Making Sense of Genesis
I need you to imagine something. You grew up as a nomad in a traveling caravan. You’re earliest memories are of gazing into a mysterious glowing cloud that was there every day in the center of camp—at night it was more like a burning ball of fire. You’ve never known anything else. Every day you help your mom and dad gather up sweet angel bread that falls from heaven—this is your main food. Except for Saturday, there’s no magic bread on Saturday, never has been. Somehow this is the only day that leftovers don’t go bad. Saturday usually has a meal with wine and roasted meat when you go to worship with your family and friends. Every now and then the leader, a guy named Moses, says it’s time to strike camp, and the entire community—about a million people with all their livestock and belongings—would follow the cloud by day and fire by night until it stopped in a new location.
Your parents and your grandparents tell stories about how they used to be slaves in Egypt. Back before God sent Moses to rescue them. They tell other stories, too. But all you’ve ever known is camping in the wilderness, following the presence of the God who miraculously feeds you with manna from heaven.
This is the setting for the Book of Genesis. Moses wrote it so these people could know who they were, who their God is, where the world came from, why it’s broken, why it’s important that they not only have faith in God but that they are faithful, and most importantly, to give them hope that God was going to fix everything and that it’s all going somewhere good.
Moses starts his book, the most famous book that will ever be written, with these words:
“In the beginning God…”
He makes no attempt to prove that God exists, he just states it, the people he’s writing this for experience God’s presence every day in profound ways. There’s no proof needed.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The same God who feeds them each day, who they follow by cloud and by fire—He made the entire universe. Then he talks about the six days of creation: the creation of light and dark, time, sky, sea, land, plants, birds, fish, animals, and finally mankind who He made in His own image.
Were they literal 24 hour days? The most obvious meaning of the text says yes. Could God have stretched the days into eons? Sure. But why would He have to? Maybe because the world seems to be older than that? If God created a gemstone, just by speaking it into existence, if it was a perfect rock—how old would it be the moment it was created? It would be “now old.” But how old would it appear to be to us? God is the Creator of time, too. Instant creation makes perfect sense to me, but if you need to think the universe is actually billions of years old, so you can hang out with the cool kids when you go to the Museum of Natural History, that’s fine, you can believe God took billions of years to speak the universe into existence.
But if you do, consider this: He says that death is a result of The Fall. There was no death before Eve and Adam disobeyed God. So however you make creation work in your theology, please believe that God is telling the truth and anyone who questions Him is wrong. God created a perfect world—however long it took HIm—then mankind sinned and corrupted it bringing death and pain and sorrow into His perfect creation. This means that Darwinian Evolution is incompatible with Scripture because it relies on death to be the process over time to facilitate evolving.
I find it much easier to just believe the plain reading of the text. He created the universe in six literal days. He’s God. To me, the real question is why would it take Him so long?
Right after God made Adam and Eve, He blessed them and said,
“Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” Genesis 1:28
Those are still the things that God wants His people to be busy doing. Here’s something to consider: how many schemes and tricks of the devil are designed to specifically target that original blessing and those original marching orders? If the idea is to fill the world with children who are governed by God’s Commandments, His love and goodness and truth? What would keep people from being fruitful and multiplying? Sacrificing children? Sex outside of marriage? Teaching lies as truth? Distortion of gender identity? Governing in ways that are contrary to God’s Word? Irresponsibly destroying the planet for a quick buck? Notice that half the command has to do with taking care of the earth and the living creatures that inhabit it.
The children of Israel were about to go into the Promise Land and be tempted with all these things—just like we are.
So they ate from the forbidden fruit. We call that The Fall. After The Fall, God told the man and woman that life would be full of pain and trouble and death. That was the bad news. But He also said this to the devil:
“Because you have done this, you are cursed
more than all animals, domestic and wild.
You will crawl on your belly,
groveling in the dust as long as you live.
And I will cause hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Genesis 3:14–15
This is known as the First Gospel. That the devil is cursed, and one day a son of Eve will crush his head, but he will be wounded, the implication is mortally wounded, when he does it. We read this knowing ultimately it’s Jesus who defeats Satan by the cross and resurrection. Eve didn’t think she was going to have to wait that long, though, she was pretty sure it would be her firstborn son Cain.
All of those Children of Israel that Moses was writing this for, they probably figured God was preparing them to crush the heads of all the wicked devil worshipers that surrounded them everywhere they went, too.
I’m about a third of the way through this sermon and I’m still in the third chapter. There’s so much here. Every sermon could go back to the Garden of Eden.
The first eleven chapters of Genesis tell half the history of the world: Creation, The Fall, Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden. Eve has her first son and her second son—things don’t go so well for the first family. Older brother kills younger brother in a jealous rage.
The beginning of cities and industry and art.
There are so many awesome, wild and wonderful stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. I can barely touch on them this morning. The world becomes filled with evil and wickedness and demonic worship. There comes a day when God sees that there’s only one pure and blameless man left on the whole earth—one man who walked in close fellowship with God.
Chapter six verse eleven,
“Now God saw that the earth had become corrupt and was filled with violence. God observed all this corruption in the world, for everyone on earth was corrupt. So God said to Noah, “I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the earth with violence.” Genesis 6:11–13
He told Noah to build an ark, save a breeding pair of each species of land animals, and when it was finished, Noah and his family, along with the pairs of living creatures got inside the ark. God shut the door and flooded the world. Basically starting over. Baptized the whole world.
After the flood, He gave Noah the same blessing and marching orders that He had given Adam about being fruitful and multiplying. He added this though,
“And I will require the blood of anyone who takes another person’s life.” Genesis 9:5
Then He made a rainbow as a sign of this new promise. If you think of it as a bow, like a bow and arrow, notice that He pointed it at Himself. Christians see that as a reference to the Son of God giving His life to satisfy the requirement of blood.
So the world repopulated. In chapter eleven they try to build a tower to heaven, they have all kinds of bad ideas, so God confuses the languages and scatters people all over the world. The Tower of Babel story.
Then we have the second part of the Book of Genesis. God chooses one man to bless so that his descendants would be a blessing to all the families on earth—this is the specific family that Son of Eve would come through. His name was Abram, later it would be changed to Abraham. God said, “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you...” God promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. He said, “Your descendants will become many nations, and kings will be among them!
“I will confirm my covenant with you and your descendants after you, from generation to generation. This is the everlasting covenant: I will always be your God and the God of your descendants after you. And I will give the entire land of Canaan, where you now live as a foreigner, to you and your descendants. It will be their possession forever, and I will be their God.” Genesis 17:6–8
Remember, Moses is telling this to the very numerous descendants of Abraham. This is who they were. Abraham was a nomad, just like them. He even traveled through a lot of the same areas that they had been traveling—and through the Promised Land that God was about to give them, which was Caanan.
One day God and a couple of angels showed up and had lunch with Abraham—to warn him about what was about to happen to Sodom and Gomorrah involving fire and brimstone. Abraham tries to talk him out of it but God says, “I would save it if there was anyone there worth saving.” Sounds harsh. The two angels went down to Sodom to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot, and the men of the city tried to rape them—bad move, Sodom. This is where “sodomy” gets its name. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed the next day.
It was going to be 25 years before his son Isaac was born. Then God was going to tell him to sacrifice his son to prove his faithfulness, and Abraham was going to do it—God doesn’t let him go through with it though.
Isaac had two sons, Essau and Jacob. Lots of family drama between those two. Jacob, whose name means “the deceiver” tricked his brother out of his birthright of being the firstborn.
Jacob ends up getting tricked into spending half his life as an indentured slave by the father of the two women he took as his wives. He has twelve sons. One strange night God comes as a man to talk—probably the pre-incarnate Jesus—and Jacob gets into a fight with him. He says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” God’s like, “That’s cute. And He touches Jacob’s hip and wrenched it out of socket. He said, “Listen Jacob the Deceiver, from now on your name will be Israel, which means “wrestles with God” because you fought with God and with men and have won.”
The twelve sons of Jacob, who was now called Israel, would be the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel. Like I said, this is Moses telling the children of Israel where they came from. Who they were.
But there was one more big question that needed to be answered. How did the children of Abraham end up as slaves in Egypt?
The last third of the Book of Genesis is that story, the story of Joseph, the next to last born son of Jacob. Joseph was his favorite son and he didn’t really try to hide it. Joseph flaunted his special favor in front of his brothers, he told them about his dreams where he was in charge of all of them and they had to bow down to him—and they got jealous and planned to kill him. But at the last minute sold him to some slave traders instead—it was his brother Judah’s idea to not kill him. They told their dad that he was killed by a wild animal.
Joseph was taken to Egypt, sold to the captain of the palace, head of security for Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. God is with Joseph, He becomes the captain’s personal attendant in charge of the whole household. But he ends up falsely accused of sleeping with the boss’s wife and gets thrown in jail. He meets a couple of Pharaoh’s servants who had also gotten in trouble and interprets some dreams for them. These servants get out of jail and one day Pharaoh has a disturbing dream and can’t figure out what it means—one of the servants remembers his prison buddy Joseph.
Long story short, Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams, which are about a famine that’s coming. Because God is with Joseph, Pharaoh ends up making Joseph his trusted right-hand man. Joseph has a plan for how to survive the famine. When the famine hits and everyone is starving, old man Jacob sends his sons to Egypt to buy some food. They find their brother Joseph in charge, they bow down to him just like the dream, Joseph forgives them and moves the whole family to Egypt and takes care of them. The book ends telling us that Joseph lived to be 110 years old and was buried like an Egyptian king. It’s a happy ending.
Of course, Moses is telling this story to the children of Israel whose ancestors had been slaves in Egypt for a couple hundred years. But now they knew how they had ended up there.
So, that’s a quick sprint through Genesis. But of course, we don’t close the Bible until we see how it points to Jesus. Where is Jesus in the Book of Genesis? And the truth is, He’s all over it. I’ve already mentioned a couple places. But there are so many more.
He was there at creation, promised to Eve, met with Abraham, wrestled with Jacob. He’s also foreshadowed in Adam, the Tree of Life, Abel, the Ark, Isaac, Joseph. So many more ways, here are two more big ones:
Before Jacob died, he gathered his twelve sons around him and blessed them. As Christians, we’re particularly interested in the blessing he gave to Judah, the brother who spared Joseph’s life because we know that Jesus will come from the Tribe of Judah. Here’s where we first learn this:
“Judah, your brothers will praise you.
You will grasp your enemies by the neck.
All your relatives will bow before you.
Judah, my son, is a young lion
that has finished eating its prey.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down;
like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
The scepter will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from his descendants,
until the coming of the one to whom it belongs,
the one whom all nations will honor.
He ties his foal to a grapevine,
the colt of his donkey to a choice vine.
He washes his clothes in wine,
his robes in the blood of grapes.
His eyes are darker than wine,
and his teeth are whiter than milk.”
Genesis 49:8–12
Jesus is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the one that will reign forever, the one that all nations will honor.
One more thing, one that most people tend to miss because they don’t read the Bible in Hebrew—and this one gives me the chills. This is so cool.
Look at this:
“In the beginning God created [untranslated word] the heavens and [untranslated word] the earth.”
Both of those untranslated words are the same word. “Aleph-Tav.” They’re the first and last letters of the Hebrew Alphabet. It’s like when we say “from A to Z, from first to last, from beginning to end.”
This is Moses telling the children of Israel, and all of us, that in the beginning, God created everything from A to Z, the heavens, and the earth from A to Z.
Things might look bad sometimes. Things might seem really dark and scary. God says, “I got this. Trust me. I have a plan.”
It shows up a bunch of other places in the Bible, too. The flood. Sodom and Gomorrah. The destruction of Jerusalem. Lot’s of places where things seem scary.
Genesis is the first book of the Christian Bible, let’s jump to the last. Revelation 22:13 is Jesus talking and He says this about Himself:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Revelation 22:13
Alpha & Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Jesus is hidden right there in the first line of the Bible. How’s that for some divinely inspired bookends?
I think God is telling us the same thing he was telling the Children of Israel. He’s got this. You’re going to face some terrifying things in this life. You’re going to be tempted to give in to your fears. You’re going to be tempted to think God is either not paying attention or He doesn’t care about you. Don’t give up. Don’t lose your faith. Stay faithful. Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Remember who your God is—He is the God who created everything from Alef to Tav, from A to Z, from beginning to end. He is Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega.
There’s this great line at the end of Joseph’s story when he’s talking to his brothers and forgiving them. He says, “What you intended for evil, God intended it all for good.” This is all going somewhere good. It started in a garden paradise and it’s going to end up in a garden paradise. Trust in God. This is only the beginning. AMEN