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Bible Blog: Why is the Bible a Story?

The Bible is, first and foremost, a story. Books of stories make up about 35% of the Bible’s table of contents. However, if you break it down by the actual length of each book, you find that story-books make up about 65% of the Bible. If that surprises you, it might be because you were taught to treat the Bible as a reference book, full of facts, figures, doctrines and commands for you to obey. Of course, it is true that the Bible contains many facts, figures, doctrines and commands—but most of those are actually part of the story—and overall scripture seems much more interested in teaching us a story than in teaching us facts and doctrines.

This is very foreign to our modern way of thinking. We prefer to have everything laid out in formulas. We want to put things under the microscope. We like to classify everything the way our scientists classify living things—kingdom, phylum, class, order, anatomy, etc. etc. And we do this in our theology, as well.

Think of how we talk about God. In most theology books, you will have a chapter on God’s attributes: God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), omnipresent (present everywhere), omnibenevolent (all-good), and immutable (he never changes)—and the list goes on. This is how we typically talk about who and what God is.

There are a couple of problems with this view of God. First of all, this list of attributes does not originate in Christian Scripture, but in Greek Philosophy. Long before the Greeks became Christians, they had a picture of the one God who created everything. Through their own logic they determined that such a God must have all of the traits I listed above. Later, when the Greeks became Christian, they brought their categories with them.

The second problem with this approach is that it gives us a view of God that contradicts Scripture. The Greek image of God is very distant. He cannot have emotional reactions, because he knows everything ahead of time. And he certainly cannot change his mind, because he doesn’t change—and he could never learn new information that would make him want to change his mind. The God of Israel, however, is nothing like this. He is constantly reacting emotionally—with anger, love, regret, compassion. The God of Israel is an emotional being. The God of Israel is also no stranger to changes of heart. The Hebrew word nacham means “to repent, relent, have a change of heart.” There are two places in the Old Testament where it says that God does not nacham, three places where God chooses not to nacham, and twenty-two places where it says that God does nacham, or change his mind.

Why do Greeks and Jews have such different ideas about the one creator God? Because, while Greeks got their ideas from thinking about God, Jews got their ideas from living with God. They didn’t try to categorize God like a beetle or butterfly—they simply recorded God’s actions, told and retold his story. They tried to understand God’s character, not his kingdom, phylum, class and order. The result is a very different list of attributes:
“The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
This list of God’s attributes appears multiple times in the Psalms (86:5, 86:15, 103:8, 105:8).  It was the Jews’ confession of who God is. And where did it come from? It came from their historical relationship with their God, Yahweh. In Exodus 34, God had forgiven the Israelites for rebelling against him by worshiping the golden calf and recommitted to taking them into the Promised Land. He appeared before Moses and said,
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34:6, ESV)
Later, when God sent a swarm of locusts against Judah because they had rebelled against God again, the prophet Joel called them to repent by reminding them who their God is:
Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents [nacham] over disaster. (Joel 2:13)
And when God told Jonah to preach to the hated Ninevites, Jonah ran away instead. Why? Because he remembered how God had treated the Israelites:
“That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting [nacham] from disaster.” (Jonah 4:2)
This is why the Bible tells us a story: because if we focused only on what God is capable of, we would see him as a cold, distant, judgmental cosmic force. But God has acted in history to show us that this all-powerful cosmic force is a person, not cold but loving, not distant but present, not judgmental but gracious and merciful. When God became a human being named Jesus, he didn’t come to prove that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Instead, he put aside his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence and died on the cross to prove that he is truly gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Amen and amen!

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