Genesis chapter 12 and reading verses one through five. Now Yehoah had said to Abram, get out of your country from your people and from your father's house to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. "'I will bless those who bless you, "'and I will curse him who curses you, "'and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.' "'So Abram departed as the Lord, Yehovah, had spoken to him, "'and Lot went with him. "'And Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. "'Then Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, "'and all their possessions that they had gathered, "'and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, And they departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. Amen. Father, we thank you for your word, every part of your word. And as we Seek to understand the chief messages that you have for us in the book of Revelation that you would enable me to clearly articulate what you have put upon my heart and for each one of us to understand them, to find great joy and excitement in the truths that are found in Genesis. We love your word and we pray that we would be sanctified through your word. And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. If there were only three books that I had time to translate when we were reaching a brand new tribe with the gospel, they would probably be Genesis, the Gospel of John, and the Book of Ruth, and in that order. Now, depending on the culture, there may be other books that would fit into that mix a little bit better, but those would be my chief books for most cultures that we would go to. And the Genesis would always be at the top of the list of books that I would translate first. And there are many reasons why Genesis is so important. First of all, you can teach all of the New Testament doctrines from the book of Genesis, believe it or not. You'll find an adequate theology of God. of the Lord Jesus Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of angels, of salvation, of sin. You'll find all kinds of New Testament doctrines right in this book. Now, they're there in a rudimentary fashion, but you'll even find the foundational principles of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church. Russell Grigg shows how even the rudiments of eschatology can be found in the book of Genesis. So it's not as if you'd be depriving people of doctrine by translating that. And you could bring in other references that you could translate on the fly for them from other books of the Bible before you translated the entire books. But it would be a good book to start with for that reason. Second, Genesis provides the absolutely necessary background, the New Testament, and that the New Testament assumes you already know. It's not going to repeat all of the background information for lazy Christians. It assumes you already are familiar with the Old Testament. So if you chop off the book of Genesis, you're going to have huge holes in the New Testament that will make it confusing to postmodern man. And let me just illustrate it with one story. Coral Ridge Ministries years ago discovered that when they took their program of evangelism explosion to the beach, they had a lot of background material that they had to show. If you've been through the evangelism explosion program, it's a decent program. But it assumes a lot that is unstated. Now, in the early days, it really didn't matter because they were largely ministering in Florida to retirees who still had the vestiges of a Christian worldview. The culture as a whole still understood Christian concepts of God, of Jesus, of sin, of justice, and things like that. And so they could assume a lot. But several years ago, when they took the same method of evangelism to the beach to engage the surfer crowd, it was like they were talking a foreign language. The beach people, a lot of times, didn't even understand what they were talking about in the very first question that Evangelism Explosion gives. The first question is, do you know for certain that if you were to die today, you would have eternal life? And they got so many puzzled looks by that question that they had to kind of give more background material and revamp it because some of the people Most of the people there actually, they didn't really think that anybody could be certain about anything. They were quite comfortable in their uncertainty. And when it came to things like God, or salvation, or heaven, they had totally different concepts of that. Most people thought of eternal life, when they began questioning, as reincarnation. Oh yeah, I believe in eternal life. Some confused heaven with karma. Some were actually materialists who didn't think they had a soul, and they were a little bit confused because we just cease to exist when we die. And others who said that they believed in God, when there was more probing, they came to realize that the God that they believed in was completely foreign to the God of the Bible. So what they did is they completely revamped the program, adding in things like creation. and who God is, and the creator-creature distinction, and the law of God, and justice, and so many things that you will find in the book of Genesis. By the way, this is one of the reasons why Dr. Crobendom's method of evangelism starts in Genesis 1 and it moves forward. A third reason to start with Genesis, so let me review those two so you get them. The first reason is, in seed form at least, all of the doctrines of the New Testament are found there. The second reason is that it provides the absolutely necessary background to understanding the gospel. In fact, let me give you a quote. In his book, The Gospel and Genesis, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones says, I have no gospel unless this is history, and this is referring to Genesis. Now you might think, that's a gross exaggeration. How in the world could he say that? You'll have to read the book to see if you're convinced by him, but I think he's correct. Third reason to start with Genesis is that it starts with stories that immediately connect with non-discursive readers of every age. Now, the Bible doesn't stay there. Unfortunately, there's a lot of missionaries. They've discovered this non-discursive, you know, oral reading cultures, and they do everything in stories, and they want to make that permanent. That's the only method of learning, but Genesis through Revelation takes you from the oral stage into more and more discursive and abstract reasoning, and it's the kind of reasoning that actually transformed pagan West. You know, Europe was totally pagan oral learners, into people who had more discursive, abstract reasoning that we associate with Western civilization. So there is a growth that God has people go through, but pagans often need to start with stories, and Genesis and Ruth have captivating stories that I think illustrate so well the four important things we looked at last week, creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. But there's one more reason why Genesis is absolutely critical as the first book, even for new believers to go through. It sets in place the worldview and the presuppositions that are needed to transform culture. For example, the binary male and female Adam and Eve paradigm that God sets up in Genesis 1 through 2 is a fantastic corrective to the LGBTQ plus nonsense that has absolutely become pervasive in our culture. Jared actually sent me an email this past week of how Great Britain has put new curriculum principles in place And their guidelines are calling for, quote, a period positive approach to menstruation that teaches that boys and girls, indeed all genders, can have periods. I mean, it's insanity, but hey, if a girl can be a boy, and then that boy has periods, it causes great confusion. Anyway, Genesis is an answer to nonsense like this. It confronts it head on. But it's not just culture that needs a heavy infusion of Genesis in their curriculum. I believe pastors do as well, and the contextualization of the gospel, you've heard that term, the contextualization of the gospel has so muddied the division between Christianity and paganism that I think we need a new Reformation in this area. And this goes all the way back to when I was younger at Fuller Theological Seminary when they started their missions training program, and missionaries were taught They need to bring just the encapsulated bare bones gospel into a culture and never change the culture. They need to make the gospel sensitive to that culture. And so there are many missionaries who go in and they leave the demonic aspects of culture completely alone. They will not change things like polygamy, female circumcision, socialism, so many other demonic aspects of culture. And the book of Genesis has played a huge role in redefining how a culture should think on these and many other kinds of issues. Genesis helps to redefine our views of family, patriarchy, aesthetics, better treatment of women, child rearing, economics, and hundreds of other areas. And let me give you just one story, one more story to illustrate this. This was a guy that went to the school I went to, Prairie Bible Institute up in Canada, Don Richardson and Carol Richardson, his wife, were missionaries in Irian Jaya, which was on the west side of the island of Papua, New Guinea. And they were ministering to head hunters there. But the concept, the Sawi concepts of God, virtues, vices, the universe, and other things were so twisted that it made them completely misinterpret the stories, even, that are found in the New Testament. For example, he was telling them the story of the crucifixion of Christ. They loved this story, and they started cheering and clapping for Judas and his betrayal of Christ. especially betraying him with a kiss. Now, Don Richardson was absolutely flabbergasted. He wondered, why are they cheering at that part of the story? But for the Samui, treachery was man's highest virtue, and their heroes actually were those who had been the most successful in befriending victims and then betraying them. They thought this is the best betrayal story ever. Well, the story of Joseph and his brothers completely changed their view of betrayal. And missionary after missionary has discovered that without Genesis, the gospel does not have context. Without Leviticus, Hebrews doesn't make any sense. And even within Genesis, if you start preaching on Genesis 12 before you preach on Genesis 11, it doesn't make as much sense, because Genesis 12 is answering the problems in Genesis 11. In other words, we need to start where God starts, which is the book of Genesis. And I'm going to start with verse 1, because this is by far the most important verse in Genesis. We're always looking at one key verse, And if you look in your study Bibles, some study Bibles will give Genesis 3.15 as the key verse, or some will give chapter 12, verse 3. Those are very important passages. But I'm convinced chapter 1, verse 1 is the absolutely most important key verse in the book of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And we might think, okay, there's just a little bit that's in that verse, we're so used to it, it just goes past us. We don't realize how absolutely revolutionary those words are to most cultures, and how revolutionary they are fast becoming in our own culture. But let me show you how this verse gives you seven presuppositions that are critical for changing culture. First one's pretty obvious. And that's that God is not an atheist. This verse opposes atheism by boldly stating that there was a beginning to everything except for God. And the Hebrew is quite clear that God existed before there was a beginning to anything and that everything else had a beginning. So one scholar worded it this way to try to get across the concept. In any beginning to have been begun, God was already there. He was there before there was time. Time is a created reality, and God is not subject to time. So God exists, and he didn't even prove himself to man. He just said, I did all of this. He reveals himself to man. He's starting presuppositionally. Second, even without digging into the rest of the chapter, the first verse rules out evolutionary thought. Now, how does it do that? Well, contrary to modern evolutionary theory, this verse says that there is a beginning to time, space, matter, and energy. Okay? Those things are not eternal. But if you reject the eternal God, you have to posit something eternal. In other words, something that has no beginning. You have to do that. It's just an inescapable concept to replace God with. And Romans 1 captures the essence of what is wrong with the evolutionary theory. It worships and serves the creature, the creation, rather than God. It deifies the creation. So creation is eternal in the modern mind because evolutionary thought teaches that there is no beginning to space, time, matter, and energy. Even with the Big Bang Theory, there is no beginning to those four things. In contrast, this verse says only God is self-existent. Okay, nothing else is self-existent. Third, the Hebrew verb in this sentence is in the singular, meaning that this God is one being. Polytheism says that there are many gods, and so if you're a missionary going to different cultures, you're going to meet polytheists. Actually, that's fast becoming the case here in America. We need to know how to deal with polytheism. But verse 1 indicates that there was only one God who existed from eternity. And as Deuteronomy 6 verse 4 says, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now when you're dealing with ethics, when you're dealing with love, when you're dealing with so many other things, this is profound. I don't have the time to get into it. That verse also destroys Unitarianism. God, Elohim, is actually a plural noun followed by a singular verb, which means that there is plurality within this singular Godhead. And when God talks to Himself in verse 26, take a look at verse 26 of chapter 1. When He talks to Himself, He's not talking to Himself in the singular. He says, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. So Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are talking with each other. John begins his gospel by saying, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Okay, so right from the beginning, there was a Trinity at work. And by the way, a lot of people think the Trinitarianism didn't start till later in the church. That's absolute nonsense. Hundreds of years before Christ, I have documents that show that the Jews were Trinitarian. They're not anymore. They're Unitarian to the core, as is Islam. Fifth, for God to have created everything when nothing was there, this verse implies the doctrine known as creation ex nihilo, or creating out of nothing. This is really the punch in the face to materialism. Material did not come from material. That's the bottom line. Throughout this chapter, the immaterial God speaks and something happens, something is created. Modern scientists believe material is all that exists, but here we see the immaterial God creating material, and later he's going to create immaterial angels and immaterial souls for man. And so you have a science falsely so-called if it's a system that excludes by definition the immaterial, which all modern pagan science does. It is completely distorting reality. This verse also opposes pantheism in that the creator is clearly different from what he created. God is not a part of what he created. A new ageism blurs those creator-creature distinctions, as does, by the way, the emergent church. If you guys have noticed, there's quite a number of churches, even in mainline denominations, that have become emergent. and it blurs that creator-creature distinction. Sixth, it opposes naturalism. Naturalism is the theory that says that science can describe accurately all phenomenon and account for all phenomenon just with scientific laws. Whereas this passage speaks of the supernatural God supernaturally producing things in miraculous ways on every day of the six days of creation without natural processes. For example, Adam and Eve were created mature on one day. God didn't take years to develop them, 20 years till they get to their prime. He created fruit trees on one day with fruit on them that Adam and Eve could eat. This is called miracles, right? Throughout this passage, we see supernaturalism at play. And obviously, verse 1 is the first description of supernaturalism. Now, why do I stress that? I can't get into it, no time for that, but almost all of the alternatives to six-day creationism have naturalism as their presupposition. You have to explain it by natural laws. And so they've got long ages going on here. No, absolutely not. And then finally, this verse opposes humanism, which believes that man is the measure of all things, that all things have to pass through the scrutiny of man's mind in order to be true. But all you have to say is, hey, in this verse, God doesn't even prove his existence. He doesn't try to prove his existence. Why? Because man's mind is not the determiner of truth. God's mind is. In this chapter, God's mind is the originator and the interpreter of all things. And in this morning's short sermon, I cannot give you the implications for each of those radical attacks on unbelieving thought, but if those seven false views are not annihilated at the beginning, evangelism could very easily be scuttled by Satan. So if verse one is the key verse, what is one word that can summarize the entire book? Well, the book's called Genesis, which is just a word that means beginnings, and I think that's the word that we ought to use to describe this whole book. First Hebrew word is reshit, beginnings. Bereshit means in the beginning. And the beginning of absolutely everything is seen in this book. We've already seen that verse one implies the beginning of space, time, and matter and energy. The rest of the chapter shows the beginning of stars, our own planetary system, water, land, plant and animal life, and of course, mankind. Now that's about as far as most commentaries are going to go, but if you've got really good commentaries, and I'll list three for you on Genesis a little bit later on, they'll show you that chapter one goes way beyond that. Chapter one shows the foundations of philosophy, language, stewardship, dominion, division of labor, specialization. As Gary North points out, really quite a number of the foundational principles for economics. For example, one of the huge debates in economics is, is value subjective or is it objective? And the Bible says it's both, it's both. In this book, God interprets things. He gives value to things. God declares things good, not good, very good in this chapter. So God is giving objective value by His evaluation, and He is expecting mankind to more and more conform our subjective valuation of things to His evaluation. So, later on in this book, if God thinks that Rachel is more beautiful than Leah, then beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder. It is, there is a subjective aspect to beauty, but God has a definition of beauty, and so God's definitions of beauty for humans, makeup, art, music, and other things need to be sanctified. Why? because of the fall. We don't always agree because of our sin nature. We do not always agree with God's evaluation, but that's not God's problem. That's our problem, right? And that's what part of sanctification is involved in. It's not just dealing with outward sins. Now if God, just as one more example, calls gold good and valuable and the basis for commerce as he does in this book, it has value even if men do not recognize the value of gold. Now some of you think that gold has no value because the majority of Americans don't value gold. The reason I know you think it has no value is you don't own any gold or silver. But God values gold. God says men will eventually catch up with this kind of thing. So that's the way you need to read in these books. See God's evaluation of things first and foremost. Now chapter two. shows the beginnings of teaching and modeling. God models to Adam and Eve how they're going to take dominion, because God takes dominion by planting a garden, and he's got Adam watching him do it right there. So he's modeling a kind of teaching. It shows The, let's see, language, marriage, and family, specialization, science, ethics, authority, service, and stewardship. And when I was in linguistics class in college, I realized that chapters one, two, and chapter 11 form all the foundations for a Christian theory of linguistics. By the way, We've got about nine copies of Bible Acrostic, I think is the name of it. Brother Michael Elliott kind of edited this book. We found this book before. We've never been able to discover who the author is. But it is an absolutely fabulous book for memorizing every chapter, what the central theme of every chapter of the Bible is. And it's really easy using this. So for every book, there is a sentence that is an acrostic for every chapter of the Bible. The sentence for Genesis is, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth and men. And each letter of that sentence then begins a sentence for that chapter. So chapter two would be the second letter in that sentence. In the beginning, the second letter is N, so it's newlyweds in the garden. Now it's a wonderful book, nine copies back there, the first nine people to get it, you know, can have it. But as you read through the entire book, you'll see that each chapter ushers in something new. There are so many firsts in this book. I won't give you a summary phrase for every chapter, but chapter three is summarized in the book by the phrase, temptation and man's fall. And that's a good summary because chapter three shows the first fallen creature, Satan, tempting Eve to join in his rebellion against God, and Adam willfully follows her lead, willfully sinning against God's order. And the result of this first interaction between humans and a demon are absolutely disastrous. They are catastrophic. Adam deliberately broke covenant with God, which covenant, by the way, was symbolized by two sacraments. There was two trees, one which was off limits, could be looked at but not eaten from, the other which was to be eaten in faith. While man's fall into sin instantly resulted in spiritual separation between mankind and God. They immediately ran from God, they hid from his face, They then come under God's curse and judgment. But it not only affects man spiritually, but Genesis 3-4 shows that the Fall affected them physically, mentally, emotionally, volitionally, religiously, psychologically, motivationally, teleologically, It's just a word that means, you know, your sense of purpose and goals. Deontologically. You've got to learn some of these $10 words, you know, you can throw around and impress your friends. Deontologically means just that sense of right and wrong. It affected them socially, individually, environmentally, generationally, and even cosmically. An entire book, I'm not kidding, an entire book could be written on just the implications of the fall to science and all of the other disciplines of life and how we should view them and interpret them. But there are many other subjects addressed by chapter 3 as well. Back in 2001, I preached five sermons from Genesis 3 showing how Satan used all the high-pressure sales techniques, 26 in all, that are used by salesmen to sell you that, you know, timeshare property. And it also gives hints as to how you can resist those sales techniques. You see, Satan doesn't just use this, and salespeople don't just use it to get you to buy materialistically, but he also uses it, and other people use it, to tempt you with sin, every kind of sin. And the reason I'm reminding you of those five sermons is to show you again that there is so much truth that is hidden in every one of these chapters in Genesis. I love the way that Cornelius Van Til used Genesis 1 through 3 to illustrate various parts of his apologetics course. If you've read through his books, you'll see he's constantly going back to these chapters, especially chapter three. I just think it's brilliant, his usage of this. By the way, another book that's just recently come into print, it used to be only on tape, and I used to always be recommending people listen to Greg Bonson's tape on the apologetic implications of self-deception. Well, now I just discovered there's a book out. that must have been transcribed on that. So these are the kinds of things that you see chapter by chapter that shape our thinking and help us to interpret the rest of the Bible and to interpret culture. And this morning, I'm not gonna be able to do justice to showing how this book really is the presuppositional foundation for the rest of the Bible. But I'm just giving you some sample ideas for your further study. Now, in terms of an overview of the whole book, I'll be giving you some under Christ, but, you know, you can get that anywhere. It's really easy to give an overview of the history of this book. I want you to dig deeper and to see there's so much that is hidden within that history that God wants to grab us and transform our lives with. Let me just mention three other implications of the fall. The cosmic aspect of the curse was thorns and thistles and death, and the whole creation, according to Romans, became subject to futility, entered into the bondage of corruption, and began to groan unto the curse. And we saw in our Revelation series that even the planets and the stars show evidence of this curse. But God holds back the curse. Why does He do this? People call it common grace or resistance to evil, however you do it, but it's for the benefit of the elect. God holds back the curse. Why? Because He's eventually going to transform this planet, and He does not allow the curse to completely destroy the world. So let me give you one example. Genesis 8 guarantees that God will not totally destroy planet Earth again during history. Genesis 8, 22 says that there will always be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night, and he guarantees that these, quote, shall not cease, unquote. Genesis 8, verse 22. Now that is a presupposition that will revolutionize your eschatology. It's also something that will help you to not fall into the fear mongering and the hysteria of this global warming hysteria movement that's trying to say, oh man, if we don't allow the state to become omnipotent and to get involved in everything, time as we know it is going to cease. We're not gonna have the summers and the winters and all this. That's absolute nonsense. Generationally, the curse was passed on to their descendants. In the next chapters, God's grace pulled many of Seth's descendants out of sin and bondage and passed on the faith through their descendants. But Cain's descendants persisted in rebellion. So we see covenant succession of, believe it or not, rebellion throughout this book and covenant succession of God's kingdom within Christian families. But then in chapter six, Christians, those were the descendants of Seth, began marrying unbelievers, perhaps thinking that They can win these people to Christ after they've married them through love. Well, the exact opposite happens. You do not want to marry unbelievers. Why? Because you may be starting a long line that will not break of covenant succession of unbelief. So stories like this in Genesis are designed to captivate our minds and to tell us, look, we've got to take seriously the covenant. Apart from God's grace, covenant succession, could lead to a succession of unbelief. Now, environmentally, the ground itself was cursed. The second law of thermodynamics began to work against them rather than for them. Now, if you want books that draw out many presuppositions, foundational truths that you're not going to get in your ordinary commentaries, let me recommend three books to you right now. These three books really dig deep. Gary North's book, The Dominion Covenant, is perhaps the finest of Gary North's economic commentaries on the Bible. I love this book. It is absolutely fabulous. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant. Jonathan Sarfati's commentary, The Genesis Account, is perhaps the finest uncompromising treatment of Genesis 1 through 11 that is available today. He only covered the first 11 chapters. It's about yea thick. It's a big book. But he's done an absolutely fabulous job on that book. Henry Morris, while a dispensationalist and not always accurate, has done an exceedingly good job on his commentary of the whole book of Genesis, and it's called The Genesis Record. Now, these three authors, I'm not guaranteeing that they get everything right, but what I like about those three books is that they point the way, at least in a in a introductory fashion to how Genesis can be applied to all of life and show that Genesis really is a foundational book. I've put a couple of pictures, I think the top two pictures in your outline, that show how unbelievers attack Genesis. I think they do so because Satan knows, and they seem to know intuitively, that if they go after Genesis, they can castrate Christianity as a whole, and they have succeeded in doing so in our generation. Now Christians, when they're engaging in apologetics, where are they shooting? They're not shooting at the pagans foundations. They're shooting at the balloons, you know. Is it balloons on top of that one? Maybe it's a different one. But they're shooting at the fruit that comes out of these presuppositions. But until we learn that Genesis calls us to a presuppositional battle, we've got to deal with foundations, we're not going to make forward progress. And I wish I had time to go through all of the chapters and show similar principles throughout every chapter that deals with psychology, marriage, relational problems, how this book is a rebuke to the United Nations, and many other foundational truths. Maybe I'll preach on Genesis sometime. I'll have a heyday if I ever go through Genesis. I love this book. Fascinating book. But I do want to spend some time in every book of the Bible on the subject of Christology. Christology is just the study or the doctrine of Christ. Contrary to what some people think, God the Son was not absent in Genesis chapter 1. What the Father planned and willed in creation and what the Spirit of God was energizing in chapter 1 verse 2, because He's hovering, the Spirit is hovering over those waters, right? God the Son was also creating. And by the way, I mentioned earlier that early, Jews prior to the time of Christ speak of three beings in this chapter Not three beings three personalities talking to each other, but they're all one God they speak of it as being Elohim the Spirit and the Mimra Mimra's word and That's exactly what John one says, isn't it? The Trinity was there And I've already quoted John 1. Let me quote from Colossians 1, 15 to 18, which is kind of shocking to modern hearers when they hear John, I mean Paul, speaking of Jesus creating. They say, Jesus wasn't even in existence yet. Well, let's see what he has to say. Paul spec of Jesus in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation for by him. And we're still talking about Jesus by him. All things were created that are in heaven, that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things. and in him all things consist, and he is the head of the body, the church who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence." Now many are nervous about saying that Jesus is the creator and sustainer of all things, but that's exactly what Paul says. Granted, it was the person of Jesus before he had a human nature. It was God the Son, but it was the same person. And if you don't affirm that, you're holding to what the early church called heresy. If scripture itself speaks of Jesus being present in Genesis 1, it is not an anachronism. the person of Jesus as God the Son was present. Okay, I'm just giving that by way of background. And I don't have time to develop it, but Jesus was intended to be mankind's Sabbath rest even before the fall happened. Now, chapter 2, verses 2 through 3, God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made. Now that Sabbath was a symbol of Christ and Genesis 3 indicates that God's Shekinah glory presence came into the garden and it says it was walking, so this is a theophany, Theophanies in the Old Testament were God the Son making himself visible in some manifestation, walking in the garden in what the literal Hebrew says was the day of his presence. The day of His presence would be the Sabbath. And Meredith Klein shows how the text indicates that this was one of their customary meetings on the Sabbath, is what the Hebrew indicates with God the Son. Now, of course, it ended up being a meeting of judgment rather than blessing and rest, but Jesus was Adam and Eve's Sabbath rest before the fall. He continues to be our Sabbath rest after the fall. Now, obviously, after the fall, they had to look forward to something happening. The incarnation had to happen. His life, his death, his resurrection had to happen. But it's only in Christ that we can find fulfillment and satisfaction. Now, many have pointed out that the sacramental tree of life was a symbol of Jesus. It symbolized the fact that Christ is the only source of life for man before the fall and after the fall. So the moment the fall happened, they were banished from the tree of life in chapter 3, verse 24. You cannot have the sacrament of Christ if you have rejected Christ, if you've fallen from Christ. But God reverses that through salvation. Genesis 2, verse 7, chapter 22, verses 2 and 14 all show Jesus is having restored mankind not only to the paradise that was lost, but to the tree of life that was lost. So when we eat the sacrament, we're doing exactly the same thing. It is symbolizing that Jesus is our life. He is the tree of life. Jesus is also the covenant Lord. Anytime you see the word Lord in all capital letters in the New King James, you know that it's his covenant name, Yehovah. That's an easy way to find it. And the first time this covenant name is used is in Genesis 2 verse 4 where God is giving instructions to Adam. Now, there is controversy in even Reformed circles of whether Genesis 1 through 2 is a covenant. You know, was the Westminster Confession correct when it called it the covenant of works or the covenant of life? And we say, well, of course, there's scriptures in Jeremiah and other places that clearly call it a covenant, but all you really needed without those later scriptures is the fact that he uses his covenant name, right? His covenant name, Yehovah. After man's rebellion in chapter three, God pursues Adam and Eve. They run, God pursues them and he catches them. This is Calvinism in a nutshell. Romans 3 verse 11 says, there is none who understands, there is none who seeks after God. That was certainly true of them. If it had not been for God's sovereign grace pursuing them, they would not have been saved. And since this was a theophany pursuing them, I believe it was God the Son. So Christ is the pursuer of sinners. Now I want to part for a couple of minutes on Genesis 3.15. This is often called the first gospel. And actually, in many commentaries, they'll say this is the first time that Christ is actually explicitly referred to. I disagree with them, but that's OK. It is clearly it is the first clear reference to Jesus and his work. And it is pretty amazing what it does refer to, not only that Jesus will be related to humanity, but other things as well. So let's read. I'm going to begin at verse 14. Chapter three, verse 14. So Yehovah God said to the servant, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. Now I'm not going to give an adequate exegesis of this, but let me give you five clear things about Christ and the gospel that are mentioned here. First, the I will shows that salvation is initiated by God and achieved by God. It's not man's will that counts, it's God's will that counts. So this gospel is the gospel of sovereign grace. Second, the phrase the seed shows that Christ will be related to humanity. If he's not related to humanity, he cannot be the seed. Third, the odd language, the seed of the woman, shows that even though Jesus was descended from Adam and Eve, remember that Eve was created from Adam, right? So everybody descends from Adam. So even though that is true, Christ would come into existence in a different way than all other humans. All other humans received both their physical DNA and their souls from both parents. That was not true of Christ. He was the seed of the woman and only of the woman. And thus, Jesus did not inherit a sin nature through a soul from the human father. I hold to tradutionism. There's different theories out there. But Jesus was connected to humanity through the woman alone. Any DNA connection to humanity came from Eve. His soul came from Eve, not from a human father. So even though this is cryptic, from hindsight, we know it is very precise. It's a veiled reference to his virgin birth. Fourth, salvation would be achieved by the Messiah through his own personal suffering, because the text says that the enemy, quote, shall bruise his heel. Bruised heels are painful. Not as painful as a crushed head, but they're painful. Yet it says, fifth, that the Christ would destroy Satan in the process. He shall bruise your head. So it's a marvelous prophecy of Jesus and of the gospel of sovereign grace. Now, there's only one reference to a kinsman redeemer in Genesis, which is the Hebrew word ga'ol or ga'al. It's spelled different ways in the Hebrew. Book of Ruth and the book of Leviticus is just full of references to the kinsman redeemer, but this is the only place that you will find it. It's Genesis 48, verse 6, where Jacob refers to God as the messenger. How could God be the messenger? You know, a messenger is somebody who's taking a message from somebody else. Well, this is God the son, the word, right? So Jesus is the messenger of God. He is the word of God. So he refers to God as the messenger who has redeemed me from all evil. Now that word redeemed is a fascinating word because it shows that this messenger had to have been physically related to Jacob. And you look at that and you say, well, that's impossible. How in the world could God be related to Jacob? As Kidner points out in his commentary, the word redeemed expresses the protection and reclamation which a man's goel or kinsman provided in times of trouble. So this is yet another passage that shows that the Christ is both Yehovah God and a kinsman or relative to Jacob. God the Son would in some way descend from Jacob, obviously only as to his humanity, but he's a kinsman. Of course, that was hinted at already in Genesis 3.15. Now, many scriptures typify the fact that this kinsman redeemer would give his life for his people. The sacrifices that God instituted throughout the book of Genesis, and I've listed a whole bunch of them for you there, foreshadow the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins. And some people are very skeptical of how much they really knew. Well, we don't have a lot recorded, but the New Testament and other passages indicate they knew a whole lot more than people give them credit for. For example, Jesus said this about Abraham. See if I can find it here. He said, your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day and he saw it and was glad. Abraham knew about Jesus and his coming and his day and the things that he would do. Now, I'm not going to take the time to develop it, but I believe that the ark that Noah built was a type of Christ and of the body of Christ. The church, in other words, only in Christ can there be salvation from judgment. In Genesis 14. the pre-incarnate Christ either literally appears as a human priest—in other words, as a theophany—or Or it was a godly priest who has no genealogy, so as to typify Jesus. And there's debate in the commentaries on that. But either way, Psalm 110 and Hebrews 5 through 7 use Melchizedek to point to Jesus. Melchizedek was a priest and a king, as Jesus was a priest and a king. He's called the King of Salem, which means the King of Peace, just as Jesus was the King of Peace. Now I wanna spend about five minutes describing the amazing picture of Jesus in Genesis 15. And if you want the second most important passage in Genesis, this is definitely it. This is incredibly important passage. So if you turn there, Genesis chapter 15, I'm gonna begin reading at verse one. After these things, the word of Yehovah came to Abraham in a vision, saying, Do not be afraid, Abraham. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward. But Abraham said, Lord God, what will you give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? Then Abraham said, Look, you have given me no offspring. Indeed, one born in my house is my heir. And behold, the word of Yehovah came to him, saying, This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir. Then he brought him outside and said, Look now toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to number them. And he said to him, So shall your descendants be. It's really hard for me to read a big passage like this and not stop and comment, but I got to keep going. Verse 6, and he believed in Yehoah and he accounted it to him for righteousness. There's so much tied up in these verses. Then he said to him, I am Yehoah who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, how shall I know that I will inherit it? So he said to him, bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. Then he brought all these to him and cut them in two down the middle and placed each piece opposite the other, but he did not cut the birds in two. Now this cutting of the animals in two was a common feature in the establishing of covenants. And I've put in your outlines there, Jeremiah 34 is just one example to illustrate that. That was a time when Israel made covenant with God. So they got a calf, They killed it, they cut it in half, divided those two halves, and Israel marched between the two pieces of that animal. What they were symbolically saying is, hey, if we break this covenant, may we be killed just like this calf was killed. May we be cut apart. And they were saying, this is a substitute as well. So they're looking forward to Jesus being a substitute on their behalf. But every covenant has a reference to blood. Well, let's keep reading at verse 11. And then when the vultures came down on the carcasses, Abraham drove them away. Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Then he said to Abram, know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them 400 years, and also the nation whom they serve I will judge. Afterward they shall come out with great possessions. Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried at a good old age, But in the fourth generation, they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And it came to pass, when the sun went down, it was dark, that, behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch." This is a theophany. A smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. So here is a theophany of God, I believe it was God the Son, passing between the pieces of the animal. Now this is huge. Instead of Abraham passing between those pieces, as would have been normal, God passed between those two pieces, in effect saying, if this covenant is broken, may I be cut off from the land of the living. And so this was a symbol, a representation of the death and suffering of Jesus who obtained our happiness and joy. Now I believe it was Jesus in his pre-incarnate form who passed between those pieces. His body was broken and his blood was shed because we broke the covenant. He was a substitute for all who put their faith in Jesus. And then God goes on to finish the covenant of the remaining verses. Now I do want to point out one more thing from that passage that is intriguing. Some people say it's a problem. It's not a problem for us, but some people say God never kept his promise. Here is the most important promise God ever gave saying, let I be killed if this covenant is broken and God promised to give Abraham the land and Abraham never inherited the land. And they say God broke his word. And I say, no, no, no, no, no. Anybody who was reading that, knowing the God of truth, would conclude Abraham would have to be resurrected in order for this to be fulfilled, and that's exactly what Hebrews 11 says. By the way, this is a fantastic passage for disproving full preterism. On the full preterist system, there is absolutely no time in history or in eternity when Abraham could inherit the world. Because on their system, there is no end to the world. There's no time in the future that all of the glorified saints are going to inherit the world. And so this is one of the best proof texts you could give to disprove full preterism. Okay, some might question whether Isaac is a type of Christ in Genesis 22, but it seems like Hebrews 11, 19 treats him as a figure of Jesus. And I'll skip over that. If we skip the I Am passages that also point to Christ, we come to the point that says that Christ is the God of the afterlife. Genesis 26 verse 24 says that God appeared to Isaac and said, I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not fear for I am with you. I will bless you and multiply your descendants for my servant Abraham's sake. Now Jesus quotes this verse in a collage of, this verse in Exodus 3, 6, and 15, to prove that Abraham was alive after he died. Okay? Jesus said, God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. So if God was still the God of Abraham after Abraham died, Abraham must have been alive after he was dead. So this verse, even though it's only a hint of that, shows that Christ is the God of the afterlife. And in chapter 35, verses 1 through 15, we see that He is our sanctifier who cleanses us from our idols and sins and makes us more and more conformed to His image. So that is an incredibly fast overview of the Christology of the work. Maybe one of the elders will take each one of those things and do a communion meditation on it, because each one you could spend a lot more time on. Now as far as the structure of the book, I'm gonna just barely introduce you to it. There are beautiful substructures, including chiasms within the major structures of the book, but almost all conservative scholars, And really, I think most liberal scholars as well recognize that the book is clearly divided by ten Toledot statements. That's a Hebrew word, Toledot. I have circled them with green in my Bible. So the first occurrence is translated as history in chapter 2, verse 4. The next one is translated as genealogy in chapter 5, verse 1. So you can see that this word toledote can be translated more than One way and if you look at your outlines the first verse in every section has that word Toledot in it You'll find you'll you'll guess at what that is Toledot can mean generations Genealogy or something that proceeds from you or a history of but it's pretty common knowledge that the ten Toledots structure of the book Now the only section that isn't preceded by a Toledot statement is the prologue, and that is because there was nothing in creation that could produce creation. Everything in chapter 1 verse 1 through chapter 2 verse 3 was simply created by God out of nothing. So the word Toledot would not be appropriate. But from that point on, the text is punctuated by Toledot statements, and there's a back-and-forth literary pattern that scholars call narrative genealogy, narrative genealogy, narrative genealogy. It's an NGNGNGNGN pattern. Now, chapter 2, verse 4 says, this is the toledote of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and that should end there with a period. This is not a second creation account, but instead presupposes the creation events earlier. It's actually going back to day 6, but having affirmed that God created the heavens and the earth on day 1, He now affirms that the earth begets something. God created on day one with a purpose. It wasn't random. The purpose was to give this world to man. So the crowning purpose was man. James Jordan says, man is presented as one of the begettings of heaven and earth, the product of earthy dust and heavenly breath. God creates from nothing. Heaven and earth and human beings are fruitful by begetting. And so the first, Toledot section focuses on Adam. The next Toledot section, chapter 5, verse 1 through chapter 6, verse 8, is the Toledot of Adam. So the focus is not going to be on Adam, but on the children Adam begot. Toledot always has to do with what a person or a thing produces, what flows from him. So what did Noah produce in the next section? It's not purely the history of Noah since the history of Noah began actually in the previous section. Rather this speaks to what Noah produced or the significance of his history. His main Toledot features were ark, a renewed creation, a renewed covenant, and his children. And the word Toledot can cover all of that. The next section begins with the sons of Noah, their Toledot, and the nations that flowed from those sons, 70 nations in all. And I'm going to skip over all of the rest of the Toledots because we don't have time. And I'm going to end by just mentioning two other central purposes of Genesis. Most people recognize that this book introduces the reader to the people of God and to the line of the coming Messiah, and the literary techniques of doing so are just absolutely gorgeous. They're beautiful. But there's another central purpose that is shown in the Joseph story, and actually is shown in the creations, is shown in almost every chapter of this book, and that is God's sovereign providence, God's sovereignty. It's a unifying scene that you find in the chapters. I think the Joseph story is one of the most brilliant displays of the sovereign providence of God. But Genesis demonstrates God's sovereignty over creation, history, conception. Wow. Just read all the conception stories and how God opens wombs and He closes wombs. God is sovereign over conception. of the boundaries of nations, so many other things. And a central message in His sovereignty is His absolute sovereignty over man's salvation. God's unconditional election can be seen in God choosing Abel over Cain, and a similar sovereign choice of Seth, Noah, Abraham, Jacob versus Esau. These were all chosen for no cause in them. It was an election based purely upon God's sovereign good pleasure. Well, this means that God gets all the glory for our salvation, doesn't it? But it also means we're secure in our salvation. We can glory in the God of Genesis. There are a lot of other cool things in this amazing book. Hopefully I've whetted your appetite. So that you can do your own study, but let's close out in prayer father We are thankful for your word and the inexhaustible riches that are found in it We could spend many many hours and still not fully plumb the depths of Genesis and we're grateful for this wonderful gift from your hand I pray that As we go book by book through the Bible, you would help us to understand some of the key features and get a deeper appreciation for the gifts that you have given to us. Do bless this, your people, as they have heard your word and as they respond to your word in singing. In Jesus' name I pray.