King Stories

Ok friends, we’re going to do some some precision theology today—some theology with some tight tolerances. I hope you’re ok with that. But lest we lose the glory in the midst of the exegesis, I’d like to set the stage this morning by thinking together about story.

Story is one of the places where the idea that human beings are nothing but advanced animals looks the most ludicrous. Humans are storytelling creatures, and this is one of those things that shows the yawning gap between animals and humans in God’s image.

It’s not just that there is a small gap—as if chimpanzees simply wrote worse stories than us, as if they wrote the Twilight series and us humans wrote The Lord of the Rings. Though that is quite a gap, it’s bigger than that. Humans tell stories; animals don’t.

Why is that? Because people, unlike animals, are made in the image of God—and God is a storytelling God. God is the arch-storyteller. And God’s stories aren’t confined to ink on pages; God’s stories leap into three-dimensional reality when he speaks. We are creatures embedded in one such story.

And fundamentally, that’s what the Bible is: the authorized version of the true story of the world, straight from the author. What on first glance appeared to be a collection of lots of stories turns out to be, on closer inspection, one, cohesive story.

What kind of story is this one story? There are lots of ways of answering this question: You could say the Bible is a story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration/re-creation. You could say the Bible is a story of bitter loss giving way to glorious victory.

But probably my favorite way of summing up the story of Scripture is that it is a King story. Like many of the best stories, the gospel, the Bible, is the story of a King.

That’s why humans are not just storytellers, but storytellers obsessed with king stories: King Odysseus regains Ithaca in The Odyssey, King Arthur at his round table, King Aragorn in Minas Tirith, High King Peter in Cair Paravel—humans tell stories because God is a storyteller; we tell stories of kings because God’s story is a King story.

We tell king stories because king stories are echoes of the story of the cosmos, the story of stories—a story we call the gospel, the good news of God’s work and God’s Kingdom. In our text this morning, 1 Peter 3:18–22, Peter let’s us look at this one story from four different angles.

1. He looks at the story of the gospel as the story of a King winning his Bride.
2. He looks at the story of the gospel as the story of a King glorying over his enemies.
3. He looks at the story of the gospel as the story of a King delivering and judging.
4. He looks at the story of the gospel as the story of a King reigning in triumph.

Now, this text—and you’ll see what I mean as we read it—is difficult. It has angular parts, confusing elements, and areas where there is definite disagreement among faithful commentators and theologians. And my plea to you this morning is not to miss the glory of the King and his gospel in the midst of that angularity and confusion. That said, lets read the text, pray, and get to work.

Number one, the story of the gospel is the story of a King winning his Bride.