Malcom: Welcome To Immerse: The Daily Bible Reading Experience.
Day 82
introduction to Beginnings.
The Bible tells this story of how our world that's gone
wrong is being made right.
Again.
God's creation was intended to be beautiful and harmonious, but due
to the deception of evil powers and human disobedience, the creation
became broken and disordered.
Cursed.
Yet ever since the fall, God has been working patiently and carefully to restore
humanity to his presence and the whole creation to its lost beauty and harmony.
The biblical narrative of restoration and renewal takes a significant step forward.
Every time God establishes a covenant.
These covenants are God initiated sets of promises and obligations
that establish a binding relationship between God and his people.
In our day, we are more familiar with contracts, agreements,
enforceable by human law.
But in the ancient world, people made covenants, which carried the
expectation that God would bless them for keeping the covenants terms
or curse them for breaking them.
And as a full participant in the covenants he makes, God actually puts himself under
his own curse, should he break the terms.
The goal of these God initiated covenants is to gather people into communities
that will live the life he intends for everyone through communities
deeply connected to their creator.
This life will spread outward to other people as well, starting
with chosen individuals, then a family, and then a nation.
God moves in the interest of winning back all things in heaven and on earth.
The first five books of the Bible tell the story of the first three covenants
God makes with Noah, Abraham, and Moses, who act as humanities representatives.
The first nine books of the Bible, Genesis through Samuel Kings are actually
one continuous narrative, sometimes referred to as Israel's primary history.
This saga covers this story from the birth of the world to the painful
account of God's people being exiled from the Land of promise.
The first five books have a special status of their own, and in Christian
tradition are known as the Pentateuch, meaning five books in Greek.
But its ancient Hebrew name, Torah reveals the purpose of these books more clearly.
Torah is probably best translated as instruction as God's covenant
community follows these instructions.
They not only receive God's blessings, but also are uniquely positioned to
bring renewal and healing to the world as implied in God's promises to Abraham.
God's instructions to his people are the catalyst for their
movement to show all peoples the true character and nature of God.
The community of God's people is being sent on a mission to renew
the world, and these instructions are, its marching orders.
This Torah is conveyed through a variety of literary genres or kinds of writing.
About two thirds of these first five books consist of laws that instruct people on
how to live the life that God intends.
These laws appear both in general terms, love your neighbor as yourself, and
in specific cases, if you come upon your enemy's ox or donkey that has
stray away, take it back to its owner.
These laws were given to govern the covenant relationship
between God and his people.
It is important to understand that these laws are for God's people in
a particular historical and cultural setting, and in an early stage of
God's story with respect to the world.
Many of the particular laws are not God's final timeless
answers about how we should live.
The entire Bible tells this ongoing story and more light is
shed as the story moves forward.
In addition to stories and laws, we find songs and poems that celebrate
special events or anticipate the future.
There are family trees genealogies, listing people in relation to their
ancestors and descendants locating their historical place in the community
that experienced God's faithfulness, generation after generation.
Other kinds of lists appear as well, detailing kings spies,
stopping points along a journey, job assignments, and so forth.
These books also contain elaborate blueprints for a place of worship
and its furnishings, and even census reports for the population of Israel.
All of these different kinds of writing are woven together into a single work
whose overall purpose is to describe the formation of the covenant community.
This community, the ancient nation of Israel will constitute God's
people on earth for the first three quarters of the Bible.
Over the course of these first five books, beginnings.
We follow the community from its earliest ancestors to the moment
it is poised to enter the land.
God promised them there, the community can begin living a life that will lead
the surrounding nations to exclaim.
How wise and prudent are the people of this great nation
immersed in Genesis.
The first book of the Bible lays the foundation for the
rest of the Bible's story.
It reveals God as the world's sovereign creator.
It shows his intention to bring blessing to people, his image bearers, and for all
life to thrive by living in his presence.
Genesis tells us about the entrance of evil into the world and the commencement
of God's struggle against it.
A theme that flows through the whole Bible.
God created the world as his own temple intending to live here
among humanity for their wellbeing.
But how will God achieve his goal in the face of rebellion and disobedience?
Genesis tells the story of God's dealings with humanity from the
world's creation to the time when Abraham's descendants were beginning
to grow into the nation of Israel.
It does this by giving the accounts the word that marks the major divisions
of the book of notable people.
The most important figures are part of the covenant lineage and therefore advance
the ongoing story Others described much more briefly represent offshoots that
will be drawn back in later as the reach of the covenant community spreads to all
of humanity in the first four accounts, human disobedience leads to evil and
violence that corrupt the created world.
Seeing that everything people think or imagine is consistently and totally evil.
God is sorry he made them.
He destroys wicked humanity in a great cleansing flood, but spares Noah and
his family, the only righteous people left after the flood, Noah worships
God and God makes his first covenant.
With Noah serving as their representative, humanity and all
animals on earth receive God's promise.
Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures.
God then makes a second covenant one that will ultimately transform humanity.
Starting with only a small group, God promises A man named
Abram later renamed Abraham.
That all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
Through him and his descendants.
God tells him to leave his home and move to a new place.
The land of Canaan Abraham essentially becomes a wanderer
in that land and eventually has a son named Isaac who becomes the
heir to all that God has promised.
God renews his covenant with Isaac and then again with Isaac's son Jacob,
who then has 12 sons of his own.
These 12 sons will become the ancestors of the tribes of Israel.
The book concludes by describing the life of Joseph, one of Jacob's sons.
Joseph is betrayed and cast off by his jealous brothers, but he ultimately has a
surprising role in preserving the family so that it can expand into a nation.
Throughout Genesis, we see God relentlessly pursuing his plans
to renew humanity and the rest of creation, blessing the covenant
community and their obedience and overcoming their disobedience.
Genesis consists mostly of stories, but family trees which connect
the stories of people in different generations also play a big role.
Ancient Hebrew writers loved to tell stories using the literary form of
chiasm in which the first and last episodes slash elements are paired.
Then the second and next to last episodes slash elements are paired and so forth.
This literary structure lays out a series of situations that are resolved in the
reverse order of their initial appearance.
The formatting of this edition of Genesis will single out the separate
elements of the chams as they appear.
Here's a brief example from the account of the flood.
A Noah builds an arc.
B God tells Noah to enter the arc.
C, the waters rise.
D, the waters flood the earth.
C, the waters recede.
B, God tells Noah to leave the ark.
A Noah builds an altar.
The overall story in Genesis has an artistic shape.
Its 11 accounts together with its prologue about creation.
Give it to 12 parts.
Mirroring the 12 tribes.
Abraham's descendants would grow into the storytelling in Genesis
is marvelous and it's best to read continuously through the whole book.
The stories are set in an ancient world, very different from our own, so
don't be surprised at the strangeness of some of what we encounter.
But the characters in these stories are human and very
much like us in crucial ways.
God is wrestling with them to slowly bring his redemptive purposes into our world.
The name Genesis means beginnings.
It is the perfect introduction to the entire Bible, giving us the framework
for understanding everything that follows
the book of Genesis.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters
and the spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
Then God said, let there be light, and there was light, and
God saw that the light was good.
Then he separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light day and the darkness night and evening passed, and
morning came marking the first day.
Then God said, let there be a space between the waters to separate the
waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth, and that is what happened.
God made this space to separate the waters of the earth.
From the waters of the heavens.
God called the space sky and evening passed and mourning
came marking the second day.
Then God said, let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place.
So dry ground may appear, and that is what happened.
God called the dry ground land and the waters seas and God saw that it was good.
Then God said, let the land sprout with vegetation.
Every sword of seed bearing plant and trees that grow seed bearing fruit.
These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which
they came, and that is what happened.
The land produced vegetation, all sorts of seed bearing plants and
trees with seed bearing fruit.
Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind and God saw that
it was good and evening passed and morning came marking the third day.
Then God said, let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night.
Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days and years.
Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth, and that is what happened.
God made two great lights, the larger one to govern the day and
the smaller one to govern the night.
He also made the stars, the God set these lights in the sky to light the
earth, to govern the day and night and to separate the light from the darkness.
And God saw that it was good.
And evening passed, and morning came marking the fourth day.
Then God said, let the water swarm with fish and other life.
Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind.
So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries
and swarms and the water and every sort of bird, each producing
offspring of the same kind.
And God saw that it was good.
Then God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply.
Let the fish fill the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth.
And evening passed and morning came marking the fifth day.
Then God said, let the earth produce every sort of animal, each
producing offspring of the same kind, livestock, small animals that scurry
along the ground and wild animals.
And that is what happened.
God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock and small animals, each
able to produce offspring of the same kind, and God saw that it was good.
Then God said, let us make human beings in our image to be like us.
They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the
livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals
that scurry along the ground.
So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God, he created
them, male and female, he created them.
Then God blessed them and said, be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the earth and govern it.
Rain over the fish in the sea, the birds and the sky, and all the
animals that scurry along the ground.
Then God said, look, I have given you every seed bearing plant throughout the
earth and all the fruit trees for your food, and I have given every green plant
as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals
that scurry along the ground, everything that has life, and that is what happened.
Then God looked over all he had made and he saw that it was very good.
And evening passed and morning came marking the sixth day.
So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything
in them was completed.
On the seventh day, God had finished his work of creation, so he rested
from all his work and God blessed the seventh day and declared it
holy because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.
This concludes today's Immer Reading experience.
Thank you for joining us.