Bible Study Genesis-Part 1, Just Getting Started

Welcome to the program Study in the Chapel.

God's Word is supreme in chapel ministries.

We consider it absolutely essential to a proper relationship with God.

We study it, we love it, we rely on it every minute of every day.

The following program is an edited recording of the regular Bible studies we hold, and we decided to share these with you in the hope that you too will be able to find inspiration, encouragement, and ultimately salvation through discovering Christ in Scripture.

Our intention is to travel all the way through the Bible.

It will be a challenging journey, one that will undoubtedly bring you to a decision.

Through this study, you will be faced with either believing or rejecting what God has said to us.

It is our intention to provide you with enough knowledge to make an informed decision about God and his word.

We strongly encourage you to listen intently and diligently, because though at the moment you may not realize it, these things are truly a matter of life and death.

In fact, these are matters of eternal life and eternal death.

Never treat what God has said lightly.

There's truly nothing more important to you.

Now join us as we seek God's will through his inspired word.

In the words of the inimitable cast of Monty Python, now for something completely different.

Now, to be honest, that's not really true.

Though we have now shifted to the Old Testament, you're going to find that the two major divisions of the Bible are remarkably similar.

I realize, by the way, that many of you, for many of you, this is like setting out on uncharted waters.

The sad truth is that very few Christians learn much from the Old Testament, myself included.

Even though I was a fairly regular churchgoer in my youth, received a fair amount of, well, so-called religious education right up through adulthood.

The Old Testament for me was once very dark and mysterious and unreachable.

But to be fair, I didn't know much about the New Testament either.

I suspect my experience is not unique.

And let me make sure that you realize that this isn't a uniquely Catholic thing.

Protestants like to brag about their scripture heavy Sunday services and weekly Bible studies, but the conversations I've had with some of the rank and file haven't yielded much confidence.

This isn't a uniquely denominational thing, Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical.

This is a Christianity problem.

And it's not new either.

The word of God has been neglected and even sometimes suppressed over the many centuries.

Here in this ministry, we're dedicated to reversing those trends, but the truth remains as expressed by God through the prophet Hosea.

You've heard me say this many times.

I've quoted this passage many times.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

So, like some of you, I was almost completely ignorant of the Old Testament through most of the first part of my life.

Most Christians, I'm sad to report, are quite unfamiliar with the Hebrew Scriptures.

That, by the way, is another name for the Old Testament.

Around here, I kind of use those terms interchangeably, in case you don't know.

It's called the Hebrew Scriptures in part, because most of it, though not all, but most of the original Old Testament was written in Hebrew, which of course makes sense because Hebrew is the original language of the Hebrew people, the Jewish people.

By the way, it's rather remarkable to realize that Hebrew is once again the official language of the country of Israel.

The official language of modern-day Israel is Hebrew.

And it's actually a miracle, if you ask me.

And to be honest, had it not been for the Bible, I believe the Hebrew language would have died out centuries ago.

You see, even way back in Jesus' day, Hebrew was barely hanging on.

The Hebrew language was not widely spoken by the Jews of our Lord's time.

Most everyone spoke Aramaic, which is sort of a common man's version of Hebrew.

Some call it street Hebrew, but not with the negative connotation that is sometimes associated with calling something street today.

So again, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Jews in the time of our Lord.

And those Jews who didn't speak Aramaic spoke Greek.

Now the usual way it broke down as to who used which language was related to geography.

The Jews who lived in Palestine spoke Aramaic, including Jesus, by the way.

And those who lived outside of Palestine spoke largely Greek.

Now I want to make clear it's not that Hebrew was not spoken at the time.

It had not died off.

Indeed, it was still very much alive, but it was mainly the language of the clergy and the religious scholars of Judaism.

However, when the Old Testament books were originally written, Hebrew was the language of the people.

And since the Bible was written for them, never forget, this is the unique thing about our so-called religious book, is it was written for us.

That is not very common in the world's religions.

The religious books are always written for kings or for prophets or for oracles.

Our Bible was written for us, starting with the Jews.

So the original language of the Bible was written in such a way so that the Hebrew people could understand that.

In other words, it was written in Hebrew.

So back to this introduction.

We are about to embark on something that is sadly rare for a Christian organization.

We're going to study the Old Testament.

And to be honest, we're going to be here for a while.

We are going to cover this book and the next one.

At least that's my plan.

God always changes my mind, but who knows what's going to happen.

My plan is to cover the first two books of the Old Testament.

They go together.

Well, we just finished our survey of Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

I loved it.

I hope you did too.

I think it was important for us as Christians to sort of begin our biblical journey by laying out some of the structure of Christian doctrine.

Starting tonight, we begin a study of the very foundation of that Christian doctrine.

As we travel through the Hebrew scriptures, we're going to be discovering the origin of Christianity itself.

Now, I know that sounds countuitive to many of you, but I'm hoping even by the end of just this Old Testament book, I will have been able to convince you, through the help of the Holy Spirit and God's grace, of course, that there is, listen to me, there is as much spoken of Jesus here in these oldest biblical books as there is in the newest.

At present, our current course of study will take us all the way to the beginning.

In fact, that's what the word means.

Genesis is actually a Greek word that means origin, creation, or generation.

Now you're thinking to yourself, because I can see all your faces, why a Greek word?

Why is a Greek word the word that's the title of that first book of the Hebrew Scripture?

Well, that Greek word comes from the Septuagint, which is the Greek language translation of the Bible that was immensely important to the Jews of Jesus' day, right up through the early time of the church.

And believe me, Jesus quoted the Septuagint quite a bit.

We know that because we can tell through the way he used the Greek.

Now, a lot more to say about the Septuagint, but we have to stay on track.

The original Hebrew word used as the title for this first book is Beresheth, which simply means in the beginning.

Beresheth, in the beginning, actually comes from the first three words of the Bible.

The Jews like to do that.

They use the first few words of their Old Testament books, particularly the Pentateuch.

We'll talk about that in a second.

They like to use the first few words of that book in order to title it.

Makes it easy to know where you're beginning.

Now we're going to cover those words, those words Beresheth in the beginning.

We'll cover them in the English, of course, when we start breaking the whole thing down.

For now, we're just giving an introduction to the book.

We will continue our introduction into next week as well.

Tonight and next week, we're just introducing the book of Genesis.

So Beresheth, in the beginning, is the Hebrew language title traditionally associated with the first book of the Bible.

We know it today as the book of Genesis, which is again a Greek word that means origin, creation, or sometimes generation.

The book of Genesis was written by Moses, though, as you can imagine, scholars have been trying to dispute that ever since we started thinking we were smarter than God.

Moses, by the way, is actually considered the author of the first five books of the Old Testament.

Genesis, as I said, but also Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible.

Theologians call that collection the books of the Pentateuch.

I just said that a moment ago.

The first five books are called the Pentateuch.

Again, that is a Greek word.

The Pentateuch means five books, five volumes.

It's a Greek word.

Again, that's because of the Septuagint's influence on biblical theology.

Now I'm certain I'll be accused of offering up hyperbole because I say this about all of them, but truly Genesis is one of the most important books of the Bible, and some even say one of the most important in all of literature.

Certainly, Genesis is very important to God because in it he is introducing some very important history.

And by the way, that will be one of the major differences that you will notice between our last study in Ephesians and this one in Genesis.

The letter to the Ephesians was almost entirely doctrine, with very few, shall I call them historical facts.

There were some here and there, but most of the time when Paul mentioned facts, he did so to set up his explanation of the important tenets of the Christian faith.

Here in Genesis, we are dealing largely with narrative.

This is in essence a history book.

It is a book of facts.

But, and this is a big but, because I like big butts, I cannot lie.

Anyhow, though this book contains facts, it does not contain all of the facts.

Now, for some fundamentalist Christians, that's a gasp moment.

Gasp.

How dare you denigrate the Bible?

Hear me out.

I will tell you, God never intended for us to get the impression that the book of Genesis, nor any or all of the books of the Bible, were meant to be an encyclopedia.

Yes, it is a history, but it's not a complete history of the world or the universe.

It is, listen to me, it is a history of a people.

Much pain and effort has, in my opinion, fruitlessly been expended by those that love God who attempt to validate to an unbelieving world by challenging the doubters to a fact check.

The unbelieving world, I'm going to tell you, is not interested in the facts contained in this book.

We should stop trying to prove the Bible to them in this way.

Like God, we should just lay out the facts and then move on.

That's what we do here.

Now, I'll probably repeat that a few more times as we go through these earliest sections of this first book.

Now, before we move on, let me make sure that you understand when I say Genesis, and really a number of the Old Testament books are more or less history.

Please don't get the impression that they're no good for anything other than knowledge acquisition.

Yes, there are lots of facts here, but as we'll talk about next time, these facts are presented to us for a purpose.

These facts point to something wonderful.

You can't just think of them in isolation or even in groups.

Hopefully, through this study, you'll begin to see that they are all important parts of a very beautiful picture.

Don't judge the message until you've seen all of the facts, as the book of Habakkuk declares, for the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak and not lie.

Though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come.

It will not tarry.

Let me put it this way if you uh live along the northern section of the United States, you're going to see things that you don't see in other parts of the country.

If you're not from here and just visiting, there will be things going on that you've never witnessed before.

For instance, say on your way to my house, you come across what looks to be a home construction site.

If you're there early enough in the process, you'll likely see the builders not actually building, but rather digging.

The very first step in building most homes here is to dig a giant hole.

If you're not familiar with northern homes, that will seem very curious to you and maybe even a little counterintuitive.

The fact that a hole is dug in order to build a home may look like lunacy to you.

You may conclude that the builder is incompetent, a fraud, deceptive.

Well, I can tell you that in that hole will go a very important part of the home.

That hole will serve as the basement, but the important part of that is that the lining of the basement will be the walls that serve as the foundation for the home.

What looks like an aimless process will actually, when the whole thing is complete, serve one of the most vital components of the whole thing.

The facts laid out in the Old Testament in isolation may seem tedious, laborious, even a waste of time.

In fact, you may even think they're untrue because they don't seem to fit in anywhere.

Listen, God never intended for you and me to dabble in scripture.

We were never to casually examine the contents of his word, hunt and peck, pick and choose.

When you southerners see that big hole going in where a house was to be built, I'm sure you thought, well, that's not going to be a very stable house if it's going to be sitting on top of that gaping canyon.

Well, if I was with you when you drove by, I'd be the first to tell you, ah, but wait, be patient.

When the whole thing takes shape, you'll see why so much effort went into that process and why every step, though it seems difficult to understand, is really just another critical piece of the finished product.

When you see the final outcome, you'll be able to praise the builder for such an ingenious plan.

Yes, Genesis is largely a list of facts, but wow, what a list it is.

Yes, it's a historical book, but it's like no other history book ever written.

This history is alive and it's eternal, and no list of facts will ever set your heart aflame like this one.

So be patient, stay alert, set aside your preconceived notions, and most of all, give God the benefit of an open mind and a willing heart.

If you do those things, Genesis will surely be a book you return to time and again to see how magnificent our Lord truly is and how important He is to our salvation.

Now we're not done with this introduction yet.

Much more next time.

See you then.

We hope this study has blessed you.

God's word is a great treasure, and it's our belief that a thorough, purposeful study of it will bring all of God's children to an understanding of his eternal plan of redemption.

It is our prayer that this will be so for all of our listeners.

Please join us again soon.

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