The Overarching Themes of Genesis

All right, so thanks for joining us here today.
We’re going to jump back into Genesis.
I believe this is our last sort of dedicated day to introduction.
Is that right, Clint?
Yeah, we’re kind of doing the last bit of our pre-study today.
And this is just kind of a map,
a little bit of what to look for in Genesis,
how to move around in it a little bit,
and a couple of things that may be helpful as we get in.
And the first thing is that the book of Genesis has
a major division that is,
I think, helpful to know, and that it’s not an even division.
The first 11 chapters of Genesis are sometimes called prehistory,
and they deal with the most ancient stories.
So that’s the creation story,
that’s the flood story,
that’s the Tower of Babel.
And those 11 chapters
really constitute kind of the world-building of Genesis,
and they answer a lot of foundational
creation-type questions.
How did we get here?
Why do people speak different languages?
Where did people live?
Why is there sin in the world?
What was God’s intention?
Where did our original ancestors come from?
So it is in the most real sense,
it is the meta-story that undergirds the rest of the story.
And we call it the prehistory, the prehistoric.
And it doesn’t mean that it’s not historic.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t take it for real.
It just means that it’s the story from the biggest lens,
and it hadn’t narrowed it down yet.
Yeah, right.
And that’s maybe a part of Genesis that is really helpful to know going into
it, is that it really does have a large scope to it.
Some of our biblical books,
like, you know, maybe give us an example like Esther,
or even Ruth,
are books that have a very sort of finite timeframe.
They’re very specific in their intention.
And in Genesis, really, it’s a very different sort of work.
It’s attempting to show not just sort of the beginning of all things,
as we sort of spent time over the last couple days talking about,
it’s not just about the first two
chapters.
It’s really about setting out this whole sort of historic arc.
And if you know something
about sort of ancient Genesis narratives,
what you discover is that there’s a lot of different ways
of conceiving how the world works.
Different peoples and cultures have very different
understandings and ideas of how the world begins.
So some of the ancient narratives are things like
one goddess slays this dragon,
or another heavenly being gets caught up in a fight with another.
And then the resulting thing is the creation of all things.
And it’s not just a story that we think
of, it’s a scientific creation story.
It’s the story of how a people,
a culture,
a place come to be.
And I think what makes Genesis so interesting in that reality,
Clint, is that ultimately what we
have here is not God
fighting against another being for things to come into existence.
This prehistory or this setup history
is always about God being in charge.
It’s simply about how God
is interfacing or connecting with this people,
Israel.
And I think that’s really a significant
sort of distinction of Genesis and one that we might not necessarily recognize
unless we were aware of it.
Yeah, I think it’s interesting,
Michael.
I hadn’t thought of it this way before,
but even by a skeptical survey of the dating of Genesis,
and certainly by Genesis’s own dating,
I can’t think of another Old Testament book that covers…
If you take Genesis dating,
we’re talking thousands of years accounted for in this book.
If you take a more conservative
approach to that, you’re still talking about centuries.
And I can’t think of another book,
maybe Kings or Chronicles,
but even there, it’s a fairly condensed…
I can’t think of another
book that bites off such a large chunk of history.
And obviously,
literally thousands of years are accounted for that.
Or if you want to read this from a scientific eye,
millions of years are accounted for in this prehistory,
this chapters 1 through 11.
And then as we move into chapter 12,
we really narrow the focus.
And in the past,
we would have called it the patriarchal history,
the history of the patriarchs,
the fathers of the faith.
We’ve become a little more sensitive to that kind of male-dominated language.
So we now just
might call it the historical or the historical
Israel portion of the book.
It is
the covenant part of the story.
It is when we narrow the story down to a particular lineage and a particular
people starting with Abraham,
then Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and throughout that rest of that family story.
And that is by far the biggest part of the book.
I would say from the book’s perspective, in some ways,
I don’t want to say more important,
but more pressing because it is the story with
which the rest of the Old Testament is concerned and continues.
And so that’s a good general rule
of thumb, 1 through 11 prehistory and 12 through 50 patriarchal history or history.
Yeah. I’m not going to,
I don’t have much to add there.
I think that’s a good summary,
other than to say to your point about the sensitivity towards the language.
I think what you might be surprised
as we read the book of Genesis is though it is called the
patriarchal part of the book,
a lot of that story actually revolves around women and relationships.
And there’s actually a little bit of an undue emphasis per its time when it was written on
some of those family relational kinds of issues.
And so I’m not at all saying that Genesis is in
any way what we might think of as 21st century and its implication.
It’s not, it wasn’t intended to
be, but there’s a sense in which I think we can see in it through some of the lenses of characters
like Rachel, right?
Who
God is at work in significant ways.
And so I think it’s helpful
to see that even in the time that this book was written,
it’s accounting for everyone that could be involved.
Yeah. I think it might be,
I might even go so far as to say while it is a male
dominated story,
it is, it is
ripe with female characters who move the narrative forward.
I mean, women are an important part of this book,
a vital part really.
And they are woven into the themes
of the book.
Really, I would, I would argue if you look at Eve from the very beginning,
I mean, I think from beginning to end,
though males tend to dominate the stage,
women have significant parts to play
in this, in this, in the story, in these stories.
If I can butt in there,
actually, because there’s a thing that we might not necessarily know unless we say it.
So if you look to a New Testament conception of
life and then life eternal,
yet we have Jesus sparring with
the Jewish leaders over the idea of resurrection.
And so we as Christians often take that frame for granted.
But in the Old Testament,
when you look certainly in Genesis,
it’s really not until
the prophets that you begin to see some of this resurrection debate happening from within the Israelite conversation.
In Genesis, at this point,
there is no conception in the writers or the ones
who are holding these texts that there is this idea of the life that happens after this one.
For them,
the idea of God keeping that covenantal promise is deeply biological.
It is deeply connected to this idea of it going from one generation to the next.
And so therefore,
women are an absolutely essential part of that journey because,
and this is why this theme we’re
going to talk about in a little bit here,
barrenness is such a significant issue is because
ultimately, what’s at stake is,
if a couple can’t have a child,
how is God going to keep the promise
for them to continue moving forward?
How is God going to keep this nation and this arc present?
And ultimately, we see God doing these miraculous things for both the men and for the women to make this promise possible.
And so there’s sort of a backhanded way in which women become an essential
part of the story because without that jointness,
there would be absolutely no way for God to keep
the promise moving forward.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that is one of the dominant themes in the book,
the idea of
multiplication,
of fruitfulness.
You know, this is the charge God will give next week.
We’ll see this in the creation stories,
be fruitful and multiply.
And yet,
that doesn’t happen without God.
Time after time, if you know any of the Genesis stories,
you know that often
woven into them is the struggle to produce life,
the struggle that a couple has in order to have a child.
And
this book places God
squarely as the
arbitrator and the answer to that struggle,
so that it’s not as though the world sometimes in one part of Christian or semi-Christian history,
there was this idea that
God made the world like a clock and wound it up and let it go.
That’s not Genesis.
In Genesis, God is deeply involved with the workings of the world,
including childbirth,
including pregnancy,
including delivery.
And God is
imminent and active in human life in a very real way.
And to your point, Michael,
though it is hard
for us as modern Christians to kind of wrap our head around the idea of no afterlife,
no heaven,
no something else,
because it is that framework that we use to envision the idea of being with God.
That we live with faith in God here,
but eventually we live literally with God.
That’s what Genesis believed about earthly life.
Literally,
in Adam and Eve’s case,
in the garden with God.
Abraham meets with God.
Isaac sees God.
I mean, Jacob wrestles with God.
God is writ large into human experience in their earthly life in a way that I think is
different and may be difficult for us,
but there’s a way and there’s a sense in which
it makes the reality of it more apparent.
Yeah, we said this before,
and I think it bears
repeating just for the context of today,
is that ultimately Genesis does not work hard to present
these founding members as perfect in any way.
And in fact, the reason why God is so imminent
and so present and so involved in these lives is the text makes it clear because without God’s involvement,
there would be no fruition.
There would be no forward path.
There would just be
humans making human decisions,
leading them down very dead-end kinds of roads.
And that’s a really
powerful sort of image,
even for us today,
to remember that ultimately it’s about God’s
practice and work in the world.
And this is unbelievably practical.
Like you said, Clint, you have even God interfering in matters between brothers,
jealousy between each other’s
property or jealousy between each other’s families or inheritances or the different sort of
political things that happen between Abraham and
kings.
There’s a lot of aspects in which God gets
involved in very sort of earthy,
dirty kinds of things.
And yet in the middle of that,
we see that God has always been committed.
And from a Christian lens,
we would never have our
seminary professors would generally caution you from including the New Testament things.
Dropping Jesus into Genesis is generally a thing that’s frowned upon.
But as a Christian,
it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to see Genesis and that theme of
God’s purposefully
chosen imminence in the midst of our lives,
portrayed so clearly in this book,
and then to see that
fulfilled perfectly in Jesus Christ.
I mean, that’s the sort of beautiful flowering
that happens in the New Testament that we realize God was so committed the whole time
He was actually willing to not just be involved in these human things,
but to take on the human
experience.
And I think while that’s not inherent in Genesis,
I think it’s a theme that begins there
that then tracks throughout the rest of the Scriptures.
Yeah, clearly, you want to be careful linking things too explicitly.
But when Adam and Eve leave the garden,
a guard is posted.
At Christ’s death,
the barrier in the temple is torn in two.
At Babel,
people are scattered and can’t understand each other.
At Pentecost, they’re brought back to the gospel,
which they all hear in their own language.
Genesis does build some
framework for how we understand what God has done even throughout the New Testament.
And I think,
I think you very clearly can see that,
not only historically,
but even textually.
Let’s just quickly touch on some other themes.
Next week we’ll be involved in the creation
stories quite a lot.
So one of the major themes of that is chaos and order.
God brings order.
And interestingly,
God does that particularly in the first part of Genesis,
the first story, by separating.
There’s a sense in which God is an organizer.
And this becomes true even later
in regard to people.
God separates this nation from that nation,
this people from that people.
God keeps those who might pollute his own people away from them.
There is this theme woven
throughout the book of Genesis of sorting.
And we’ll do our best to point it out when we get to it.
But it’s very common.
And I think very,
very easy to recognize.
Yeah, I think there’s also some general themes about things like naming,
who God names and why
they’re named that way.
There’s moments in the story where God would give a character a new name,
which symbolizes a new life that lives beyond that point where God speaks to them.
It’s sort of a thing that’s not really built into sort of popular Protestant culture,
though it does live
in even the Catholic Church where you’ll take on the name of someone else as you sort of encounter
God at a particular moment in life.
But that sort of progression of naming happens throughout the book as well.
Yeah, and then another huge theme,
the idea of promise of covenant of blessing
there is woven throughout this book at just about every level,
the idea that people are called,
people are blessed,
people stand on the covenant or seek to stand on the covenant in some cases.
Along with that is a kind of obedience, disobedience theme.
That one’s interesting because there are
times it’s very clear.
And then there are times that it seems that people are on their own to
navigate things as they see fit,
and God doesn’t really have much to say about it.
Other times God is very evolved, either affirming or chastising them for what they’ve done.
And so obedience and
disobedience is an important theme that runs through this.
You could add authority,
revelation,
how do we learn things,
how do we know things.
And then as you mentioned kind of on the front end, Michael,
though it’s a different way of telling it.
This is particularly once we get to chapter 12 following,
this is really a family story.
But behind that it’s a God story, but it’s God’s,
it’s the story of God at work in a people that trace their lineage to a family.
And it’s a messy
story as most family stories are.
There’s some beautiful parts of it.
There are some really
harsh and strange parts of it,
maybe even more so to us because it’s a different culture,
a very different time and place.
But this is that you will,
I think, be surprised if you’ve not read
Genesis before.
I think you will be surprised how much of the book of Genesis is tied to
the very
particular lineage of about 10 characters.
Yeah, right.
And I want to just sort of hone in there,
Clint, on that point that you’re making,
because it has more implication than what it may seem.
It’s not just about the fact
that the scriptures intertwine these different characters and show
us God’s work in them.
It certainly is that.
It’s more than that though,
because the scripture itself,
Genesis itself is a kind of interweaving of different versions of these stories that come
from different characters in different places.
And we don’t necessarily recognize that, especially
as English readers who turn to our Bibles and have chapter one,
verse one, all the way to the end.
All of these pages flow together.
They’ve been edited seamlessly.
And when I say edited,
that is a very complicated word,
because what we understand by that is not that they were edited
by just English authors,
though we do lose some of the particular vocabulary shifts that happen
in different sections, because we only have one word in English when in the Hebrew there’s multiple words.
But there’s also just simply different ways and perspectives.
We’ll have some stories
where you’ll read it and then you’ll follow it up and you’ll think, wow,
this sounds familiar, but it’s different.
And that’s not an accident,
because different sources have actually been
brought together to tell this story.
And the scholars get to that through a variety of different means.
A biblical scholarship can be a very dry kind of work.
If you pick up a
academic study of Genesis,
you’re going to find that it gets down to some unbelievably thick weeds.
But that said, as scholars have worked,
they’ve discovered that there are different sort of recognizable patterns
and different perspectives throughout the book.
And I think it’s helpful to
know that, because as we engage the book,
we’re not just seeing the diversity of characters,
we’re actually seeing a diversity of voices within the book itself.
And I think that’s
really a beautiful sort of reflection.
Yeah.
If that doesn’t feel clear yet,
join us next week,
because right away in the first two chapters,
we’ll see two very clear examples
of stories that seem similar,
but clearly came from
different places.
We’ll be able to, I think,
put some flesh on that right away.
And the last thing,
I think the last theme,
and this one is important.
I’m not even sure I would call it a theme,
actually.
I will call it a characteristic.
The book of Genesis has virtually no interest in explaining God,
only discerning what God does,
only pointing out the work of God.
But when it comes to the question that we would most like to ask,
which is why,
the book of Genesis is most of the time remarkably silent.
Why does God like
one offering and not the other offering?
Why does God pick Abram?
Why doesn’t God do this?
Why doesn’t God do that?
Why did God do that?
Genesis is just largely uninterested in trying
to define the motivations of God.
God is the character in this book that is
always free to do as He pleases and is always right in what He does.
And that is hard for us because we come
from a time that is more inquisitive and maybe more confident of our ability to answer such questions.
But in the book of Genesis,
God is the rock that cannot be understood but can be known.
And I think Genesis will give you a lot of opportunities to bump into that reality.
Yeah, and maybe my last word and sort of flow of that,
Clint, is that’s why there’s so many encounter stories in Genesis.
There’s not anybody who climbs up the ladder and knocks on God’s door.
Though there is a story of someone trying something like that.
But there’s no ability for the humans to
step into God’s narrative and to assert themselves.
That’s not how it works.
It’s a one-way street.
And I do think that offends some of our modern sensibilities.
But it’s there not just as a
cultural reflection.
It’s not just there because this is what was commonly believed.
This is a theme that will flow out of Genesis into the rest of the scriptural text.
It’s a core sort of central
identity of first Judaism
and then later Christianity.
And so I think it’s a helpful
place to sort of have that idea formed because that helps us as we make our way throughout the
rest of the scriptures.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we want to thank you for hanging in with us as this
kind of pre-work.
Next week we’ll be jumping into the text.
We’ll get into Genesis 1 on Monday.
We hope that you can join us.
We hope something in this has been helpful.
And hang in there with us as we
move into the first chapter next week.
See you at chapter 1 verse 1.