Suppose I were to write three versions of a story. In every version, the first half of the book looks forward to the coming of the king. There are promises about him and about how glorious his kingdom will be, about how his kingdom will fill the earth with peace and well-being, and how all his enemies will either have a change of heart and join up with him or be smashed to smithereens eventually.
That’s the first half. Now the versions of the story diverge.
In the first version, the king comes and he is enthroned as king over the world. His kingdom starts advancing from just a handful of followers to a vast multitude and … then it all falls apart. His followers leave him. His enemies grow stronger and stronger. His kingdom shrinks and shrinks. But at the last moment, he exerts his power once more to rescue his people, helicopter them to safety as it were, and destroy his enemies.
Would that be a satisfying story? Or would it perhaps leave you feeling as if something was lacking, as if the second half didn’t quite live up to the expectations raised in the first half?
Perhaps another version of the story would be more satisfying. In this second version, the first half is the same. Then the king comes and he’s enthroned. Some good stuff happens and some bad stuff happens. Things improve and things get worse.
For a little while, the king’s people seem to be making progress. Then they lose all the ground they had gained. For a while, the king’s enemies seem to have the upper hand, but then the tables are turned to some degree in some part of the world. The king’s people keep struggling along.
On and on it goes like this. And then one day—suddenly, out of the blue—the king pulls the plug and it’s all over. He takes his people and leaves, and his enemies are destroyed.
You sigh happily: “What a good story.” Or not. Maybe you’d say, “I liked parts of it, but … there wasn’t really a plot, was there?”
The first half gave you a sense of direction, a sense of where the story would go, a sense that there was going to be a story. It raised expectations. It created hope. The king was going to come! But then, when he came, it was all just a bunch of events happening and there didn’t seem to be an overarching story. It didn’t seem to go anywhere.
Someone might object: “You’ve missed the point. There was a plot. The plot through it all was just this: The king was making sure he had all of his people with him before he pulled the plug and ended the whole thing.”
To which you might respond, “Huh. That’s what the story was all about? That’s not the impression I got from the first half of the book.”
Not satisfied yet? Maybe try the third version of the story. The first half is the same. And then at last, the king comes. But he’s not recognized as king yet. He’s even rejected by his own people and put to death. But then he’s raised from the dead and enthroned. This king even has power over death. The gates of death will not be able to stand against this king!
The kingdom starts small, just a handful of people, but it starts to grow. Enemies become loyal citizens in the kingdom. Little outposts of the kingdom start springing up, even in the heart of enemy territory.
For much of the story, you realize, this little kingdom—really, it’s tiny, like a little mustard seed thrown into the ground and buried, just as the king himself was once—this little kingdom could be snuffed out in an instant. And yet it isn’t. The enemies try, but instead of the little kingdom being destroyed, the enemies are destroyed—or become followers of the king themselves!
Some of the action in the story is on a large scale. There are battles, battles that end perhaps with the enemies of the king becoming grudging citizens of his kingdom. “Oh, they’re just faking it,” you say. And you’re right. They are. But their grandchildren aren’t. Their grandchildren love the king and are loyal to him.
But there are also times when the enemy clearly has the upper hand. The king often seems to throw away the lives of his soldiers like a chess player sacrificing pawns. Or he spends them on worthless, meaningless tasks. Or so it seems.
Off goes one pawn to an enemy’s kingdom, and he starts announcing that everyone must submit to the king … and they kill him. Off goes another pawn into an enemy’s kingdom, and he labors for ten years without anyone being drawn to become a follower of the king. But at the end of those ten years, he’s successful. There’s one new citizen of the kingdom. One.
Much of the real action, you start to realize as you pay attention, is happening behind the scenes. It’s not just the big things, the big battles, the bigger than life characters. There are hundreds of thousands of minor characters who do little things like saying to the king, “Please help.” And then there’s a big battle and you focus your attention on the warriors and the victory and you forget all about that little widow who kept asking the king for help. Or a little baby becomes a citizen of the kingdom—and the whole course of the story changes.
Sometimes, this third story looks like the second one. This happens and that happens. There are ups and downs. It often doesn’t seem as if there’s any progress, unless perhaps you take a deep enough or a broad enough view—and then you see.
It’s kind of like one of those movies with twenty different characters and their twenty different stories that seem unrelated until, as you keep watching, you see that this story intersects with that one at some point and that one intersects with the other one and they really are intertwined. Only in this story, unlike the movie, there aren’t twenty characters and twenty stories that are really all one. There are billions, all somehow connected to each other and to the main plot, if only you had eyes to see it.
But bit by bit, as you read on, things do begin to change. It’s hardly noticeable sometimes, but it’s real. People’s lives change so that they start to act like kingdom citizens. A nation starts to resemble the king’s kingdom in some ways.
And then, just when you start thinking you’re getting somewhere, it all turns upside down. Now it looks like the first version of the story again, getting darker and darker, with defeat after defeat … over here. But don’t blink or you’ll miss it. Something good is brewing just under the surface over there.
In fact, this story is like a series of victories cleverly disguised as defeats. The enemy is so well organized, it seems at first, and the king’s citizens—they seem to be moving around chaotically. But then you catch a glimpse of the truth. The enemy soldiers march and fight well, but they’re crazy. It’s as if they’ve been hit in the head. But that chaotic pattern of the kingdom? That’s a well-crafted dance or a march to victory, even though the citizens are all limping.
And when you reach the end of the story, you see a kingdom that really does reflect the character and the majesty and the glory of the king and it fills the earth with peace and well-being. You say, “I see it at last. This is what I expected to happen when I read the first half of the story. Everything in the story was leading in this direction.”
And just like the last jump scene in a horror movie, so too here. The king, victorious, lets out the leader of the enemy forces, whom he has bound. The enemies make one last desperate attempt to overthrow the king and all his people, but the king laughs and destroys them and then exalts his people to even greater glory.
Which of these three is a satisfying story, a story that would grip you and keep you on the edge of your seat till you reach the end, when you’d say, “Oh, that was a good story”? Which of these is a story so engaging that you’d want to be a part of it?
One of these three is the story of history, from Genesis 1 on to the end when Christ returns. Which one is it?
[“A series of victories cleverly disguised as defeats” is not original with me. My memory attributes it to Herbert Schlossberg’s Idols for Defeat. The rest of the imagery in that paragraph I owe to some lecture or other by Jim Jordan.]
John Barach is a freelance writer, copy editor, proofreader, and indexer, with clients including the Theopolis Institute, the Davenant Institute, Lexham Press, and the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament—and maybe your next project, too.