As Jake and I were driving home the other night, we were noticing the moon. I think we'd been discussing the star of Bethlehem and our amazement at the sovereignty of God - that in the midst of scientific patterns and laws that mandate the activity of stars and planets, God knew, even at the dawn of time, when the universe was spoken into existence, the exact day and hour when His Son would be conceived in the virgin, when His Son would be born into the world, and when His Son would be executed and die, in order to mark each of those exact moments in the sky with a kind of celestial poem.
Jake and I talked about what it must have been like at the death of Christ, to witness a blood red moon, which got us to gazing at the moon as we drove along...
Jake said he'd never really thought of it before then, but it was a weighty realization that this same moon which we peered at on our drive home, this same moon which continues to rise on our modern twenty-first century nights, this same exact moon witnessed the death of Jesus Christ. And this same moon rose on Adam and Eve, back when creation was brand new and the moon itself was still young. And this moon watched the flooding of the earth, saw the rebuilding of civilization and the division of language, the scattering of peoples, the rise of mighty Egypt and all of the plagues which swept across it. Etc. Etc. etc... The moon has seen it all. The moon has witnessed the enduring, unfolding narrative that continues to be played out upon the earth as God moves to restore His creation to Himself.
As we drove along, gazing at the moon and discussing all of this, we decided that the weight of this realization - the realization of the ancientry of the moon - came from our deepest desires as humans to be part of an epic story, a story older and grander and much larger than ourselves. And it is things like a timeworn moon which remind us that the story of the Scriptures continues on, played out upon the earth today, and we are just as much a part of this tale as the heroes of old or the prophetic heroes (and villains) to come.
It is our story, too. It is my story. I am a part of it, and it is a part of me, and this makes me want to know the story well, because it is my heritage. And it is my future and only hope of glory. It is where I have come from and explains so much about why I am the person I am. And it helps me to know where I am going.
The other day I was listening to a sermon given by Scot McKnight (shocker), and he said that Bible scholars have found at least 35 allusions to specific Old Testament texts in the song of Mary, found in Luke 1. Here was a young woman who understood the Story and recognized her place in it. She knew the promises God had given to her people, long before her time, and she understood what was being asked of her in light of those promises.
I want to be a woman like Mary. I want to know the Story so I can recognize significant moments in it as they happen.
The Story continues. The restoration continues. I am reminded of other ancient things - not as old as the moon, but timeworn nonetheless. Ancient sites like the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Pyramids. Though ravaged by time and weather and acts of history, reduced to mere shadows of their original glory, these ruins still awe us. Though they have fallen, their glory cannot be fully put out. This is exactly what I was writing about the other day when I went on a tangent about "kavod". Maybe we still like to see these ancient sites, maybe tourists still flock to them, for the same reason that Christmas continues to move us. They call us back to our former glory. They remind us of ourselves. Something in their desecrated histories resonates with our own. We sense we are connected to the stories of these places in a drama that continues to unfurl. For we, too, are "glorious ruins", except of course that unlike most of these grand monuments, we are being renewed and restored.
No longer are we called Deserted. We are called the Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord. We are called Sought After. (Isaiah 62:4, 12)
The King of the Universe continues to fight for, rescue, and pursue the hearts of his divorced beloved, and this is the great, unfolding Story of the world. A struggle toward final salvation. A sweeping epic of extravagant love. For that is how the Story first began: in perfect love. As I've said in this blog time and time again, our "Sacred Romance", as coined by John Eldredge, began in the intimacy of the Trinity, which is the dance at the heart of all true reality. And this is why our hearts crave to belong to a larger something than ourselves. We were made for it. We were made to be swept up in that perfect, Trinitarian, ever-extending love. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel - except , of course, that it isn't a fairy tale at all, because it's true. It is true and it is living and it calls us into itself. The Story of the Scriptures not only happened but has kept on happening and is still happening and will continue to happen until the last events described in the book of Revelation have come to pass, for I am convinced at the colossal and prolonged desire of God, throughout history, to draw us wanderers back into His arms.
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