Introduction to Genesis

The Bible’s Opening Revelation and a Prayer for Preaching

The word of the Lord says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Amen. Amen.

Well, we'll remain standing for just a moment. I'd like for you to pray with me before I preach, as is my custom to always offer a prayer for the preaching of the word of God. Father God, we come to you in Jesus' name, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

And we know that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. So Lord, as we come to you today, though we will be spending our time most in the old covenant scriptures, Lord, may we not ever forget that the very purpose of the old covenant is to point to Jesus Christ.

And Lord, that everything that was lost in Genesis is gained in him. So may it be, Lord, that we never take our eye off of our Savior as we study your holy scriptures. I pray, Lord, especially that you would keep me from error, for I am a fallible man.

I am capable of error, and for the sake of your people and for the sake of your great name and for the sake of my conscience, I would pray to be protected from that. And I pray, Father, for the here, Lord, for the believer, that they would be bolstered in their faith, that they would be encouraged, challenged, and spurred to good works.

And Lord, for those who do not yet know Christ, that today would be a day of reckoning for them, that they would face the truth, that the truth would cut them like a two edged sword. And Lord, they would be laid bare before you and that they would call out in repentance and faith to the only one who can save.

And Father, we pray all this in the name that is above all names, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Oh, we are beginning something new today. It's the first Sunday in September. And just so happens that a few months ago I completed a study of the book of First Corinthians.

And it has been since I began preaching here my custom to preach through whole books of the Bible. And in an elders meeting not too many months ago, we were talking about what maybe should come after First Corinthians.

And I brought up the point that it had been a long time since I had preached through an Old Testament book on Sunday morning. I've taught through Old Testament books on Wednesdays. I've taught Bible studies, but I had not done an exposition of an Old Testament text on Sunday morning.

In fact, I couldn't remember having done an entire book. So today is the beginning, and I dare not try to give you an idea of when the end will be, because Genesis is 50 chapters that are subdivided into 10 major divisions and two larger divisions of that.

And I think the first major division from chapter one to chapter 11 could take two years by itself if the time were allowed. So I don't even pretend to tell you how long this is going to take. And I said in First Corinthians I was going to do it in a year and it took 18 months.

So even then I wasn't completely correct. I don't even want to try this time. But there has been a struggle in my preparing this series because I was struggling with where to begin. And there is a tendency, especially with me, to want to dive right in and begin investigating the text.

Just start with the exposition one, verse one, you know, first word, start going down the list. And when I began to think about that, I started to think about the fact that I just finished teaching a series on how to study the Bible.

And as I taught that series, one of the things that I taught in that was that if you're going to study a book of the Bible, that you should begin with not only the context of the passages that you're looking at, but you should also look at the context of the book itself.

Who wrote it? When was it written? Why was it written? To whom was it written? And what is the major theme of the book? And so that's what we're going to do today. We're going to outline Genesis. And I want to warn you, in a sense, today may feel more like a lecture from a college professor than it does a sermon from a pastor.

The Pentateuch as the Foundation of the Bible

But never you forget that part of worship is learning about God and his word. So I've been told you're more of a teacher than a preacher. Well, I shout enough. I think I qualify. If that's what some people think it means to preach, I promise it will not just be a dead lecture, but I will be digging into some things that you may have never heard.

I may be using some language with which you are unfamiliar, and I'm doing so because I think it is profitable for you and it is necessary to a right understanding of this book. Every passage of scripture sits within a context.

Every book also sits within a context. So what I want to introduce you this morning, the title is actually a little miscommunicating. It says Introduction to Genesis, but I'm actually going to introduce you to something a little broader, something called the Pentateuch.

The Pentateuch is a big, fancy word which simply refers to the first five books of the Bible. It comes from the word tuchioi, which means scroll, and penta, which means five. If you're familiar with like a pentagram and things like that, something that has five sides or whatever, it's a five scroll book.

We often think of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as five different books, but it's really not. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are the books of Moses, but it's really the story from beginning to end that Moses wrote for us to help us to understand the beginning of our universe, the beginning of our world, the beginning of man, the beginning of sin, and the beginning of the Hebrew people.

Next week, I'm actually going to look at all of the beginnings in Genesis. That's my second sermon. I'm going to look at how many things actually started in the book of Genesis. I'm at 16 so far. So you have a 16 point sermon next week, at least.

But there's so many things that have there. That's what Genesis means. It means beginning. And so many things have their beginnings in Genesis. But again, Genesis also begins what we call the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Torah, also known as the law.

But in the New Testament, commonly referred to as the writings of Moses. Griffith Thomas said this, the five books of the Pentateuch record the introduction of the divine religion into the world. Each book gives one phase of God's plan, and together they constitute a unity.

Genesis speaks of the origin of the religion and of the people and of God choosing as his medium. Exodus records the formation of the people as a nation and the establishment of God's relationship with it.

Leviticus shows the various ways in which this relationship was maintained. Numbers shows how the people were organized for the purpose of commencing the divine religion in the promised land. And this book also tells of the nation's failure and the consequential delay with the reorganization in the wilderness.

Then Deuteronomy shows how the people were prepared while on the border of the promised land for the entry was soon to follow. So you see, it's all one story. It's five phases of one story of one people that begin with the words in the beginning.

God created the heavens and the earth. By the way, that's the name of it in Hebrew. And in Greek, the name is Genesis from the word Gine, which means origin, root or beginning. You've heard the word gene.

If we talk about your genes or your origins, that's the that's that's an English derivation of the Greek gene. It means the beginning or origin. So that's what we call it. But in Hebrew, it is called Bereshit.

Bereshit means in the beginning. Simply the first three words, Bereshit, it is in the beginning. So that's what this book is. It's the beginning, but it's not only the beginning of the Bible. It's not only the beginning of the Old Testament.

It's the beginning of a five part story. Genesis to the Exodus, to Leviticus, to Numbers and to the book of Deuteronomy. And since the whole Bible is actually reliant upon those five books, in fact, I challenge you, remove those five books from your Bible and try to understand it.

Take out Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and start with Joshua and see if it makes any sense. It really won't. The Bible is founded on this foundation of the writings of Moses and everything else that comes after that points back to Moses.

This is why the Pentateuch is so often attacked by the unbelieving world, because unbelievers rarely aim their guns at your ceiling. They aim their guns at your foundation. Right? If you're at war with somebody, they don't attack your walls.

They attack your foundations, because if they can cause the foundations to crumble, everything else falls down with it. Therefore, if the Pentateuch is the foundation of the whole Bible, the attack from the world is going to be against the foundation.

And therefore, that is what we see. We see the world attacking the foundation of the first five books of the Bible. Dr. Merrill Unger says this, he says, the foundation of all revealed truth and of God's redemptive plan is based on the Pentateuch.

If this foundation is unreliable, the whole Bible is unreliable. Hear that again. The whole Bible is founded on the Pentateuch. If the foundation is unreliable, the Bible is unreliable. Now, I want to I want to mention, having said that, it has become very popular not just in the world, but in the church to divorce the Old Testament from our faith.

There was a very famous pastor. He has one of the largest churches in the United States who recently made the comment just in the last few years that the goal of Christianity is to unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament scriptures.

And the phrase, and I went back and listened to him in context because I wanted to know what he was saying, and essentially his point was simply to be made. It doesn't matter what you believe about Genesis.

It doesn't matter what you believe about Exodus. It doesn't matter what you believe about any of these things. What really matters is that you believe in Jesus. That sounds very spiritual. It sounds very nice.

But here's the problem. Everything that you know about Jesus is based on what you learn in Genesis. Everything that matters about sin, redemption and salvation is dependent. You unhitch from that and you're in a lot of trouble.

You throw that away. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. One of the most famous, having said that, I want to move on. One of the most famous attacks against the Pentateuch is still very popular today.

Rejecting the Documentary Hypothesis

And this is where it's going to get a little technical. So forgive me if this is, don't check out is what I'm saying. Stay with me because what I'm about to tell you, you might say, I don't know why I need to know this.

I'm going to explain why you need to know this, but let me explain what it is first. There is something called the documentary hypothesis. How many of you are familiar with the documentary hypothesis?

OK, good. Nobody knows. I can spend a few times. I don't have to feel like I'm repeating something everybody knows. The documentary hypothesis regards the authorship of the Pentateuch. Now, I have said several times already, I believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

Well, I would and I would go on to say he wrote all of it, except a few parts, specifically the parts that refer to his death. I think that was probably written by Joshua because it'd be really hard for him to describe his own death and burial.

I mean, you know, not not impossible for God to give him that revelation, but I don't think that that's a necessary jump. I think we can say that Joshua, his second in command, would have been right to have completed the book and added a bookend with his death and burial.

There's also a few places where it seems like Joshua may have included a few lines in Genesis and Exodus and Numbers because there are some places where it says, and it's called this and to this day, which seems to indicate that this is something that where it was called something else at the time of Moses, but now it's called this.

And so there's a sort of like possibly what we might call an editorial note that was added. I don't have a problem with that either. What I have a problem with is those who would say Moses did not write it.

And the documentary hypothesis is this. The books of Moses were not written by Moses. They were written by a committee later during the time of the Babylonian captivity and after. So you're talking about several hundred years.

After Moses and David and Solomon, you're talking about a very long time after there were supposed to be four different groups that wrote different parts. And these four different parts were then combined to create the Pentateuch.

I want to read from the New World Encyclopedia. I don't normally quote encyclopedias, but sometimes they do well. And I think it describes it well. In biblical scholarship, the documentary hypothesis proposes that the Pentateuch was not literally revealed by God to Moses, but represents a composite account from later documents.

Four basic sources are identified in theory design designated as the Yahwist, the Elohis, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomic, usually dated from the 9th or 10th through the 5th centuries BC. So basically, here's the argument.

If you read the Pentateuch, if you read Genesis through Deuteronomy, you'll see sometimes where God is referred to as Yahweh or Jehovah. You'll see other times where God is referred to as Elohim. And what they say is the times that God is referred to as Yahweh is written by one group and the times he's referred to as Elohim is written by another group.

And these two accounts are pressed together. And then you have a third group that were the priestly class who came upon and wrote most of Leviticus and the ending of Exodus, which has all the laws. And then you have the Deuteronomic, which says Deuteronomy was written by an entirely different group.

And so that becomes, you know how a documentary is put together. Several sources are drawn together to make one story. And they say the documentary hypothesis, you have several sources come together to make one story.

Sounds good, right? It's actually very wrong, and we'll talk about why in a moment. But the point is this, you say, why do I need pastor? I came today to be encouraged. I didn't come here for this college lecture.

Let me tell you why you need to know this. Number one, if you have a child or grandchild who is going to college and they are taking sociology, I have a degree, social science. I know if they go to take sociology, social science, psychology or any of the other disciplines which make them study the humanities, they will be forced to take courses on religious history.

And almost to a man, the modern university professor will say Moses didn't write the Pentateuch. It was written by a committee about 500 years before Jesus. Now, don't you think your kids should hear about this here rather than there?

Don't you think you should be able to answer the questions that your kids are going to ask when they go there? But I have a second reason as to why you should know this. How many of you are familiar with a man named Jordan Peterson?

Wow, really? I would have thought more of you. OK, Jordan Peterson is a pretty famous conservative voice. He is a professor from Canada and he has made himself very popular with conservatives because a lot of what he says makes a lot of sense.

But he is not a Christian and he doesn't claim to be. I read his book last year because I knew a lot of other people were reading it and I wanted to see what he had to say called Twelve Rules for Life.

And in his book, Twelve Rules for Life, he espouses the documentary hypothesis over and over. And he doesn't even try to defend it. He just says it is. He doesn't try to make the point, he just says this is the way everybody knows this.

Only the ignorant backwood hillbilly would believe that Moses actually wrote the Pentateuch. We know. You see how confident ignorance can be. We know Moses didn't write this. No, you don't. In fact, I want to give you some some reasons why I reject the documentary hypothesis.

A few thoughts for you if you are going to go out. Oh, by the way, if you ever watch the History Channel, it comes up on there sometimes, too. If you look up arguments against the Bible, it'll come up there on the Internet, too.

So let me challenge you with several reasons why you should reject the documentary hypothesis. Number one, there is absolutely no manuscript evidence at all at any time to support any type of editorial work done to the Pentateuch during the time suggested or even before.

There is no evidence. It's absolutely a theory based on nothing except conjecture. There's no evidence at all for it. That's number one. Number two, among those who espouse it, there is wide disagreement as to what parts were put together by whom.

So they don't even agree among themselves as to who is the Yahwist, who is the Elohis, who is the priestly and who is the Deuteronomic. The only parts that they really seem to agree on are the Deuteronomic and even those are debated.

They don't even agree. Number three, there is archaeological support for the writings, customs and religious knowledge that is contained in the Pentateuch as being from the time period of Moses. So there's actually more support that this writing was during that time based on how it's written, the language that is used, and all of these other things fit into the time of Moses, not a thousand or fifteen hundred years later.

And finally, and this should also make us think, there is an internal unity and coherence within the Pentateuch that does not support a cut and paste origin. But if you would like one more piece of evidence, I'd like for you to turn to John chapter five, because this is if you if you really want to be convinced, as I hope you do, I hope Jesus could convince you, because this is the part that I think is the most important.

If you go to John chapter five and go to verse forty five, John five forty five. Do not think that I will accuse you to the father. This is Jesus speaking, by the way. So do not think that I will accuse you to the father.

There is one who accuses you, Moses, on whom you have set your hope, for if you believed Moses, you would have believed me for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

All right, so I think you get where I'm coming from now. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you have no reason to deny Moses is the author of the Pentateuch because Jesus just said it. He says, Moses wrote of me.

And if you believed what he wrote, you'd believe in me. There's no question. There's no real ambiguity here. It's not as if Jesus said, well, we don't really know what Moses wrote. And there's an objection that there was a documentary committee later.

Not that Jesus would use that language. But, you know, there was groups later that that filled in the gaps. No, he says Moses wrote of me. In fact, if you if you were to go to Luke 24, we won't go there now.

But if you were to go to Luke 24, Jesus on the road to Emmaus with the two disciples, it says, beginning with Moses, he explained himself from all the scriptures. Beginning with who? The documentary committee?

No, I mean, to be sarcastic, but you understand. Jesus believed Moses wrote the Pentateuch. So here's a question. Was Jesus just a man of his times, ignorant of the truth and not really understanding of history?

I mean, is that what we're really going to say? Or are we going to admit that Jesus knows who wrote the Pentateuch? Moses is the author of Genesis. I will stand on that. I will continue to teach that as the foundation of our study.

And if you want to take issue with it, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. But just understand, I don't see any way to get around the words of Christ. Moses wrote of me. So that deals with the issue of authorship.

Who wrote it? Moses. But I want to move now to the second question, and that is the type of literature. If we believe Moses wrote Genesis, which I do, my next question, my next issue, my next thought is, what was Moses attempting to write when he wrote it?

And by the way, we didn't deal with this question of when. I believe he wrote it during the wilderness wanderings because he died at the end of that. And he certainly didn't write it before he had the burning bush experience.

So it would have been some time between the burning bush experience and the Exodus and the wilderness wandering. So it would have been in there. And I imagine, yeah, you figure 40 years in the wilderness is a lot of downtime.

You know, a lot of time to sit down and write. So I imagine that was the time period of its writing. That would put it about fourteen hundred and fifty B .C. ish. And I'm not going to get real specific on that, but it's right around there.

Fourteen forty, fourteen fifty would have been about the time period for the writings of the first five books. So what type of literature is it? It's a huge, huge question, because if you're going to study a book, you have to know what type of literature it is.

If you went to study the Psalms and you use the same interpretational methodology that you used with Romans, then you would have a very difficult problem because the book of Psalms is written as poetry and Romans is written as didactic literature.

And the Bible has poetic, historic, didactic, apocalyptic. There's all kinds of different types of literature in the Bible. So there's not one interpretive method to use that just sort of fixes everything.

We could say the grammatical historical method is the method, but it is. But again, you start with the question of what's the grammar intending to explain? Does it explain it poetically? When the Bible talks about the trees clapping their hands, is this a literal statement or is that an anthropomorphism?

I think it's clear that it's ascribing human characteristics to non-human trees. That's what we call an anthropomorphism. So when we deal with Genesis, the question becomes, what type of literature is this?

Well, many people believe that Genesis is mythology. Now, just for a moment, I want you to consider why someone would think that. You have a talking snake. You have a woman who is turned into a pillar of salt.

You have fire and brimstone falling from the sky and destroying a city. There are places where you could understand someone reading and saying that sounds very similar to the myths of Medusa and Diana and Jupiter and all of the other Greek myths.

So I just want to be fair and say that if somebody said, yeah, I think that there's some mythology here, while I would disagree, I want to be fair and say, OK, I understand why you would think that because there are some incredible things that are stated in Genesis.

I mean, ever seen somebody turn to salt? I mean, I'm serious. I'm not, first of all, if I'm making you nervous, I don't think it's myth, but I'm sure I'm making a point here. If somebody had that understanding, I would understand from a human perspective why it was difficult.

We've never seen somebody turn to salt. We've never seen a talking serpent. We've never seen fire fall from heaven outside of a meteor crash or something. We've never seen a whole city destroyed by the sky.

And yet we're going to see all of that in the next 50 chapters. By the way, this is why I don't believe in, people get all excited, hey, they're going to teach the Bible in school. I don't want them to.

I really don't. And if you want to talk to me after about why, I'll give you a thousand reasons. But the first reason is that they will teach it as myth. They'll teach it the same way they teach the stories of the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods.

And it'll just be one more myth, one more story of myths. I don't, we don't need that. Honestly, it's not going to help. We need prayer in schools. Who's leading the prayer? Which, which imam are they going to come lead the prayer this week?

Why don't you teach your kids to pray and not expect the school to do it? I mean, just being straight. Everybody's so excited. We're going to get Bible study in school. Who's going to be teaching it? And what are they going to be teaching?

It's going to be relegated to myth and nothing more. Just just throwing that out there. So do I believe that Genesis is myth? No, I don't. I believe Genesis fits into the category of historic narrative.

You say, why do you believe that Genesis fits into the category of historic narrative? Well, the first is this. It has two primary divisions. The book is divided into two parts. The first 11 chapters we could define as primitive history, creation to Babel.

The next 39 chapters. Yeah, I'm not good at math. The next 39 chapters are redemptive history or what we might better call patriarchal history. And it is the history of the Hebrew people. And so we can take the whole book and say there's two parts.

There's primitive history, creation to Babel. There is patriarchal history. That's Abraham to Joseph. Every one of those parts is roadmapped with one phrase. These are the generations of. That statement comes up 10 times in Genesis.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth. These are the generations of Adam. These are the generations of Noah. These are the generations of Abraham. These are the generations of Isaac. Over and over and over, it is intended to provide a documented history, not a mythology.

You don't find genealogy in mythology. So the primary argument for the historicity of Genesis is that it contains within it its own statement of what it's intended to be. It is the generations of the earth and mankind and God's elect people.

Having said that, I want to add a statement. Please don't let me lose you. If I'm losing you, wake up, pretend you just drank coffee and stay with me. All this is foundational. I want to say this. And before you pull out your arrows and shoot at me, listen to me, because while I do not believe Genesis is myth, I don't.

I believe every word of it and I believe it is accurate and true. But what we need to understand, Genesis is not written as a science textbook. Having said that, I'm not saying it's unscientific or anti-scientific, but it does not use the language that modern humans who are steeped in the scientific process would use.

Genesis gives itself, like the rest of the Bible, to something called phenomenological language. Are you familiar with that word? Phenomenological simply means the language of appearance. We all use this all the time.

You've been watching the storm? So you've been seeing the news? You've been seeing the weather reports? Have you heard the weatherman say at any point the sun will rise at seven? In the morning? Did you hear him say that at some point?

The sun is going to rise at 648? Did you call the studio and say, listen here man, I know science. And that sun is not rising, we are turning toward it. And this earth is moving at several hundred thousand miles an hour.

And what's actually happening, Mr. Meteorologist, is that the world is moving, not the sun. So let me tell you, you don't know science. Would you do that? No, because you're not stupid. You understand that phenomenological language is the language that we all use to describe nature and wilderness and the world around us.

Therefore, we will see in Genesis times where we are seeing what God did and it is being described to us as we would understand it to be. It's not attempting to understand things like the atomic process or the melting point of steel or anything like that.

It's not describing to us in scientific language what happened. It's simply telling us what happened. And therefore, I will say, those who try to make an argument that Genesis is unscientific or try to force feed the modern scientific method into Genesis often find themselves at peril with both.

When it comes to creation, Genesis is primarily concerned with the who and the why. More so than with the how and the when. But we spend most of our time talking about the how and the when rather than the who and the why.

Now, does it tell us when? I think so. And we're going to talk in a few weeks. We're going to talk about timetables and old earth versus young earth and those things. And there are questions. And we're going to talk about some of the questions of does the Bible allow for a belief in evolution?

I don't believe that it does, but we're going to ask that question and answer it. Does the Bible demand that we believe in 24 literal days? I believe that they're 24 hour days, but I'm going to describe different ways of understanding that that people have had.

Were Adam and Eve real persons? This is the sticking point. There is no way, no way to come away from the New Testament without having to understand that Adam and Eve were absolutely real people. If you believe Adam and Eve were not, were just myth, then you've got a huge problem with the salvation of Jesus Christ who is called the last Adam.

So there are going to be points where I say this is a non-negotiable. This is an issue. And then I'll say these are points. I think this is this. I think this is this. But there's going to be points where I say if we don't believe this, we've gone away from orthodoxy.

But when it comes to other questions, there are going to be some places for liberty. And I think there should be. But here's the point I want to get across to you today. As we said earlier, all believers in Christ should believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

All believers in Christ should believe that Genesis is history. It is not an account of the myth of Adam or the myth of Abraham. Some people don't even believe Abraham was real. Some people believe he was a mythological patriarch.

And, of course, then there would be no Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, or the rest. So, again, my major points today have been so far. Number one, if you believe Christ, you should believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

Number two, if you believe Christ, you should believe that Genesis is history. But now I want to finish. I want to draw to a close by talking about the purpose of Genesis. We've looked at the author. We've looked at the time.

We've looked at the type of literature. I want to now look at the theme. And then we'll draw to a close. The theme of Genesis is really the encapsulation of the grand narrative of the whole Bible. Because the theme of Genesis is fall to redemption.

From creation to fall to redemption. And that's really the grand narrative of Scripture. Man, created in the image of God, falls from that place of having been created to being an enemy with God. And yet God, in His mercy, extends grace to that race of people who hate Him and provide salvation for them.

That's the theme of the whole book. And as I stated earlier, I think it was when I was praying, I quoted John Calvin who said, We have in Christ what we lost in Adam. That's the theme. Loss and restoration.

What we lost in Adam, we have in Christ. Think about how God's mercy is shown throughout Genesis. On the day that you eat of this, you shall surely die. Some people say, why was God so harsh? You know how R .C. Sproul responded to that.

What's wrong with you people? God's going to create a perfect universe with a perfect garden. You need nothing and He gives you only one command. And you can't even maintain that command. And you fly in His face and eat of His fruit and deny His sovereignty over you.

And then you're going to say, what's wrong with God? What's wrong with you? That's the real issue. What's wrong with us? We don't understand justice. We don't understand righteousness. We don't really understand God.

But even in the midst of that justice, there is grace. Genesis 3 .15. There's the promise of the one who would crush the head of the serpent. Later in the same chapter, God takes the skin of animals and He covers the nakedness of the two first parents.

He then takes and He gives the judgment against the wickedness. The Bible says the wickedness of men was only evil continually. And God takes the wickedness of men that He could have destroyed and He gives an ark.

And He says, here's grace. And it looks like a boat. And He calls them in. And then later, He takes one man out of a family of idolaters. And He says, you go into the place that I have prepared for you.

You go into this promised land. And He says, and I will make you a great nation. And I will bless you. And those who bless you, I will bless. And those who curse you, I will curse. And through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed.

And later in the book of Galatians, Paul says, that's the gospel. So we have fall and we have redemption. Even in the pages of Genesis. Is God just? Yes, but He's also merciful. And we see both in the history of Genesis.

Genesis as Historic Narrative and Phenomenological Language

When I was 19 years old, I was confronted with a man. Really, for the first time in my life, I was confronted with a man who was an atheist. I was working at a call center. America Online, if that tells you how old I am.

Is it ending around anymore? I was working at a call center. And I was talking about God. I wasn't even saved, by the way. I was unsaved, but I'd grown up in church. So I had enough to talk about. And I was talking about God.

And this atheist was sitting next to me. And he said, I don't believe that. I just know too much to believe all that. And as I began to investigate his statement, I found that he was an ex-science teacher.

His name was Eric. He was a smart, young man. Probably ten years older than me at the time. And he had already gone to school. He had already become a teacher of science. I think it was middle or high school.