Anyone who has read JRR Tolkien’s great masterpiece The Lord of the Rings will be aware that it is an extremely complex piece of literature.
Tolkien’s work is divided into three main 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 within these chapters, which contain both prose and poetry, there are a huge number of separate stories involving a huge number of different characters.
However, in the midst of all these stories there is one overarching story which links all the other stories that the book contains. This is the story of how the two hobbits Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee fulfil the task of destroying a magical ring (the ‘one ring’) by casting it into the depths of the volcano Mount Doom, thus preventing the evil sorcerer Sauron from achieving worldwide domination.
If you ask what The Lord of the Rings as a whole is about, the answer is it is about their fulfilment of this task. The various parts of the book explain why this task was necessary, how this task was eventually achieved, and the benefits 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 author Tolkien made the decision that it should be so. He could have written a different book containing different stories held together by a different overarching story, but that is not what he decided to do.
Tolkien’s decision to write The Lord of the Rings in the way that he did affects the way that the book should be read. To read the book properly, as Tolkien intended, involves reading the contents of the book in the light of the overarching story of the task given to, and fulfilled by, Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee. To read the book as if it had some other central theme, or as if Tolkien intended the various stories in the book to be read independently of this central theme would be to misread it.
The reason my mind was drawn to thinking about The Lord of the Rings in this way was that in church last Sunday there was a talk about the account of the choosing 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 people are really like on the inside rather than what they appear to be like from the outside (1 Samuel 16:7) and that God chooses and equips people to serve him in various different ways on the basis of what he knows about what they are really like, with the application being that we must be open to serve God in the ways which he decides. Only in passing was it mentioned that David was ancestor of Jesus.
The talk was quite a good one as far as it went. There was nothing that was said in it that was actually wrong and yet when it ended, I was left dissatisfied. The reason I was dissatisfied was that the account of Samuel’s choosing 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 good biblical interpretation Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Kevin Vanhoozer writes that when reading the Bible, we need to understand its contents ‘eschatologically’ (i.e. in the light 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 therefore 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 eternal purpose of God ‘to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Eph 1:10). All this is to say: the eschatological subject matter of the text calls for an eschatological frame of reference. Otherwise, it will 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 is making is that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments have God as their overarching author. Just as Tolkien was the author of The Lord of the Rings and the story it contains is the one he wanted it to contain, so God is the ultimate author Scripture, working thoughts its human authors, and the story it contains is the one he wants it to contain.
If we ask what this story is about, the answer is that just as the story told in The Lord of the Rings is about the destruction of the one ring in the fires of Mount Doom, so the biblical story is about the restoration of God’s rule over his fallen creation in the person of the Messiah, the God-man Jesus Christ. In addition, the biblical story is also about God’s formation of a ‘holy nation’, a people who are currently willingly subject to God’s rule in Christ, and who are called to bear witness to others about what God has done that they may become willingly subject to God’s rule as well.
This being the case, the question we have to ask about any 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 don't ask ourselves this, we will miss the point.
In the case of the story told in 1 Samuel 16, for instance, the account of the choosing and anointing of David is about how God continued to form Israel as his holy nation by using David to be the means by which the tribes of Israel came 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 will be a king from the royal line of David who will ‘build a house for my name, and I will 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 such as 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 concerning the son she will bear:
‘He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;and of his kingdom there will 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 may say to you confidently of the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of 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 we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not 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 the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.’
In these words of Peter, the title ‘Lord’ refers to the divine identity of the person referred to by this title and thus we are told that the resurrected Jesus shares the identity of the one God of Israel and that he will 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 leads to the formation of a renewed people of God, a renewed Israel made up of people from all nations, both Jews and Gentiles, who together constitute the new ‘house of God’ promised in 1 Samuel 16.
In terms of 1 Samuel 16: 1-13 all this means that expounding this passage properly in the light of the overall biblical story means explaining that God instructed Samuel to appoint David as king so that David could perform his role in the formation of the Old Testament people of Israel, and so that he could be the recipient of the promise of a royal descendent which was ultimately fulfilled in 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 this divine king we need to live in obedience to his commands, which is why in Matthew 28:19 the disciples are instructed by the risen Christ to teach all people ‘to observe all that I have commanded you.’
