What is the Bible? Part 1 - The Beginning

Genesis 1:26–2:3 NASB95

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

Introduction

New Series: What is the Bible? God's Work of Redemption in Human History

We begin series with Genesis. “Genesis” means “beginning.” Genesis is the beginning of numerous things:

Obvious: Beginning of the Bible

Beginning of this universe and everything in it. Beginning of humanity: man and woman. Beginning of marriage and family. Beginning of work and responsibilities; laws of nature, days, stars, universes

Beginning of: created beauty, music, art, cities, culture, language

Beginning of prophecy, redemption, covenants, fulfillment of prophecies and divine promises

But also beginning of:

sin; punishment and alienation from God; death; murder & sexual sin, stealing, lying, betrayal, war, violence, authoritarianism, slavery, sibling rivalry

1. Creation: The Very Beginning (Gen 1:1-2:3)

The Author: God (Gen 1:1-2:3)

Gen 1:1: we cannot say it enough - “In the beginning God . . .” God is the author of all creation. He is the author of life and human history.

In one sense, we can say that God is the ultimate Protagonist of the human story.

He is the one who exists unto himself and relies on no one. He is the one who creates everything out of nothing. He writes the script, sets the stage, and directs and produces the story of life.

If we prefer art metaphor: God is the painter who set the canvas, decides the colors, and creates a world of his choosing. It is His masterpiece.

CS Lewis [letter to Arthur Greeves: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity), 18 October 1931]:

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

“Myth” = literary term, meaning “story.” Lewis is saying that Christianity, or the story of the Bible, is the true story—things that really happened—but it is God’s story.

Through Genesis 1, God:

Creates -

Orders (contrary to chaos) -

Designs (contrary to arbitrariness, or randomness) -

Gives Purpose and Meaning to everything, esp humanity - Purpose/meaning directly related to design

The Bible, in its very essence, then, is the story of human history written by God. And now we come to the beginning of humanity.

The Actors: Man and Woman (Gen 1:26-31)

Genesis 1:26 “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”

The greatest of all the characters of God’s story is mankind. They are set out differently from the rest by being made in God’s image.

Imago dei: reason and will, capacity for love and relationship, among other things

Both Adam and Eve made in God’s image, giving both inherent worth and value

But also makes them differently: complementary so they can work together but also play different roles in God’s story. The woman plays the wife and mother; man is the husband and father. The husband is given the duty to lead Eve, not in a domineering, authoritative way, but a loving and self-sacrificing way.

God places them in the Garden of Eden

He gives them just one negative command: do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Things go well for quite a while . . .

But then the unthinkable happens: the beginning of sin.

2. The Fall: The Beginning of Sin (Gen 3:1-13)

The Antagonist: The Serpent, The Devil (Gen 3:1-5)

Genesis 3:1–5 NASB95

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’ ” The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The first lie recorded in the Bible: “You surely will not die!” The lie to get Adam and Eve to doubt all who God is: omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient Creator

The first temptation: “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The temptation is to reject the roles God has placed them in his story and try to usurp God as the author of the story.

Rather than playing the parts of man and woman given to them by God, Adam and Eve turned to create their own stories:

The Apostates: Adam and Eve (Gen 3:6-13)

Defectors

Genesis 3:6–13 NASB95

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Here is the beginning of sin, the Fall, the event that would ever change the course of history. One small sin polluting the entire world like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water.

Eve thought the fruit looked good and “it was a delight to the eyes.” The Hebrew word refers to the idea that it appealed to the appetite. What we see here is that the appetite for food that was given to her by God to be used for good, Eve used her will to use it for bad. An appetite of the flesh is not necessarily evil; it is what we do with it.

The appeal, however, was ultimately to her sense of pride. Again, pride in and of itself is not necessarily evil. We ought to have a sense of pride when we do what is right. But Eve uses her sense of pride to take the bait that she can become independent of God, be her own God, have her own story.

And she did not keep her disobedience to herself: she gave some to Adam. And Adam follows her without hesitation.

The consequences are immediate: shame, guilt, and trying to hide from God.

And then the blame game, shifting responsibility for one’s actions to someone else and trying to justify one’s self for committing sin.

But God will have nothing to do with the blame game. He renders to each character of this story what is due to him. And so the beginning of punishment and alienation from God ensue.

3. Punishment: The Beginning of Alienation (Gen 3:14-24)

The Devil (Gen 3:14-15)

Genesis 3:14–15 NASB95

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat 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 you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

Eve (Gen 3:16)

Genesis 3:16 NASB95

To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”

Genesis 1–11:26 (4) God’s Judgments Pronounced (3:14–21)

The woman’s penalty impacts her two primary roles: childbearing and her relationship with her husband. It is appropriate punishment since procreation was central to her divine commission and because she had been instrumental in her husband’s ruin

Adam (Gen 3:17-19)

Genesis 3:17–19 NASB95

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”

Genesis 1–11:26 (4) God’s Judgments Pronounced (3:14–21)

Ironically, the ground that was under the man’s care in the garden as his source of joy and life (2:15) becomes the source of pain for the man’s wearisome existence

Everything (Gen 3:17b-18, 22-24)

Genesis 3:22–24 NASB95

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

4. What does This Mean?

Since the Bible (and hence human history) is God’s story, he has written it the way he wanted

God used frail, sinful humans and their language to write the Bible. God used human conventions of language: metaphor, hyperbole (exaggeration), riddles, similes, personification; he used different genres, like history, poetry, biography, apocalyptic symbolism—all sorts of literary techniques and genres to communicate the history of human Redemption.

(1) The Bible was not written in a mysteriously heavenly code or even secret codes.

“The Bible Code” by Michael Drosnin (1998) : If you rearrange the letters of original language of the Bible in a certain way, it foretells future coming events. Author claimed that the Bible predicted WW2, the moon landing, Watergate, JFK’s assassination, election of Bill Clinton, and much more.

But such an idea has its roots in Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) from the Middle Ages. It is occultic.

(2) We should note that we cannot take everything literally in Scripture. Not everything is meant to be taken literally.

In John 10:9 “I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.”

Rev 17 describes a harlot who sits on a beast with 7 heads and 10 horns, and the harlot is drunk on blood.

Isa 11 and Rev 7, 20 speak of “the four corners of the earth.” No one—well, no one of good reputation (maybe some on the Internet)—takes this to mean that the earth is a flat square.

Since the Bible (and hence human history) is God’s story, he gets to design the meaning and purpose for all creation

We—no one—have the right to change the script, nature of the characters, or story line

There is a blueprint, a design, by which God created us and all the universe, and we are to conform ourselves to that blueprint.

The hierarchy of creation: man as the pinnacle and most valued among all creation

Human purpose and meaning of life: to love God and worship him and enjoy him forever

Man’s role and woman’s role

Design of marriage and sexuality

Who we are as humans - in light of LGBTQ and transhumanism

Transhumanism: (1) the freedom to take advantage of any technology to change yourself in any way you desire, (2) merging the human with technology, thereby changing present human thought and action and behavior, (3) uploading our minds to a computer source, shed bodies, overcome all spatial and other limitations and live forever digitally

All these things are nothing but rebellion against God’s design and purpose, an attempt to write our own script and put ourselves in the position as God the Author.

Since the Bible (and hence human history) is God’s story, we are to live by His Word

Devil/Serpent: “Did God really say . . . ?” Adam and Eve did not live by God’s Word.

Did God really design and say that marriage is between a biological man and woman? Did God really say that having sex and not being married is a sin? Did he really say that homosexuality is a sin? Did God really design and create men to be men and women to be women?

Did God really say I have to pray for my enemies and those who are “toxic?”

To look at this idea of living by God’s Word from another angle, we can actually say that Adam and Eve were in a much better position than most American Christians today. Adam and Eve at least knew what God said. Most American Christians do not because they neither read nor study the Bible.

Charles Spurgeon once preached a sermon on the Bible, use the verse from Hosea 8:12 “Though I wrote for him ten thousand precepts of My law, they are regarded as a strange thing.”

He commented in his sermon he preached on a Sunday evening: “I come here tonight in God’s stead, my Friends, to plead with you as God’s ambassador, to charge many of you with a sin. To lay it to your hearts by the power of the Spirit, so that you may be convinced of sin, of righteousness and of a judgment to come. The crime I charge you with is the sin of the text. God has written to you the great things of His Law, but they have been unto you as a strange thing.”

[Spurgeon, Charles H.. Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 1: 1855]

“There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write ‘damnation’ with your fingers.”

Both book of Deut and Jesus remind us that “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD” (Deut 8:3; Matt 4:4).

Finally:

Since the Bible (and hence human history) is God’s story, we know what is wrong with the world

You and I, our society and culture—the entire world—know that something is wrong with the world and the people in it. There is famine, disease, starvation, war, riots, murder, school shootings, genocide . . .

But our world does not know what the root problem is.

Some say it is ignorance.

Others say it is just a misfiring of our brains from the long history of evolution.

Some think it is the lack of distribution of wealth.

“The consciousness of sin was formerly the starting-point of all preaching; but today it is gone. Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness; the religious literature of the day is redolent of that confidence. Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world's evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world's good; no help is needed from outside the world.”

[Machen, J. Gresham. Christianity and Liberalism . Unknown. Kindle Edition.]

But according to God, according to the Bible and its description of the beginning of all things, we humans are not the solution. We are the problem.

What is wrong with the world is we humans rebelling and sinning against God. “God said, ‘You shall not . . .’” But we did.

Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Yeah, but “I’m a good person.” No, you’re not:

Romans 3:10–12 NASB95

as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.”

Mark 10:18b “No one is good except God alone.”

And because we know the true problem, we know the real solution: Jesus Christ.