January 1

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Genesis 1-4

We’re going to be reading from the New International Version this week.

Genesis means the beginning. And Genesis is written by Moses. I mentioned a documentary called Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy. More info about this can be found here: https://patternsofevidence.com/moses/

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

Thank you for this reading today. Thank you for showing us and telling us about the beginning. Thank you for the glimmer of hope that you provide even in the midst of the fall. We thank you for the Scriptures. We thank you for having somebody to write down these words so that we can read them. We just ask your blessing on this reading of the Bible this year. We ask Your blessing up those who are taking this journey. Lord, may we see new things each and every day. And may we hear your call in our lives they way these men and women heard the call in their lives. Thank you, Jesus. In Your Name, Amen.

7streamsmethod.com | @7streamsmethod | #7Streams

Commentary

The Bible asserts great matters for us; the origin and reason for everything right from the beginning.  Our ultimate life quest is mapped in four ethical issues: origin/meaning/morality/destiny.  Origin: where do we come from? Meaning: why are we here? Morality: what is right and wrong? Destiny: where are we headed?  All are explained (some in full, some insinuated through prophecy) in the opening of the Bible.  Why? because God wants us to know He made the earth, not chance.  He made us – we didn’t.  We are not former swamp dwellers, nor are we advanced apes. God told us that it was He who made the earth and us.  He also said how He made everything.  All is created by His voice, except us who are made by God forming and breathing into us.  Done!  Darwin’s drivel is a zero factor.  Darwin himself admitted late in life that his ponderings were irrelevant and that his followers were making a religion from what he mused about “origins…”  God being our source is our meaning.  He guides in our vocation and purpose – Adam is to work the ground. God shows us ‘the right’ for our lives.  He instructs and forbids.  Even our destiny is alluded to shortly after falling into sin; Genesis 3.  We also see the converse of our reason for existing as murder becomes prevalent shortly after exiting Eden.  And  the  long  journey  back  to  paradise  begins.  We view history in light of this Judaic origin or we misinterpret history and everything else about our existence.

We welcome you aboard as you have joined us on this grand and significant journey.

Moses is writing Genesis in the latter half of the 1400’s B.C.  It is hard to imagine that virtually no one on earth knew that it was GOD who had created the earth or how He had done it.  By this time in history (ca. 1445 B.C. shortly following the Exodus event) there were manifold tales of creation.    Some believed there was a salt water god and a fresh water god, warrior gods, their subjects, deistic “divisions of labor” controlling nature and man; ad infinitum.  And man perceived that the gods were often at war. Jackals were the god of the dead, beetles (dung beetles, mind you) were the god of new life. There was Horus, Isis, Osiris and so forth.  The tales were fantastic, gruesome, even revolting.  280 differing creation tales were afoot across the earth.  So Moses is writing out the creation story (as God dictates to him) for the purpose of revelation and clarification but also as a polemic/argument against the pagan tales of the day. 

The implied first word in the Bible could just as easily be, “No~,…(in the beginning God created”…not the imaginary demi-gods that people talk about.”  God gave us Genesis because people are told the truth or fallacies are devised.  E.g., the 10 plagues of Egypt were executed for the purpose of proving that Moses’ God was all-powerful over and above all 10 of Egypt’s manufactured gods.  Word of the plagues and exodus had quickly spread so the world was now ripe for the true Creation story written by someone who knew God personally.  We see in Exodus 33:11; God is talking to Moses and Joshua in the tent as plainly as a man talks to his friend.  This is the setting in which the Creation story is written as Judeo-Christians find it today.  It had been at least 26 centuries since Adam & Eve were expelled from Eden.  That’s a long time for the nations to be in the dark about origin, meaning, morality, destiny.  That perilous state of mind and existence could now end.

The literary structure of the Creation story is pure brilliance.  The Trinity is woven right into the initial verses.  (Remember that all religious cults/pagans/heathens/philosophical falsehoods err on ‘Trinity’.)  God created, v. 1.  Right before action commences His Spirit is hovering over the waters.  The Hebrew verbiage is the image of a dove hovering in midair right before landing.  This is prophetic of The Spirit landing upon Jesus like a dove at baptism.  Colossians 1:15-16 reminds us who is doing the talking here in Genesis 1.  “All things were created by Him and for Him…and in Him all things hold together.”  So when “God said…” in Genesis 1: vv.3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24 it is Jesus talking.  Remember this.  Our Savior is creating us!  Let that sink in and be transformed.

The numbers and reoccurrence of threes and sevens and tens go beyond what a human mind could construct. There are seven words in verse one, 14 in verse two, “earth” is mentioned 21 times (check the Hebrew if you wish). “God” is mentioned 35 times.  The phrases “It was so” and “God saw” are both written seven times. The phrases “according to its kind”, “God said…”, “let there be” are stated 10 times; [3+7].  Each day, each step, each element are more manifold and complex than the prior.  It is very fetching that the first noun God articulates for us is “light”.  Light clarifies everything, like God aims to do for us.  And yet this light cannot be defined … not even today.  The world’s greatest universities and technical laboratories may be getting close but they, as of yet, have not discovered, defined, or described light.  The eye of humans, mammals, beings, insects included, interpret light.  This is what “seeing” is.  A human eye has 118 million+ elements at work; 110M cones, 7M rods, the one inch long optic nerve running from our retina to our brain is the diameter of a pencil lead and encases over a million intelligence cables. The intricacies of interpreting ‘light’ can be discussed for a lifetime.  And God created this with His voice – in a sentence.

Did you notice that what God separated on days 1, 2, and 3, He filled, ordered and embellished on days 4,5, and 6.  Therefore days 1 and 4 link. Days 2 and 5 link, as do days 3 and 6.  Read it again and be amazed.  And just a note that most miss – the vegetation/greenery is made on day three while the sun is made on day four.  Some in their attempt to merge the biblical creation poem with evolution rubbish purport that each day was hundreds of millions of years, perhaps a billion years per day.  Well then how did the vegetation thrive without sunlight for 700/800M years?!  Indeed this Gap Theory has far more gaps than theory. … In the beginning God created. God created is “Elohim ba-RAH”.  Bara is the word for ‘created’.  This Hebrew word for what God does in creating does not exist elsewhere anywhere in all literature, nor is there its equivalent in any other language.  “Bara” is God doing what only God can do.  Westerners attempt to embellish up this concept saying that God created “ex-nihilo”/out of nothing.  The process may be noble but ‘bara’ cannot be improved upon.  We use Isaac Newton’s line of thinking (the first to chair the physics dept. at Cambridge Univ.) when we interpret God’s activity via our thought processes.  God’s ways are too wonderful to explain.  Let’s marvel and be in awe versus dissect and deduce.  We are not ‘one up’ on God.  Just a little warning about becoming sophomoric as we are learning of God’s Ways here.  

We see our sun everyday and can readily forget that God, in a Word, also made 100B other suns as well, 100B other stars, and 100B galaxies that each have 100B stars in them – per galaxy!  Just think that the galaxies we see from the Hubbell telescope photos are the artwork in God’s living room … and this is where He wants to bring us in time!  It’s too mind boggling to behold.  There are billions of black holes that are too strange to understand.  There are neutron stars that are so dense they weigh millions of tons per teaspoon in volume.  This is extremely peculiar to even discuss a realm where time does not exist, where astronomic physics undulate incessantly and our perception of reality does not come in to play at all.  Meanwhile, back to our earth… if we were 1% closer to the sun [93M miles out here] we would burn to death. If we were 1% farther we would freeze to death.  There are 23 elements on earth perfectly balanced in their composition that allow for life on this earth.  This combination [that allows for life] is not even detected elsewhere in our galaxy.  One would do well to see the video “Privileged Planet” narrated by John Rhys-Davies to further perceive what God has created on this earth alone.   ALL this is the activity called “bara”.

And there is way more. The micro-world mirrors the galaxies of the universe with an equally amount of mind-taxing complexity and fascination.  This too is “Ba-RAH”.  The atom, first perceived and discussed in ancient Greece, about the same time that the Prophet Malachi was writing, is baffling to even be vaguely aware of.  The discussion of atoms resurfaced in the 1600’s.  Remember, lest we devolve into brain worship and secular humanism, God keeps these things covered until, in His wisdom, He allows us to dis–cover it; Proverbs 25:2.  God creates – we DIScover.  Be that as it may, an atom is a billionth of a grain of rice in size. To hear it the other way, a billion grains of rice placed end to end is 4,000 miles long.  That’s Honolulu to Chicago /or/ Berlin to NY City /or/ London to New Delhi!  Now cut a grain of rice into a billion pieces and that is the size of an atom.

Then In 1890, it was discovered that there are levels in the micro world that are subatomic.  It has since been learned that there are roughly a hundred levels yet below and below and below the atom!  The realities of physics and matter and facts and truth in the subatomic level take us into a realm that is strange and bewildering and wondrous; where perceived reality is just as “immensely” detailed as the galaxies all while the physics warp and bend and Divine creativity is on display.  All this is the effortless work of God in his activity that the Hebrew language calls “bara”.  We will never get to the end of it this side of paradise restored.  What does God want with us regarding all this? Simply to be grateful and amazed.  There is so much more that God has for us on every level, things we cannot perceive as normal humans.  Yet the door to entering into what God has for us is opened through believing.  Philosophically, nothing has changed since Abraham who simply believed and thereby God credited him as righteous for so believing; Rom. 4:3.

In this creation poem of Genesis 1-2 the cosmic account is chapter one.  The personal account is chapter two.  At the center of this poem is the creation of man on the sixth day.  After 25 verses, God says, “let us create man”.  After this process, there are 25 verses to the end of the creation story. Man is the perfect center of things.  We are the crown jewel of Creation.  Only day six ends, “…it was very good.”  Adam names the animals, they do not define us.  We are given dominion over the earth, not the vice versa.  We are why God is preparing heaven … it’s not for the trees or hamsters.  And after man is created on day six, God rests.  Each day ends, “and there was evening, and there was morning…”  It’s the reverse of how we perceive it.  At this we give pause.  We usually think morning and evening.  Before Genesis 1-2 creates the seven day week.  Workers, slaves especially, were worked straight until an early death.  Seven days a wee-? what?  Rest for workers? wha-?Why?  This was the mood of the ancient world.  The six day work week held until Henry Ford devised the five-work week.  He figured that a day for play and shopping in addition to a day for his mostly Christian workers to rest would merely give them more time to recreate, play, picnic, shop, drive and thus bolster the economy further.  It did.

Chapter two is filled with marvels as the earth’s watering system is listed in description.  Study these enchanting rivers and springs all you will.  The world is grand and gorgeous and golden and aromatic and filled with bountiful and appealing food ready to eat.  There was an insulating canopy over the earth during Genesis 1-6.  There were no harsh seasons.  The temperature was rather uniform the world over.  Shelter/clothing was not needed. Elevation did not change the temperature.  Man and animals grew very big (Gen. 6:4 KJV), and lived very long between Eden and Noah’s flood.  Granted Eden was a garden – yet so was the rest of the earth.  There are thousands upon thousands of square miles of gardens, trees, bushes, ferns, flowers, and fruited plants 5,000+ feet down under the ice on both poles today!  Drilling expeditions reveal this definitively.  They were flash frozen in place when the Ice Age started.  My husband is completely convinced this happened at the beginning of Noah’s flood in 2,400 B.C.  Feel free to argue with him on FacetaGramPinBookGooglaHooya Who.  The earth had no deserts.  It was all the perfect setting for perfectly harmonious living- perfect relationships too.  We do realize that God made one thing by hand on earth from earth and that was Adam.  He also made one being from another being and that was Eve from Adam.  It could have all remained so good had man been able to simply abide and obey.  Sounds gravely familiar doesn’t it?

Yep, only a snake could mess this up.

What the Bible is relaying to humanity in these opening chapters of Genesis is that God made a perfect world (origin) and man’s disobedience mangled the blessing; God did not ruin things, our disobedience did.  The condition of suffering and hardship is what man unwittingly opted for in eating a piece of fruit.  Just a little venture into disobedience was no big deal…, right?.  Well, “Pandora’s Box” was opened and it would not be shut again through any amount of effort.  The cunning serpent knew his scheme would birth endless disaster as his modus operandi was told in chapter three.

Notice that The Evil One is asking the woman questions and getting her to engage in questioning God; getting her to doubt God.  Hear the word “quest” in “question”.  Normally someone on a quest is asking questions as they are looking for new information or directions or similar.  The Serpent’s question is because he is on a quest to take down a race that is made in God’s image.  It’s the grandest way for the Devil to spite God; his enemy.  And notice that he went after the woman.  This conniving would then pull in Adam and the human race would then be hooked into condemnation at every level.  Be wary of any marketer, salesman, politician, or movement of any size or scale that seeks to single out and entice women into making lead decisions that are going to assume that men are to be passive here.  It permanently affects all of society.  This is far more insidious than many reckon with.  One artist croons on, “some people claaaim that there’s a woman to blaaame, but I know…”  Some may find this endeavor amusing.  Don’t skip Gen. 3:6c, “Adam was with her.”  He heard her banter with the serpent, he knew Eve was musing about this ulterior realm, he saw her gazing, he saw her pick and eat.  And then he willingly though perhaps hesitantly joined her.  His silence was inexcusable and thus he was not excused from falling out of blessed paradise.  Neither was anyone else.  The whole world would pay a price that would be exacted in death.   When God asks Adam, “where are you?” God is not lost about Adam.  Adam and Eve are lost, not God.  Their children become lost as do all children yet to be born. Their transgression affects, animals, plants, the soil, even the oceans and atmosphere in time.  Work would now be frustrated versus 100% gratifying.  Don’t think there was no work before the fall and that work was now the result of the Fall.  There was work for all from the beginning.  Any leader who succors his followers by promising a free ride and no work has an agenda that likely mirrors the Serpent’s in Genesis 3:1-4.  There has NEVER been a world without work.  Anyone who declares differently is a liar.  As for childbirth, future generations would all arrive through a painful process that was formerly not too much more than a subtle joyful interlude during a woman’s day.  Yes everything would be different now.  The sadness was prodigious, vast, mortal and there would be no end to it. [We’ll get to Revelation 21:4 in December!]  There would be no returning to Eden.  An angel and a flashing, flaming sword guarded Eden’s entrance.

This is the core story of why there is wrong in the world.  Unfortunately there’s a popular argument among self-declared “intellectual” that there can’t be a loving, intelligent, omniscient God because the world is so messed up.  That avenue of thinking is as wrong-headed as walking through a scrapyard of mangled junk cars and exclaiming that Ford, GM, and Chrysler don’t make good cars because if they did make good cars, they wouldn’t be so twisted, destroyed, and rusting into worthlessness.  Car makers don’t make cars to look like this, Einstein.  People who don’t obey traffic laws nor yield to the laws of physics are what make cars into ugly heaps.  It isn’t the car manufacturers doing.  They produce and distribute cars that run perfectly. 

After leaving Eden, we come to chapter four; Cain and Abel. The Bible delineates for us that we are our problem.  Don’t blame God. Don’t blame the Devil. Our straying triggered our death.  It was a biological law now.  The system of the world would kill us, but what is far more hideous is that we would kill each other.  Technology would not solve this core urge to kill, it would only expedite the manner of it.  The 1900’s saw the greatest advances in science of any century.  It also witnessed the deliberate slaughter of well beyond 100M people.    This first murder was caused by jealousy.  Cain is jealous that his brother Abel’s sacrifice is accepted and his is not.  The contents of the sacrifice was not the issue at hand.  Cain reacted and it was starkly revealed that he had an attitude that refused to be corrected.  Yes he wanted God’s approval but he wanted his way more so.  A great preacher and sage stated that peoples’ actions and words testify to their character but reactions reveal one’s heart even more.  It turns out that Cain was so hardened in his heart that murder was his preference over reclamation.  He claims he’s not his brother’s keeper – however he was his grim reaper.  What horror for the world, for Adam and Eve too.

He’s a marked fugitive who is banished to wander.  Yet through the anguish, God assures that He will protect Cain.  When we see Cain having a wife, going to a city/building a city the curious reader will ponder who these people are.  Isn’t Cain back to being an only child since killing his only sibling? Adam & Eve had children in the years between Genesis 2 and 3.   We’ve read rabbis who think that there were a minimum of 44 children sired preFall in Genesis 3.  Others assert that Adam & Eve had 60 children total; 33 sons and 27 daughters.  Does that spin your mind?  We urge the reading of extra-biblical material and joining in the intriguing discussions.  It is not legitimate to stubbornly dig in and declare that this information isn’t relevant because it’s not in the Bible.  Well, neither are mobile phones, laptops, and 60″ flat screens at sports restaurants.  We spend much more time with all these commodities than reading our Bibles.  How about let’s not cling to ignorance but fervently read material that clarifies our Bibles for us -as well as reading our Bibles.

The movement eastward, Gen. 3 & 4, is a theme that is coupled with the digression away from what God intended. Genesis 11:1-2 men are continuing the march away from God.  We also see Lamech -this is Noah’s father- and his story. There is music, instruments, metallurgy.  Impressive stuff!  Let’s not be thinking that “those people way back when…” were dirt-bag cave dwelling knuckle draggers who walked around grunting and eating dirt clods. None the sort.  The engineering and structures, medical initiatives, genetics and ‘technologies’ [if you will] of the pre-flood world are stunning topics to research though there isn’t time to delve into it here.    The reading today ends with “…at that time men began to call on the name of the Lord.  It had been 235 years since leaving Eden…long time to try to do things our own way isn’t it?

Lord Jesus come quickly is all I can say.  But that was going to be about 4,000 years away …