Salvation Story

Seven years ago yesterday I started this blog.  I don't have anything monumental to say about seven years of blogging except that in some ways that feels like a long time, and in others it doesn't.  I feel as if I have been doing this forever, and yet it is hard to believe it has been seven years. 

Thank you to those of you who are out there who keep reading.  Blessings.

I'm just beginning The Meaning is in the Waiting by Paula Gooder.  I imagine over the next few weeks I'll be writing alot about waiting. 

In the introduction she mentions that one of the difficulties of Advent is that we feel as if we are waiting for something that has already happened.  Christ has come.  Christmas (the first Christmas) has come and gone, and yet we spend December waiting for it. 

Gooder encourages the reader to think about time and the Bible in a different way.  As we think about God's salvation work in the world, we are tempted to think about individual events -- creation, Noah, Abraham (blessed to be a blessings), Jesus, Paul -- the list of individuals and individual events can go on and one.  Instead, she says, think of it all as one big event.  God at God's salvation work.  Then, creation and the work of a prophet become part of one purpose -- layers of an onion (my own week analogy).

With that in mind, read this quote from the introduction:

...the Gospel writers are standing in this same tradition of biblical salvation history that sees Jesus' presence on earth as yet one more -- even more wonderful -- example of God's intervention in the world.  Thus Jesus' presence is creation, Exodus, return from exile (and much more), all rolled into the one glorious snowball of salvation.

I remember when I was working my way through the Bethel Bible series.  At the end of two years of study, one of the revelations to me was the view of the Bible not as a series of perhaps unconnected books, but one book -- the story of God's work of saving the world.

What does that mean for us?  We aren't waiting for something that has already happened.  We stand here in the midst of it -- we stand here waiting for what happens next in God's salvation work, hoping to be allowed to take part.