“From the reader’s perspective, it is not hard to see how these dark shadows over the history God’s people on earth seem to fill our horizons. But, as we have noted already, there is another thread that not only runs in parallel, but actually runs right through that of the recurring failures of the church and that is the never-failing grace of her Lord and Saviour.”

The grand storyline of the Bible can at times make depressing reading if we do not pay close attention to the gospel threads that hold it together.

After its glorious beginning in the accounts of creation in Genesis, our high hopes for God’s wonderful world are dashed by the third chapter and its record of the fall. (Though it is all too easy to allow the space devoted to the dark tragedy and implications of this event to eclipse the disproportionate weight and glory of the single verse that contains the protoevangelion.) And, as the narrative continues over the eight chapters that follow, the same is true. In that brief compass, covering vast swathes of human history, we encounter some of the darkest moments of time. So much so that God intervenes with the drastic measure of the flood in Noah’s day. But here again we must not allow the dark matter bound up with human sin and its consequences to blind us to the irrepressible workings of God’s covenanted grace.

The story rolls on with Noah who, though God’s instrument of salvation through the deluge, shamed himself barely before the earth had fully dried out. Then Abraham: the man of faith, yet the one who lied with serious consequences. Isaac, like father, like son. Jacob, heir of the covenant, yet the one who sought to manipulate his way to what he and his mother thought his God-appointed destiny ought to look like. Joseph, who knew from childhood he was ordained by God to play a vital role in his plan of redemption, yet whose youthful pride seemed to derail it before it had even begun to be fulfilled.

The remaining books of the Pentateuch only seem to intensify this pattern. Moses, again a child of destiny, but who tried to fulfill it according to his own instinct and intellect ending up in exile for the next 40 years. (And even when his time came in the exodus, he was barred from entering the land on account of his sins along the way.) We see failure among God’s people, failure in their leaders and God’s reputation being tarnished in the eyes of the surrounding nations.

The entire Old Testament is a record of the recurring failures of the church of that epoch. (Psalm 78 provides a poetic summary of the extent to which this was so.) And when we move into the New Testament, the storyline does not change. In the Gospels the disciples who are called, trained and richly blessed by our Lord, not only stumble repeatedly during their time in training, but also fail miserably when it mattered most. The same is true in the period covered by the book of Acts. Good things happen as the gospel spreads, but bad things are never far behind as the enemy of souls not only opposes its work from without, but also distorts and frustrates it from within the church.

All the New Testament letters were written because of sin, failure and confusion in the New Testament churches. The last of them, Jude, almost seems to have an air of desperation in face of challenges confronting the churches Jude was addressing. And when we finally get into Revelation, we are confronted almost immediately with Christ’s pronouncements on the state of the seven churches of Asia Minor (which have resonated with the ‘sevenfold’ church in its entirety throughout its history). And his words are not easy to hear because they expose painful truths of the failures that repeatedly surface in the church.

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