We basically stay in the same passage. We walk through it verse by verse, word by word. What we're going to do this morning is look at all of Genesis 1 to 11. We'll be here until about 6.30 tonight. I'm just kidding. We're going to get the 30,000 foot view. So we're going to go down the runway. We're going to take off. We're going to get up to elevation. And we're going to look at sort of the whole landscape. I think sometimes we can see sort of the zoomed in Google Earth view, right? Where you're like, oh, there's my house. And there's the swimming pool in the backyard. Oh, there's that tree. What we're going to do is zoom it out so we can see the whole county, the whole state, so to speak. Kind of get the full grandeur of these 11 chapters. So no, we're not going to look at every verse. And we should be out of here by 1 or 2 p.m. today. Here's the big thought this morning. Genesis 1-11 lays the foundation for the entire Bible. We've got to understand this foundation, right? We've got to come to grips with these vital truths that are in this passage of Scripture. In fact, there are four vital truths, and underneath that even some sub-points that we'll unpack this morning, that show how crucial Genesis 1-11, how crucial these chapters are for our faith. These are not just some interesting chapters in the Bible that you're like, that's nice, we can take them or leave them. No, these are our crucial, vital chapters. So what did Genesis 1-11, what did they leave us with? What are the big takeaways that I want us to have in our hearts and our lives moving forward years and decades from now? What are the truths that you can build your life upon that we find taught so clearly in these chapters of the Bible? Now, whether you are a member of our church, and you've been here pretty much for the whole series, or you're just visiting with us for the first time, whether you regard yourself as a Christian this morning who believes in God's word, or you got some questions. You're like, man, I'm wrestling with some of this. I don't know how this all fits in. Maybe I'm a little skeptical of the whole Christianity thing, and whether or not there is a God, or I'm going from a completely different background altogether, I invite you to look at these chapters with us. And I just ask you to be open-minded for the next few minutes as we walk through these passages and these verses and these truths. So what are the truths that Genesis 1-11 declare and shout to us that we need to heed, that we need to embrace, that we need to understand? Well, first off, it shows us tremendous truth about God. It reveals God's glory. Genesis 1-11 reveals God's glory. Really, that's the theme of all of scripture. If you read the entire Bible and you don't see the glory and the majesty of God, you're reading the Bible wrong, right? The Bible is not really primarily about me or about how to live a good life or about how to flourish, though we do learn some of those things along the way. The Bible, more than anything, is written to reveal God to us. And that is true in Genesis 1 through 11. So what does it reveal to us about God? Well, it reveals to us God as the powerful creator. Genesis 1 and verse 1. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said. And this will be the first of several series of God said, and God said through Genesis 1. And in Genesis 1, we see God through his sheer power, creating the entire universe. Absolutely staggering. In fact, Genesis 1 and 2, these chapters give us a complimentary portrayal of how God created. Genesis 1, big picture. Here it is, six days, God makes everything. Genesis 2 kind of zooms in on that last day and says, here's how he created man. Man is unique in God's creation. Here we see God creating everything that exists. When it says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, that is showing us the heaven, that massive expanse, and the earth, and everything in between. It's a way of saying, in the beginning, God made everything, and now here's how he did it, in six literal, consecutive, 24-hour days, makes everything in the universe. That is absolutely staggering. Every atom, every star, every molecule, he creates it. He writes the laws by which they're gonna be governed. He sets in motion the whole process of how life will be perpetuated. This is absolutely awesome and incomprehensible. He creates every star, every planet, every atom, every scientific law, every living organism by his sovereign decree. And God said, he does it by his power, does it by his power, sheer power omnipotence. There's no room in Genesis 1 for just random mutations and needless suffering in a creation, and his creations would be required by secular godless theories. No, this is God with just a word creating. And this, of course, is affirmed throughout the whole Bible. Brian read Psalm 19 this morning. The heavens declared the glory of God. We have the fingerprints of God in his creation. This design that is evident everywhere we look that shows that this had a designer. There is intelligence in our world, that requires an intelligent designer. There is order, that requires someone who ordered it. There is law, requires a law giver. There is morality, requires a being who is moral to write that in our hearts. The creation shows us God's power, it shows us his powerful wisdom. Jeremiah 51 verse 15, listen to these words. He has made the earth by his power. He's established the world by his wisdom and has stretched out the heaven by his understanding. By the way, scientists have realized that the heaven, the universe is expanding. There we have it, God's stretching it out and it's continuing to be stretched out, continuing to expand. Creation exudes design and we know intuitively that the beauty and the intricate arrangement of molecules and proteins and amino acids and DNA cannot be by accident. It's not merely the result of time and chance. Oh no, it reveals God as a powerful creator. And this all-powerful creator, he's not just a distant God who creates and then walks away. No, he is a God who wants to have a relationship with his creatures, a God who creates us so that we would know him. A God who wants to be worshipped, who demands to be worshipped. He deserves our praise. He deserves our adoration. He is supremely worthy of our utmost delight and of our deepest admiration. So when we look at the creation and we see a beautiful sunset, or you look at a cell through a microscope, or you look up at the night sky at the stars, we should look at that and say, our God made that. And a God who can create that and design that is absolutely incredible. And so we sang this morning, I sing the mighty power of God that made the mountains rise. Hey, when was the last time you made a mountain? Hey, none of us have done that. We have human beings with all of our abilities and scientific prowess, we cannot create Mount Everest. We just can't. We're not gonna create new life. Only God can do that. And so only God is worthy of our worship. Genesis 1 also reveals to us God not only as our powerful creator, but as our benevolent ruler. We might think, okay, God makes everything, but you know, this world's pretty messed up. Notice Genesis 1 and verse 31. And God saw everything that he had made. So this is the end of the creation week. This is the end of day six. And behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. So God's creation is good. When we say benevolent, we mean God is good. And this comes out in the fact that the creation as God originally made it was good, was perfect. It's very clear the original creation was good in every sense. The animals dwelling together in harmony with each other and with man. There's no natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes and forest fires in God's original creation. The world as God intended it, the world as God made it originally, was a world that had no sin, that had no suffering, that had no evil, that had no disasters, and that had no death. People often will wonder, man, how can a good God allow suffering and evil? Part of the answer to that question is going to be this. God did not originally intend it to be that way. It has become that way through sin and because of the fall. But God is the benevolent ruler who creates and he makes it good. He makes it beautiful. We read into Genesis 2, we find out that God puts man in the middle of paradise. So God makes man in Genesis 2, verse 7. Notice verse 8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. So God's benevolent rulership comes out in the fact that he makes this beautiful creation, that he makes man as the crown jewel of his creation, puts man in the middle of paradise in a perfect environment where there's no influences that would make man evil. No, he puts man in this beautiful place in the midst of paradise. And God says to him in verse 16, the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. Just expansive generosity and kindness to humanity. He said, enjoy my creation. I made it for you, for your benefit, for your enjoyment, for your pleasure, for your satisfaction. But God doesn't just stop there. Verse 18, and the Lord God said, it is not good. So for the very first time, God says, something is not good in my creation. Everything's very good. Verse 18 of Genesis 2, the Lord said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him and help meet for him. I will make him a suitable partner. And so what does God do? God creates Eve. He institutes marriage. You see, if you wanna know if God is a benevolent ruler or not, you need to look no further than the institution of marriage. Marriage is a reminder that God is good. He that findeth a wife findeth a good thing. Your spouse is a reminder of God's supreme generosity and kindness. Now, do you think of your spouse that way? Or do you think of your spouse as, well, they do this and they do that, or do you view your spouse as, this is God's gift? generosity, kindness, benevolence. Now we know in a fallen world, marriages are not always perfect and sin gets in there. But as God intended it, marriage was his idea and it was designed for man's benefit, for the benefit of humanity, for the benefit of man and woman. And so down at the end of the chapter, God makes Eve out of one of Adam's ribs. Verse 23, Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This is a covenant relationship. covenant relationship, unbreakable relationship. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. There you have the institution of marriage. What we're saying here is God is a benevolent ruler. He makes us a beautiful creation. There's no suffering, no evil, creates marriage and all of these wonderful gifts. But as benevolent rulership comes through, not just in his creation, but in his commandments, right? As ruler, we're assuming God is in charge of his creation. He has the right to tell his creation how it should operate and what should be done. Look in Genesis 2, verse 16. So we read that, the Lord God commanded the man, you can eat of every tree, but verse 17, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it for the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. God's generous love and kindness and eat of every tree. Here's one command God is saying, you must never ever forget Adam and Eve, humanity, that I am God and you are not. Here's a commandment to remind you of the fact that I am the sovereign God, I am the king, you're my vice-regent ruling under me over this expansive, beautiful, perfect creation. One tree, don't eat of it, if you do, death, curse, destruction will enter in. We've got to understand this, all of God's commandments are given to us for our good. He's like, I don't like all these rules and this morality and this right and wrong in Christianity. Sort of just takes away the fun. God gives us his commandments for our good, right? He's the owner and he writes this owner's manual. Here's what human flourishing is gonna look like. Do it my way, there will be joy. We say, nope, I'm gonna do it my way. And it always brings misery and suffering and ultimately death. It's his universe, it's his rules. Does it ever seem strange to you that humanity universally recognizes the existence of right and wrong? You go to any society, any culture in the world, at any time in history, and there will be some kind of morality, right or wrong. Why is that? It's because we are made in God's image, and part of being made in God's image is a sense that there are some things that are just objectively, morally, it is always morally wrong to murder, right? Any culture, always morally wrong. Now people do it, but we know it's wrong. It's right to do certain things. Why is that? It's because God is the benevolent ruler. We also find this out in these opening chapters of Genesis, that God is not only the powerful creator, the benevolent ruler, he's the righteous judge. So we know the story in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve rebel against the one commandment that God gave them. They reject it and they say, we're gonna eat of that tree anyway. And so man is now sinful. And beginning in Genesis 3 verse 17, God pronounces a judgment on them. He's gonna pronounce a judgment on the serpent, on the snake that deceived the woman. There's gonna be a curse that's placed on the creation. But here we see God as the judge. And unto Adam, he said, Genesis 3, verse 17, because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it. Curse it is the ground for thy sake. So there's judgment, because Adam willfully rebels against God, judgment comes upon the ground, on the creation, on just the system. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistle shall it bring forth unto thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, which is a promise of death. For out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. There's gonna be death, there's gonna be sorrow, there's gonna be futility. There's going to be just this curse on God's creation. Creation that prior to this was good and perfect is now gonna know destruction and calamity and disasters because of Adam's sin. We see God as the righteous judge Because of man's sin, God curses. You see, God is righteous. He's holy, he's perfect. He cannot just allow sin to go unpunished. He cannot just say, oh, no big deal. Sin must be dealt with because God is holy. But it doesn't stop there. We come along a few hundred years, maybe even a few thousand years to Genesis chapter six. Go to Genesis six with me. We see once again God revealing himself as the righteous judge. Genesis chapter six, now that we're in the days of Noah, this is 10 generations later, many, many years have passed. Man is now sinful and has descended into greater and greater depravity. And God, verse five, Genesis six, saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That's humanity without Christ, without the restraining influence of God's common grace. If God just sort of let people do what they want, that's what it looks like. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him at his heart. We've talked about that. That is not saying that God didn't see this coming, but rather this is to accommodate our understanding. God is now going to institute the next phase of his plan. He is going to act consistently with his character. And the Lord said, verse 7, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I made them. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. So here we see God once again judging. He judges in the Garden of Eden. He's the righteous creator. He will not tolerate rebellion in his world. Here, once again, this rebellion has come to such a level, God says it's time to start over, and he's gonna bring about a global flood. Noah and his family will be rescued. Everything else in the world, with the exception of that which is in the ark with Noah, perishes. Why? God is a holy God who always will judge sin. No sin will go unpunished. Every sin must be punished by our holy God. And by the way, our earth today still bears the scars of the massive upheaval that's described here. What's described in Genesis 6-9 is nothing short of a global universal flood, covering the entire earth in water. You say, well, how do we know that? There are literally millions of dead things buried in rock layers all over the world that stand as a testimony to God's righteous justice. He judges sin. But that's not all. We looked at last week at Genesis chapter 11 with the Tower of Babel. God says to man, spread out, fill the earth. Man says, no, we don't wanna do what God tells us to do. We're gonna build a tower, we're gonna try and achieve, sort of get to God on our own. And so what does God do? He judges, confuses man's languages, and scatters man throughout the world. Now here's the question you have to grapple with. Is this the God that you know and worship? So I think of God this way, you know, God is, He's tolerant, He's a God of love. We're gonna talk about that tonight, by the way, invite you to come back for our conclusion of our series on misusing scripture. God is love. Well, what does that mean? Is this the God that you worship, the God that Genesis 1 to 11 reveals, a God who is the omnipotent creator who makes everything in our universe? Is that your God? Is He that big and that awesome? Is the God that you worship the benevolent ruler? The one who says, it's my universe, my rules, here's my commandments, here's my goodness. Is that the God that you worship and admire? Is the God you worship and admire the God who's the righteous judge? Let me put it this way. Are you okay with this morning the fact that we are worshiping a God who literally killed everybody on the planet in a global flood? You say, oh, I don't like that kind of, I find that revolting. If the God you're worshiping is not that God, you're not worshiping the God of the Bible. You're worshiping a God of your own making. That's called idolatry. We see in the Bible a God who is righteous and holy, and one of the reasons we worship Him is precisely because He is righteous and holy. This is not the, oh, this embarrassing attribute of God that we try to hide in the back room when the guests come over. This is one of the attributes of God that is front and center in Scripture, is that He is holy and that He hates sin. And thankfully, He's also a God who's gracious, that we will see as we move on through today's message. Here's my point, Genesis 1-11 reveals so much of God's glory, and there's more. We could keep on going through these divine attributes. Is that the God that you admire? Is that the God you love? Is that the God that you serve? So Genesis 1-11, it reveals God's glory. It shows us God, but it doesn't just stop at showing us God. Number two, it explains man's existence. So not only does Genesis 1-11 show us God, here he is in all of his glory, but it also shows us man. You say, what are we like? We start with God. This is really important, even the order here. We start with who God is and we reason down to man. We look at our world through the lens of God's the creator, God's the ruler, and then we come down to who we are. One of the big problems today is people want to start with man and reason up to God. Oh, this is how we think of love, so God must be like the way we think. No, that's not how it works. We start with God, reason down, not with us, and reason up. Genesis 1-11 will explain man's existence. It's going to explain our origins. Here's a question for you. Why is there something rather than nothing? If there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing? If you don't believe that there is a God, you have to believe the bizarre notion that the universe somehow created itself. Like you got a pile of lumber just sitting in the garage and you go off on vacation and you come back and poof, it's built itself into a gazebo. That does not happen. We laugh because we're like, that's just insane. If someone tried to say, well, that just happened. Like kids are like, I didn't make that mess. Like it just kind of, no, we know nothing comes from nothing, right? Like if there's no God, why is there something rather than nothing? And why is it something we see organized and designed So the question we want to ask is, does Genesis 1 to 11 explain to us why our world is the way it is? For one thing, our world exists. For another thing, our world exists with life, with intelligent life. If there's no God, where does that come from? Of all the riddles that Darwinian evolution cannot solve, the origin of life is the greatest. Scientists with all of their vaunted knowledge and expensive equipment have not ever been able to make life in a laboratory from non-life. Like here, make life out of nothing. It's just not possible. You cannot get life from non-life. And even if they were able to do it someday, it would be a team effort of hundreds of PhDs, which tells us this, you can only get life with intelligence, right? It takes intelligent design to get life. Genesis 1 to 11 explains why we are here, how we ended up here. The fact that life exists. reveals to us that God is the most plausible explanation of it. This is not a God-of-the-gaps fallacy, like, oh, here's God, we don't ever, no, no, this is the most reasonable explanation, and this is the explanation that Genesis 1 and 2 gives to us. Why are we here? God created us. Why are we alive? God created us. You say, how did God do it? Genesis chapter two and verse seven, how did God create human life? And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. This is a direct act of God. This is not God just using random processes to bring about human life. This is God himself making this happen, forming man. That is the word used for a potter forming a clay pot. This is direct involvement and then God giving us our soul. We are not just a sack of chemicals on our way to becoming stardust. We are given a soul, we have a spirit, we have the ability to know and worship God. There's something that is fundamentally different about humanity that is not true about the animals. Now, sometimes people will raise the question, well, how do we know that Genesis 1 to 11 gives us an accurate account? Couldn't this just be a bunch of mythology, or this is poetry, or this is just sort of giving us an explanation, sort of a Jewish riff on ancient cosmology? There are people who will argue the opening chapters of Genesis are not really true. They're just sort of poetry. They kind of say that God in some way created and maybe he used billions of years and mutations and these sort of things. There are people who will be proponents of what is the so-called theistic evolution, which by the way is neither theistic nor evolution. You can't have both those things together. You can't say that you have an intelligent God guiding an unguided process. That doesn't work. But the proponents of theistic evolution, an organization called Biologos, they state that, quote, the author of Genesis is not interested in telling us how God created or how long it took. Have you read Genesis 1 lately? were given evening and morning was the first day, evening and morning was the second day, evening and morning was the third day, and it goes on, and God creating from the dust of the earth. It is very concerning to tell us not just that God created, but how and how long it took him to do it. I don't know how you read Genesis 1 and then say, well, it's not really telling us how God did it. No, it's telling us how God did it. It is an accurate account. It gives us extensive detail regarding how God created, included repeated references to timeframes, We're told that instead of looking to the Bible for answers, we need to defer to unproven hypotheses to give us all the keys to unlock the mystery of Scripture. We'll go read Darwin, and then we'll come back and read Genesis, and Darwin will tell us how to read Genesis. No, it goes the other way. God's truth trumps all other claims to truth. We do not need to submit the Bible to godless theories. Instead, we need to accept the word of God over the word of fallen and fallible men. Here's a question. Was anybody there when God created the universe to tell us how he did it? The answer is no, so I'm gonna take the word of the one who was there, and that is God. The other question we need to ask is this, how does Genesis 1-11 present itself? Is it being presented as a big poem full of just sort of flowery language that we're not meant to take literally? And the answer is a resounding no. There are certain hallmarks of Hebrew poetry that are absent, like parallelism, like simile, like metaphor. This is written in exactly the same style as we would read a history in the Old Testament, or the call of Abraham. or the fall of Jerusalem. It is written and meant to be understood as historical, not as poetry. And here's my question to you. If we arbitrarily decide that Genesis 1 to 11 is all poetry, where do we draw the line? Say, well, just the creation part is poetry, but the fall happened. Why? Why do we draw the line there? Why not just say all of the Bible is poetry, and even the resurrection of Jesus is just sort of a moral lesson for us? We can't come along and just arbitrarily decide there's parts of the Bible that we won't believe. We take God's word as a united revelation of what is true, and this is a revelation that shows us why our world is the way it is. Now, of all God's creations, God's creation of mankind is presented here as the pinnacle. Genesis 1, verses 26 and 27, and God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Genesis 1, Genesis 2 are going to reveal to us why man is the way that he is, not just our origins, and we've got an accurate account of those, but we're being told what our nature is like. We are made in the image and likeness of God, which doesn't mean that we look physically like God, but rather that we have a correspondence, a resemblance. We have a spirit. We have the ability to know and worship and reflect our God. We were made for so much more than just this life. Our purpose is bigger than just living on this earth for 70 years and trying to accumulate as much stuff as we can before it's all over. No, we were made for so much more. We were made for eternal joy. Made in God's image. We're given with a spiritual nature. We're tasked with ruling his creation. We have a conscience. We have the ability to make choices. You're asked this question, why is it that everybody worships something? You can go anywhere in the world, everybody worships something. It's because we were made in the image of God as worshipers. And if our worship does not attach itself to the one true God, it will attach itself to something else, to some other idol, some other false god. Genesis presents Adam and Eve as historical people, made in the image of God. Genesis 3.20 says that she is the mother of all living. We come later on to the genealogies in Genesis 5, and the writer of Genesis traces humanity back to Adam and Eve. We go to Luke chapter one, presenting the genealogy of Jesus. We go all the way back to Adam and Eve, all presented as people who are just as historical and as real as David or as Jesus himself. Read Genesis, it's true, it's history. Acts 17, 26 says that God has made all nations of the earth from one man. That's from Adam, he's the father of us all. So you say, why is our world the way it is? Why does humanity exist? Because God created us. Why are we worshipers? Why are we made with this longing for God and for eternity and conscience and right and wrong? We're made in his image. But there's some fact about our world that's really troubling and it is that we look around and we see evil. You turn on the news and you hear about riots happening in Wisconsin and people getting shot in the streets. We hear about racism, we hear about rioting, we hear about just rampant evil in our world from terrorism all the way to sex trafficking. You're like, why is this here? Just this past week, we saw a hurricane that comes and smashes through Lake Charles, Louisiana. Destruction. Why? We hear about forest fires just burning California to nothing. You're like, well, where does this come from? Why is there evil and suffering in this world? If there's a creator God who rules, why this? Well, Genesis also tells us why. And it's because not only are we made in God's image, but we are fallen. We have rebelled against God. One of the most striking features of our world today is the fact of sin, suffering, and death. Now, go over with me to Romans chapter five and verse 12 for divine commentary on the event of the fall. Romans chapter five and verse 12. Listen to these words of scripture. Here's the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, writing under the inspiration of the Spirit, and he says this, wherefore as by one man, sin entered into the world, and notice this, and death by sin. So death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. So here's Paul coming along and he's saying, where does sin come from? Where does death come from? It's because Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. Real historical event, Adam sins. And because of his sin, death comes. You don't have death without sin. That's the link that's established there. Genesis 2.17 says, the day you eat thereof, thou shalt surely die. If Adam and Eve did not sin, they would not have died, right? But because they sinned, there is now death. And you think about it, all disease and suffering and sickness is simply the process of death maybe spread out a little bit longer. That's in essence what it is. So what comes along with death is violence. What comes along with death are destructive hurricanes. What comes along with that, ravaging diseases. We say, why is there cancer in our world? Because we live in a fallen world. When Adam sinned, he's the representative of all of us in the Garden of Eden. When he sins, he takes the whole human race with him, and the entire creation is put under a curse to where there is now tremendous destruction. See, that's really depressing news to realize we're in this fallen world and that's not changing anytime soon. But here's the good news. You know what that tells us? That tells us that death and suffering and disease, destruction, are not part of the original creation. They tell us that those are intruders, unwanted house guests that kind of barge their way in, kick the door down, so to speak, and they're not gonna be here forever. There's day is gonna come when Jesus reigns and he kicks those intruders out, when death will be no more, when sin will be no more, suffering will be no more. And we look forward to that day. Let me contrast that with a secular worldview. Okay, we're saying Genesis tells us how we should look at our world, how we should understand humanity. If you have a secular worldview, by that I mean a worldview that doesn't have God at the center, that doesn't take the Bible as our lens. Okay, when I say worldview, it's what you look through to see the world. The Bible is our lens, it's like a set of glasses to correct our defective eyesight, right? Everything's kind of blurry, you put the Bible on and I can see things clearly. If you don't have a Christian worldview, If you have a secular worldview, it declares that somehow, something came from nothing. It says that life somehow came from non-life. Intelligence came from randomness. And life only developed through millions of years of suffering and death. That's how evolution works, right? Like stuff dies and there is survival of the fittest, and the stuff that survives and doesn't get eaten by everything else, that survives. That's in direct contrast with how the Bible presents the world as God created it. That makes suffering an intrinsic part of our world. It means suffering is purposeless, random, and yes, eternal. Does not fit with a Christian worldview that says one day death will die. Not the means that God used to create, but the judgment that comes upon sin. So us as Christians, we have hope knowing the world will not always be this way. As C.S. Lewis says, the leaves of the New Testament are wrestling with the news that it will not always be this way, right? That one day, This curse will be lifted. One day we'll enter into heaven's glory and Jesus will reign and death will die. Shows us who we are. And by the way, we are still fallen, undersent. Every single one of us are sinners who have rebelled against God. And the wages of sin is death. Not just physical death, though that is part of the sentence, but eternal death. I'm talking about eternal, conscious torment in a real place called hell. That is what the Bible presents as the wages of sin. We're talking about dead, serious, think about your eternity, forever and ever and ever separated from God. and a place of fire and darkness and separation from Him. That's the penalty for sin. And that is the destiny of all those who reject God, all those who refuse Jesus Christ. If you're not a believer in Jesus this morning, that's your destiny, that's who you are without Him. But He beckons you and summons you to Himself. And that brings us into this third glorious truth that we've gotta embrace from Genesis 1 to 11. Not just the truth about God, the truth about ourselves, but here we get this truth about Christ. Number three, Genesis 1-11 reveals God's redemptive purposes, reveals God's redemption, reveals His salvation, reveals His promises. You see, if Genesis 1-11 is not in the Bible, or if we dismiss it as myth or poetry, the very foundations of the gospel are destroyed. You see, if there's no Adam, there's no fall. If there's no fall, there's no need for redemption. The fact of sin is very, very clear in Genesis 3, but in the middle of this, right? Okay, Genesis 3, go there with me. There's this amazing promise that's embedded in the middle of the judgment. So here's God saying, okay, Adam and Eve, you've sinned. Here's the judgment that's gonna come. There's gonna be death. All of these things, look at verse 15. And I will put enmity between thee, this is speaking to the serpent, speaking to Satan, between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed. And then notice this, it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel. So right here at the very beginning of the Bible, right after man sins, God's saying there's gonna be a descendant from the woman, the seed of the woman, and there's gonna be an individual who's gonna come who is going to crush the head of the serpent, crush the power of Satan. And yeah, Satan will be at a bruises, he'll get a quick little strike in there, but eventually his head will be crushed, he'll be defeated. You read through the story of the Bible and we find out who that is. So God makes this promise. We see promises made there in Genesis 3 and verse 15. We see this promise gets hinted at over and over again throughout these opening chapters. Adam and Eve begin to have their children, their first child, if you go to Genesis chapter 4 and verse 1, and Adam knew his wife, Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, I've gotten a man from the Lord. She expects her very first son is, ah, he's here, here's the promised seed who would come and crush the head of the serpent and deliver us from this curse. The name Cain means gotten or acquired, and we could even translate Genesis 4, 1, I've gotten a man, the Lord, he's the incarnate Lord, perhaps he's the Messiah, perhaps he's the deliverer. We find out that Cain is, in fact, a spiteful murderer. He slaughters his own brother in a fit of envy-inspired rage. So Abel is killed. Cain's not the Messiah. They have another son. Verse 25, Adam knew his wife again. She bare a son called his name Seth, which means appointed. For God, she said, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew. So maybe this is the promised one. but it turns out he would not be the promised one. Genesis 5, we get this genealogy. The part of the Bible your eyes glaze over when you're doing your reading, right? You're like, oh, a list of begottens. These are really important. These genealogies are links in the chain of God's promise. They're showing, okay, this coming one is going to, the seed of the woman is gonna come. How? Well, Genesis 5, we get the genealogy of Adam all the way to Noah. And there are promises made about Noah. He's gonna be the one to give us rest in some kind of way. We find out Noah, he's a sinner, just like the rest of them. So Noah is not the Messiah. Then Genesis 11, we get another genealogy taking us all the way from Noah to a man named Abram. And God calls Abram and selects Abram and says, I'm gonna make of you a great nation. And then he says, through your seed, all families of the earth will be blessed. Ah, there's the promise again. The promise of the seed of the woman. It's gonna be a descendant now of Abraham, we find out. Abraham has a child of promise named Isaac. Isaac has a son named Jacob. Jacob gets his name changed to Israel. And the people of Israel go down into Egypt. stay there enslaved for hundreds of years. God delivers them through Moses, another little harbinger, a little hint of that hope, a little shadow of what's gonna come, a deliverer who's gonna come. But Moses, we find out he's not the deliverer. He has sinned just like the rest of them, the great lawgiver. We fast forward a little bit further through the story of the Bible, and we get a man who comes along with the scene whose name is David. David's a man after God's own heart. David, though we know, is also a sinner. But God makes a promise to David saying, David, One of your descendants is going to rule as king forever. Another promise. God making promises all over the place in the Old Testament. The coming seed of the woman, this coming descendant of Abraham who would be the one to bless all families of the earth. We get this promise that a descendant of David would rule forever on this throne. He's got to be a man to be in the line of David. but he's gotta be God because people die, right? You can't rule forever if you die. That's not how that works. So these incredible promises, we get to Isaiah, we find out that the one who's coming is gonna be a suffering servant who's gonna bear the sins of his people. He's gonna reign as king, but he's also gonna die as a servant. How do you have a servant who reigns and a king who serves? Then you come to the book of Genesis. Genesis 1 opens once again with a genealogy, and it shows us that through these descendants of Abraham, through David, we get Joseph, who adopts Jesus, who's born of the Virgin Mary. And Jesus of Nazareth, he's the one. He's the one who is looked for. He's the one that is longed for. Eventually, in the fullness of time, Jesus of Nazareth comes in the line of David. He's the seed of the woman, the promised son of David, and the long-looked-for liberator. And guess what he does? He lives the sinless life that Adam could not. Adam completely fails the test in the Garden of Eden. Jesus passes the test in the wilderness. Remember the temptation in the wilderness. He succeeds where Adam fails. He succeeds where Israel fails. He comes as a new and a better Adam. Just as Adam is the head of all humanity that is lost, Jesus comes along saying, I'm gonna create a new humanity. All who are in me will be saved and will have life. And just as Adam's guilt is imputed to all of his descendants, Jesus' righteousness gets put to the account of all who believe in him. He comes as a new and a better Adam to reverse everything that was lost in the fall. He lived a sinless life. He faced a temptation and he passed and he triumphed where Adam failed. He succeeded where Israel sinned. But then something happens that we don't expect. He's going to be king. He's going to take the throne. He's going to establish a kingdom. But then he's killed on the cross, murdered in cold blood, slaughtered like a sacrifice, paying the penalty for all his people, for all the sinners who would ever repent and believe in him. When He dies on the cross, He is not simply the victim of a murderous plot. He is the fulfillment of God's righteous plan. He is the one who has come to pay the price for all man's sin. He satisfies the wrath of a holy God, and three days later, He rises again from the dead, demonstrating not only that He's defeated sin, but he's also defeated death, demonstrating that his sacrifice has been fully accepted by God the Father. That's the good news. And all of that is set in motion in the third chapter of the Bible. All of that starts all the way back in the Garden of Eden, where man's original state is lost in rebellion and sin and all of those things. And we come now to an empty tomb. And the empty tomb is God's declaration that what Adam messed up is going to be restored in Christ. It is a harbinger of the undoing of all that was done in the Garden of Eden so long ago. You see, it was in the Garden of Eden that sin and death entered. It was in Eden that a curse was imposed, and it was at the cross and at the empty tomb that sin was defeated and death was destroyed. But that's not all. The story of the Bible does not stop with the resurrection, though the resurrection is the harbinger that, hey, we're almost there where everything's gonna be made new. In Genesis 1 to 11, we see God creating the heavens and the earth. We watch as man falls, plunging all of creation into chaos and sin. We see the earth devastated by a global catastrophe. Paradise is lost. By the end of Genesis 3, the entrance to the Garden of Eden is being guarded by some angels with fiery swords saying, man cannot just enter in. And yet there's the hope that one day it will not always be that way. And indeed, guess what we find when we get to the end of the story? Okay, so remember, heaven and earth, and a tree of life, and paradise. Go with me to the end of the Bible, to the book of Revelation. This is pretty sweet. I don't want you to miss out on this. This is so cool to see how the Bible mirrors itself beginning and end like these bookends. So Genesis 1-1, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Revelation 21 and verse one, and I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was no more sea. In the Garden of Eden, man is expelled from the place of fellowship with God, expelled from the sanctuary of God. Look at verse three of Revelation 21. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men. That's what was lost in the Garden of Eden. Fellowship with God, expelled from the sanctuary. And he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God. A complete reversal of the fall. Verse four, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. Those are all the things that entered when man fell. They're going to be expelled when Jesus comes back and establishes, brings us into eternity. And he that sat upon the throne said, behold, I make all things new. Verse six, he said, it is done. All right, so we see this amazing reversal of what was lost in the Garden of Eden, this tabernacle of men restored into paradise, all those who believe in Jesus. Revelation 22 in verse two. Okay, in Genesis three, man lost access to the tree of life. Revelation 22 in verse two, in the midst of the street of it and on either side, there was the tree of life, which bear 12 manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month. and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." And then notice this, there shall be no more curse. Okay, there's this curse that's imposed in Genesis 3, Revelation 22 in verse 3, the curse is done away with. Right, so the whole story of the Bible is rooted in these opening chapters of Genesis. The seeds of hope are planted in Genesis 3, and they come to full fruition in Revelation 22. Absolutely staggering. These opening chapters are crucial for our understanding of the Bible. Okay, man, that sounds absolutely awesome. Genesis 1-11 is the vital beginning of the story. A story whose turning point is a rugged cross and an empty tomb. A story whose end is eternal life. So you say, I want to get in on that. I want to get in on having my sins forgiven. I want to get in on having that kind of eternal life and entering paradise and enjoying all that God intended for man back in the beginning and then some. How can I have that assurance? Well, that calls us finally to a response. Genesis 1-11 does not call us to just simply say, hmm, that's interesting. There's an obvious response that we are called to, though it is not stated in as many words. It's very simple. Genesis 1-11 calls us to conversion. We see sin. We see how sin entered the world. We see how sin affects all of humanity. We see how God views sin. He judges it. We see a flood. We see an individual who is rescued. Why? Because Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. How do we find grace in the eyes of the Lord? We're told in Hebrews 11, Noah believed God. You say, what is the response this calls me to? It calls me to repent and it calls me to believe. It calls me to conversion. It calls you to conversion. If all we take away from this study of Genesis 1 to 11 is, man, that's interesting, like now I know how the creation happened, and God does it all, and there's a flood, and Noah, and Adam, and all these, and there's some genealogies thrown in there for good measure. But if we don't take this step, we're missing out on what it is that God has for us. It's clear that man is in fundamental rebellion against God. That's set in motion in Genesis 3. We see it illustrated in Genesis 4 with Cain killing Abel. We see it once again in Genesis 6 with humanity becoming utterly corrupt. We see it after the flood with even righteous Noah succumbing to drunkenness and his family being a complete train wreck. We see just sin pervading everything. What do we need to do with sin? We need to repent. We need to turn away. We need to have a change of mind about sin and run to Jesus. Repentance and faith are two sides of the same coin. You turn tails on sin and you head to Jesus. You repent and you believe. Repentance is not a change in lifestyle, but a change of heart. It is not something we just do on our own through effort, I'm gonna try really hard to repent. It is a gift from God, the result of the new birth. Repentance is seeing our sin for what it is and agreeing with God about it. And the way, by the way, you know that you have repented is that your life is marked by repentance, by change, and by growth of being more like Jesus. We must believe. There's promises that God made. So Adam and Eve, he says, the seed of the woman is going to come. And through the seed of the woman, there's going to be a deliverance. Adam believed that so firmly, he calls his wife Eve, the mother of all living. Adam responds to God's promise, how? By believing. God tells Noah, I'm gonna judge the whole world with a global flood. How does Noah respond? He believes God, he builds an ark. Abraham has said, leave this place and go out and into a place where you'll receive for an inheritance, and he believed God. The promises of God call for our faith. This is crucially important. If you are trusting in yourself this morning, say, I'm trusting that I will make it to heaven, I will be right with God, because I have done, and you have a list of things in your mind of, I joined a church one time, or I've been baptized, or I'm a good moral person, there's no way that God would judge me. You are relying on yourself rather than on the promises of God, and that strategy will always end in condemnation. Our only hope is to run to Jesus and trust in Him alone. Jesus and Jesus alone can save you. His death on the cross paid the penalty. His resurrection secures eternal life. So if you are not a believer in Him, will you turn to Him? Turn to Him today. Now, Christian, I think all of this calls you and I to a lifestyle of worship. This is our God. This is His world. This is my Father's world. What if we had this consciousness as we walked through life that we're living in God's world and he's in control? What would that do to your worry, your anxiety, and your fear? If you're like, God made this, he set the story in motion, and he's gonna finish it. What if we went through life recognizing that he's the sovereign God who made everything, the one that we represent and reflect? And what if when we gathered together, we came with the intention of saying, we are going to make the name of Jesus great, and we're going to exult in it, and we're going to celebrate it, we're going to delight in it. How different would our lives be? How different would our lives be if the God that we knew and worshipped was the God of Genesis 1 to 11? So that's the wrap of this story. We get the beginning here, and today we get the end of the beginning. But the story's not over. The story of the Bible continues, and God's working continues in your life, in my life, even today. Father, we thank you so much for your word. I pray, Lord, that you would use it in our lives for your glory. And Father, if there's any today who need to turn to Christ, I pray that they would do so before it's everlastingly too late. We pray in his name, amen.