Anyone who has read JRR Tolkien’s great masterpiece The Lord of the Rings can be aware that it’s an especially complex piece of literature.
Tolkien’s work is split into three most important parts, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ ‘The Two Towers’ and ‘The Return of the King.’ These three parts are made up of six books and sixty-two chapters and inside these chapters, which contain each prose and poetry, there are an enormous variety of separate stories involving an enormous number of various characters.
However, within the midst of all these stories there may be one overarching story which links all the opposite stories that the book accommodates. This is the story of how the 2 hobbits Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee fulfil the duty of destroying a magical ring (the ‘one ring’) by casting it into the depths of the volcano Mount Doom, thus stopping the evil sorcerer Sauron from achieving worldwide domination.
If you ask what The Lord of the Rings as a complete is about, the reply is it’s about their fulfilment of this task. The various parts of the book explain why this task was needed, how this task was eventually achieved, and the advantages that flowed from its having been achieved.
The reason that The Lord of the Rings is centred around this central story is that as its creator Tolkien made the choice that it must be so. He could have written a special book containing different stories held together by a special overarching story, but that shouldn’t be what he decided to do.
Tolkien’s decision to put in writing The Lord of the Rings in the way in which that he did affects the way in which that the book must be read. To read the book properly, as Tolkien intended, involves reading the contents of the book in the sunshine of the overarching story of the duty given to, and fulfilled by, Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee. To read the book as if it had another central theme, or as if Tolkien intended the assorted stories within the book to be read independently of this central theme could be to misread it.
The reason my mind was drawn to eager about The Lord of the Rings in this manner was that in church last Sunday there was a chat concerning the account of the selecting and anointing of David as king of Israel by the prophet Samuel as described in 1 Samuel 16:1-13. The talk was about how this account in 1 Samuel 16 tells us that God looks at what individuals are really like on the within reasonably than what they seem like like from the skin (1 Samuel 16:7) and that God chooses and equips people to serve him in various alternative ways on the premise of what he knows about what they’re really like, with the appliance being that we should be open to serve God within the ways which he decides. Only in passing was it mentioned that David was ancestor of Jesus.
The talk was quite a great one so far as it went. There was nothing that was said in it that was actually flawed and yet when it ended, I used to be left dissatisfied. The reason I used to be dissatisfied was that the account of Samuel’s selecting and anointing of David was never properly linked to the overarching biblical story of the saving work of God in Jesus Christ.
In his helpful study of the principles of fine biblical interpretation Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Kevin Vanhoozer writes that when reading the Bible, we’d like to grasp its contents ‘eschatologically’ (i.e. in the sunshine of God’s ultimate purpose). In Vanhoozer’s words:
‘God has commissioned and inspired the words of the prophets and apostles, words that ultimately run to Jesus Christ. Doing justice to the letter of the text due to this fact means situating it in an eschatological frame of reference, ruled by a scriptural imaginary: the story of God forming a holy nation (Exod 19:6; 1 Pet 2:9), making all things subject to Christ (1 Cor 15:28) and the earth his footstool (Isa 66:1; cf. Matt 5:35, Heb 10:13). Biblical discourse is messianic kingdom discourse. Christ is the realisation of the everlasting purpose of God ‘to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Eph 1:10). All that is to say: the eschatological material of the text calls for an eschatological frame of reference. Otherwise, it should not come into focus but remain so many squiggly lines that form no coherent pattern.‘
Unpacking the technical theological language that Vanhoozer uses, the vital point that he’s making is that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments have God as their overarching creator. Just as Tolkien was the creator of The Lord of the Rings and the story it accommodates is the one he wanted it to contain, so God is the final word creator Scripture, working thoughts its human authors, and the story it accommodates is the one he wants it to contain.
If we ask what this story is about, the reply is that just because the story told in The Lord of the Rings is concerning the destruction of the one ring within the fires of Mount Doom, so the biblical story is concerning the restoration of God’s rule over his fallen creation within the person of the Messiah, the God-man Jesus Christ. In addition, the biblical story can be about God’s formation of a ‘holy nation’, a people who find themselves currently willingly subject to God’s rule in Christ, and who’re called to bear witness to others about what God has done that they might turn out to be willingly subject to God’s rule as well.
This being the case, the query we now have to ask about any a part of the Bible is what it tells us about God’s formation of a holy nation and the restoration through Christ of God’s rule over his fallen creation. If we do not ask ourselves this, we’ll miss the purpose.
In the case of the story told in 1 Samuel 16, as an example, the account of the selecting and anointing of David is about how God continued to form Israel as his holy nation through the use of David to be the means by which the tribes of Israel got here together to form a unified Israelite nation state, fully possessing the land promised to Israel by God, and having its political capital and temple at Jerusalem. In addition, this story sets the stage for the promise subsequently made by God to David in 2 Samuel 7:1-13 that there can be a king from the royal line of David who will ‘construct a house for my name, and I’ll establish the throne of his kingdom for ever’ (2 Samuel 7:13).
In the Old Testament this promise to David is re-echoed in passages comparable to Psalm 45:1-7, Psalm 89:4 and Isaiah 9:7 and the New Testament declares that this promise is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Thus, in Luke 1:32-33 the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary in regards to the son she is going to bear:
‘He can be great, and can be called the Son of the Most High;and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he’ll reign over the home of Jacob for ever;and of his kingdom there can be no end.’
Thus also, in Acts 2:29-36 Peter declares on the day of Pentecost that God’s promise to David has been fulfilled in Jesus’ resurrection and ascension:
‘Brethren, I’ll say to you confidently of the patriarch David that he each died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to today. Being due to this fact a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one among his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being due to this fact exalted at the best hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and listen to. For David didn’t ascend into the heavens; but he himself says,
‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make thy enemies a stool for thy feet.’’
‘Let all of the house of Israel due to this fact know assuredly that God has made him each Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.’
In these words of Peter, the title ‘Lord’ refers back to the divine identity of the person referred to by this title and thus we’re told that the resurrected Jesus shares the identity of the one God of Israel and that he’ll reign in heaven until he has subjected God’s ‘enemies’ (the forces of sin and evil which have corrupted God’s creation) to God’s kingly rule.
Furthermore, in Acts the pouring out of the Holy Spirit by the ascended Jesus referred to by Peter results in the formation of a renewed people of God, a renewed Israel made up of individuals from all nations, each Jews and Gentiles, who together constitute the brand new ‘house of God’ promised in 1 Samuel 16.
In terms of 1 Samuel 16: 1-13 all which means that expounding this passage properly in the sunshine of the general biblical story means explaining that God instructed Samuel to appoint David as king in order that David could perform his role within the formation of the Old Testament people of Israel, and in order that he might be the recipient of the promise of a royal descendent which was ultimately fulfilled within the birth, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, the divine eschatological king of whom David was only a forerunner.
It also means explaining that because Jesus is that this divine king we’d like to live in obedience to his commands, which is why in Matthew 28:19 the disciples are instructed by the risen Christ to show all people ‘to look at all that I even have commanded you.’
 Anyone who has read JRR Tolkien’s great masterpiece The Lord of the Rings can be aware that it's an especially complex piece of literature. ...){kind=link}