Genesis Study Introduction

To my side.
Okay,
glad to have you with us,
everybody, as we start this study of Genesis.
Hey, yeah, thank you.
And so,
we talked about what could we do that would be a significant
undertaking that might be able to get us through this semester,
and really landed on Genesis pretty
quickly.
Just a fundamental kind of book.
Hey, Bernie, thank you.
So, what we plan to do—now,
the thing about Genesis that’s intimidating is that it is huge,
and it is all over the place.
And so, as we talked, what we do, we will go chronological.
In other words, we will go through the book of Genesis,
but we are not going to go verse by verse.
Genesis is okay to read that
way, but to really study Genesis,
you need to spend some time with the characters that you’ll meet.
You need to wrestle with some sort of bigger themes that we run into.
And some of those are
so well represented that it would be very hard
to just go verse by verse as we’ve done.
So, we’ll go
largely—early on, we’ll go chapter by chapter,
or we’ll be in
chapters for a while.
We’ll go—we’ll have some thematics.
As we get into this further,
I suspect there’ll be lots of
days where we may spend—we may spend a week or more,
in some cases, on a particular character
and the themes and things that that character represents and brings to the story.
So,
it will be a little different than what we’ve done in the past,
but we think for this book,
it will work well.
And as always, we encourage lots of questions.
We hope that there’ll be
opportunities to think about things in a new way.
And we think this book is a really great one for
the way that we’re
going to try and approach it.
Yeah, I think, actually, interestingly,
the book of Genesis is one of those books that people know a lot about or have thought a lot about.
Generally,
the very beginning of Genesis,
you’ve got these first couple chapters that have gotten a lot of
press, the idea of in the beginning,
God created.
And so, for that, Genesis kind of has a reputation
of being that very early kind of text.
What a lot of people don’t know if they’ve not read Genesis
relatively closely is how deep the stories go,
how very important the characters are.
So,
as Clint said, you know, we’re going to take a couple days to sort of slowly lay out some of
a plan and a little bit of a background upon why this book is so important.
I think one of the
reasons for that is because if you jump right into Genesis and you start going by verse by verse,
you might easily sort of get caught up in that idea that this book is all about how God creates
and not the story of how God draws near to God’s people,
how this marks the beginning of God’s
covenant, God’s choice to be involved in the life of the people,
even the people who so quickly
spoil the good intention,
the good creation that God put into place.
So, I think that this is a
really essential book.
And I also want to make a plug for the fact that I think ultimately,
Genesis becomes a backbone upon which the rest of the Bible stands.
It begins the themes that
you see teased through and that goes all the way into the New Testament,
which I think we’re going
to expound upon more in another conversation.
But it’s really important that we take our time
to see these characters,
but I do think we would easily get pretty bogged down if we try to do
every verse in succession.
So, we’re going to try to balance that and of course,
you know, we’d be open to feedback as we go along.
If there’s a section as we’re going that you’d be interested
in, you know, we’d be happy to hear more about that.
Yeah, so I think there are two struggles
when it comes to the book of Genesis.
The first is that many of us learned it as a kid and we
learned it with foam board characters,
felt board characters.
We learned big picture stories
that sometimes we never went back and revisited and really mined the depths of, you know, we
we learned creation, we learned the flood,
but we didn’t wrestle as children with some of the deeper,
sometimes even darker themes that are in those stories.
And so, we want to revisit them.
And the second mistake that we make to your point, Michael,
is that we read Genesis for things
that it honestly isn’t very interested in telling us.
So, we try to read Genesis as modern science,
which it isn’t.
We try to read it through the lens of the 21st century,
which it isn’t.
And when we do that, we miss these kind of deeper things that are in it for us.
So, to really do justice to Genesis,
I think you have to be willing to meet it where it is rather than try to drag it to where you are.
And I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re not going verse by verse.
In other words, there are lots historically,
there are lots of people who have gone verse by verse through
Genesis, and they will tell you,
“This is what this thing means on this day,
and this is the way it
happened and why it happened.” But in order to do that,
you are trying to have Genesis answer modern
questions, which it largely isn’t interested in doing.
And to really, I think,
understand and live into this book,
it takes just the opposite.
You have to be willing to take a trip to its world
so that you can understand the people who wrote it and told these stories and lived these stories,
what they found of truth and faith in them.
I’m not sure what you think about this,
Clint.
My family doesn’t have a lot of Genesis stories.
Some families do.
You know the generational process and the generational path.
My family doesn’t have that.
And so for me,
it’s a little bit of a different experience as people of faith.
When I
situate myself in the family of Christianity,
this is a part of that story.
But if you came
from a family where maybe Uncle John told you all of the stories about grandmother,
great-grandmother, or maybe that story of immigration,
maybe it was the story of coming
to the Midwest and it’s finding a place where your family would farm or whatever those sort
of Genesis stories are,
they’re important not just because of their historical context.
I mean, that is important unto itself,
but they’re important because they situate you in a larger
story filled with the characters who both had strengths and weaknesses.
They get good things
and they get bad things and they give you a frame or a reference for the decisions and choices that
you should make in the future.
Hence why some of us do have that sense, “Oh, well,
that’s a very love-all thing to do,” or “That’s a very goecky thing to do.” This is a book that really
situates us in a historical context for real particular people.
Here are the men and women
who were instrumental in this family moving forward,
and this is very clearly relevant
for the people of Israel,
for the nation that is chosen,
but as Christians as we look ahead,
we become engrafted into this.
If you joined us for the Roman study,
that’s exactly what Paul
was talking about, this idea that we’re grafted into this larger narrative,
and so it’s fitting
then that we turn to this text and we see in it the good news of how we fit into this larger family story.
Yeah, and I want to be very careful here because we will have to bear this out in lots
of conversation, but we do need to understand that when we read the book of Genesis,
we are reading
faith history.
We are reading history in the sense that the people who told these stories
were telling them to explain some of the world they lived in.
They were telling them to
carry on the lineage of the people.
They felt that their children ought to know how it had
come to be that they were a people,
why they lived and where they lived,
and those kind of questions.
There’s a lot of that kind of explanation in the book of Genesis.
What is
more difficult is the
clear assumption of the people was,
yes,
the way they told these stories assumed that they
believed in the veracity and truth of them.
You will also find if you read Genesis carefully
that they’re okay with ambiguity.
We’re not going to get hardly at all into the book of Genesis
where we’re going to see that the people who treasured these stories first were okay with
some looseness in them.
I think if we get caught up,
we have tended in the modern church,
particularly the evangelical church,
to get very bogged down in the question of whether Genesis is factual history.
To be honest,
I don’t know that it’s a particularly helpful question
for most of the book.
In fact, I think it has gotten in the way so often that it is largely
unhelpful in many instances.
But don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense.
If that sounds problematic,
if that sounds troubling,
bear with us and we’ll have lots of opportunities to talk about it.
But
it’s a way in which I think people have struggled to know what to do with the book of Genesis.
You mentioned this in passing a little bit earlier,
Clint, and I think it’s just worth
reprising is how many of the stories of this book
get included in children’s Bibles.
It’s really, really interesting because as you get to know more and more about Genesis,
what you’re going to come to learn is so many of these stories are familiar until you read them
with a closer view.
When you come to them with an adult’s vantage,
the themes of this book,
things like Abraham going to the promised land,
things that these are generally positive stories
in the children’s Bible in the text itself.
They’re very complicated.
They’re very nuanced.
They’re full of all of the questions and doubts and fears and sometimes even backbiting and jealousy
that we know from our experience of the world.
What makes I think the Bible so credible,
Clint, is that it doesn’t shy away from the experience of being human.
In other words, these characters aren’t polished.
They’re not sort of wax figures that we put in a museum.
They are real people and the text is so honest and authentic in its telling of those lives.
I think it as people of faith is a very beautiful sort of invitation to live in the
words of Genesis for a while because I think it’ll help us to adopt that for ourselves.
Yeah, there’s a wonderful looseness in this that reminds us that the people who told these stories
knew things about them that we have forgotten,
that we don’t know.
Why was Abel’s sacrifice
better than Cain’s?
We don’t know.
We take some guesses based on the language.
They probably understood that question in a way that we don’t.
There are other places where characters do things
that are clearly sinful.
They’re clearly considered outside the bound of righteous behavior,
and yet they’re sort of praised for it.
There is a kind of Middle Eastern appreciation for
shrewdness and for trickery in this text that is very telling of when and where these stories came from.
And again,
if we can only look through the lens of our modern sensitivities,
we’re going to struggle with some of those.
There are things we can’t answer about this,
but if we can understand them,
we can better hear this text speak to us.
And I think, you know,
again, we’re not going to
get very far into the story before we start bumping into some of those things.
And I think that’s what makes Genesis so fascinating is if they made an attempt to sanitize this book to
make the people of faith look like heroes.
They did a very poor job.
There is an honesty
to this book about our situation as humans that I think is trustworthy.
I think it’s
appealing.
I think it’s real.
Yeah.
And so I don’t want to steal too much thunder for
future conversations other than to say it would be wrong to finish a conversation,
an introductory conversation on Genesis without making it clear that the thing that this book does
beautifully is it sets up the rest of the scriptures with the major character and the
major characters, none of these people that Clint was describing.
It is God.
It is the one who calls, who goes with,
who in some senses suffers with all of the fallen humanness of these people.
And the beauty of that is we’re now making that introduction to the one who has a plan that
over arcs the entire scriptures gets started in this place.
And so I hope that you’ll commit to
being part of that journey as we go through it,
because it is a really compelling image
for us in our own lives to see that God is doing the same work in our own beginning and ultimately
in our own end,
God is faithful and that arc happens through the whole way.
Yeah, very good.
And we’re grateful that you would be a part of it.
We hope that you’ll continue to join us.
This week we’ll probably be doing some of this introductory work as we get ready to kind
of open the text either Thursday,
most likely Monday, but tomorrow we will continue to
think about how it is that we read this book.
How can we approach Genesis in a way
that allows us to get the most out of it and to hear it most clearly?
Yeah, there’s plenty of time to get on board.
So if you know someone who you think would appreciate it,
be sure to send
an invite because they will in no way have been left behind.
And we look forward to seeing you
tomorrow at two o’clock.
Thanks everybody. Thanks.