Creation/Redemption

5. The One Story of Creation and Redemption

So creation is an ongoing project that includes providence/upholding, redemption, and the eschaton. It is only the whole story that gives meaning to creation.¹ Redemption "is the completion of the whole project of creation, not the saving of a few souls from hell."² Genesis 1-2 tells of a beginning. So "creation," the beginning, points forward:

creation �

And the story proceeds toward its eschatological end and goal by way of fall and redemption:

creation � fall � redemption � eschaton

The fall can be considered a reversal of creation, but only if both creation and fall are considered apart from redemption. Redemption can be considered a reversal of the fall, but it would not have occurred if the fall had not occurred. And the eschaton is not a reversal of anything that went before. It is part of the story. There is no regrettably lost alternative story.³ No part of the story is fully understandable apart from the full story. It is in the new heaven and earth, not in Eden, that we see what God intended when he created.
It would be correct to say that God limits his authority by creating other wills. But we must also say that that this self-limitation is in fact how God exercises his sovereignty. God gets exactly what he wants because he is sovereign. But the only way he can get the specific thing he wants is by giving authority to others, that is, by not exercising coercion. What he wants is the whole story, which, because it is a story about freely-given (and therefore real) love, means that he does not extend the exercise of his sovereignty into all the details of the story. He "wills and posits the creature neither out of caprice nor necessity, but because He has loved it from eternity, because He wills to demonstrate His love for it, and because He wills not to limit His glory by its existence and being, but to reveal and manifest in it His own coexistence with it."⁴ The eschaton is "a completion that is destined, but not fully determined, in advance."⁵ God did not create reliable lovers. He took the risk of not being loved and continues to do so. This paradoxical exercise of sovereignty is the basic shape that stands behind every part of God's relationship to his human creation. It is what gives that relationship the nature of a story, that is, a series of related events that cannot be reduced to a principle and that could have gone differently because more than one free being is involved.
The creation-redemption story includes everything God has created. Because "creation is affirmed and not denied, elected and not rejected, it is the object of God's good pleasure."1 But all creation is now in bondage to the power of sin and "eagerly awaits the revealing of God's children" (Romans 8:19). God saves those who believe the gospel because he loves the whole cosmos (John 3:16), that is, the devil's kingdom (). God's ultimate plan is to "unite in Christ all things in heaven and earth (Ephesians 1:10).