God Gets His Family Back

In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.” From the first book to the last the Bible tells of wayward children and the tortuous lengths to which God will go to bring them home. 

Indeed, the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion in the book of Revelation. Many of Jesus’ own stories center on the theme of lostness, captured most movingly in the parable of the…