The End of Our Beginning

When I was helping my mom set up her kindergarten classroom, she played a bunch of songs that I gave her years ago on her iPad. This song popped up: The End of the Beginning by David Phelps. It's basically about a man sitting on a plane reading the Bible, and the guy next to him asks him what he's reading. Instead of just saying it's a Bible, he says it's a bestseller, history and mystery, and decides to read from the Gospels and bursts into a chorus about it. It's kind of an epic-sounding song, if you ignore the fact that any person that can understand English will know instantly that it's a Bible. But suspending disbelief about the possibility of this situation, here's the song for you to listen to:

Click here to listen.

For years, whenever I heard this song, I thought it was strange that the chorus never even mentioned that Jesus rose from the dead. It just ends at "he walked on the road and died on the cross, and that was the end of the beginning." I mean, if I want to be cynical, it's probably just so the unknowing man can ask how something like the end of the beginning matters, because Jesus is dead. But if I don't look at it that way, I find something else. This song categorizes two parts of a story: there's from the beginning of the Bible all the way up to Jesus's death. Jesus's death is the end of that part, the beginning of another.

I've always seen the Bible separated into two parts, too: the Old Testament and the New Testament. But with this new categorization, you see things in a totally different light. Jesus's death ended humans having to sacrifice things for forgiveness. It ended only Hebrews being able to be saved. Jesus's death started a new beginning: everyone can be forgiven and saved. But how strange, and perhaps how beautiful, it is to think that you, right now at this very second, are part of the same story where Jesus rose from the dead. It's as if although the Bible stopped being written, the story of the human race and their relationship with God goes on. Because Jesus died on the cross, and then rose in victory, we are included in the salvation he brought. We're still living in that miraculous story.