Story 77 Genesis Review
How to Read the Bible
Let’s remember together the big picture of what we learned from Genesis. God has an amazing plan for the human race. The Lord created a universe of beauty and light for them, and brought the first two humans to life in a perfect Garden. He made them in His image. He made them for his love. He made them so they could love him back in perfect, close relationship. He utterly deserved their complete trust.
When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they rejected the ways of their holy, loving God. Instead of pure reverence and awe of their amazing Creator, they treated His directions with contempt. They listened to the Serpent and questioned God’s truthfulness. Then they acted as if they knew more about what was good for them than their Maker. They betrayed their perfect, whole relationship with the King of the Universe for a piece of fruit!
Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden temple of the Lord, but God still offered them tremendous grace. Instead of destroying humanity and eliminating the terrible troubles that evil and sin would cause, God persevered with the human race. He blessed Adam and Eve’s children, knowing full well the terrible cost that God himself would have to pay. One day, his own Son would have to suffer and die to bring them salvation from the curse.
The children of Adam and Eve had many children as well, and after hundreds of years, the population of earth grew to millions upon millions of people. These people had all inherited the sinful nature that Adam and Eve had brought on themselves, and they sank deeper and deeper into horrible disobedience. So God called His servant Noah into a covenant partnership with himself to save the human race. He told him to build an ark. God was going to start the human race over through the one man who had remained righteous when everyone else was utterly contaminated with the filth of sin. When the rains came, all the people of the earth were drowned in the mighty downpour. The earth was washed clean from the pollution of sin. But Noah and his family survived. Humanity and the animals they were meant to rule over were saved from extinction.
From Noah’s family, thousands and thousands of more people filled the earth. God had a very special plan to help the people of earth know God and come close to Him, just as He was with Adam and Eve in the Garden. So out of all those thousands of people in their cities and villages, God chose one very special man. Just as the whole human race had come from Noah’s family, God would build a whole nation out of Abraham’s family. And just as with Noah, God would make a covenant with Abraham. Once again, he would save the human race. The children of Abraham would grow to such a large size that they would become their own nation. This nation would have a special place before the Lord. They would be his priests to the world. They would teach the rest of the human race how to worship God. They would help humanity understand who God is and what his plans are for the world.
One of the most sacred and precious gifts that God’s holy nation gave the world was the Bible. Genesis is the first of many different sections of the Bible that were written over hundreds upon hundreds of years. Whenever we read Scripture, there are some very important things to remember. First of all, we can totally accept by faith that the whole Bible is inspired by God himself. They are God’s Words to his people. But the Lord used his human servants to write down what he had to say. Often, one writer will sound very different from another. Each has a different personality and they were often from different eras in history. They were still giving God’s perfect Word, but God gave them the privilege of using their own voice to express it!
It is also important to remember that there are different kinds of writing in the Bible. Some of the Bible gives us beautiful poetry, like the Psalms. They teach us to worship and bring our emotions to the Lord. Other parts of Scripture are wisdom sayings. They teach us how to live in the cursed world in a way that honors God and protects us from the cost of sin.
Some sections of Scripture are prophecies, where God revealed the future to his faithful servants through oracles. Prophecy can be found throughout Scripture, but it is especially found in the books that are written by the prophets themselves, like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. Another type of writing in the Bible is called the historical narratives. These are true stories in history that show us how God has been at work in the world. Most of Genesis is historical narrative.
There is another very important thing for us to remember as we study a section of the Bible. While every section of the Bible is important for us to read, we are not the people that the authors were thinking about when they wrote their section down. They were thinking about people that were alive in their own time, and their message was especially for them. In order for us to understand their message, it is very, very important for us to understand who they were writing to and why they wrote it. Then we can truly understand the heart of their message! That is how we learn what God was teaching about himself! From there, we can understand what those parts of Scripture mean for our own lives today.
The Torah, or the first five books of the Bible, were written by Moses. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy tell the story of human history up until the time when Israel went into the Land of the Promise. The first people to hear Moses’ message and read it were the children of Israel. Their challenge was to invade the Promised Land. It was their destiny to go to war against the sinful nations that were already there. In that story, their parents had already failed to trust God. Even though God had parted the Red Sea and conquered the Egyptian army for them, they pulled back in fear and refused to go. They had to wander forty years in the desert because of their rebellion. Would the next generation of Israelites make the same mistake? Would they trust God fight for them and give them victory?
As Moses recorded the story of God’s work in the world from the first moments of Creation to the last days before he died, he was presenting the children of Israel with the story of their God and his utter faithfulness. He was fortifying them with story after story to build up their faith so they would have courage to go into the Land of Promise! The story of Creation would remind them of his absolute power and authority. They would understand his utter righteousness as God came against all those who lived according to the wicked ways of Satan, the evil Serpent. They would know that out of all the other people groups of ancient history, the Lord of all had called them to a high and sacred role. They would see his grace as he offered lavish forgiveness to repentant sinners like Eve and Jacob and Judah. And as they read about their own forefathers like Abraham and Joseph, they would learn how powerful and precious it is to God when his servants respond to him with trust and obedience. If they heard these stories and had faith in the God who wrote them, the children of Israel would have the courage to obey no matter what challenges lay ahead.
It has been well over three thousand years since the Book of Moses (also called The Torah) was written. Just because it was written with the young Israelite nation in mind does not mean it doesn’t have very personal things for us to learn from God today! God is still reigns in all powerful, all knowing, perfectly pure holiness. He is still sustaining the whole universe by his powerful Word. He is still pursuing his sinful, broken children in love, just as he pursued Adam and Eve in the Garden. The Lord still longs for us to respond to him by faith. He still blesses those who repent from their sin and turn to him! The Old Testament teaches us many sacred, valuable things about what the True and Living God is really like, and how he has been at work through history. It is not just God’s story or Israel’s story. It is our story. Abraham is our father, and the work of God in time is our heritage. We are members of the Kingdom that he has been establishing on earth since the very beginning!