Introduction
TO THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE
The timeline of the Bible is the itinerary for a journey we will follow. The Creative Imagebearers website and accompanying workbook will carry us through. We get to understand who we are, and who God is in His plan and purpose for all things. God has designed this journey. It is like our own road to Emmaus, a path we walk with God by our side as He shows us around. He allays our fears, tells us His purposes and reminds us that we have a destiny beyond that which we can see right now. Each step and stop along the way is important, indeed essential in understanding who God is…
The Biblical Timeline
DISCOVERING AN EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY WITHIN
Trinity
God reveals Himself through the narrative as ONE. He is beyond compare and yet He exists as THREE persons. This is a mysterious way of being and is the ground upon which everything finds its foundation. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Always has been and always will be, but He takes time to reveal Himself so that we can comprehend Him. He exists in tension. The Three persons of the Godhead working together…
Creation
God spoke all things into existence, He is before all things. All things were created in Him, by Him, through Him and for Him. He also holds all things together right up until this moment. His will is to redeem all things and reconcile All things to Himself. The gospel message is cosmological. God is not out to save souls, but to redeem the cosmos. All we can see and all we can’t see; every atom, every creature. He longs to welcome back every prodigal imagebearer…
Rebellion
Just as God is sovereign over the expanse of the whole cosmos, He has designed us to be stewards of a very small part of His creation. He is infinite God and we are finite humans. All things God has created are finite. We all began in God and He gives us the free will to determine our fate. We get to chose to image Him or pick something else from creation to mirror. So, His imagebearers have free will to choose to love Him or to create an alternate bent-in reality to live out of…
Co-Creation
From the start God gave us work to do. To engage with Him in creation and transform it using our ingenuity. To form tools for music, architecture, culture, creative pursuits and to join with Him in learning to rule and reign over all of life. To bring increasing Order, Beauty and Abundance as we extend the garden to the whole world. After the fall, we need to co-labour with God once more. Only now we also see God bring Healing, Deliverance and Resurrection Life as well…
Incarnation
When the second person of the Trinity. The Spirit of Christ comes in the flesh. Baptised into the womb of a young jewish virgin girl and born in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. He is named Jesus. Every moment after of this child’s development is exactly like our own in every way. He is fully human and has to grow into both His divine imagebearing and His human imagebearing identity. Jesus holds the tension between both His Trinitarian Family and His Human genealogy simultaneously…
Resurrection
Jesus’ death and torturous sacrifice is for us as imagebearers all the more incredible when you consider he did it all fully human and fully God. At no point during His life here on earth did He allow His humanity to swallow His divinity. Nor to have His divine life overpower His human frailty. He was partaking wholly in humanity and wholly in Trinity at every single second. Moment by moment held in living tension. He was born, lived, died and was resurrected and is now, fully human…
Community
Just as Jesus comes back from the dead and reappears, He mentions that He is going to leave once more! Can you imagine hearing this from the messiah who has only just come back? Who has defeated death and now can institute the promised Kingdom here on earth just as it is in heaven. Only they now hear that His plan is to leave again! Is He playing with their emotions? “But don’t worry, I’ll send the Holy Spirit to empower you to be my imagebearers from here to the ends of the world!”…
Groaning
Paul writes from a cell and says to the churches, “I am fulfilling in my own body the suffering of Christ” to present you perfect and blameless, God’s imagebearers by the work of salvation. Wrought in Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit. We are now called to live between the times. In the now-and-not-yet. To deliver a coming kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven. There is much groaning to this midwifery work of delivering life. It necessitates an innate ability to live surrounded by death, but expectant for life…
Re-Creation
Isaiah writes to the Jews in exile in Babylon. Who have seen the promise of God extinguished in the rubble of Jerusalem, their holy city and temple are destroyed. God’s presence with them as a people seems a distant memory. They have abandoned God and feel the isolation and desolation in a foreign land. Into this stark reality, the prophet reminds the people that God has not forgotten them. The message the prophet writes speaks to the very depths of our human condition offering hope from beyond the grave.…
Reconciliation
The Bible ends in a similar vein as it began. Full Trinitarian Fellowship and the reunification of Heaven and Earth will be a reality. This time, instead of God being separate from His image bearers, His creation and all reality. Now, everything God made receives an invitation into a new Trinitarian belonging. Jesus as a creature, invites all creatures. Spiritual and physical to come to rest in full Trinitarian fellowship where we will rule and reign with Christ. Our lives here a prologue for what is to come, our stories will be written into eternity….
