On Genesis 1–12

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This week I’m starting a new series on the opening chapters of Genesis at Riverview. I’ll break the content down into manageable chunks and share it with you here on this blog. There will also be podcasts, each covering one chapter of Genesis 1–12.

These early chapters of Genesis are foundational for the whole Bible. They reveal who God is, and who we are in relation to God. They talk about a creation seeking autonomy from God, about people who only care about what’s good for them, about families giving up their identity as the people of God, about the seduction of power that leads to violence and corrupts God’s world, about how God manages and rescues his world, about how nations do their own thing and use war to build kingdoms that try to take over God’s world.

The big claim of Genesis 1–11 is that one God created all things, so this one God is in charge of everyone and everything. The purpose of God’s partnership with Abraham was therefore to restore the blessing of the heavenly sovereign’s reign to the nations. The rest of the Old Testament is the story of people descended from Abraham, but that story is not complete until the nations are back where they belong — under God’s sovereignty.

That makes the early chapters of Genesis foundational for the New Testament too. There is no other way to bring peace to the earth, unifying all the peoples of the earth in the anointed ruler (the Christ) God has given us.

Yet Christians have divided over how to interpret these early chapters for around 400 years now. Ever since the so-called Enlightenment, Christians have posed questions to Genesis that it was never written to answer. That’s a fruitless exercise. We’d get much further if we could step back and ask what it was written to tell us.

That’s what we’ll do. We’ll begin by talking about how to approach Genesis 1, about how to hear what the text was saying in its own culture, language, and time. It’s a brilliant revelation of God and of who we are in relation to him — the relationship between heaven and earth.

Looking forward to sharing this with you. Subscribe if you’d like an email each time there’s a new post.

Allen.