How Individual Bible Stories Make Up the Grand Narrative of the Gospel

Excerpted From

Literarily

By Kristie Anyabwile

How Individual Bible Stories Make Up the Grand Narrative of the Gospel

Everybody likes a good story, especially an engaging story with unexpected twists and turns. Stories captivate, explain, reveal. They evoke strong emotions and sometimes transport us into the past or future, to land or sky or sea, or even to imaginary and fantastical worlds that feel as if they really do exist. Stories, real or imagined, affect us. A really good story will engage the intellect and emotions. They transport us to places and circumstances that sometimes echo or mirror our own experiences, and even if the people, places, and perspectives are new to us, they tap into a part of our common human experiences of love, loss, and longing.

In the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the theme song summarizes the plot of the entire series. The song begins “This is a story all about how, my life got flipped, turned upside down.” The rest of the song tells us the background of the main character, how he ended up living with his uncle and aunt in ritzy Bel Air, and sets the audience’s expectations that this story will center around the clash of cultures.

I love the opening line because every good story is a story of “how”—how people lived, loved, lost, taking us on the journey with them that we might learn from their experiences.

Biblical history, also called Bible narratives, is history told in story form. These stories tell the history of God’s people from the beginning of the world, to when God’s people were held in captivity (exile) in Babylon, to the time after the exile (postexilic), to the time of Christ, to the rise of the church, to the consummation (the end of history and fulfillment of God’s promises to His people). This type of history makes up almost half of the Bible. Narrative, historical literature can be found throughout most Old Testament books, but the books of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther are Old Testament narratives that specifically chronicle the history of God’s people before Christ’s birth.

These narratives move the overarching story of the Bible forward from God’s call to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28), to His warning against disobedience (2:16–17), to His law outlining His expectations of His people to love and obey Him in a fallen world, to the unfolding story that helps us see the ways God’s people responded to His instructions and the consequences of their actions. These stories explain the past by setting us in a specific place and time, introducing us to the problems various historical characters faced and how those problems were solved, and helping us to see how we are to live in light of the characters’ successes and failures. Narratives showcase embodied, imperfect human experience as both a mirror and a window—a mirror that helps us to see our lives reflected in the lives of those in Scripture, and a window through which we can see the lives and circumstances of others and learn from them. There are narratives in the New Testament as well.

Narrative stories convey meaning through character interactions and development, conflict resolution, problem solving, and emotional release. Through these narratives we see real-life situations that highlight themes of power and vulnerability, strength and weakness, victory and failure, hiding and exposure, loss and gain, mystery and revelation, virtues and vices, poverty and wealth, perseverance and acquiescence, joy and pain, sunshine and rain.

If we’re paying close attention, any story can teach us moral lessons about God and ourselves, but the uniqueness of biblical narratives is that they are intended by God to help us understand His ways with humanity and how we might live as His people by learning from the foils and faith of the biblical characters living under His sovereign rule.

The beauty of narratives is that they show rather than tell. The storyline (also called the plot) helps us discover what the story is emphasizing so we avoid improperly spiritualizing (looking for deeper spiritual meaning beyond what the text and context allow) or blindly contextualizing the narrative (bringing the text forward to our day too quickly). A narrative is meant to be engaging and memorable, yet its meaning should be fairly easy to grasp. Narratives add the drama, the comedic relief, the intense ebbs and flows of emotion that keep us on our toes as we read. These are the page-turners of the Bible and help us to understand the nature of humanity and how we reflect or discredit God’s character.

Narratives center around the plot. The plot is the whole of the story from beginning to end and generally follows an organized and unified path that gives shape to the story. This path is often referred to as a plot arc. The plot arc has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning of the plot consists of characters who are usually placed within a particular setting and an inciting incident that sets the main action of the story in motion, often creating tension or a problem that needs to be solved or a question that needs an answer. The middle of a plot is the nail-biting part of the story, called the climax, where the reader is on edge waiting to see how the problem will be solved. At the end of the plot is the resolution, in which a new normal is established and the setting for a new plot is initiated.

Not every biblical narrative neatly follows the plot arc, but since stories make up the majority of narratives and much of the Bible as a whole, we have focused our time on the plot arc. However, there are other ways to describe the movements in a passage, such as following time references that serve to chronicle history, analyzing character behaviors and finding the main foil to compare and contrast with the main character, or identifying the main scenes within a passage and discerning how those scenes carry the plot forward.

The plot must hold together so that the sequence of events makes sense as a unit. The goal of using the literary technique of a plot arc in studying biblical narratives is so we might move beyond reading narratives as individual, self-contained stories with moral lessons on good versus evil and do’s and don’ts. Rather, we want to see how each individual story contributes to what God is doing throughout history to redeem a people for Himself, to view human experiences in ways that point us to our need for Christ, and to connect each narrative to the story of the Bible as a whole (the metanarrative).

Excerpted from Literarily: How Understanding Bible Genres Transforms Bible Study by Kristie Anyabwile (© 2022). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.

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