DAY SIX:

The Call of Abram

Genesis 12:1-20

Good morning, and welcome to Day Six. I've heard from some of you that you've had trouble logging in to post comments. Blogspot doesn't make it as easy as they might. The options for logging on are limited. If you have a Gmail account you can use it to get on. If not, you might consider the last option on the list, OpenID. OpenID is an effort to create a single, secure User ID for all Internet content. If you have a Yahoo or AOL account, it's very easy to get an OpenID. If you have any problems, please let me know. You can always e-mail your comments to me and ask me to post them for you.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are really just an introduction to get us ready for the story of one man and how God used him in His plan to redeem the world. The last part of chapter eleven, after the Tower of Babel, gives a genealogy of Noah's son Shem. While He cares for all people, God is beginning to narrow the focus of His plan to save us. Noah had three sons, but it is through Shem that the line of redemption will come. From verse 27 on we read about a man named Terah. Terah had three sons, Abram, Nahor and Haran. Haran died, leaving a son named Lot.. Verses 31 and 32 tell us, "Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran."

Here's a map to illustrate this journey:

They were headed for Canaan, which is straight west of Ur. Why not just travel in a straight line? Because that would take them into the heart of the Arabian Desert, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. So they had to follow the Euphrates River north and then veer south and west toward Canaan. This route had water and the amenities of civilization. Terah made it as far as Haran, but for some reason stopped there. Maybe he liked the area. Maybe he appreciated that it bore the name of his departed son. Whatever the reason, Terah and his entourage stayed in Haran and Terah died there. 

Now let's look at our passage today. "Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Let's think about this for a moment and try to see it from Abram's perspective. God is asking him to take off and leave his family to go to a place that God won't come out and name. If he will do this, though, God will promise him some really great things:

• I'll make a great nation from you. You will populate and rule this land you'll enter;
• I'll bless you. You'll have My protection and you'll prosper;
• I'll make your name great. Abram's name means "exalted father." 
• You'll be a blessing to others- those who bless you I will bless and those who curse you I will curse;
• And I'll bless the whole world through you.

Some incredible promises! And the word incredible is a good one here, because incredible means unbelievable. Why would God choose Abram, who is 75 years old, who has no children, whose wife is 65 and barren? How can he possibly become a great nation with no heirs? How can he pull up stakes and move who knows where?

But that's exactly what Abram did! He packed up his belongings and with Sarai and his nephew Lot headed out for Canaan, his father's original destination. Maybe God made a similar promise to Terah, but he didn't follow through. 

When they arrived in Canaan they found it full of (what else?) Canaanites, who had made a good life for themselves and were unlikely to move just because Abram said, "Excuse me. The Lord said I could have this land." They came to Shechem, not far from Jerusalem, and God again said something incredible: "To your offspring I will give this land." Abram offered sacrifices to the Lord, and then moved his tents to a spot between Bethel and Ai, two places that would have great significance to his descendants.

We might be tempted to think that Abram was somebody who followed God so closely that he never sinned or made mistakes. The last part of this chapter speaks otherwise. During a time of famine Abram left Canaan and went to Egypt. Yes, the famine was severe but God had promised to provide. And once in Egypt, Abram passed Sarai off as his sister because he was afraid that the Egyptians would kill him to claim her. The Pharaoh saw her and took her into his harem. Abram was willing to sacrifice his wife's virtue to save his skin. God stepped in and did what Abram wouldn't. God struck the palace with plagues, and the Egyptians put two and two together. Pharaoh kicked Abram and Sarai out of Egypt, with all they brought plus the wealth they acquired while there.

It's almost impossible to overstate how important Abram (later God changed his name to Abraham, "father of a multitude") is in God's great plan of redemption. This man is the beginning of a thread that will run through the rest of the Bible. Abraham provides the foundation upon which God will build His people.

Tomorrow we'll look at God's covenant with Abram in more detail. I look forward to you comments and questions!

THE SERMON FOR WEEK ONE:

We Messed UP

Genesis 6:5-8

Here's the link for the sermon that goes with Week One. Week Two starts tomorrow!

DAY FIVE:

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11:1-9

Good Friday morning!  This is the last reading for this week. You can use Saturday and Sunday to catch up on anything you've missed. I'll be preaching this Sunday on what we've been studying. Your comments have been very helpful to me as I prepare the sermon. Sometimes we preachers answer questions that no one is really asking. I'm glad that you've asked the questions that are important to you.

We're skipping over the last part of chapter nine and all of chapter ten, so I'll give a quick summary. The Bible is so brutally honest! Someone once said that the Bible is a book that no man could write if he would, or would write if he could. Noah, the man who found favor in the eyes of the Lord, settled down to farming. He planted grapes, made some wine, got drunk and took his clothes off. Ham saw his father in that state and told his brothers. This had to be more than just informing them of the fact that their father was drunk and uncovered. Perhaps he was ridiculing Noah. Some scholars suggest that some sort of sexual abuse was involved. In any event Shem and Japheth walked backward so that they would not see their father in that state and covered him. When Noah came to he cursed Ham for what he had done, along with his son Canaan. He then blessed Shem and Ham for the kindness they had shown him.

Chapter ten is a genealogy of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. They spread all over the world and divided into many nations and ethnic groups. Even though it comes before the passage we'll consider today these events took place after the Tower of Babel. Verse five says, "From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations." We also read about Nimrod, "a mighty hunter before the Lord," who founded the world's first nation-state in what later became Babylon.

Chapter eleven begins "Now the whole earth had one language and the same words." Think of how much easier life would be if everyone spoke the same language! We could travel and work anywhere in the world with no communication problems. There'd be a lot less of the misunderstandings that come when trying to cross language and culture barriers. This was a good thing, right? Yes, but as we've seen that sin nature has passed down from Adam and Eve to all of their descendants, and human beings once again proved that they can take anything that's good and corrupt it. God had told Noah and his sons to spread out and repopulate the earth. Instead, they all stayed together and found a nice place to settle, the Plain of Shinar. This is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers just north of the Persian Gulf in modern-day Iraq. The soil was very fertile and the climate was favorable. No need to go any further! They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” They looked for a symbol that would unify them and decided that a tall tower, reaching far above the plain and visible for miles, would do the trick. So they set to work. There was no stone in that area and the palm trees that grew there were not suitable for this project. So they made bricks out of mud.and used bitumen (a black tar that comes from oil) for mortar. They were making rapid progress and the tower grew ever higher.

The Lord came down to look at the project and saw what they were doing. He realized that they were establishing their lives apart from Him, in disobedience to His command. If they finish this project they'll go on to even bigger things and nothing will be impossible to them. So God said, "Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." The "us" here, as we saw in the creation story, is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God in three Persons. Every imagination of man's heart was evil. Yet God loved His creatures and had promised Noah that He would not destroy all mankind again. By confusing their languages so that they couldn't understand one another and would break up into groups with common languages and move on to start their own nations all over the world. They called that place Babel, from a word that means to confuse.

The Tower of Babel was a product of the same lie the serpent told Eve: "You will be like God." Don't go off and spread yourselves out. Stay here, where you can be strong and united, and build a tower to show how great you are. That lie is so tempting, but it never delivers on its promise!

There's something in our human nature that makes us love tall things. We look at the tall mountains and long to climb to the top. We build ever-taller buildings, and since 1998 the record for the tallest building in the world has been broken seven times. The Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai is currently the world's tallest building at 2,716 feet, but there are plans for even higher buildings in the next few years. A few years ago our oldest daughter took us on a boat tour on the Chicago River. It's a lot easier to see the buildings from the water and to see just how tall the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower and seventh-tallest building in the world) and the then brand-new Trump Tower which was nearly as tall. When I was about five years old I remember my parents taking me to the LeVeque Tower, at the time the only skyscraper in Columbus. It stood 556 feet tall, and the cars below seemed as small as ants!

The desire to build big and tall things can be good. The great cathedrals of Europe were built for the glory of God. The Methodist Church's spire is the tallest structure in Sebring and can be seen all over town, it's cross reminding us of our Lord and Savior. I wonder, though, if maybe we Christians have fallen prey to the same "edifice complex" that was behind the Tower of Babel. The church is not the building, but the people of God who meet there. It is the people who make the building holy, not the other way around. One of my assignments in seminary was to write a history of the church I served as a student pastor. It's building burned down on Christmas Day in 1944. I called that a tragedy. The professor corrected me. The destruction of the building was a disaster; the split in the congregation that occurred a few years later was the real tragedy.

Many years after the Tower of Babel the Apostle Paul stood on another high place, Mars Hill, overlooking Athens. He said, "[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us..." (Acts 17:26-27) This scattering of the people all over the world was a part of His great plan to redeem us!

Next week we'll see how God's plan unfolds further in the life of Abraham and his family.

I'll do my best to post this Sunday's sermon on the church's podcast page by early afternoon so you can listen if you aren't able to be with us.

DAY FOUR:

God's Covenant with Noah

Genesis 8:1-9:17

Good morning!  Yesterday ended with Noah, his family and all the animals on the ark, being swept along in the raging flood.  Today we move on to life after the flood.

"But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark." Can you imagine forty days and forty nights of torrential rain and crashing waves? There might have been times when Noah and his family wondered if God really did them a favor by putting them in the ark. I was serving a church in Wisconsin when January of 1985 brought a long spell of cold and snow.  By snow, I mean one big snowfall of 18 inches followed by temperatures as low as -30º!  We weren't able to have worship that month. That's when I understood cabin fever! Surely it must have been far worse for Noah and his crew. But God didn't forget them. The rain stopped and the waters started to recede. It took another 150 days, however, for the waters to recede completely. But the sunshine and being able to go topside and smell the fresh air must have been heavenly!

One day they felt a jolt as the ark came to rest in the Mountains of Ararat (not necessarily Mt. Ararat itself, but in that range of mountains). This is in the far eastern part of modern-day Turkey, near the border of Armenia and Iran. Mt. Ararat itself is nearly 17,000 feet high. They knew that the waters were going down, but they couldn't yet see land. After a while Noah sent out "drones," first a raven and then a dove, to look for land. The raven didn't come back, apparently finding a place where it could stay. He then sent out a dove, which came back. Seven days later he sent the dove out again, but this time she returned with a twig from an olive tree. There's dry land somewhere out there!  When the dove went out after seven more days, she didn't return. She'd found a place to nest.

Soon God told Noah to open the door and let everyone out of the ark. The animals left and headed off to "be fruitful and multiply," replenishing the earth's animal life. Noah built an altar and offered sacrifices to God, thanking Him for keeping them safe through the flood. This pleased God, and He said, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” God had destroyed the earth because of the wickedness of mankind. He could do that over and over and over again, but that bent to evil will still be there and will still infect all people and taint all that they do. So God promised never to flood the earth again. The seasons will follow after one another until the end. We read in the next chapter that God gave a sign: "I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh." What a beautiful reminder of God's love! I have to smile every time I see a rainbow, because it reassures me that God keeps His promises.

God commanded Noah and his sons to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." It's a great big world that needs to be repopulated. In chapter one God told man, created in His image male and female, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. He reasserts this command to Noah and his sons. He put a fear of man into the animals so that they would respect our God-given authority. I thought about that when we were out at the Grammer Farm for our church picnic. Those cows weigh 800 pounds or more and could easily hurt or kill their caretakers. But they don't. They obediently submit to milking, and they gratefully receive their food. I think of this every time I get on a horse (which, I admit, I haven't done for a long time), I think of this half-ton beast between my legs. He can easily throw me off and stomp me to death. Instead, he lets me saddle him, put a bit in his mouth and he takes me wherever I want to go. Even the wild animals which could harm us have a healthy fear that causes them to run from us. This dominion carries with it responsibilities as well as privileges. This is not a blank check to abuse animals or to rape the earth for its natural resources. We must be wise stewards of God's world, which we will pass on to our children and children's children.

Yesterday we looked briefly at Abel's murder at the hands of his brother Cain. It was just the first of many to follow. God said in Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." Human life is precious to God. He made us for a relationship with Him, and no one has the right to murder someone who offends us or has something we want. Anyone who does so with "premeditation and malice aforethought," to borrow language from Perry Mason, must himself die. Not because the life of the murderer is worthless, but because the life of the victim is priceless. It is entirely appropriate for the judge to say, after sentencing someone to death, "May God have mercy on your soul." Murder, like any other sin, can be forgiven through the work of Christ received in faith.

Manslaughter, self-defense and war are special circumstances, which we'll discuss when we get to the Ten Commandments.

Thank you for reading this. I eagerly await your replies!

Pastor Marty

DAY THREE:

Noah's Ark

Genesis 6:5-7:24

Good morning! Thank you for all of your responses to our study. They've been very helpful to me as I work on the sermon for Sunday. I know that a lot of people "lurk," that is they read but prefer not to post any comments.  That's perfectly fine! If you'd like to share your thoughts with me privately you can send them to my e-mail address: martin.radcliff@gmail.com.  

Now on to today's Scripture.  This is where we begin to skip parts of the Bible in order to hit the high points in 100 readings. I'll briefly fill in what we've skipped.

Yesterday we saw Adam and Eve evicted from the Garden of Eden. They must now make their way in a much less hospitable environment. Chapter four begins with the birth of their first son, Cain, and then reports the birth of their second son, Abel. Cain killed Abel, luring him out into the open field. When God confronted him and asked where Abel was, Cain replied with a phrase that's a part of our language to this day: "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Lord banished Cain, who moved away with his wife to begin a new life. The genealogy of Cain's descendants follow, with hints of increasing depravity with each generation.  The chapter concludes with Eve bearing a third son, Seth. The chapter ends with thee words: "At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord." God preserved a faithful remnant in the midst of an increasingly dark world.

Chapter five is where people usually get bogged down when they read the Bible.  It's the dreaded "begats." It's a list of Adam and Eve's descendants through Seth. We see some astronomically long lifespans.  Adam was 930 years old and Methuselah had the longest life in the Bible at 969 years.  We see the phrase "and he died" over and over again. No matter how long they lived, they still died. It's a reminder to us of our own mortality. It's also a reminder that God cares about us individually. We don't know anything about most of those listed, but God had their names recorded to teach us that He cares about everyone.

Now on to Noah! As one generation succeeded another, the lines of both Cain and Seth showed more and more depravity. Finally God had had enough! Verses five and six are powerful: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." God's heart was broken! The creatures whom He had created in love ignored Him and abused one another. This is a reminder to us that God is grieved when we sin.

There was one man, however, in that generation who was different. "But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord." His name means "rest." The word translated favor is rendered grace in the King James Version. Grace is, in fact, favor with God, a favor that we cannot earn but which He freely gives us. God graciously chose Noah for what must have been the most ambitious construction project the world had seen up to that point.

God told Noah that He was going to destroy the world with a great flood. He commanded Noah to make an ark. The word in Hebrew means "box," and is the same word used of the basked that carried the baby Moses. This box was certainly bigger than a breadbox!  The measurements are in cubits, which is the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, roughly 18 inches. Thus the ark was 75 feet wide, 45 feet tall and 450 feet long! Noah was to fill that ark with two of every kind of bird and animal, along with enough provisions to feed all of them.  What a job! And imagine the ridicule that Noah and his sons endured from the ungodly people around them. But they completed the ark and the animals came in. Then we read in 7:16 "And the Lord shut them in." Once that door was shut, no one else could enter the ark. Everyone else was doomed. I think God Himself shut the door to spare Noah from doing it, knowing that he was condemning the rest of the world to death. This is a reminder to us that a day will come when God will close the doors of our lives.  Hebrews 9:27-28 says, "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him." Jesus is our ark, our place of safety, from the God's righteous judgement for our sins!

The rains came, for forty days and nights. The waters rose and the ark lifted off the ground. There was no means to steer the ark, so they drifted. When the rain finally stopped, it took 150 days for the water to dry up. We pick up the rest of the story in tomorrow's reading.

Jesus said in Matthew 24:36-39, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man." The first part of the story of Noah is a warning of God's coming judgment and a call to repent. Tomorrow we'll see the other side of Noah's story, which is a bright promise for the future.

Thank you again for all of your thoughts! This is turning out to be quite an interesting study.

DAY TWO

Genesis 3:1-24

Good morning!  On to chapter three of Genesis. Yesterday we saw Adam and Eve in the beautiful paradise called the Garden of Eden. They were the crowning work in God's creation. They bore His image and lived in perfect harmony with God, each other, and all of nature.  Nothing could possibly go wrong...

Verse one starts out, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made." This is no ordinary snake, but rather the first mention of Satan in the Bible. To understand this passage in the first book of the Bible we need to look at the last book, Revelation. There are many points of contact between them, and in Revelation we see all the loose ends that popped up in today's passage all tied up neatly.

Revelation 12:9 says, "And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him." The name Satan comes from the Hebrew word for enemy. The title devil comes from the Greek word diabolos, which means accuser. Satan is an enemy of God and His people. He's out to con us out of the riches of God to chase after the fools' gold he dangles in front of us. We'll have more opportunity to discuss Satan as he appears in other passages.

The serpent asked Eve a question: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” That's a distortion of what God said: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (2:16-17) God told Adam that he could eat from any tree, including the tree of life, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan's first line of deception is to pervert what God has said to us.  That's what he did when he tempted Jesus in the wilderness (we'll look at this on Day 55, which we'll reach in mid-April).

Eve's response shows us just how important it is to know God's Word accurately.  “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” First, God didn't say anything about not touching the fruit.  And second, which tree in the midst of the garden? The tree of life is there too. This is the first example of someone adding to God's Word. Perhaps Adam added that part about not touching it when he told Eve. The motive might be good (adding another layer to protect God's commandments), but this is how the Pharisees of Jesus' day started out.

Now comes the big lie: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God lied to you! Not only will you not die, you'll gain something that God is withholding from you. You'll be just like Him! Don't you want to be a god? This is the root of all the temptations we face, and the source of all of our heartache. Satan repeats this big lie over and over again, and we fall for it. He talks us out of following God by seeming to offer us more than God does. But it never works that way.

We read on, "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate." 1 John 2:15-16 says, "Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world." We see all three of these things in Eve's response: the desires of the flesh- that fruit would taste good; the desires of the eyes- that fruit was beautiful; and the pride of life- she would become wise and not need God. So Eve bought the serpent's deception. But what about Adam? Did he do anything to stop Eve or talk her out of eating the fruit? No, he joined her! Eve might say that she was fooled, but Adam ate that fruit out of defiance toward God.

Did they become like God? Not quite. "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths." Instead of wisdom they received shame. They had to cover their nakedness and hide that shame. That beautiful intimacy they had enjoyed was gone.

Worse yet, they lost their intimacy with God. He came looking for them to have His daily time of fellowship and they weren't there. God called out "Where are you?" Of course He knew where they were and what they had done, but He's being coy with them so that they will confess it. Adam said that they hid because they were naked, and God asked how they found that out. "Did you eat that fruit I told you not to eat? It's pass-the-buck time: The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Adam's response is almost comical. It's your fault, God.  You're the one who gave me this woman! Then Eve blamed the serpent. No one is owning up to what they did.

There are consequences when we disobey God, and they were not long in coming. First, God condemned the serpent to crawl on his belly and eat dust. The serpent would continue to dog the woman, but her offspring would crush his head. In the midst of all this bad stuff God has already tipped His hand on His solution. This is the very first promise of a coming Savior.

Childbirth will be painful for Eve and all her daughters after her. She will yearn for her husband and try to dominate him, but he will resist and dominate her.

Adam's sentence is very severe. God cursed the ground that Adam would cultivate. It won't be beautiful and well-watered like the garden. He'll have to work hard to stay ahead of the weeds, and his best efforts will produce little. And speaking of that dirt, God made man from it, and he will return to it one day. "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." They didn't die the very day that they ate the fruit. That would have been more merciful. Instead the man and woman are doomed to die by inches over many years.

But God had compassion for his children. He made garments of animal skins for them to cover their nakedness. This is the first example of animal sacrifice. Those animals took the punishment for sin and covered their shame.

Then God expelled them from the garden. The tree of life is still there, and if they were to eat of it they would live forever. Adam and Eve were forced to leave, and God stationed cherubim (a type of angel, but they don't look like pudgy little children!) with flaming swords to keep them from coming back.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of what we read today. This seemingly trivial decision Adam and Eve made has devastating consequences for all human beings. We'll see tomorrow how quickly and how far their children and grandchildren went astray. The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam,who was a type of the one who was to come." (5:12-14) But God doesn't leave us in this bleak place. Paul goes on: "Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous." The one man who will set things right is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came to die for our sins and rise to restore to us eternal life.

We'll see this pattern all through the rest of our study: people sin, but God has a plan that He will unfold to take care of our sins and restore us to fellowship with Him.

That's a whole lot for today! Let's here from you.

DAY ONE:  The Creation

Genesis 1:1-2:25

Good morning, friends!  Welcome to Day One of the 100 Essential Bible Passages study.  You'll notice that today's Scripture passage is a link to the Bible Gateway site.  I've set the English Standard Version as the default, but you can choose from over twenty other English translations as well.  If you click on the link today's passage will open in another window so that you can go back and forth easily.

There's no better place to begin than in the beginning.  And "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This simple sentence is perhaps the most profound in all of the Bible.  God created everything there is.  Further, God existed before the creation and is separate from it.  Two important truths come from this verse; if we have a Creator, He created us with a purpose (the rest of our reading today will give us insights into that purpose); and if we have a God-ordained purpose for our lives, we are accountable to God to fulfill that purpose.  

We go on to read in verse two that the world was "without form and void."  The Hebrew words indicate a state of chaos.  The world was an uninhabited and dark wasteland.  Yet God was present!  "And the Spirit was hovering over the waters."  This is the Bible's first mention of the Holy Spirit.

Then God got to work! Over the course of six days He brought light and life to this dark wasteland. The sun, moon and stars in the sky, the fish in the deep and the birds of the air, and all sorts of plants and animals.  Last of all He said, “'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Here's where we start to see the Creator's purpose for us.  We're made in God's image and likeness. That means not that we resemble God physically, but that we have His attributes. God is intelligent and we also can think; God creates, and we can be creative; God is just, and we have an innate sense of right and wrong. God is unlimited and we are quite limited.  Nevertheless, God made us this way so that He can have a relationship with us.  We see in the next chapter that God visited His image-bearers every day to fellowship with them.

When He was done creating, He called it all "very good." He was satisfied with His work.  Then He rested on the seventh day. Not because He was tired, but to set an example for us. The Sabbath is not only a command, it is also a blessing for us. The fourth of God's Ten Commandments is "Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy." He told His people to rest from their work, just as He did. This day is set aside for worship and rest.  Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28) We see the consequences of our 24/7/365 world. God knew we'd need that day of rest, so He ordered us to take it.  I'll talk more about this when we consider the Ten Commandments in a few weeks.

Chapter 2 verse 4 is a re-telling of the creation, with a special look at the creation of man.  This has led some to conclude that the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) are a compilation of different sources which were combined at a later date.  This is called the Documentary Hypothesis. What we see here, however, is a common literary device of ancient times. The author provided a quick overview and then went into detail on the most important aspects. This isn't a separate story, but a continuation of what we read in the first chapter.

Again we see God's purpose for us. "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." (2:15). Work was a part of God's plan from the beginning, and a result of being made in His image. God is not idle, and we must work as well. There is dignity in any honest work, and we can do it all for the glory of God.

And here's the accountability.  God gave Adam just one rule. Don't eat from that tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They day you taste it you'll surely die.  I'll spend more time on this as we look at how Adam and Eve violated this one simple rule.

God noticed that the man was lonely. He needed someone to share his life. None of the animals could satisfy this need. So God created a "a helper fit for him.” The words here have a sense of corresponding to, that this helper would fill in all the gaps in Adam's life.  God made this helper from the man and called her in Hebrew ishah, from the word for man which is ish.  Remember from the first chapter how God created man as male and female. Men and women both bear the image of God and complete one another. We read that Adam was overjoyed and fulfilled when Eve came into his life. They enjoyed a beautiful relationship.  They were "naked and unashamed." Just as they didn't hide behind clothes, they also didn't hide their inner lives from one another.

That's a lot for today, and I haven't touched on some of the things I thought I would, like the Biblical account of creation and modern science. I'll just say this: in the whole discussion of HOW God created everything, we sometimes forget WHO created everything and WHY.

It's your turn! You can post your replies below. What are your thoughts and questions? Let's discuss the passage we read just like we were face to face. I'll use your insights and questions to shape Sunday's sermon. And if you're not able to worship with us on Sunday you can listen online.