David Spriggs: Becoming Part of God’s Drama

Whether your preference is for Shakespeare at Stratford, Law and Order on Friday nights at home, the afternoon play on Radio 4 or Da Vinci at the cinema, most of us, in one form or another enjoy becoming involved emotionally and imaginatively in drama of one kind or another.

|PIC1|Becoming a Christian can be thought of as an invitation to become one of God’s actors in his great drama of redemption. Living as a Christian then becomes the exciting challenge of playing our part, along with all other Christians, in God’s great play.

I find this metaphor an exciting and stimulating one, not because I am into amateur dramatics (I find learning lines off by heart a nightmare not a dream!), but because I think it allows us to develop a stimulating and lively relationship with the Bible. And let’s face it, not all Christians find this easy today.

I work for Bible Society and our mission is ‘To make the voice of the Bible heard everywhere.’ Of course, that involves huge investment in the global task of translating, printing, publishing and distributing the Bible in many hundreds of languages – and much more besides. But we also are committed to helping Christians in our own country too. We speak about increasing the confidence of the church in the Bible. That’s where this insight about drama can help us.

It was Tom Wright, now the Bishop of Durham and author of many books helping us understand the different parts of the Bible, who first caught my attention with this picture. He suggested that we can think about the Bible as a newly discovered play written, say, by Shakespeare. People would be wildly excited if this were to happen and quality actors from around the world would be queuing up to get a part in its first performance, I’m sure. But, he went on to say, there’s one problem with it. The ancient manuscript has one scene, from towards the end of the play, missing. There’s plenty of material to understand the plot and to gain a very clear sense of all the major characters. We’ve even got the final scene, when all the story lines flow together and get unravelled. Having all this means we can make excellent sense of it all. So what should we do about the missing piece? Tom suggests that we would get the cast and the directors together, once they had absorbed all the written text we had. |TOP| Next we could work up the first four Acts, so that they became absorbed in the play. Then we could ask them to improvise the missing pages in such a way that it also led into the final scene. No doubt, there would be various ways the scene could flow; probably there would be some clashes among the actors and certainly they might have their own views about particular lines. The result might not be exactly what Shakespeare intended but it would mean we had something pretty authentic and at least the play could go on! It would be wrong never to let the general public view it because a piece was missing.

This is very much the position we find ourselves with respect to the Bible. Act 1 is the amazing story of God’s creation. Act 2 the desperately sad account of human fall; together these provide the context for the rest of the play. Act 3 shows how God gets to work to start the process of redemption, by calling Israel into being, with all the twists and turns that the Old Testament reports. Act 4 is in some ways the highpoint of the drama, telling of Jesus and how God accomplishes his redemption of the world. Yet the highpoint isn’t the end! The church is born and this is Act 5 which culminates in the Book of Revelation and the renewal of earth and heaven. But this is where the problem lies. Between the end of Acts and the beginning of Revelation chapter 4 there is a hugely significant missing piece – the story of the Church of Jesus Christ. We belong here. God has invited us to join his theatre company to help enact the gap. Without us playing our part well the story won’t unfold properly. So we have the huge privilege of making it happen, while, of course, always recognising and respecting that the play is not ours to rewrite as we fancy, because God is the author and it’s his story we are part of, not the other way round. Tom puts it very succinctly when he says we are called to live with ‘faithful improvisation’.

|AD|If we are going to do this, then one factor needs to be high on our agenda. We need to be people who are really immersed in the scriptures. Now while it may help to read the Bible many times, it takes more than this. Undertaking daily Bible readings and listening to lots of Sunday sermons, can also help, but won’t be enough. What we need is a real sense of the overall plot, the key events, twists and turns and even blind allies in the story line, as well as insight into the characters. It is with this in mind that Bible Society has worked with SPCK to publish a book and to provide questions for individuals and groups to work on to get even more from it. Surprise, surprise, we’ve called it The Drama of Scripture. If you find this way of approaching the Bible and Christian living as stimulating as I do, then I encourage you to look at the special web site, www.thedramaofscripture.com to find out more. You can even contact Bible Society (contactus@biblesociety.org.uk) to ask for a free sample of passages from the book. Better still buy the book, resources@biblesociety.org.uk.

We may never win an Oscar for our part in living out God’s story creatively and honourably, but we will receive God’s crown and have the enormous satisfaction of knowing we have played our part well in the greatest drama the world can ever know.




|PIC2|David Spriggs


David Spriggs is a Local Baptist Minister for 20 years; Previously headed up the Evangelism Department of the Evangelical Alliance; Now working for Bible Society in various roles relating to the place of the Bible in the mission of the church in England and Wales, currently Bible and Church Consultant; Author of several books, and many articles mainly on church leadership and growth, prayer and spirituality, the Bible; Writes regularly for a number of daily Bible reading notes publishers, including, BRF, CWR, IBRA, SU and Living Light. For more information about the Bible Society please click www.biblesociety.org.uk