The poet Muriel Rukeyser once claimed that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” I couldn’t agree more. If I asked, “Who are you?”, I’d be surprised if you responded with a breakdown of your atomic structure (“Well, I’m 64% hydrogen, 25% oxygen, 10% carbon…”)! No, we are storied creatures, so much so that it is hard to make sense of who we are today without reference to the individuals, encounters, experiences, and terrain that intersected—even diverted—our route from stream, to tributary, to river, and on.

‍

One of the few lessons I remember from elementary school was being taught that every story hangs on three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. 

‍

Beginnings are familiar to us. We speak of them all the time in our everyday conversations (“Where are you from?” “Who are your people?”). This makes sense, because how else can we measure how far we’ve come if we don’t know where we started? There is something definitive about a beginning; it’s a fixed mark we can always look back on to orient ourselves.

‍

The middle gets a little fuzzier because, well, we’re still in the middle of it! The middle of tasks unfinished, of relationships reconciling, of circumstances unfolding. The middle is where we live our lives, with the contours taking shape around us even as they are shaped by us. Small wonder, then, that the middle consumes so much of our attention. 

‍

It is the ending that we really have a problem with, for the same reason that I devour good books at lightning speed only to slow to snail’s pace for the last few pages—invested in the characters and immersed in the story, I can’t bear for it to end. 

‍

Aldous Huxley, author of A Brave New World, observed that most human beings behave as if “death were no more than an unfounded rumor.” I sometimes wonder, though, whether our obtuseness towards death has as much to do with hubris as fear. When we think of the future, we like to think of it as open-ended. The rest is still unwritten, as they say. But this is only true if we’re presumptuous enough to believe that we’re the ones holding the pen. 

‍

What if there is another who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), because he is “the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 21:6)? How tightly we cling to the delusion that not only do we live our stories but we write them. You live your truth, we say, and I’ll live mine. Not so. Not when there is one who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)—Jesus Christ, whose resumé includes the title “author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). 

‍

It seems things are not so open-ended, after all. The rest is written. In fact, the author has even been so generous as to disclose the full story-arc to us ahead of time, complete with spoilers. It’s called the book of Revelation. 

‍

The question is, dare we read it? If there is a revelation to be had, do we want to hear it? 

‍

I’m not usually an advocate for skipping ahead to the end of a novel to see what happens, but in this case we’re not talking about fiction. There are some aspects of life (our eternal destiny being one of them) where the outcome is too important for us to blithely say, “I don’t care—surprise me!” Most of us would probably agree that if the Holy Spirit deems something worth writing about, then it is worth reading about. And yet, more than with any other book of the Bible, when it comes to the book of Revelation we hesitate. 

‍

This hesitation is due in part to the weighty subject matter, but I think it’s also because we’re afraid of getting it wrong. If the sharpest biblical scholars can’t agree on how to interpret some of the apostle John’s apocalyptic language, then what hope have we?! And that’s not even taking into consideration some of the most outlandish features—horsemen and dragons and demons, oh my!

My encouragement would be not to miss the wood for the trees; it is possible to get so bogged down in minutiae that you miss the masterpiece. Sure, some of the artist’s technique and skill may elude us, but the broad-brush strokes are bold and blazing, and there is plenty for all of us to marvel at. Our God is the consummate artist, and he has crafted a story that is as cohesive as it is beautiful.

“In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1)

First, God. Always, God. The only one who is both author and protagonist of the story. There is no “before” him, there is no “after” Him. He is, he acts, and at his initiation there is creation—the creation of a world, and of a garden in the east.

The Hebrew noun for “garden” derives from the root verb “to surround or defend.” In a landscape of scarcity, gardens in the ancient Near East were designed as enclosed spaces, revered pockets of protection and luxury where life flourished and thrived free from existential threat (consider the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the ancient wonders of the world). 

No surprise, then, that this was the environment in which God established relationship between himself and his first image-bearers, Adam and Eve. The garden of Eden: a secure, sacred space in which to live, to love, and to walk with God in the cool of the evening. No wonder we spend our lives hungering for intimacy—it’s where we began.

Until a lie was spoken (“Did God really say?”) that called everything into question, distorting human perception such that protection was seen as oppression, an enclosed garden became a “cage”, and intimacy was destroyed by disbelief and disobedience. Having turned from their protector, they lost the protection of his garden. Exchanging fruitfulness for thistles, and intimacy for enmity, our ancestors whom God raised from the dust to rule over it were now returned to it. 

Then came the middle. Generations of toil and trouble, in which people yearned for what once was and longed for what could be. Shut outside the walls, poets wrote sublime songs of gardens where love was awakened once more (Song of Songs), musicians sang of rivers that made glad the city of God (Psalm 46), and prophets foretold a day when their divine bridegroom himself would come to reclaim the people of God as his bride. Restored from rubble and ruin, she who was once called a Desolate Land would again be called Married (Isaiah 62).

Until one ordinary day in a relentless succession of ordinary days (and weeks and years and centuries and millennia), the bridegroom came! He lived with us and loved us; he walked among us until his steady steps led him toward another garden. There his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow, weeping not only for what had been lost, but what he had yet to lose to bring us home (Matthew 26:38-39). There it was that he resolved to reach for the tree not to take for himself, but to give up himself. As it is written, “He himself bore our sins in His body on that tree…by His wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). In Eden, humanity considered equality with God something to be grasped, and the fruit of the tree they ate from was shame and death. In Gethsemane, Jesus emptied himself unto death for our sake, and the fruit of the tree that he hung from was our reconciled relationship with God (Philippians 2).

And what now for the people of God, still living in the middle? So long as we’re here, our purpose is to abide in Jesus and bear fruit (John 15) in preparation for what is to come. 

For those unfamiliar with the conclusion, perhaps that sounds like a pessimistic way to live—always waiting for the end. But we know better, because we have the revelation of Jesus Christ (Revelation 1:1), the author who was himself so invested in his characters that he refused to close the book. And so we wait as he taught us—not for an ending, but for a new beginning! Not as a terminal patient watching the clock run down, but as a head-over-heels bride eagerly awaiting her bridegroom to return and sweep her off to their wedding day. This is, after all, exactly who we the church are to Jesus: “his Bride who has made herself ready” for “the marriage supper of the Lamb!” (Revelation 19:6-9) 

And what is to be the setting for this sacred wedding between God and his people? A garden—and what a garden! Vibrant and verdant and cosmic in scale, this garden is the city of God himself! God’s own dwelling-place, descended from heaven to the new earth as God himself comes to live among us:

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1-2)

We may have spent our days eking out a life from the dust, but in our heart of hearts we know this is not the soil we were made for. 

The poet T.S. Elliott once wrote that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and to know the place for the very first time.” 

And so we shall arrive at last, and finally know exactly where—and with whom—we belong, even as we are fully known. In the beginning, God walked with humankind in the garden of Eden. In the middle, Jesus knelt in grief in the garden of Gethsemane. And in the end, which is really a new beginning, our Bridegroom shall joyously walk with us again in the garden of glory. What a story that will be.

‍