doing more harm than good.

We?re weighed down with personal guilt and unspoken shame. The heavier the burden gets, the worse we feel about ourselves, the worse we feel, the more likely we are to do things that bring on more guilt and shame.

Lurking behind all of this is a sense of dread that comes with the knowledge of our impending death. We know that death comes for us all, but we have no idea what comes after death. The more we think about our coming death the more meaningless our present life seems. What?s the point of life if we all end up dead anyway? (Read Ecclesiastes if you want to follow this depressing thought all the way to the bottom of hope.)

We?re in quite a predicament aren?t we?

There is an old story about a stork who finds himself stuck in a deep bog of mud. The stork furiously flaps its wings trying to break free but can?t. To gain leverage, the stork puts his beak into the mud and manages to pull one foot out of the mud and then the other, only to realize that now its beak has sunk too deep in the mud to be extracted. So he puts one foot down and then the other hoping to gain some leverage. . .

That?s our story. We?re stuck in the mud and we can?t get out. Our best efforts only make things worse. In fact, the harder we try to break free, the deeper we seem to sink.

The truth is we?ll never free ourselves from the compounding consequences of our sin. Someone else will have to come along and get us out of this mess we?re in. It?s only after we finally accept this reality that the gospel story starts to make sense from our perspective.

The gospel is the story of how God comes to rescue us from ourselves, our sin, and from the forces of evil that have taken advantage of our rebellious spirits and enslaved us.

Jesus joins us in the mud, gets stuck in our mess, and gives us the leverage we need to break free. The gospel is good news because Jesus has come to do what we can?t do for ourselves.

The name Jesus means ?God saves.? Jesus is our salvation. In the Gospel story, salvation can have a number of meanings.

Salvation means that our sins our forgiven. It means that our relationship with God is restored. God takes away our guilt and shame and replaces it with his loving presence (a.k.a the Holy Spirit). God lives in us and we live in God.

Salvation means broken community can be repaired. Jesus teaches us to love and serve and forgive others so that we can live in harmony with each other.

Salvation means that we are equipped to do the job we were originally created to do. Jesus gives us wisdom so that we can be good stewards of the world that God has entrusted to us and better reflect God?s image back into his creation.

Salvation means that death is not the end of our story. It means that the good we do in this life is not wasted or forgotten. When God finally renews and restores this world, we will be raised to life so that we can enjoy God and his perfected people in his perfected world?forever.

This is all made possible by what God has done through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

So from our perspective, we can say that the gospel is a story about how God comes to rescue us and present us with a benefit package filled with more blessings that we can count. (Read Eph. 1: 1-13 to see how one guy gushes on and on about the benefits of salvation).

But the gospel is more than just a benefit package. It?s also a job description. Just as God created us in his image to be his creative partners in caring for the world He saves us so that we can partner with him in repairing and restoring his broken world.

Do you see why ?gospel? means good news?

The gospel is good news about God: there is no end to his love. He will not be denied. He will put his broken world back together again even if it kills him (and it did).

It?s good news about the world: God is putting his broken world back together one person at a time.

It?s good news about us: God loves us so much that he has come to save us and include us in his story of redemption. He offers us a job description and an unbeatable benefit package to go with it.

Finally, it?s good news about Jesus. He is the victorious Lord who conquered sin, death, and forces of evil. None of this would even be news, much less good news if it weren?t for his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the key to the story from both perspectives. In the next chapter we?ll explore how this is so.