These are the crucial elements of the Bible. If we do not see these four matters and understand these elements as the framework for all of God’s revelation throughout the scriptures, we will miss what God is after. We will miss the economy of God.
Greek: oikonomia – English: economy
For many, many years as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ I studied the scriptures with a microscope. I studied words and their roots. I dissected passages, cross-referencing them with dozens of related passages. Yet, I must confess that after 20 or more years of doing so, I was still ignorant of God’s eternal economy.
It was only after I began to step back and began to look at the scriptures through a “telescope” that I began to gain real light. It was when, by God’s mercy, I was granted an opening to see the intimate connection between Genesis and Revelation that I began to be anything more than a child in my understanding.
Oh, believe me! Before I was granted that mercy from God, I was still able to bloody folks about the head and shoulders with my knowledge of the scriptures and to inform them just how they could and should fix themselves and their circumstances through appropriately getting themselves “in line with the Word of God.”
I did this to those around me and, worst of all, I did it to my own children.
Like the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day, I knew how to exhort people to become a whited sepulcher—just the same as I had become. I was good to look at from man’s limited point of view and, just as Jesus said, “full of dead men’s bones.” I was a dead man. I had no life in me.
Yes, surely, I was a Christian. But, the life Christ had for me was entombed in me.
Years earlier I had “invited Christ into my heart,” and there He was—held my prisoner, my hostage, and my “key to eternal salvation.” But He definitely was not “my life.” As Jesus said so clearly in John 6:53, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat [lit: masticate] the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves,” so I had no life in myself.
So, beginning to see the scriptures from a holistic perspective—from, with and by the Spirit seeing that God has an economy that stretches from Genesis to its ultimate consummation in the New Jerusalem—was the beginning of my real and full salvation. Taking the real and living Christ as the Word of God (John 1:1) as my daily food—not as material for mental dissection—made all of the difference in me.
I am so grateful for God’s mercy in this.
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