**The below introduction is from an article David wrote titled, “Thinking Biblically About Law and Justice”, in The Journal of Christian Legal Thought, Vol. 13, No. 1. You can read the full article in PDF here.

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Introduction

If the Bible is the Word of God, we should expect the Bible to speak into every area of life. If Jesus is the Saviour of the World (John 4:42), the Son of God (1 John 5:20), the one who makes the Father known ( John 1:18), and the one by whom, through whom and for whom all things were made (Colossians 1:16-17), then we need to read the Bible (both the Old Testament and the New Testament) in the way the Church Fathers read it, as a big story whose hero is Jesus, and interpret what the Bible says about everything else in the light of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.

The big story told in the Bible has a number of key stages. John Stott focused on four stageswhenever he was thinking what the Bible had to say about issues facing Christians today: What was God’s original design in creation? How has that design been affected by the Fall? What has Jesus already achieved in restoring that design through His life, death, and resurrection? How is God’s original design going to be renewed and transformed in the new heaven and the new earth?

Craig Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen see the big story of the Bible as a drama in six acts: creation, Fall, Israel, redemption by Israel’s king, the mission of the church, the return of the king. In order to take account of as much as possible of what the Bible has to say about law, justice, and politics, I looked at eight different stages of the biblical story in my book A Biblical View of Law and Justice.

Stage One: Creation—principally Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

Stage Two: Fall—principally Genesis chapters 3 to 6.

Stage Three: Common Grace and Providence—principally Genesis chapters 7 to 11 and the Books of Wisdom.

Stage Four: The Law of Moses—Genesis chapters 12 to 50, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Ruth.

Stage Five (Side One): Kingship in Israel—the Historical Books of the Old Testament.

Stage Five (Side Two): Prophecy in Israel—the Prophetic Books of the Old Testament.

Stage Six: Jesus—the Gospels.

Stage Seven: The Mission of the Church—principally Acts and the Epistles.

Stage Eight: The Final Judgment and Our Future Hope—Revelation and the Apocalyptic passages in the Gospels and in the Epistles.

The rest of this introduction is designed to help you see how each of these stages in the story contributes to the biblical message about God’s purposes for law and God’s desire for justice. In order to understand the role and responsibility of Christian lawyers, of Christian citizens, and of the Church, we need to grasp the place of law in God’s design and desire for human beings.