The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

by Jared C. Wilson
The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

by Jared C. Wilson

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Overview

Jesus’s parables offer Christians brilliant insights into the heart and mind of God. Forsaking a moralistic approach to the text, Wilson helps readers experience afresh the glories of Christ in these simple, yet profound, stories.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781433536687
Publisher: Crossway
Publication date: 02/28/2014
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Jared C. Wilson is assistant professor of pastoral ministry at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a popular author and conference speaker, and also blogs regularly at Gospel Driven Church, hosted by the Gospel Coalition. His books include Gospel WakefulnessThe Storytelling God; and The Wonder-Working God.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Postcards from the Revolution

The Gospel of Luke shows us that Jesus began his public ministry in an instance of brilliant audacity. He went to church on the Sabbath like a good Jew, proclaimed the coming of the Lord's favor according to the prophet Isaiah like a good preacher, and then, stunningly, in essence said, "This prophecy is about me" like a good instigator. The congregation was stirred, pleased. Who wouldn't want to hear that the prophecy of Isaiah 61 was being fulfilled? They "all spoke well of him" and found his proclamation "gracious" (Luke 4:22).

But the tide turns. As so often is the case throughout the Gospels, the crowd attracted to Jesus becomes the crowd crying for his blood. What happened? Jesus finished his self-centered sermon and sat down among them. Maybe that's what did it. He should have drawn a sword or issued an altar call. Instead he took a seat.

"Wait a minute. Isn't this Joseph's kid?" someone says.

Hearing their murmuring, Jesus adds a coda from the pews:

"Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Physician, heal yourself.' What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well." And he said, "Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian." (Luke 4:23–27)

What happens next is one of the quickest mood shifts in the history of mood shifts. The crowd that had been marveling, that had been struck with the impression of grace, "were filled with wrath" (v. 28). Instead of shaking his hand at the narthex door, they drive him out of it. Right out to a cliff, ready to throw him off.

Now, I have preached some bad sermons in my day (and have plenty of bad sermons yet to preach), but none of my sermons — as far as I know — ever drove anyone to want me dead, still less to physically attack me. But if we are reading the text correctly, we will see it wasn't a bad sermon that stirred up wrath, but a good one. A very good one. It was the inauguration of the public ministry of the climactic good news itself, actually. But something in that addendum drove the point home in such a way that it drove its hearers to murderousness.

Jesus recalls the way God has preserved his people in the past by passing over the likely to minister in the nooks and crannies to the unlikely. In a nutshell, he is saying to his congregation, "You probably won't accept me. So this message is not for you. It's for widows and Syrians." This is what we might call a public dis-invitation. They don't teach this model in preaching classes at seminary. Some pastors work for years to perfect the art of the altar call. No one practices an altar refusal.

From the very beginning, Jesus insists that the kingdom is not for the healthy but the sick (Matt. 9:12). The prophecy itself makes this clear! Who is the gospel for, according to Luke 4 and Isaiah 61, but the poor, the brokenhearted, the captive, the mourner, and the faint? And if we may add in the preamble to Jesus's epic kingdom announcement, the Beatitudes introducing the Sermon on the Mount, we include the meek, the hungry, the thirsty, the pure, the merciful, and the peacemaking.

Jesus is turning something upside down, and for that the angry crowd wanted to turn him upside down.

But really Jesus is turning something right side up. And when we read the parables he employed to teach the crowds throughout his ministry, we could do a lot worse than to see them as narrative portraits of rebellion against rebellion. The rightful king has landed, and he is leading an insurrection against the pretenders to his throne.

As the crowd in Nazareth has Jesus between rocks and a high place, he calmly passes through them and walks away. Jesus, like the stories he told, didn't look like much, but the power of the eternal God was in there.

This story in Luke 4 illustrates something central about the illustrations we call the parables, namely, that they are not for everyone. Jesus's message of the day of the Lord's favor sounds wonderful ... until he says it's only for certain people. He says a similar thing about the parables. On the one hand, this is counterintuitive because we think of the parables as "sermon illustrations" of a sort, stories designed to make Jesus's teaching plain and clear and easy to understand. But on the other hand, the way the parables actually function is entirely intuitive — which is to say, you either get them or you don't. More on that in a bit, but for now, let's pan out to see the larger context of Jesus's ministry. The parables can't be understood without it.

The Gospel of the Kingdom

When Jesus, and John the Baptist before him, went about preaching that the kingdom of God (or "heaven," to use Matthew's circumlocution) was "at hand," they were clearly not saying the kingdom was coming thousands of years from then. They had no illustrated charts or infographics chronicling an eschatological timeline involving Israeli statehood, Russian tanks, American Blackhawk helicopters, Swiss supercomputers with ominous nicknames, and UPC tattoos. They said, "It's here. It's arriving now." In Mark 1:15, Jesus seems as unequivocal as you can get: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."

This makes sense when we read back in Luke 4 that Jesus says, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (v. 21). Matthew summarizes the message of Jesus as "the gospel of the kingdom" (Matt. 4:23; 9:35).

The gospel of the kingdom is the announcement that Jesus the Messiah has arrived and has begun restoring God's will on earth in and through himself. The fulcrum upon which this restoration turns is Christ's substitutionary work in his sinless temptation, suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection from the grave.

Through Adam's disobedience, sin entered the human race, affecting human dominion and the environment. Look at all that is cursed in Genesis 3:14–19. If we cannot tell from the world itself that the whole place is messed up and we along with it, the truth is plain enough throughout all the narratives that make up the Bible. From the fall of mankind onward, the Scriptures show us the breakdown between man and God, man and man, and man and the created world. When Adam and Eve, deceived by the Serpent and driven by their prideful lusts, ate the forbidden fruit in the hopes of greater peace, the result was the diminishing of it. So the Old Testament portrays a broken world groaning under the weight of the consequences of its sin. But it also portrays the loving faithfulness of a holy God who will not let sin and the Serpent have the last word. Every new day the patriarchs are breaking covenant, and every new day God is keeping it.

The promise of vindication may come as early as Genesis 3:15, which casts a long shadow to the foot of the Messiah in the New Testament, pierced in crucifixion yet victorious in the crucifixion over the Serpent. After the four hundred years of silence that began at the closed door at the end of Malachi, God's people are ripe for redemption. Jesus's preaching ministry from top to bottom proclaims this inevitability and the purpose and effects thereof. In his incarnation he is the second Adam (Rom. 5:12–14), redeeming the human experience from the first Adam's failure. In his teaching he is Wisdom made manifest, fulfilling the Law and the Prophets and actually embodying what they foretold. In his miracles he is signaling the in-breaking of God's restorative kingdom. In his suffering and crucifixion he willingly submits to the wrath of God owed to true sinners and thereby satisfies the wages of sin and conquers its power. In his bodily, glorified resurrection he conquers the power of death and becomes the first fruits (1 Cor. 15:22–24) of the promises like those in Psalm 16:9–10 and Job 19:26. Everything rad is coming true.

The kingdom is at hand because it is at Jesus's hands. In his ministry, from that first explosive sermon on that Sabbath day in Luke 4, it comes violently (Matt. 11:12).

But if the gospel Jesus and his disciples preached was the gospel of the kingdom, what is the kingdom, exactly?

Some may say that the kingdom is heaven, and in some sense it is, but too many who say this have in mind a celestial place of disembodied bliss, the place the Scriptures sometimes refer to as paradise. Matthew, as we have noted, speaks of "the kingdom of heaven" rather than "kingdom of God," but what is in view here is not some extraterrestrial, spiritual locale. Matthew's intended audience is Jewish, and because the name of God is unutterably sacred, he substitutes "heaven" where the other Gospels use "God." Therefore, Jesus was not really preaching that the location of paradise is "at hand," at least not in any material way. In any event, since God is omnipresent and the locale of paradise, whatever that locale is, is best thought of as the place where God is, heaven has in some sense always been at hand. For instance, heaven broke into earth in the temple religion of the Old Testament Israel. Heaven was "at hand" in the Most Holy Place. No, when Jesus preached the kingdom, he was not specifically talking about the place we often think of when we hear the word "heaven."

Some will say that the kingdom of God/heaven is the church. There is an element of truth in this as well, but it still will not do. The church indeed cannot be prevailed against by the gates of hell (Matt. 16:18), which sounds a lot like the forecast of the kingdom in Daniel 2:44 (among other texts). But the kingdom and the church are distinguished in numerous places. In Luke 17:21, Jesus says that the kingdom is "in the midst of you," which makes little sense if the kingdom is you. It could be that Jesus is saying the kingdom is in the midst of you plural, you together, as in the body of believers. But when we read the descriptions of Jesus and his disciples preaching the gospel of the kingdom and hear the commands to the church to preach the kingdom, it ought to be clear that Jesus is not preaching "the church," still less that the church ought to be preaching itself. "For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord" (2 Cor. 4:5).

The place heaven is not the kingdom, and the people called the church is not the kingdom, but the gospel of the kingdom of God tells us something about heaven and calls the church to do the telling. The kingdom is the manifest presence of God's reign. George Eldon Ladd puts it like this:

When the word refers to God's Kingdom, it always refers to His reign, His rule, His sovereignty, and not to the realm in which it is exercised. Psalm 103:19, "The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all." God's kingdom, his malkuth, is His universal rule, His sovereignty over all the earth. ... The Kingdom of God is His kingship, His rule, His authority. When this once is realized, we can go through the New Testament and find passage after passage where this meaning is evident, where the Kingdom is not a realm or a people but God's reign. Jesus said that we must "receive the kingdom of God" as little children (Mark 10:15). What is received? The Church? Heaven? What is received is God's rule. In order to enter the future realm of the Kingdom, one must submit himself in perfect trust to God's rule here and now.

Again, there is some sense in which those who receive the kingdom "receive" the church and heaven, but those are the benefits of embracing the yoke of God's sovereignty, the implications of the gospel. What the gospel announces is that the God-man Jesus of Nazareth is doing the Messiah's work of tearing the veil between heaven and earth through his sinless life, sacrificial death, and glorious resurrection. He brings the manifest presence of God's reign into fallen mankind and broken creation. And since he is bringing this reign in and through himself as king, he is preaching himself.

The parables, then, serve this end: they proclaim, in their unique way, the gospel of the kingdom of God and Jesus as king of that kingdom. The glory of Christ is to be had in the parables, provided the parables are had at all.

But while the glory of God has been brought to bear in the reign of Christ in and through Jesus's ministry and atoning work, the effects of sin continue and the brokenness is still to be endured for the time being. Habakkuk 2:14 holds out a vision for the world's end that has God's glory covering the entire earth like the waters cover the sea — itself a parallel to the Revelation forecast of Jesus as the illuminating sun of the new heavens and the new earth. In the teachings of Paul and Peter, in the prophecies of John in Revelation, and in the teachings of Jesus himself, we understand that while God's kingdom is "at hand," it is also not fully here. We may say that Jesus Christ inaugurated the kingdom, but he has not yet consummated it. He will do this at his second coming. Therefore, a biblical understanding of the nature of the kingdom of God keeps in tension the reality that the kingdom is both "already" and "not yet." As we will see, the parables capture this tension as well.

The Kingdom Story

God is the greatest storyteller ever. Our most brilliant, most captivating, most spellbinding authors have nothing on him. All good stories are but pale reflections and imitations of the great story of God's glory brought to bear in the world. The Bible is a book of books, a combination of stories that tell one larger story, and in the Bible we have the overarching and thoroughgoing added element that the story is true. Only God can write a myth that is at the same time historical, factual. Only God can write a biography that is at the same time a history of biographies to come, because God is the only creative person who is also omniscient. Only God can write a story that resonates not just in the power of the imagination or the heart or the mind, but in the very soul; only God can write a story that brings dead things to life. Only the word of God quickens, divides, heals, resurrects. The poetry, the history, the laws, the lists, the genealogies, the proverbs, and the prophecies together make up the mosaic of God's vision for the universe with himself at its center.

What is the grand story that God is telling? It begins with his triune self as the only eternal good and holy, and then moves to his creation of the world and the men and women in it, creatures specifically designed to glorify him and enjoy him forever. But as in every good story, there is a conflict, a crisis. Mankind seeks his own glory, his own enjoyment apart from the Creator, and the result is death. Wretched men that we are! Who will rescue us from this body of death? (see Rom. 7:24).

Every good story has a hero, and God himself is the unparalleled hero of his story. Since the story is about his glory, this only makes sense. So throughout the Old Testament narratives, we will see just how frail and stupid the "heroes of the faith" really are. Only a few escape their narratives without blemish, but even an upstanding man like Boaz has a prostitute for a mother. Abraham lies and finagles, Isaac capitulates and spoils, Jacob schemes and wrestles, Joseph is a gullible braggart, Moses stutters and stumbles, David lusts and backstabs, and the list goes on and on. Why? Because they're sinners. But also so that we will see the one who is true and faithful, the hero of the story, the real dragon-slayer between the lines, hidden in the shadows, biding his time until the moment he is pleased to come and instigate the story's eucatastrophe, the moment at which all heaven breaks loose.

While the Old Testament heroes fail and fumble forward, God promises judgment and vindication, the former to the unrepentant workers of wickedness and the latter to his covenant children. These are the two primary things we want in a good story when our hearts are right: justice and a happy ending (or at least the hint of one to come later). This double-edged dynamic recurs throughout many of Jesus's parables.

The Old Testament is fraught with warnings and brimming with promises. If you read it right, you will feel the anticipatory tension building all the way into the last chapter of the Old Testament, where we see these ominous and ecstatic words of prophecy:

For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts. (Mal. 4:1–3)

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "The Storytelling God"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Jared C. Wilson.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

1 Postcards from the Revolution 15

2 A Radical Refocus 37

3 Uncommon Knowledge 47

4 Three Times Found 59

5 Justice and Good Sinners 77

6 The Dreadfulness of Death after Death 91

7 Jesus Is for Losers 107

8 The Parables before the Parables 121

9 Jesus, the Living Parable 145

10 The Unstoppable and Unfathomable Kingdom 161

Conclusion 175

General Index 179

Scripture Index 183

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Jared Wilson’s new book is a punch in the gut. Gone are the tame, bedtime-story versions of the parables we’ve been told in the past. Instead, Wilson invites us to see them afresh with all of their explosive, imaginative power.”
Mike Cosper, Founder and Director, Harbor Institute for Faith and Culture

“In showing us the parables of Jesus for what they are (and are not), Jared Wilson invites us into a deeper understanding of their author and the kingdom he came to establish. The Storytelling God teaches us to read and reflect upon the parables with great care, and rightly so. The parables, and this book, point the way to life abundant.”
Scott McClellan, Communications Pastor, Irving Bible Church, Irving, Texas; author, Tell Me a Story: Finding God (and Ourselves) through Narrative

“My own bookshelf has precious few commentaries on the parables and this will definitely fit nicely into that gap. In fact, this book is actually two books for the price of one. Part devotional commentary and also doubling as a solid gospel tract. This book serves the gospel straight up on a plate. His chapter commenting on the gospel and the poor is worth the price of the book alone. Clear, straightforward, biblical, gospel-centered writing. Definitely recommended reading.”
Mez McConnell, Senior Pastor, Niddrie Community Church, Edinburgh, Scotland; Director, 20schemes; author, Church in Hard Places

“With a characteristic combination of wit and wisdom—humor and sobriety—Wilson grabs your attention, fixes it upon Christ, and keeps it there for the duration of the book. Readers in search of a pastoral introduction to biblical parables that is rich with real-life applicability can gladly make room for this volume on their bookshelf.”
Stephen T. Um

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