40. The Great Story Again

© Daniel Yordy – 2019

The government of the province of Ontario in Canada, a formerly Christian place, has just passed a law making it illegal for parents to prevent their little children from being introduced to the idea of gender change or to hinder their subjection to the physically altering drugs and surgery should their pre-adolescent child indicate in any way that he or she might want to be a different gender. Should the parents suggest to the child to remain what they are, they are guilty of child abuse and their children will be taken by the province for their “protection.” (A judge here in Texas recently issued the same decree against a Christian father.)

I read a statement by an Ontario college professor that preventing your little boy from pretending he is a little girl and thus from access to toxic drugs that will force his little body to change, that prevention of the parents is truly child abuse. While I typically measure the actions of government as being driven by deceitful, purposeful, and evil intent, this college professor sounded as if he truly believed what he was saying.

As I pondered what that meant, I began to understand better the importance of the law and Paul’s statement that, by the law is the knowledge of sin.

The problem has been, of course, that Christians have then used the knowledge of sin given them by the law to try harder “not to sin.” God meant for them to see the boundaries of death and then to flee with all their might into Christ our only life. God did not mean for Adam to “not eat” of the tree of knowledge. He meant for Adam to see the boundaries of death and to flee into the Tree of Life.

The massive loss of any cultural identity of restraint throughout the western world is overwhelming. We see a generation arising on this earth that is unsustainable. And we realize that even apart from the law of God giving us simple guidelines of good conduct towards one another, human cultures have banned specific types of human expression because they are unsustainable. The release of all restraint will take the human experience into unimaginable ruin.

People do NOT know what and who they are, although they pretend that they know with all ferocious arrogance.

It is interesting that Vladimir Putin of Russia, a man who genuinely supports and participates in Christian expression, stated recently that the world in which we live is built on Biblical values. He was defending the Russian law that, while allowing complete freedom to homosexual people to live as they wish behind closed doors, makes it illegal for them to use their practice as a political weapon or to promote it publicly or to present it to children.

His position and the position of the Russian people is considered “evil” by the story spinners in the western world. The peoples of Russia will likely survive the coming cataclysm; the peoples of North America likely will not.

This massive and rapid descent into darkness, I’m sure you also are fully aware of and are as concerned about it as I am.

Here’s the thing. A child’s identity is pretty well formed by the time they are 15 or 16. At that point, their knowledge of who and what they imagine themselves to be will continue to direct the rest of their lives. And the great confusion coming into the self-stories of children in the west today comes equally from growing up inside of dysfunctional adult relationships on the one hand and the mind-control environment called the public school on the other. The primary thing these children lack is any perception of getting their own food out of the ground.

A sustainable generation, a generation knowing who and what they are inside of wholeness of life, must be birthed and raised by a generation who are also whole inside of Christ and inside of practical human endeavor in their own self-stories.

It is also interesting to see that, while the Internet is a great blessing to us, it also gives a voice to everyone. And the one kind of speech that is rising across the west is accusation of every kind, accusation that needs no evidence and allows no proof that it might be false.

Now, I’m saying all this as a backdrop for what I want to present again in this letter, and that is the great story of God. If we did not know that everything coming apart at the seams in our world today was very much inside of our Father’s understanding, we would despair.

The typical Christian definition of God’s approach to this whole collapse is not only contrary to God, but it is repugnant to us. That is, that God plucks a few out of this mess and takes them to heaven, simply throws the rest into hellfire forever, and then washes His hands clean of the whole awfulness. This “story” is the story of Satan full-blown as the “image” of God.

God’s Story, on the other hand, brings a full answer to every single piece of awfulness in this present world, and that answer is the Church, a family of people living in the full knowledge of a world of life.

The name for this answer in John’s vision is Jesus proven faithful and true, that is, a woman clothed with the sun and bringing forth life.

No one can rightly understand Revelation apart from the Great Story of God.

When I did my word study of Revelation during my college years, taking every major word and symbol of the vision and writing out every single verse in the Bible containing that word or symbol, I found myself writing out the various verses of Genesis 1-3 over and over again.

This is what planted in me the idea that God gives a full and complete answer in the end to every issue raised in the beginning. The phrase from one of the prophets is, “Known to God are all His works from the beginning.” We understand that to mean that the events of the beginning define for us the doings of God in the end and that everything is finished before it even starts.

BUT – the one thing left out by most “interpreters” is the reality and meaning of the tree of life. More than that, I have not heard or read any other Christian source positioning the words of the serpent, “Did God indeed say,” against the words of Christ, “Let there be light” as the defining source of everything from then until now in the unfolding history of creation.

The Great Story of God is primarily a mystery story and a love story, fully both, and completely woven together.

The climax of the mystery story and the climax of the love story are the same occasion.
Every element of the beginning of the story is found in Genesis 1-24. And the elements of the completion of the story are found in Revelation, along with specifics from Paul’s gospel.

I am the A and the Z, the source and the completion, says the Lord God, the One who is existing [I am] and who has existed and who is continuously and actively coming, the One who takes hold of all, the All-Carrying, All-Sustaining One (Revelation 1:8).

I am the source and the completion; I am the opening act and the closing act of the story.

God wrote the setting and the characters, but it was the serpent who began the story line with his pronounced accusation against God, that God lies.

The mystery story has two parts. The first part is the accusation against God, that His words are not Christ and that His words are not true. The second part, then, comes out of the agreement Adam made with the serpent, that none of Adam’s seed would ever be the appearance of God. Jesus was found guilty by humans and angels of the crime of God manifest in the flesh, and His sentence was execution. Yet it was not Jesus, but Father, whose crime of revealing Himself to heaven and earth through human flesh is considered to be the greatest of all crimes.

The romance story has two parts. The first part is the Lover throwing Himself into the arena for the sake of His Beloved, paying every price with no thought of Himself to win her heart as His own. The second part, then, is her response of love to Jesus in giving herself to Him in marriage union and in birthing His seed into this earth, a generation of people who know God and through whom God is made known. This seed of the woman, then, proves God true.

Here is the most vivid expression in symbolic form of the great climax of both the mystery and the romance, that is, the visible completion of Jesus proven faithful and true.

And a great sign was perceived in heaven, a woman enclothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a garland of victory of twelve stars. And having a child in her womb, she screams, being in travail and being tortured to bring to birth. And another sign was perceived in heaven and, look, a great fire-colored dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and upon his heads, seven royal crowns. And his tail drags a third of the stars of heaven and he cast them into the earth. And the dragon stands in the face of the woman about to bring forth, so that when she should bring forth, he might devour her child. And she brought forth a male, a son, who is about to shepherd all the nations with a rod of iron, and her child was seized into God and into His throne. –

– And I heard a great voice in heaven saying: Now have come the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ, because the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down, the one accusing them before our God day and night. And they have overcome him through the blood of the Lamb, and through the word of their testimony; and they have not loved their souls unto death (Revelation 12:1-5 & 10-11).

I can show you a line from Paul for every important phrase in this description. For instance – “a woman clothed with the sun. – “Enclothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The same direct connection runs all the way through.

In Through Eyes of Fire, I laid out the great story of God in Chapter 10, “Christ, God’s Story.” I want to give here an analysis of that story rather than the description as I feebly attempted to do there.

I’ve been watching a number of YouTube videos recently on the meaning of story and why some movies fail as stories and others succeed. I’ve learned some important things that relate directly to God’s story.

There are a number of extended stories in movies or television shows that have failed spectacularly in their ending. One of those is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Another, much more important to me personally, is The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The failure of this story conclusion was the most painful experience I have ever known in all my years of enjoying stories.

One YouTube commenter, in puzzling over what makes an ending fail so horrifically, taking the entire story down into ruin with it, presented the conclusion that the most important single element in a great and true story is that all the rules of setting, of world-building, of character development and dialogue, of relationships, etc., that all those rules set forth in the beginning must remain consistent throughout and must be seen as the same reasoning beneath everything happening in the end. A character is not interesting when they win contrary to the rules of their story, but only when they win entirely inside the rules of their story.

Gethsemane and Psalm 22 makes Jesus real to the rules of our story and therefore of God’s story.

More than that, every question opened up in the beginning of the story must be resolved in some satisfying way in the ending of the story. Thus, when God says, “I am the A and the Z, the source and the completion,” He is assuring us that every issue raised in the beginning will be satisfied in the end and that victory will come through what we are as humans inside our present lives and world.

God cannot end His story by introducing things that have not been part of human life all the way through. Anti-Christ must be that which is utterly familiar and personal to every one of us just as Christ must be. The beast must be something every human who has ever lived knows full well. The dragon must be that pressure of accusation that has warred against every human born from their conception.

And the Church must be what we are, weak humans, stumbling and foolish, filled with all the fullness of God and loving one another with pure hearts fervently.

What God can do, however, in the writing of the final episode of His story, is cause all things to become what they are, fully made visible. And so we understand that the evil we are seeing unfold in our world today, as I described partly at the beginning of this letter, cannot be something “new.” In complete contrast, what we are seeing is what the world has always been. The world has always been this evil, we just covered it over with fake definitions and willful ignorance. The fact that we can’t do that anymore is not bad, but good. And thus evil being seen as it is – is just part of the unveiling.

It is GOOD that we are now seeing the world as evil. Doing so is part of placing ourselves entirely into God’s story.

You see, there are two stories being told through every human life and through the entire history of man on this earth. Every life and every circumstance is found in both stories, but one story is true and the other is false. The true story has not been known; the false is well-known.

And so consider what I would call the most sickening failure of any story ever told.  

“That God plucks a few out of this mess and takes them to heaven, simply throws the rest into hellfire forever, and then washes His hands clean of the whole awfulness.”

Yet to many, this seems to be the ending that fits the “story.” They think that way because the story they know is spun inside the tree, that is, the mind, of the knowledge of good and evil.

Remember that the two trees in Genesis 2-3 ARE the two minds of Romans 8. – The tree of life has made us free from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Romans 8:2 – paraphrased). – The story of life has made us free from the story of death. – The mind of the Spirit, the mind that speaks Christ our only life, has made us free from the mind of the flesh, that mind that spins the story of “I-not-Christ.”

“I-not-Christ” is a story that is not real. It is entirely fake, made-up, sheer fantasy. To live in it is a complete waste of time because it is NOT what is happening.

The two stories allowed in truth are either “Christ-not-I” or, as I have discovered in the JSV of Romans 7, “Sin-not-I.” Either way, it’s “Not-I.” There never has been an “I-not.” We have never generated ourselves.

And we have discovered that when we replace “Sin” as our view and source with “Christ” as our view and source, our entire life is transformed from all-sin to all-Christ. And that is pretty cool; it’s also the gospel. Replacing “Sin” with “Christ” in the story of our minds is the Biblical definition of “repentance.” Those who cry, “You must repent,” have never yet repented.

Another way by which stories fail is when the creators of the story set forth a plot in their minds and then force the actions of the characters to fit into and to follow that plot. In great stories, the characters are set forth first, and then they act out from themselves, out from who and what they are, and thus every step forward comes only as the natural outflow of character decision and action.

Sometimes, the entire plot is only that which unfolds from the nature and actions of the characters; at other times, although every character arc in the story unfolds naturally out from each character, yet all the characters in the story are hit by an outside event that cannot break their own story arc, but serves rather to press it into a for-real unfolding. Two examples are the great stories of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, in which Napoleon’s invasion of Russia impacted, but did not alter, the unfolding of each character arc, and Titanic by James Cameron in which the sinking of the Titanic impacted, but did not alter, the unfolding of each character arc.

What makes a story fail is when the character arcs are altered by the plot, making the character to become something entirely different from what they had been.

A story in which I would have to become something entirely different from what I am before I would know victory is a story that has failed before it even begins. Only the whisperer of lies would generate such a meaningless story.

In The Hobbit movie, one simple and clear story was turned into three long extravaganzas. Those parts that were Tolkien or even added, but kept true to Tolkien, were the unfolding of an awesome story. I absolutely loved the entire scenes of the dwarves in Bilbo’s house and Bilbo and Gollum in “Riddles in the Dark,” my favorite chapter in all world literature since I was twelve.

But look at the rules of story and context, character and tension set forth in the gathering of the dwarves in Bilbo’s house in the first chapter of the story. The key meaning of the story, built so spectacularly well, in my estimation, was the togetherness of the dwarves and Bilbo. And every part of this togetherness, including both tension and fellowship, honor and suspicion, was laid out for us through the first segment of the trilogy, An Unexpected Journey.

In Tolkien’s story, this fellowship and tension of dwarves together with Bilbo was the very heart and meaning of the climax of the story. The entirety of the third segment of the movie, The Battle of Five Armies, contained nothing of this fellowship and tension, and excluded it entirely from the three-hour “ending” of what became an utterly stupid story, one of the greatest crimes, in my estimation, in the history of making movies.

Here is what is SO important for us to know in perceiving the real story of God. The account in Genesis 1-11 is plot ONLY. The character arcs that ARE developing even before Genesis 3 are not shown to us in the Bible until the upper room, 4000 years later, the evening before Gethsemane and the Cross.

Here is the absolute RULE by which we define God as the character arc out from which the entire story unfolds. – “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”

Yet because Nicene Christianity has turned this image of God, that He has been from the beginning of His story, into a tiny and limited humanoid demigod far away from us, which they title, “God the Son,” they have then positioned the God out from whom the story comes as being like the devil. And thus this “devil as the image of God” story-line forces every character coming into the story to fit itself into some high-above “will of God” or to fall out of the story into ruin.

In other words, the serpent’s story is that we must fit ourselves into God’s plot, that God does not unfold His story through who and what we are. And since the serpent’s claim to be “what God looks like” is false, Christians have expected a false ending to a false story that never has been God’s.

Take Jesus in agony in Gethsemane, calling you and me into Himself, rising to His feet saying, “Here am I, I and the children whom You have given Me,” then pushed forward stumbling, then falling under a cross He cannot carry, then hanging between heaven and earth in utter human turmoil and confusion inside, utterly weak, utterly cast upon the Father, and you have the image and likeness of the God of Genesis 1-3 in the beginning of the story. Every part of God’s story unfolds only out from this Character Arc.

This is why I now use the term “age-unfolding life.” Our life, Christ our life, unfolds the plot of all the ages to come. Our story will never fit into some pre-determined “plan”; our story will always come out of who and what we are right now, Christ as us, Father revealing Himself through our present human weakness.

As you know yourself, Father with you, so you know all the ages to come.

This is real story-telling.

Jesus, walking the path of the Atonement, IS the only visible picture to us, thus far, of the character and actions of the One who begins this story standing on a box, like little Jane Eyre, and being accused of lying before all created beings.

“Yeah hath God said…”

Look at the one in agony in Gethsemane, agreeing with God to receive you and me into Himself. Look at the one stumbling under a cross He cannot carry. Look at the one unveiled to us by David in Psalm 22.

You are looking at the very One who, in Genesis 3, was accused before all created beings by the outwardly greatest created being, “You are FALSE!”

Staying true to the rules of the context and drawing the plot out from the nature and actions of the characters are not all that is required for a great story. Two other things are essential as well. One of those is the quality of the main character and the other is the quality of the opponent. Great story requires a worthy opponent.

First, you have to like the main character. “God,” as revealed by the devil, is a being that no one likes. The Father, as revealed by Jesus, wins the hearts of every created entity.

Few great movies have connected the audience with the main character more powerfully than the opening scenes of Gladiator with Russel Crowe. By the time the real tension of the story begins, the audience identifies completely with Maximus, mostly because they LIKE him. More than that, we see the tension of the story coming, not out from the enemy, Commodus, but rather out from the nature, decisions, and actions of Maximus.

Then, we see that, although Commodus is very different from Maximus in many important ways, still, his opposition to Maximus is overwhelming in its power. At every point, Commodus could easily win. Maximus triumphs ONLY by meeting Commodus at his own game and fitting himself under the rules set by Commodus.

In the real story of God, by the time the real tension of the story begins, we identify completely with Father because we see Him as He is, through Jesus, and we LIKE Him, we LIKE a Man who lays down His life for us. More than that, we see the tension of the story coming, not out from the enemy, Satan, but rather, out from the nature, decisions, and actions of the Father, whom we now see clearly through, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”

Then, we see that, although Satan is very different from our Father and from Jesus in many important ways, still, his opposition to Jesus is overwhelming in its power. At every point, Satan could easily win, that is, Jesus was tempted in all points exactly as we are, that is, Jesus was corruptible and subject to death. Jesus triumphs, then, ONLY by meeting Satan at his own game and fitting Himself under the rules set by the evil one, that is, coming in the likeness of sinful flesh – He humbled Himself, even as far as the death of the cross, that is, the most terrible form of execution devised by evil minds.

Yet Jesus, in His time of being visible in outward human form, served to show us both the beginning and the ending of God’s story. He is the source and the completion, yes, but as source, He shows us the Father as He is, and as completion, He shows us the Father revealed through us together, the Church.

The story is the tension. God’s story begins with the accusation leveled against Him that He is false, that His word is incapable of bringing forth LIFE in present human experience. That accusation must be shown to be completely false before God’s story could ever come to a real and satisfying end.

But how is God accused of falseness? We now know that the real accusation against God is the accusation against us – “Christ is not your life; you have a life not Christ.” In other words, “You are not coming out of God’s thoughts through the good-speaking of Christ; rather, you exist only out from whatever foolish story you spin in your own mind.”

“Did God indeed say” really means “God is not speaking of you.”

We know the Father in the beginning only as we see out from the eyes of Jesus through every step of the Atonement. We know Father in the end only through Jesus planted in the earth and becoming many – the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Christ who fills all inside of all (Ephesians 1:23).

When we see the story line told by our Christian brethren in this world, we are seeing a story line of evil, coming out from the tree of death, with no knowledge of any tree of life. And we are seeing a story line that, if it were actually “God’s story,” would produce an ending of spectacularly sickening failure and ruin. And such is the ending of that fantasy story of death.

It is not the ending of God’s story of life, for His story has always and only been LIFE.

God’s story is easy to show and tell. Plant a bean seed in the ground. Water it, and let it grow into a bean plant climbing up a trellis. When the vines are thick with pods, you harvest those pods. Now you have many more beans exactly like the first. In fact, they are much more than “like” the first bean, for they came entirely out from that first bean and it’s story of code is written all through them. Then, the whole family sits down and enjoys a pot of beans together.

One seed has become many, and all rejoice together.

Yet that’s not the story; rather, it’s the character arc, God showing Himself as He is.
The story comes in as the enemy scatters his seed, and his vines grow upon alongside the good bean vines, and all the workers in the garden are singing the song of the false seed and the false vines.

It is the question that makes the story. Does God lie or does God speak the truth?
Here is the ruling verse of God’s story. – Let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: “That You may be justified in Your words, and may overcome when You are judged” (Romans 3:4).

But what Word is the MOST IMPORANT Word at the heart of God’s story?
Romans 8:28-30 is critical in that it sets out the plot and the characters and sets forth God’s reasons for the story, what He hopes to gain in the end – many sons sharing the same form with Jesus as the revelation of God. Yet that is not the beating heart of the story, the central specific point upon which all the action of the story hangs, the point towards which everything happening in the story unfolds, and the point out from which all victory flows.

Here is the heart of God’s story.

This is My full completion, that you love one another just exactly as I love you. Greater love has no one than this, that he should set forth his soul for his friends. – By this we have known love, because He set forth his soul, His story of self, for us, for our sakes; and we also are committed to setting forth our souls for the sake of our brothers and sisters (John 15:12-13 & 1 John 3:16).

If this beating heart is not our full experience together before the ending of this age, before the resurrection of our bodies, right here, right now, in us today, then God’s story is without purpose. Indeed, it would be the worst story ever told, for it would prove Satan to have been right and true all along.

The climax of God’s story, Jesus proven faithful and true, coming out of the nature and actions of God from the beginning, is a family of people living life together loving one another with pure hearts fervently, raising their children and grandchildren inside of such a story of Love.