Myth Become Fact
2 Timothy 3:15 - "...and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus."
On the evening of September 19, 1931, three Oxford dons walked out of dinner at Magdalen College and onto a tree-lined path called Addison's Walk. The path circles a small water meadow where deer still graze at dusk. They were talking about metaphor and myth. The warm evening air was so still that when a sudden gust of wind blew leaves off the trees, they held their breath as if something holy had just passed through.
One of the three men was J.R.R. Tolkien. Another was Hugo Dyson. The third was C.S. Lewis, a professed atheist who loved myths but could not bring himself to believe any of them were true. He had called them lies breathed through silver. Beautiful and moving, but not real.
But Tolkien pressed him that night with a claim Lewis had never quite heard before: what if the dying-and-rising gods Lewis loved so much in Norse and Greek mythology were not competitors to the gospel but rumors of it? What if every great human story about sacrifice and resurrection was a fragment of splintered light, the deep ache of the human heart sensing something true before it ever knew the name of it? And what if one day, in one real place, on one real hill outside Jerusalem, the myth actually happened?
Tolkien called it myth become fact. The story humanity had been stammering out in every culture for a thousand years had finally stepped into history and breathed and bled and walked out of a tomb.
The three of them talked until three in the morning. Nine days later, riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle on the way to Whipsnade Zoo, Lewis quietly crossed the final threshold and came to believe in Jesus Christ.
Here is why that story matters for how we read our Bibles today.
Most of us open the Old Testament like we’re visiting someone else's family reunion. Genealogies we don’t recognize, Tabernacle measurements we can’t picture, and kings whose names all run together. It feels like a long wait before the real story starts in Matthew. We read the first two-thirds of the Bible as backstory.
But Jesus didn’t read it that way. On the Emmaus road, on the afternoon of His resurrection, He fell into step with two grieving disciples who were walking away from Jerusalem. And Luke tells us that "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). The risen Christ took them on a walking tour of the Old Testament, pointing at page after page, and said: this was Me, and this was Me, and this was Me. Later in the same chapter, He would tell the disciples plainly that Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had been about Him the whole time (Luke 24:44).
Every page has been bending toward Jesus. The offspring promised in Genesis 3, the ram caught in the thicket on Moriah, the Passover lamb, the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness, the greater Son of David, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the stone the builders rejected. The Old Testament isn’t the warm-up, it’s the long ache of creation waiting for the Face it was made for. And when that Face finally showed up in a manger and a tomb, Tolkien was right. The myth had become fact! The ache had an answer. The splintered light came together into a Person.
This is why we can open a familiar passage this week and read it like it is brand new. The risen Christ is still walking the Emmaus road with anyone who will slow down and let Him point. And when He points, the light that hits the page is the same light that blew through Addison's Walk on a warm September night and rearranged C.S. Lewis’ whole life.
The whole Bible has a point, and His name is Jesus.
Today: Take one Old Testament story you think you already know (Joseph in the pit, David and Goliath, Jonah in the belly of the fish, Ruth on the threshing floor) and read it slowly today hunting for Jesus. Ask the text two quiet questions: Where is He hiding in this story? How does the story point to an aspect of His character or His work?
Prayer: “Father, I am amazed that every ache in the old stories was an ache for Jesus, and that every fragment of splintered light was a rumor of Him. Open my eyes today the way You opened the eyes of the travelers on the Emmaus road. Let me see Christ on every page, and let the seeing turn into worship. In Jesus' Name, Amen.”
-PK