pilgrim people

Some of you may have caught the program aired last night on the National Geographic Channel titled, “Unlocking Da Vinci’s Code.” The little bit that I watched revealed yet another example of our culture’s fascination with sensational stories and shoddy scholarship. It is the same every Easter and Christmas. Some author or filmmaker is interviewed (in this case, Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown) who is trying to debunk the facts of historic Christianity in order to advance his theory that the Bible is little more than a good, inspirational myth (or, in Mr. Brown’s case, a contrived set of lies put forth by a conspiring church, all of which has been worked up into a best-selling novel and blockbuster movie, mind you). But whether it is novelist Dan Brown or liberal theologian John Dominic Crossan, what is always evident in these pop-culture interviews is a gross failure to engage the Bible as an organic redemptive-historical drama that proclaims one message from Genesis to Revelation: God redeeming a people for himself through the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.

This is particularly the case with the Bible’s report of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The skeptic takes up his little ax and begins hacking away at the record of Christ’s resurrection in the Gospels, thinking that if he can fell this one tree, than the whole forest must fall. The problem is that his little blows, proof-text by proof-text, will never accomplish his goal. For even if he thinks he has succeeded in chopping down one tree, he has failed to see that every tree in the massive forest proclaims the same thing and the underlying roots are all connected. The death and resurrection of Christ was, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14.3-4, “in accordance with the Scriptures.”

Paul is not thinking of a few neat little proof-texts in the Old Testament; rather, he is thinking of the whole sweep of the biblical narrative and redemptive history which testified and pointed to the Person and Work of Christ. He is looking at the whole forest and saying, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the fulfillment of God’s whole redemptive drama since the curtain was raised in the beginning. He is referring to the entire Old Testament as the story which has reached its climax in the Messiah, and has now given rise to the new phase of the same story, the phase in which the age to come has broken in, with its central characteristic being rescue from sin, death and hell.

Christ’s death and resurrection was in “accordance with the Scriptures,” as the Champion Seed was promised to Adam and Eve when they were exiled from the holy garden. One would come to crush the serpent’s head and ultimately reverse the devastating judgment of death that came upon them because of their sin. That is why Adam named his wife immediately after that promise, “Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” This new Seed and Second Adam would bring us to the Tree of Life and the heavenly glory that was lost through the First Adam’s sin and rebellion.

Christ’s death and resurrection was in “accordance with the Scriptures,” as a whole sacrificial system was erected in the temporary, theocratic, covenant people of Israel. Christ is the true Passover Lamb, sacrificed for God’s people so they would escape the death that comes from God’s justice. He is the offering for our sins foreshadowed in the all the blood that was spilled daily at the Tabernacle. He is the true offering which was typified on the great Day of Atonement; he passed through the curtain and opened the way to the Holy of Holies.

Christ’s death and resurrection was in “accordance with the Scriptures,” as the glimpses of God’s wrath against sin proclaim. The same wrath that produced the catastrophic flood, the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues sent upon the Egyptians, the conquest of Canaan, and the exile of Israel and Judah was poured out upon Christ on the cross in order to satisfy the justice of God and behalf of those whom he represented. He is the One spoken of in all the psalms: “a company of evildoers has encircled me; they have pierced my hands and feet – I can count all my bones – they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” (Ps 22)

He is the One spoken of by all the prophets: “Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed…the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Is 53)

The whole Bible is one unfolding drama of hope. It is one story of God’s promise to his people to bring them to that for which humans hoped in the beginning: glorified eternal life, symbolized in the Tree of Life – a hope that was never realized in the First Adam, but HAS been realized in the Second Adam. The Bible is one beautiful record of God redeeming a people for himself through this Second Adam, and it is weaved with the fabric of covenant from beginning to end.

This is what the skeptics never seem to engage. It is as if they have picked up individual pieces to a puzzle and argue that each piece doesn’t make sense and doesn’t fit. But that is because they don’t have the box top to the puzzle! The individual pieces don’t seem to bear witness to something larger, because they don’t see the big picture.

Should it surprise us that they don’t? Seeing how Christianity has been sold as therapy for so long, how can we really expect the skeptics in pop-culture to engage the redemptive-historical drama of the biblical narrative that culminates in the Person and Work of Christ? For so long now, evangelicals have been using the Bible as a) a manual for building moral character (personally and politically); b) a self-improvement book to give me my best life right now; c) a catalyst for mystical experiences; d) a prophecy guide for deciphering CNN and FOX news; or a combination of any of the above.

In such an ecclesiastical climate, it should be no wonder that the skeptic looks at the Bible as a strange and confusing collection of stories, proverbs, genealogies, and prophecies that really amounts to little more than superstitious fairy-tales, spiritual experiences, and practical ethics. And so, for them, the Bible is just one more book of virtues like all the other religious and moral books of the world. Why then should we believe in supernatural events like the resurrection?

But if you listen to them carefully, in almost every case you can readily tell that they have not seriously read or understood the Bible as a whole. They have heard Sunday school stories, and they are very familiar with certain texts and verses, but in most cases they have never heard how God’s covenant with Abraham acts as an anchor for the whole Bible. They have never been forced to wrestle with the Bible’s central message of the Two Adams. They have never heard of the eschatological hope that was set before man in the beginning, which is pressed on the conscience of every human being, but has been fulfilled in the Person and Work of Christ.

The apostle Paul, however, calls the Old Testament to the witness stand when he says that the death and resurrection of Christ was “in accordance with the Scriptures.”