Biblical fiction comes with a built-in problem: The better the story works, the easier it can become to forget where Scripture ends and imagination begins.

Mark M. Yarbrough knows the difference matters. The president of Dallas Theological Seminary has spent years teaching people to understand the Bible as one connected story. Now he has stepped into fiction with The Battle for Heaven and Earth, a novel co-written with bestselling author Jerry B. Jenkins.

The book reaches back to the opening story of Scripture, using fiction to imagine Lucifer’s rebellion, creation, Eden and humanity’s fall. Scripture provides the framework, but not enough detail to simply turn the biblical text into a novel.

King Kulture spoke with Yarbrough about why the story needed to be a novel, how two writers share one book, where imagination has to stop, why evil rarely looks evil and what writing fiction taught a Bible professor about Scripture.

You’ve written and taught about the Bible for years. Why did this story still need to be told this way, as a novel?

I’m privileged to do something called the Story of Scripture, where we help people understand the grand narrative of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

I’ve also been fascinated with what’s happening in culture with things like The Chosen and House of David, helping people visualize the story in a very visual culture.

Narrative literature in the Bible asks us to imagine. It asks us to experience the story. Think of pastors and teachers who communicate God’s Word. How many times have you heard something like, “Can you imagine what it was like stepping into the boat with Jesus?” That phrase is trying to get people to experience the story.

We never want to abuse the text. We don’t want imagination to replace revelation. Creativity has boundaries, and those boundaries were Scripture itself.

If we come back 10 years from now and this book has done everything you hoped it would do, what happened? What are you hoping this book does?

It gets people to the biblical text. It gets them to connect dots throughout Scripture.

My prayer is that it drives people to the text. It helps them imagine with wonder and awe who God is and what He is doing because of this problem that even today we find ourselves in.

I pray it gets people to the Bible, that it makes them have a greater appreciation for who God is and what He is doing because of the mess that we find ourselves in, and that we have a greater confidence in God’s plan.

You chose to start the story before Genesis 1, with Lucifer’s rebellion. Why start there? What does that add to the bigger story of Scripture?

It’s huge. Our culture today, and I would argue every culture, has always asked that question: If God is good, why is there evil?

These opening chapters of Genesis give us great insight into who God is. He is the Creator God. That’s the claim of Scripture.

When I teach Genesis 3, I tell people, if you want to know why you are the way you are, why your family is the way it is, why marriage is hard, why business is a struggle and why this planet is groaning, it’s because something’s broken in Genesis 3.

You’ve got to know the problem before you understand the value of the solution.

There’s what the Bible actually says, and then there’s a lot we don’t know. How did you and Jerry decide where you could use your imagination and where you needed to stop?

Number one, understand the storyline and what it does reveal. Make sure we stay with the scriptural storyline.

Number two, we used the word plausible. Anything that we wrote needed to be consistent with that. It couldn’t mess up the storyline.

Did we have a problem inventing things? No, because that’s what fiction asks you to do. But we wanted to stick with the storyline.

How does writing a book with somebody else actually work? What does each of you bring to it, and what happens when you don’t agree?

It’s fun, number one. My co-author on this one, Jerry Jenkins, is a legend in regard to his writing prowess and the more than 200 books he has written.

I would write the first draft of every chapter. I did the storyline and the characters, and then I would get that draft to Jerry and he would work on it. He’s a master storyteller. I’m telling this story at a large realm. Jerry’s a page burner. He knows what it’s like to be on the other side so that people keep turning pages.

Frequently, that meant I would send chapters and then they would shrink. He has a gift of precision in how that story is told.

Then we would go back and forth. There was a lot of wonderful give and take. The greatest button known to man is called “Accept All.”

Jerry made it very clear that when it came to anything theologically, he would defer to me. That’s a lot of what I brought to the table. When it came to writing style and how to say it, I would say, “Jerry, I defer to you.”

We never really had any major disagreements. It was a very fun process.

Was there anything you wanted to put in the book that one of you finally said, “No, that’s going too far”?

We didn’t actually have one of those moments. We did press ourselves and ask, should we have gone further?

That’s a hard question because when you’re imagining this perfect world before there was sin, Scripture doesn’t tell us what the development of Adam and Eve looked like or what this world was like when there were no problems. Your imagination can run wild.

We know what human beings are capable of now in a fallen state. So what could this world have been like before sin? How far should we have gone in imagining what the Garden of Eden was like?

Do you ever worry that once you put something into a story and make it feel real, people may remember your version of it as what the Bible actually says?

We do, which is why we’re trying to give them all sorts of resources to go back to the text. Our prayer is that they read the Bible.

It’s no different than The Chosen or House of David. It’s imaginative, but there is a biblical storyline. Honor the storyline. It’s OK to imagine, but give people enough tools to point them back to the text so they can say, “OK, this is what is actually said for certain.”

Our version is an imaginative one. But we want to drive them back to the text.

Lucifer doesn’t start out as some cartoon version of evil. We watch pride slowly twist things that were originally good. Why was it important to tell it that way?

There’s a version of Lucifer in the mainstream that has a little bit of a caricature to him. Think of some of the old pop-culture pictures of good and evil: On one shoulder you’ve got the good voice, and on the other you’ve got Lucifer standing there with a pitchfork.

Scripture doesn’t give us all of the details, and we want to acknowledge that. But Scripture gives us a lot to think about.

We wanted to paint him as a deceiver, as Scripture reveals him to be. He’s referenced as the father of lies.

Every human being actually understands pride already. We’ve wrestled with that. We still wrestle with it. We know his whispers way too well.

He doesn’t go around saying, “I’m evil.” He takes things that sound good and twists them. Is that how you think evil usually works?

His words are sneaky.

Even when you get into Genesis 3, the first words he speaks start subtly challenging the words of the Creator. He gets these image bearers thinking about the words that God has said and why God said them.

Then he starts twisting them. By the time you get farther into the conversation, the lie comes in.

There is something else going on in the text. It is to get you to doubt the Creator. And he is still doing that today. The same things that we see today are the regurgitation of the same old lies.

If God knew this was going to happen and could have stopped it, why didn’t He? Is the answer you give in the book the answer that makes the most sense to you personally?

It is. It’s called the sovereignty of God. That’s a big Bible word, but the claim of Scripture is that God is sovereign and we are not.

He knows things, He sees things and He understands things that we don’t. And we’re still asked to trust.

Personally, I’ve been walking with the Lord since I was 10. The older I get, the longer my list gets of things that God allowed that I wish He would not have. Who doesn’t have those?

And God still asks me to trust. From beginning to end, Scripture says God knows what He’s doing. He has allowed this for a reason, and He still asks me to trust Him.

Right in the middle of everything going wrong, God tells Michael, “See My beauty.” Why was beauty important enough to put right there?

It’s easy for us to lose sight of good when we’re in great pain. That’s just the truth of life.

It’s easy to worship God on the mountaintop when things are going well. But it’s difficult when you’re in pain and suffering.

God says, “I need you to see that there’s still good in this world, that there’s still blessing in your life even in the midst of the mess.”

God never ignores our pain. Sometimes taking our eyes off our circumstances allows us to have a bit of a refocus. It doesn’t mean we’re ignoring it. It doesn’t mean we’re sweeping it under the rug.

God asks us to see good even in the midst of bad.

How do Christians take spiritual warfare seriously without becoming so focused on Satan and demons that they start seeing a demon behind every problem?

Scripture reminds us that there is an unseen realm. Hands down. It’s real.

If we become so focused on this that we invent things we think are real, and every problem in this broken, fallen world has a demon behind every bush, that can lead us into a whole realm that Scripture doesn’t give us.

Scripture is the boundary. There are things it doesn’t give us all the insight into. We don’t need to go down paths Scripture doesn’t give us.

Our focus is not on the devil. The hero is God.

God and Lucifer are not co-equals here. Scripture never paints Satan as an equal to God. This is not a question of who’s going to win this battle.

God judges Adam and Eve, but He doesn’t abandon them. What do people sometimes get wrong about the relationship between God’s judgment and His mercy?

God doesn’t quit on broken humanity. I use a phrase sometimes: God doesn’t quit on us when we quit on Him.

Genesis 3 is such a painful chapter because of what happens and what it leads to throughout human history. But there are huge moments of hope in that chapter. God was already at work in humanity’s worst moment.

Humanity brought this on themselves. This is our sin, not God’s. These are the results of our decisions, not God’s.

And yet right in the middle of that brokenness, God is already pointing toward what He’s going to do about it.

What do you think Christians sometimes get wrong about what it means to be made in the image of God?

There’s a mystery with what it means to be made in the image of God. I love that language in Genesis 1:26 because it’s the only part of the created order that’s given that phrase.

We wanted in the novel to honor male and female being created in the image of God. We wanted to express the beauty that exists in humanity and the privilege and charge God gives human beings to be stewards of what He created.

It’s as if God has made all of this and says, “Humanity, I want you to reflect Me in who you are and in what you do.”

There is innate value in every human being because every human being has been created in His image. Our greatest sense of purpose and identity comes when we understand there is value in who we are because we represent God’s image.

That emphasis on human creativity also became part of the project beyond the printed page. Yarbrough said 10 songs appear throughout the novel and have been produced as a full musical soundtrack. Pre-save The Battle for Heaven and Earth: The Soundtrack.

What has writing fiction taught you about Scripture that teaching it in a classroom couldn’t?

It has helped me appreciate the reality of the story we’re presented.

It’s easy for us to be totally didactic: This means this, and that means that. But narrative asks us to step in. These were real people, a real moment. They had real emotions. They felt pain. They hurt.

I think we can glamorize a lot of the Bible. I always say the Bible’s rated R, man. It does not hold back.

You get to the story of Noah and the flood, and I’ve sat in a church where it’s happy two-by-twos. They’re smiling, getting on the ark. And I’m going, it’s a story of judgment because the world is in turmoil because of sin. That’s a different storyline than happy two-by-twos.

Writing fiction asks us to step in and see the reality of what Scripture itself claims happened, which sometimes we miss.

If somebody finished this book while their life was being torn apart by their own sin or somebody else’s, what would you hope they heard in it?

I would hope they would understand why we’re in this problem and mess. It’s called sin. It may be their own individual sin. It may be because we live in a broken, fallen world. There are bad things that happen, and there are bad things that happen to us.

But I hope they would see the hope that is already given by God in the midst of this mess, that He’s already at work.

Our prayer is that we’re going to write multiple volumes of this, that this isn’t just a one-and-done book. There is a story to be told.

I hope even a nonbelieving world, or mature believers who love to imagine and experience the story in a greater way, will engage with it. The story of Scripture is the greatest story ever told.

The Battle for Heaven and Earth: A Story of Scripture Novel by Mark M. Yarbrough and Jerry B. Jenkins is scheduled for release Nov. 3 from Thomas Nelson. Pre-order the book on Amazon and pre-save The Battle for Heaven and Earth: The Soundtrack.