This is the End of All the Stories

By Paul Goodrich

The Bible is more like a library than a book. Its 66 separate books, written in multiple languages by dozens of writers across a span of a millennium and a half, range in style from story to prophecy, from personal letter to world-changing apocalypse. The more deeply we delve into any passage of Scripture, the more keenly we feel the distance in language, culture and history from those original audiences.

Sometimes it is helpful to come up out of one of those deep dives into a particular passage to look for broader themes. Those might take the form of a prophecy in one era that is fulfilled in another (for example, Isaiah's prophecy of the Persian king Cyrus by name in Isaiah 44:28, 150 years before Cyrus ascended to power and issued the decree recorded in II Chronicles 36:22-23 that permitted the Jewish exiles to return to the Land). Another thematic element is a type: an image that is repeated with a deeper meaning (for example, Jesus refers to the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 that had the power to heal snakebite victims who looked at it when He tells Nicodemus in John 3:14 that "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life").

Yet another way in which broad themes can show up in Scripture is in what we might call "story arcs." The Gospel of Matthew, for example, opens the story of Immanuel -- God with us -- in 1:23 and closes it with Jesus' statement in 28:20 that "I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

Amidst the flurry of images both grand and terrifying that make up so much of the landscape of Revelation, it is striking to note how many of the story arcs of Scripture reach their resolution here. This book is not merely a roadmap to the future; it is the grand finale of the Biblical narrative. In it the biblical canon is completed, providing closure to themes of sin, redemption, and God's ultimate victory. Some of the more prominent story arcs would be these:

The Tree of Life

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve rebel against God by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge. As a result of this rebellion, they are not only cursed but driven from the Garden to keep them from also eating the fruit of the tree of life:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

-- Genesis 3:22-24

The curse introduces human mortality, and that story continues until Revelation 22, where the arc closes with the curse lifted and all the nations granted free access to the Tree:

On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

-- Revelation 22:2b

Access to God

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were allowed to walk and talk with God (Genesis 3:8); this of course stopped with the curse noted above.  Portions of the Mosaic Law regulated access to the presence of God, first in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple, for specific members of the priestly clan on particular occasions, but this was prohibited on pain of death for all others. We see an initial hint as to the end of this story arc in Matthew 27:51, where the curtain in the Temple that concealed the Holy of Holies is torn open “from top to bottom,” as God might do to grant access, rather than from bottom to top as humans might do in attempting to force entry.  But the final conclusion of the story is seen in the final chapters of Revelation:

I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple … There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.

-- Revelation 21:22; 22:3-4

The Law is no more.  There is no longer only one place to meet with God.  As in the Garden, so in the New Jerusalem:  now that the whole story of sin and redemption is complete, the servants of God can once again talk with God face to face.

The Serpent vs. the Seed

The promise of a coming Savior is actually an integral part of the curse upon the serpent:

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.

-- Genesis 3:15

(Note that some translations render the verb above as “crush” rather than “bruise”).

This passage starts the story.  We’re not given many details at this point, but apparently some “seed of the woman” will crush the head of the serpent at some point, and be injured in the process.  Further along the story arc, Isaiah prophesies about a virgin who “will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).  This prophecy is ultimately fulfilled in Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20), making him indeed a “seed of the woman” only, and not of her soon-to-be husband Joseph.  That fact is reiterated in Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.

-- Galatians 4:4-5

Through His death on the cross, Jesus did indeed break the power of “him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14b), but the devil continues to deceive and accuse until he is finally crushed forever:

And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

-- Revelation 20:10

"Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven"

One of the more frightening stories in Scripture is seen in the consequences of our first parents’ first sin. This broke their fellowship with God and introduced death into the world, as we saw above, but the letter of the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome tells us that all of creation has also suffered:

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.

-- Romans 8:19-22

The prayer that Jesus taught to His disciples includes this striking line:  “Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).  Doesn’t that seem unrealistic on its face?  Even in the most glorious days of the kingdom of Israel, it could never have been said that God’s will was done to any degree resembling Heaven’s standard of perfect obedience.  The corruption of that first sin in the Garden continues to fester across our entire planet, and if we were in any doubt as to the measure of that corruption, we need only consider what it takes to root it out.  Revelation 6 and 8 describe the horrors that are unleashed with the opening of the seven seals, and chapters 8 through 11 reveal the similarly awful consequences of the sounding of six trumpets.  We get our first inkling of hope toward the end of chapter 11 when the seventh trumpet blows:

Then the seventh angel sounded; and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ; and He will reign forever and ever.”

And the twenty-four elders, who sit on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying, “We give You thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who are and who were, because You have taken Your great power and have begun to reign. And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth.”

-- Revelation 11:15-18

There is more to the story, but this is the point where history begins to turn.  This is where Christ is revealed as King.  And this is where we see what it costs to answer that prayer of Matthew 6.

God with us

We saw above how the Immanuel story arc defines the Gospel of Matthew, but we see it in even greater fashion from Genesis to Revelation.  The first three chapters of Genesis portray the creation of the world, the creation of mankind and how sin entered the world.  Alone among the Gospels, the Gospel of John (the same John to whom God gave the book of Revelation) reflects those opening chapters of Genesis with its opening words, “in the beginning”:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

-- John 1:1-5

Further down, we learn that the Word is not only the Creator; He has stepped into His creation:

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

-- John 1:14

The Greek word translated as “dwelt” above is skēno’ō, which comes from skēnē ‘tent, tabernacle.’  Hold that thought:  we’ll get back to that in just a bit.

The beginning of Genesis and the beginning of John reflect each other.  Genesis describes the creation of the world; John focuses on the creator.  Genesis brings humans into the story; John shows the Word stepping into His creation as a human.  Genesis reveals the first sin; John lets us see God’s heart as Jesus identifies with us by receiving baptism:  this signified the repentance that we needed and He did not, and sets up the story of our redemption.

This story arc ends in one of the most beautiful passages of all Scripture:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

-- Revelation 21:1-3

The story is complete.  Our old friends skēno’ō and skēnē have returned.  The Word “tented” among us for a while; now He has set up His dwelling in the new Jerusalem and invited us in.  All the horrors of the earlier chapters of Revelation – actually, all the horrors that arose from that first sin in the Garden – have passed away, and a new Story begins.  C.S. Lewis captured some of the wonder of these final chapters of Revelation in the closing lines of The Chronicles of Narnia:

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.