The God Who Shows Up: Creation, Covenant, and the Shape of the Biblical Story
Confirmation Class: Lesson Three
The Apostles’ Creed begins: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”
That’s it. That’s the whole first article. One line. But that single line contains everything we need to start talking about who God actually is.
Three Ways of Thinking About God
Before we can talk about the God of the Bible, we need to clear away some fog. There are three basic frameworks for thinking about God’s relationship to the world:
Pantheism claims that the world is God. God exists in the door, the books, the dogs, the flowers, and the dirt. When you observe creation, you are seeing God. Everything is connected to the divine.
Deism holds the opposite view. God is in heaven, and we are on earth. The classic metaphor is the divine watchmaker: a craftsman who builds a watch, winds it up, sets it down — and walks away. The watch runs on its own. The watchmaker has nothing more to do with it. This reflects the functional worldview of the modern, post-Enlightenment West. The dome on the stadium is closed. Science explains the mechanism. God, if he exists, is irrelevant to daily life.
The biblical perspective is neither of these. In the Jewish worldview—the perspective of the Old Testament and that of Jesus—heaven is God’s domain, and earth is humanity’s domain. However, they are not two isolated spheres. They are meant to overlap and intersect. Even now, before the final restoration, there are places where heaven and earth intersect: temples, tabernacles, mountaintops—thin places where the veil between the two realms becomes semi-transparent.
The Enlightenment told us the stadium dome is closed. The Bible insists it was always open air.
Why Does God Create?
Here’s a question that sounds simple but can sometimes be difficult to answer: Why did God make the world?
Love needs an object. You can’t love in isolation — love requires a subject and an object, someone doing the loving and someone being loved. This is part of what Christian theology means when it speaks of the Trinity: the love between Father and Son, expressed in and as the Holy Spirit, is so complete that God is, in some sense, already an event of love within himself.
But God, because he is love, creates. He creates human beings to love. He creates a world where they can flourish. He loves us and wants us to eat, feast, drink, have relationships, and experience all the joys, pleasures, and delights of existence. Not because he needed to, but because that’s what love does. It overflows.
And then humanity sins.
The Shape of the Story
The God of the Bible doesn’t reveal himself through a list of abstract attributes — omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. Those are Greek philosophical categories. They’re not wrong, exactly, but they’re not how God introduces himself.
God reveals himself through what he does. Through story. Through history.
The clearest moment in all of human history where we see who God truly is is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. God’s greatest and fullest self-revelation to the world didn’t occur at a philosophy lecture but on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. We’ll come back to this point, but first, we need to trace the shape of the story that leads there.
The Book of Revelation gives us a helpful framework. In chapter 4, the heavenly creatures worship God for one reason: “You created all things, and by your will they exist” (Rev 4:11). God is worthy of eternal worship because he is the Creator.
But in chapter 5, there is a second act of worship — and it’s for something else. “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,” they cry (Rev 5:12), because by his blood he ransomed people for God from every tribe, language, people, and nation (Rev 5:9).
God is worshiped first as Creator. God is worshiped second as Redeemer. Since we’ve already talked about God as Creator, we’ll turn our attention to God as Redeemer.
Abraham, David, Exile, Messiah
The story of redemption follows a pattern. Matthew’s Gospel spells it out in its opening genealogy:
“So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations” (Matt 1:17).
Three sets of fourteen. Six sevens. The world is waiting for the seventh seven — the age to come, the climax of history.
The four tent-poles of that story are: Abraham. David. Exile. Messiah.
Here’s the through-line:
Abraham: God looks at a world fractured by sin — by Babel, by murder, by flood — and chooses one family. Not because they’re better, but because through them he will bring blessing to all families of the earth: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3).
David: Centuries later, God finds a man after his own heart and makes him a king. And in 2 Samuel 7, one of the most dramatic passages in all of Scripture, God makes him a promise. David wants to build God a house — a temple. God replies: “You won’t build me a house. I will build you a house. And God doesn’t mean a building. He means a dynasty. A line. A throne that will never end: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:16).
Exile: But the lifeboat sent to rescue the world keeps sinking. Abraham sinned. Isaac sinned. Jacob deceived his father to steal the birthright. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. Israel worshipped a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Law directly from God. The people demanded a king and got Saul. Then David — the man after God’s own heart — committed adultery and had a man murdered to cover it up. Just a few generations after David, his kingdom split. Eventually, the northern kingdom fell and went into exile. Then, in 586 BC, Babylon came for the south. Jerusalem was destroyed. The temple — the place where heaven and earth met — was burned. The Davidic line was cut. God’s people were scattered into exile.
The prophets understood this not just as a political catastrophe but as a theological one. God had left the building. And the question burning at the heart of the Jewish story was: Will God and the people ever come back?
The Jewish Bible ends here. The Christian Bible ends with a new creation. Our Old Testament ends with Malachi. But in the Hebrew Bible, the story ends with 2 Chronicles 36 — the decree of Cyrus of Persia releasing the Jewish exiles to return home. With Cyrus’s decree, the exile was technically over, at least for the southern kingdom. But the story of Israel goes well past Cyrus’s decree, and while the exile may have been over in some sense, to the people still living under foreign rule, it didn’t feel over. The people return to the land, but not all 12 tribes. The people still live under foreign rule and occupation. And perhaps most alarming of all, the temple was rebuilt, but the glory of God never returned to fill it. The promises, and the nation along with them, felt dead. And so the prophets speak of dry bones waiting to live again (Ezek 37), of twelve scattered tribes waiting to be reunited, and of a new covenant written not on stone but on human hearts (Jer 31:31–34; Ezek 36:26–27).
What the Exile Shattered
To understand why Israel was still waiting — still groaning — even after some of the people came home, you have to understand what the exile had broken. Four things sit at the very center of Israel’s life with God, four things that the exile called catastrophically into question.
Temple. From the very beginning, God planned to dwell with his people on earth. The climax of the book of Exodus is not the crossing of the Red Sea or even the giving of the Law — it is the construction of the tabernacle and God filling it with his glory. Heaven and earth, finally overlapping. The ark of the covenant was the place where that connection was most concentrated, the seat of God’s presence among his people. Solomon eventually built a permanent temple in Jerusalem, and again God’s glory filled it. But when Babylon came, the temple was destroyed, the ark was lost, and — most devastatingly — God departed. When the exiles eventually returned and rebuilt the temple, something was missing. The glory never came back. The rabbis knew it. The prophets knew it. The house was standing, but God was not home.
Torah. The Law was not just a moral code; it was a way of life designed for a specific people, in a specific land, centered around a particular place of worship. Large parts of it — the sacrificial system, priestly rituals, feasts, and offerings — couldn’t be practiced in Babylon. In exile, Torah became impossible to observe fully, not because the people lacked devotion, but because the Law depended on a context that no longer existed. And even when some people returned, the question remained: how can you be the people of God when the center around which that life was organized has been destroyed?
Sabbath. The seventh day. The day of rest. But Sabbath isn’t just a weekly rhythm — it embodies a whole theology of rest woven into the fabric of creation itself. God rested on the seventh day (Gen 2:2–3). He promised his people rest in the land. The language of rest runs throughout the entire story: when God tells David in 2 Samuel 7 that he has given him “rest from all his surrounding enemies” (2 Sam 7:1), that is Sabbath language. The land itself was meant to observe a Sabbath rest every seventh year. The entire seven-structure of Matthew’s genealogy — six sets of seven generations, the world waiting for the seventh seven — is Sabbath language. The exile was a catastrophic interruption of that rest. The Sabbath pointed to a restoration yet to come.
King. God had made an unconditional promise to David: your throne will be established forever, your son will rule, and I will be his father (2 Sam 7:12–16). The Davidic king was not just a political figure — he was the embodiment of God’s rule over his people and, ultimately, over the whole world. When Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and carried the last Davidic king into exile, that promise seemed broken. The line continued biologically, but the throne was gone. No Davidic king sat in Jerusalem. And without a king, Israel could not be what God had called it to be.
These four — Temple, Torah, Sabbath, King — were not peripheral concerns. They were the skeleton of Israel’s entire life with God. And the exile had shattered all four. Some people came back. The temple was rebuilt. The Law was still read. But the glory had not returned, the Torah could not be fully kept, the rest had not been restored, and there was no king on David’s throne.
This is why Israel was still waiting. This is why, five hundred years after Cyrus sent them home, Jewish men and women were still praying for God to act finally, still scanning the horizon for the one who would set things right.
Seventy Weeks of Years
In Daniel 9, something remarkable happens. Daniel is doing the math. Jeremiah had promised that the exile would last seventy years (Jer 29:10)—and seventy years had passed. So Daniel begins to pray, confessing Israel’s sins with desperate urgency. And the angel Gabriel appears with a message that reframes everything.
It’s not seventy years. It’s seventy weeks of years — 490 years — before the true end of exile, before God finally sets things right (Dan 9:24).
By the first century, the whole Jewish world was doing that math. Everyone was calculating. Everyone was watching. When is the exile actually going to be over? When will Yahweh come back to his temple? When will the covenant be fulfilled? When will the kingdom come?
The Return of the King
The prophet Malachi ends his book with a warning and a promise: the people have wearied God. They say evil is good and wonder where the God of justice has gone. And God responds:
“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal 3:1).
God is coming back. But first — a messenger. A forerunner. Someone to prepare the way.
Now read the opening verse of the Gospel of Mark, the first gospel ever written:
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written... ‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way’” (Mark 1:1–2).
Notice the pronoun. Malachi says, “I will send a messenger before me.” Mark says: I will send a messenger before your face. The speaker remains the same, but instead of addressing himself, God is now speaking to someone else.
Mark says the messenger is John the Baptist, and the one John prepares the way for is Jesus. Which means Jesus is the one that Malachi’s God promised to send. Jesus is the return of Yahweh to his temple.
Jesus is Yahweh. In person. In history. In a human body.
And the very first thing Jesus says in Mark’s Gospel, after his baptism, is this:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).
The 490 years are up. The exile is over. The Creator is finally revealing himself as the Redeemer. The story that began with Abraham — that ran through David and exile and all those sinking lifeboats — is reaching its climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
What This Means
This is the story the Gospels are telling.
Not the story of a great moral teacher. Not the story of a spiritual guru offering timeless wisdom. The story of the God of Israel — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — returning to his people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to do what centuries of covenants, kings, prophets, and priests could not do: reverse the exile, restore the kingdom, and renew the creation.
The themes that structure the whole Old Testament — Temple, Torah, Sabbath, and King — all of which were shattered by exile — are all being restored and fulfilled in Jesus.
As Christians, we’re staking our lives on a story. The story of a God who created the world out of love, whose love refused to abandon it when it fell, and who — when every rescue operation failed — came himself to redeem the world that he had made.
Questions, thoughts, or corrections? Hit reply — I read everything.