The Grand Scope of Scripture

The Story of All People in All Places

Introduction

In the beloved Christmas classic Home Alone, Kevin, the main character, is told by his older brother Buzz that the old man next door (Marley) is a child murderer who puts his victims in buckets of salt, which he later uses to clear his driveway. Because of this, Kevin spends the entire movie assuming Marley is a murderer. By the film’s end, Kevin is caught by bandits, who he has sent through all kinds of agony. The bandits are about to “whack” Kevin when Marley hits the burglars with his shovel out of the shadows and sets Kevin free.

Kevin was told Marley was a murderer; Kevin witnessed, personally, Marley as a savior.

I can’t help but suppose this humorous Christmas film accurately depicts how we construct ideologies about the workings of our relationship with God. Many of our presumptions of who God is to us and the Creation are rooted in popular, contemporary notions that Scripture tells the story of a God who is only for some. In this view, God’s acceptance in the Old Testament is limited to Israel, and God’s acceptance in the New Testament is limited to the Church. Yet, Karl Barth reminds us, “What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical with what is universally human.”¹

I propose that Scripture tells the story of God working to reconcile all humans with God and each other, centering on the Incarnation of the Son of God.

Biblical Backdrop

John’s gospel has a unique connection with the opening of the book of Genesis. John’s gospel and the Creation poem in Genesis 1 speak of origins. Genesis 1 tells us that God created everything in the beginning. Yet, John’s gospel goes further and speaks to the eternal condition of Jesus being with God, as God. In other words, Genesis creatively speaks to what God has done; John speaks to who God is in the Son, Jesus.

John doesn’t stop there, however. John calls the incarnate Son the Word (λόγος). Justo L. Gonzalez writes, in reflecting on how early apologist Justin Martyr thought of Christ as the Logos,

According to a tradition of long standing in Greek philosophy, the human mind can understand reality because it shares in the Logos or universal reason that undergirds all reality. For instance, if we are able to understand that two and two make four, the reason for this is that both in our minds and in the universe there is a Logos, a reason or order according to which two and two always make four. [John’s] Gospel affirms that in Jesus, the Logos or Word was made flesh. Thus, according to Justin, what has happened in the incarnation is that the underlying reason behind the universe, the Logos or Word of God, has come in the flesh.²

By declaring that the Incarnate Son is the Logos, John expresses that the reasoning behind everything in Creation is found in Jesus. This is the foundation of the argument of my thesis about the grand witness of Scripture. Colossians 1:15-16 NRSV tells us, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.”

All creation, including humanity, finds existence in the Son and purpose, as Colossians states, through him, as the Logos, and for him, as God. If we read Genesis and all of the Old Testament through the knowledge of the Son and what the Son has accomplished on behalf of all Creation, we start to see that woven into the fabric of Scripture is the understanding that God is a God of all people, of all time, and has always worked to reconcile his people to himself.

In his book Reading Backwards, Richard Hayes writes, “In the new situation created by the death and resurrection of Jesus, Israel’s Scripture is to be comprehensively construed as a witness to the gospel.”³ If this is the case, and I believe it is, we can journey into the depths of Israel’s Scripture (the Old Testament) and find a ubiquitous witness of a reconciling God.

Israel’s Scripture

Genesis 1 and 2 give us an account of the ordering of the cosmos in the beginning. These are more than mere history; these are poetry communicating truths beneath the surface. Pinpointing a specific time frame for the authorship of Genesis is particularly difficult given the current evidence; however, the time of Babylonian exile is most often suggested as the likely period in which Genesis took shape, similar to the book we have now. The period for the Babylonian exile was around the 6th century BCE.

Ancient cosmology, as in the Genesis 1 and 2 stories, is function-oriented rather than material-oriented. The ontological beginning of a thing was measured when it began functioning as it was designed to function rather than when it materialized. John Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, wrote in The Lost World of Genesis One,

If we follow the sense of the literature and its ideas of creation, we find that people in the ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things—instead, everything is function oriented. The gods are beginning their own operations and are making all of the elements of the cosmos operational. Creation thus constituted bringing order to the cosmos from an originally nonfunctional condition.⁴

The beginning chapters of Genesis tell us that God has formed a functioning creation as a cosmic temple, culminating in day seven when God rests—an ancient Near Eastern way of saying a god has taken their place in their temple. Again, Walton writes, “The inauguration of the functions and the entrance of the presence of God to take up his rest creates the [cosmic] temple.”⁵

However, not long after this account of the original functioning of the universe, the euphoric peace turns chaotic again. The newly created humans choose a tree of the knowledge of good and evil over a tree of life. The difference between the trees? One offers control (knowledge that will make one like God); the other offers life (dependent on God retaining the understanding that elevates humanity where it wasn’t meant to be through its power). Genesis 3 is where the context of Babylonian exile grows relevant. The people of Israel and Judah were exiled from their Eden—the Promised Land. They were exiled because they turned away from God. They chose the tree of knowledge and neglected life. Genesis 1-3 reminds Israel—and us—of God’s original intent and how we have poorly stewarded that original intent. 

Genesis then tells of a righteous man, Noah, who would become the seed of recreation through a universal flood. God would send the creation back to its original state, as the waters cover the deep, to—symbolically—recreate the world. Despite the unsuccessful recreation, a marvelous mystery took place in the flood. Humans did not change; God did. Perhaps that’s the point of the flood narrative: to show us a change in philosophy on the part of God rather than a change in morality on the part of humans. In the book A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, we read,

The flood story focuses on God and God’s commitment to the world. This God expresses sorrow and regret; judges but doesn’t want to; goes beyond justice and decides to save some, including animals; commits to the future of a less that perfect world; is open to change in view of experience with the world and doing things in new ways; promises never to do this again…God is the one who has changed between the beginning and the end of the flood, not human beings.⁶

God commits to the creation as-is rather than throwing the whole thing away. If humans were to return to their proper functional design, it would be God’s work, not theirs. God understands that committing to humans means he will be the one to suffer. Yet, God creates humans in his image and likeness so that a day could come when he would tear through the barrier, take on humanity, and redeem us from the inside. Already, from the start of Genesis, we see the forming of the foundation for ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (the Word becoming flesh).

As redemption through recreation falters, God chooses to bring his purposes to fruition through a family. That family is the family of Abram (later, Abraham). God longs to redeem all nations through Abram and his family, not redeem Abram and his family out of all nations. Genesis 12:3 NRSV says, “...in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The rest of Genesis tells the story of Abraham’s lineage through Isaac, Jacob—later Israel—, and Jacob’s sons who would become the heads of the tribes of Israel, and the family’s settling in Egypt through the leadership of Joseph, a son sold into slavery by the others.

Ironically, the families of the sons who sold Joseph into slavery end up in slavery themselves, and Exodus opens by recalling how Israel found itself in Egyptian slavery, desperate for redemption. Through plagues and much back-and-forth with Pharoah, the people of Israel are set free under the leadership of Moses, and in the waters of the Red Sea, their enemies are destroyed.

When the Israelites reached Mount Sinai, the place that set the precedent for the rest of Scripture, God readied them to enter into a covenant with him. This covenant and law within make Israel the nation through which the world would be redeemed, fulfilling God’s covenant with their father Abraham that every nation would be blessed through him [and his lineage].

In Exodus 19:5-6 NRSV, the Lord says, “The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” First, the Lord clarifies that the whole earth is his, echoing Psalm 34:1, which asserts the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness within it. We can only properly understand Israel’s purpose in the ultimate plan of God within the understanding that the entirety of the Creation is the Lord’s. Israel, at Sinai, is anointed as the priests of God’s cosmic temple. The role of a priest is to be an intermediary between people and God. For example, Aaron announced the people’s sins over the head of the scapegoat and sent the goat into the wilderness, carrying away the people’s sins. In this instance, in Leviticus 16, the priest (Aaron) is an intermediary between God and the people.

Israel is called a kingdom of priests to the whole earth. Israel’s being a holy nation, or set apart, was not so that God could reject other people, groups, and nations; it was so that Israel could act as a bridge between the nations and God. With this in mind, we must see the tension in the Old Testament—good and bad kings, rejecting God for false gods, and all the major and minor prophets calling Israel back to her original purpose and identity—as part one of the story of a creation made whole and the humans within that creation restored.

The Old Testament—Israel’s Scripture—is critically important because it tells us that God must step into our self-made delusion of what it means to be human and redeem it from our side. It could happen in no other way, and we are confident it could happen in no other way because we see the strain of our most significant attempts and failures throughout the Old Testament.

We leave the Old Testament corpus recognizing that although God’s people have a holy call, they are no different ontologically from anyone else. “Reading backward,” as Richard Hayes suggests, we realize the call of God’s people, represented in Israel and the Church, is to be the means through which the entirety of the human race ultimately discovers that the Incarnate Son has brought them delightfully close to God.

Isaiah 2:2-4 NRSV

In the days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn way any more.

Born is the King

With the backdrop of the Old Testament in mind, we can properly discern the New. Jesus, the Incarnate Son, is born into a world dramatically different than the one Malachi leaves us with. Israelites are now Jews in a Greco-Roman culture. Everyone spoke a new language, Koine Greek, though many Jews spoke Aramaic (a Hebrew form). The people of God were spread across the Diaspora.⁷ Although many were “home” geographically, they were indeed foreigners in their land. Israel needed a King. Israel needed a new David to rise, destroy the Romans, and send them back to their former glory.

The prospects of Jesus’ assent to David’s throne were good. Jesus was from the right family line, carrying the anointing of all the divine prophecies and signs.⁸ Yet, what unfolded in Jesus’ life was completely unexpected. Jesus did not come to conquer the Romans so that Israel could be restored; Jesus came to include the Romans and everyone else in a new Israel—a new creation—governed by peace. Jesus wouldn’t kill Romans through war; he would be killed by Romans—with the Jewish leaders’ approval—as an act of laying oneself down for the sake of peace and restoration.

In commentating on the gospel of John, The Death of the Messiah from The Anchor Bible Reference Library says, “[Jesus’] whole purpose is to come to [the] hour and drink [the] cup in order to glorify God’s name and fulfill the Scriptures.”⁹ If Jesus is fulfilling the Scriptures in his ministry, death, burial, and resurrection, we are invited to see the Scriptures within the finished work of Christ. Christ reconciling the human race means the Scriptures are ultimately looking for a day when complete reconciliation occurs.

However, the question remains: How can we be sure that Jesus’ reconciliation, thus the scope of Scripture, is for all and not only some? How can we be sure that this reconciliation fulfills the Old Testament?

We turn to Paul’s epistle to the Romans, particularly Romans 5. In one of the most significant philosophical writings in the Bible, Paul takes this moment in his letter to help listeners understand the magnitude of what took place in Christ. He begins his argument by reminding listeners that Christ died for the ungodly while we were still weak. (Romans 5:6) The word translated weak (ἀσθενῶν) can also be translated as helpless or sick. In other words, Christ reconciled us through his death while we were broken. Origen of Alexandria commented, “For we were ungodly before we turned to God, and Christ died for us before we believed.”¹⁰ This eliminates the notion that we need to do something to unite ourselves to the reconciling work of Christ. Christ accomplished this work while we were “lost”; therefore, “this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the results of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NRSV)

We already feel tension between Paul’s philosophy and American modernity’s philosophy. The majority believe (rightly) that salvation is by faith, not works, but many have also distorted that to mean that it is our faith that saves us. Christ saved us while we were faithless. Therefore, faith plays a crucial role in living out our salvation, but faith does not save; Christ does.

Paul then builds on his argument by declaring the proof of God’s love for us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8) and that it was while we were enemies that we were reconciled to God through the death of his son (Romans 5:9-10). It is through Jesus Christ our Lord that we have now received reconciliation (Romans 5:11).

Yet, the question of how this happened remains. Paul is aware of this and spends the rest of Romans 5 describing how reconciliation for all was accomplished and how the Old Testament’s Scripture is fulfilled through Christ’s work.

According to Paul, sin came into the world through one man: Adam. Paul takes us back to the story’s beginning to place Christ there and thread Christ from the beginning to the present to the end (eternally). Sin resulted in death. Because death is the result of sin, and all have sinned, death has come to all. We are all the seed of Adam and connected in our susceptibility to sin and death. However, Paul states in Romans 5:14 that Adam was only “a pattern of the one who was to come.” The word for pattern is τύπος and carries the idea of an anticipative figure. I like the imagery of Adam as a “prophetic signpost” to the one who was to come. In other words, we know about the one to come because we’ve seen the one who has come.

In The New Interpreter’s Bible, N. Thomas Wright writes, 

The thought is of a die or stamp that leaves its impression in wax: Paul’s meaning seems to be that Adam prefigured the Messiah in certain respects…, notably in this, that he founded a family that would bear his characteristics.¹¹

Then, the climax of the argument Paul presents in Romans 5. The free gift is not like the trespass. What is the free gift? Grace through Christ. “For if the many died through the one man’s trespass (that of Adam), much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.” (Romans 5:15 NRSVue) Adam’s permeating death modeled how one man’s actions affect all who come from him.

Nevertheless, Christ’s permeating life was greater than Adam’s death because Christ preceded Adam (John 1:3) and proceeded from Adam (in the Incarnation). Adam, sin, and death have always been wrapped up in Christ. A more excellent gift of grace finished its effects through the Incarnation and Passion of Christ.

To make the argument abundantly clear, in Romans 5:18, Paul states, “Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” The Greek word for all is πάντας, which means the whole. The whole human race experienced the sting of death from the one man: Adam. Yet, in an even more excellent way, the entire human race experiences the justification and life from the one man: Christ.

Finally, before moving to Chapter 6 and what we should do in response, Paul speaks to the Law. This work in Christ seems to diminish the need for the Law, and possibly the Old Testament built on the Law, altogether. However, for Paul, the Law is necessary. He says, in Romans 5:20-21, “But law came in, so that trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so grace might also reign through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Cyril of Alexandria wrote regarding these verses, “The law came as the revealer of our common weakness so that the human race would appear even more clearly to need the aid of the medicine of Christ.”¹² Pelagius commentated, “The amount of sin has been revealed so that the greatness of grace might be known and so that we might pay back a corresponding debt of love.”¹³

In a few unsuspecting verses, Paul ties up the story of the Old Testament with the story of Christ and the reconciliation of all in the New. The Bible is one congruent story whose scope is all.

According to Douglas Campbell,

God’s Son came to save the human race undoing the destruction of Adam, not just the destruction of Jews. Hence it seems that exactly the same rationale should apply. God will not let humanity go. In contrast between divine benevolence and human recalcitrance fought out in the space that is the human race, God will win…And we can be confident, in view of this, that God really is a covenantal God, committed to us all permanently and irrevocably.¹⁴

Karl Barth, in musing on Romans 5, wrote,

God takes man’s transgression seriously by taking it upon Himself: He himself becomes the sinner and dies in man’s place and so makes both sin and death pass away. Adam and Christ are thus distinguished from each other. The history of Israel under the Law shows that there is no way from the sin of Adam to the grace of Christ, but that there is a way from the grace of Christ to the sin of Adam. The Law excludes Adam from the grace of Christ, but by fulfilling the Law Christ can take upon himself Adam’s sin. Adam excludes Christ: but Christ includes Adam. Adam does not become Christ, but Christ, without ceasing to be Christ, becomes Adam as well. And because Christ thus identifies Himself with Adam’s sin and Adam’s death, Adam the sinner becomes a witness to Christ, the Reconciler.”¹⁵

Implications for Ministry

Now that I have established the grand scope of Scripture, how should we respond in ministry? As in past times, the Bible today is weaponized for agendas that isolate people or people groups from those “on the inside.” Even the Church is more divided than ever against itself. We have little room for critical thinking, debate, discussion, healthy disagreement, and the unity of differences in one united mosaic—to use the Scriptural picture from Irenaeus of Lyons—of Christ’s reconciliation.

At a minimum, the scope of Scripture demands that we contend for the justice of all people. It calls us to live with the humbling posture of becoming less (John 3:30). The ministry we’ve been given as the Church is not to save the world—Christ has already accomplished this—but to witness to the world that it has been radically loved, redeemed, and carried home. Our purpose is not to find Adam in humans but Christ, the Logos, in humans despite the presence of Adam.

The Church, as the new priests within the cosmic temple of Creation, is to mediate between God’s people (the human race) and God until the “knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the sea” (Habbakuk 2:14). We are to love as he has loved us. We are to tell the story of God that roots us in the story of who we are. C. Kavin Rowe writes,

The story of everything is a story about all there is. The very earliest Christians believed that the God who elected Abraham and his offspring and who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead was the one who made all that is not God. There is God and not-God, and that is all there is.

When, therefore, you tell a story about God, you are telling a story about everything.¹⁶

When we find ourselves within the grand scope of Scripture, we discover that all of Creation is standing on tip-toe, waiting and yearning for our unveiling so that with us, it can experience freedom (Romans 8:19-21). We, as the Church, are the first fruits of what is meant to be a kingdom that is ever-expanding until it includes the entirety of Creation (Isaiah 9:7). Let us, therefore, know every living thing as worthy of justice, righteousness, and redemption, until the day when we see it come to pass.

1. Karl Barth, Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 111.

2. Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: Volume 1 (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 65–66.

3. Richard Hayes, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 16.

4. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 33.

5. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 91.

6. Bruce C. Birch, Walter Brueggemann, Terence E. Fretheim, and David L. Petersen, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 54.

7. The term diaspora comes from an ancient Greek word meaning "to scatter about." These were Jews scattered due to exile.

8. Including the angelic encounter with Mary, the virgin birth, the angelic encounter with the shepherds in the field, the visit of the wise men to give gifts to the new king, and, of course, all that his birth fulfilled from Israel’s Scripture.

9. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, From Gethsemane to the Grave, Volume 1: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels: The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New York: Yale University Press, 1998), 34.

10. Origen, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament VI: Romans (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 131.

11. N. Thomas Wright, The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes: Volume X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002), 527.

12. Cyril, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, 150.

13. Pelagius, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, 150-151.

14. Douglas Campbell, Paul: An Apostle’s Journey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 168.

15. Karl Barth, Christ and Adam, 106-107.

16. C. Kavin Rowe, Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2020), 11.