Genesis • Introduction

I want to welcome you to our winter Bible study, and I mean winter. We've never had a winter Bible study before, so this is our first time. This is awesome. If you haven't gotten a book, you'll want to be sure and grab one, and you can open it up, too. There's a little place for notes for this morning for the introduction. It's a nine-week study called Divine Design, God's Unfolding Plan Through Genesis. And January is a good month for beginning new things, and we get to begin the beginning of the Bible, which is a really good fit. But the word Genesis itself means in the beginning, or it means beginning, and it's always awesome to go back and take a peek at something that's in the beginning, especially if you know a lot more about the story. And I look out over this room, and I see a lot of women who do know more about the story. But Paul and I, we were a little bit late on the draw, but we finally went to the newest Star Wars movie in January, Rogue One. Are there any Star Wars fans here? Okay, there's a couple. You're kind of tentative, like do I dare say? Even if you're not a fan, unless you've lived under a rock for 40 years, you know what Star Wars is about, right? Darth Vader, lightsabers, all that kind of thing. But it's kind of an interesting unfolding story that we've enjoyed for 40 years. Can you believe it? Forty years, before I even graduated from high school, the first movie came out. But this particular movie that we just watched a couple weeks ago takes place right before episode four, which was movie number one, but it takes us kind of back to the beginning of a part of the story. And while I was sitting there in the theater, you can't help but have this feeling like, oh, that makes sense. Now I understand, right? Plot closure here, you know? And it's so much fun, like it's really enjoyable to see those things and to just have those aha moments. Like I always wondered, why was there this vulnerability in the Death Star? It was designed that way. Now we find out that there was a designer and he implemented that. And so it's really cool. So as it pertains to the Bible, I'm not talking about Star Wars. As it pertains to the Bible, a lot of us, for 40 years maybe, have enjoyed the sequence of the Bible back and forth, filling out the unfolding story. But how enjoyable is it going to be for us now together to go back to the beginning? And I know as many times as you've read the Bible or studied, I know because I have had in writing this, I know you're going to have those moments where you go, that makes so much sense by going back to the beginning and looking at things. So I just pray that that's something that God will do for us. And even if you don't have this perspective, you know, of the big picture, maybe you even have misconceptions of the Bible, you know, I can tell you that the Holy Spirit is going to be right there with us to help us and to guide us in the things that we do want to understand. Well, the Bible teaches us right in the beginning that we are formed in the image of God. We are image bearers. His imprint is upon us. And if we are in the image of God, we should take time to understand God's plan, to understand God's truth as he reveals it to us. One barrier that we have for that is that we live in a culture that is very, very confused about truth. And that does present a barrier, that does present a problem for us. You know, and this confusion is expressed in so many ways around us, it just like presses in on us. Do any of you like to go to our little Mexican restaurant, Tacos Mi Ranchito? Oh man, that is good food, huh? But it's a busy place and you have to stand in line like 20 minutes, and 20 minutes is enough to make you smell like a burrito. Even if you didn't stay and eat lunch there, like everyone knows, oh, did you like that? Was that good? Because that smell just kind of permeates. Well, I feel like that's what it is with our culture. You know, it just presses in on us. We have no intention to smell like a burrito, it just happens. And the same way is true, we have no intention to grasp the philosophies of the world. It just sort of presses in on us. So it's good that we are in this together. You know, we're not alone. There was a man named Titus who lived in the first century and he lived on an island called Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. He had a mentor, he had a pastor. His pastor was the Apostle Paul. The Apostle Paul would encourage him, write him letters. One of those letters is in our New Testament, it's called Titus. And in that letter, when the Apostle Paul was encouraging him in the lane that he had, what God had put in his life, Paul came right out of the chute and said, I'm writing to you, he says, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth. That's why I'm writing to you, is to build up their knowledge of the truth. And Paul acknowledged that Titus lived in a tough place. He too lived in a tough culture. The people were very difficult there and the Apostle Paul acknowledged this and he said even one of their own prophets says, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. And Paul said, that testimony is true. It was a difficult place that Titus, he had his work cut out for him in bringing the knowledge of the truth. Paul's advice in this situation to Titus, he said in the opening of his letter, he says, as for you, here's my advice, teach what accords with sound doctrine. That's what Paul told Titus to do in this situation where truth was hard to come by. Teach what accords with sound doctrine. He says, enlist the older men who are sober-minded to help you with this. Enlist the older women who are reverent in how they live to help you out with this so that the word of God will not be reviled. But the point was, of all the things that Paul could have encouraged him as pathways into these people's hearts and minds, it was teach sound doctrine. So that should be good advice for us too. Not to teach what's popular, not to teach what makes us happiest, not to teach what dovetails with the philosophies around us, but to teach sound doctrine. And so that's our goal here. You know, at Women of the Word, I think we do a pretty good job of doing that. This is our eighth little booklet that we've gone through and taking either whole books or portions of books of the Bible, studying chapter by chapter, verse by verse. But I pray that as, you know, we head into this, that this is what's going to happen. This winter when I started praying about where we should go, I had a few misfires, a few paths that I had to go. But I felt like what the Lord was telling me was that passage from Titus, teach what accords with sound doctrine. And probably there's nothing better than going to the beginning, going to Genesis, and say, hey, we're made in God's image. Let's find out the truth that he wants to reveal to us right from the words that he expressed. So we also live in a culture that's confused, it's lacking in truth. We live with an enemy who sows lies and deception, particularly to our young people. And we live in a time where we need a steady diet of biblical truth, sound doctrine, and we need to meditate and ruminate on those truths to feed our spirits. So that's how we got here, this Bible study, Divine Design, God's plan through, God's unfolding plan through Genesis. Now, this, I just want to give you a little bit of prep about what to expect. This isn't technically a verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter study because if you've already figured out after today, we only have eight weeks left, and Genesis is really long, and that just wouldn't fit. So rather than going chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and being led through by the numbers, this Bible study is going to be a little bit more relational. We are going to be led through by the people, okay? Here's what I mean. Do you guys remember playing on the playground at school when you were little and there was the monkey bars? I never really thought they were fun at all, but we just did it, right? You climb up one side and you just work your way with upper body strength, which I never had, to the other side and you climb down. And now, in retrospect, I'm thinking, what is fun about that? Like, if it had been a zipline, that could be fun, but I can't imagine anything fun. But anyway, we did it. But the cool kids would grab one rung and they would use their athletic body in such a way as to swing past the next one, right? They would do skips like that. And they looked so beautiful, like the human body doing that was so beautiful. Well, we are all going to be cool kids through Genesis because what we're going to do is we're going to go, Adam and Eve in a perfect world. And then the next rung is Adam and Eve in a fallen world. We're going to swing to Noah and his wife, and then we're going to swing to Abram and Sarai, and then Abraham and Sarah, and then on and on through there. So we're going to be driven by people rather than numbers. So I just want you to know that. So there will be portions that we're going to skip. And this is going to be a little bit more of a relational Bible study. And I want to explain what I mean by that. This isn't an academic study of the book of Genesis, although that would be awesome to have an academic study, but this one isn't it. Here's what I mean. If you went to your friend's house and you walked into her kitchen and you asked the question, why is your tea kettle boiling? She could give you a correct answer to that by saying, well, the flame on my gas range is heating up the copper bottom of my kettle, and it's causing the oxygen and hydrogen molecules to excite, and to reverberate, and bump up against each other, and some are being thrown off as steam. And that would be a legitimate answer to your question, right? But is that not a technical answer to your question? Or you could walk into your friend's kitchen and you could say, why is the tea kettle boiling? And she could say, because I'm making tea. And that would be a personal answer. Still legitimate, but it would still be a proper answer to your question. Or you could walk into her kitchen and say, why is the tea kettle boiling? And she could turn around with a smile and say, I was hoping you'd have 10 or 15 minutes to have tea with me. And we could talk. And that's a relational answer to the same question. I've come to realize most of the Bible is relational. God wants to express. God is saying to us, can you sit down? I would love it if you'd sit down and have a cup of tea for 10 or 15 minutes, and we can talk about this. Now, the Bible is technical. It is academic in places. It is obviously personal, but there's so much relational to the Bible that I think we miss because we're not watching for it and we have a misconception. When I started talking to you about sound doctrine, some of you probably powered down a few notches because in your mind, you think it's academic. You think it's technical. But I hope that we're going to see through this study that's very relational. And as we go through this study of Genesis, we're going to find the relational aspects of sound doctrine through creation, through gender, through marriage, through sexuality, sibling rivalry, judgment, the effects of sin, redemption. These are all really relational things that we're going to be looking for. So some of us, probably a lot of us, we have family members, co-workers, friends and neighbors that really have fallen prey to the lies of the enemy with regard to some of those things, with regard to gender, marriage, roles of male and female, same-sex attractions, those types of things. And as we try to share God's love with them, it can create a tense environment. Sometimes we might not even feel like we know for sure exactly why we believe what we believe. So I hope that this study is going to help with that too. Sometimes when we look into the Bible, we look at it like a recipe book. Now, on what page can I find a recipe for a chocolate souffle? And we want to open our Bible and say, what page, what chapter does it tell me about this? Tell me what to think. What page, what chapter does the Bible tell me what to think about this issue? But the Bible's not like that. The Bible is an unfolding story. It is relational. God is unfolding his plan to us from beginning to end. And so it is an unfolding story of God's plan to rescue us from the broken world that we now live in and to build his own family, those that belong to him through the redemptive work of Jesus, his son. So I want to just go through a list here of what we can expect. You can tell this is an inspirational introduction. This isn't a technical introduction to the book of Genesis. So I want to share with you what we can expect to find. Because it is the book of beginnings, it's the book of firsts, we learn for the first time that God created people for his own pleasure and for relationship with him. We learn that they were created complementary toward one another. They were created male and female, not transpositional. We witness the first wedding before, even next week, before we get out of chapter 2, we witness the first wedding in the Bible between a man and a woman. And we can't help but think like we were just saying, oh, that makes so much sense. Because at the end of the story, at the end of the Bible, there's another wedding of the lamb and his bride. And so the second chapter of the Bible, the second to the last chapter of the Bible, we have these two weddings. And it's an aha moment where we go, ah, that makes so much sense, right? We see the purpose of women as life givers. It is our superpower. We sadly learn that death and struggle are introduced into our experience for the first time in history through the rebellion of man. Death and struggle did not exist before Genesis chapter 3, before we have the rebellion of man. We learn about God's justice through a global judgment. And we learn about God's preservation through that same global judgment. We learn about the birth of the Hebrew people through Sarah. We learn about the birth of the Arab people through Hagar. We see a shadow of our coming redeemer through the son Isaac. And we see a shadow of the bride of Christ through his wife, Rebekah. And then when we get to Jacob, we realize that God's plan is bigger than dysfunctional families. God's plan cannot be perverted or thwarted even through the blunders of Jacob's family. But the whole world will be blessed through that very family. And it gives us encouragement for our own lives. If any of you have the Jesus Storybook Bible, it's a great little Bible. We carry it in our bookstore. And if you're quite adult, it is awesome to pick it up and just read it cover to cover. There you go. There's an idea. If you want to tell somebody, I read the whole Bible this year. You'll have my permission. Anyway, the Jesus Storybook Bible calls it God's secret rescue plan. I love that. God's secret rescue plan to save us from this broken world. But you know, even though I think that that's really neat, God doesn't keep secrets from people who press in on him. God doesn't keep it a secret to people who want to know, who want to be his. I want to read for you Jeremiah 29 13.

The Bible isn't so much about what God wants us to do as it is about who God wants us to see. And so as you do your study guide, at the end of each week, there are three sections that I hope will be a challenge to you. And I hope that you would get to that part each week. And one is relevant to this. The Bible wants us, God wants us to see someone through the Bible. And that is his son, Jesus Christ. So each week, there's a section that's called The Unfolding Story of Jesus. And we're going to be able to try and connect the dots between what did we just study and how does it show us the unfolding story about Jesus and his redemption. There's another section each week called Cultural Confusion. And hopefully, it will lead us into understanding why I'm confused about thinking about things because the burrito effect, right? The culture has pressed in on me. And take the passage that we've studied and help us to confront any misconceptions that we have. And then there's another section each week. It's called Heart Assessment. And when we study the Bible, it's super helpful for us to look up and look at the big picture and then shrink it all the way down and look at the details that mean something to my life. So we're going to be constantly doing this, zooming out and zooming in. And if we are created in God's image, we should attempt, we should ask the Holy Spirit to make us pure image bearers, every day turning into a more pure image bearer. So that's what I mean by heart assessment there. So if you can stay with this study all the way to the end, I really think, like I have experienced in just putting together the study guide, that God is just really going to show you some really neat things. I just want to encourage, if you have looked at God's design for gender. Or if we look, when we look at God's design for gender, and if you happen to believe that gender is irrelevant or transpositional, then we want to come to Scripture with an open mind and just see what it says. And when we look at God's design for marriage, if you are not married, or if you are divorced, or if you are widowed, we want to look at Scripture for the bigger implications beyond me and my husband, but the big picture of what marriage means and the relational aspects that God has for it. If we look at God's design for women as life givers, and you either have no children, or you are single, or you have struggled with infertility, or you are put off by the idea that women should be the ones to bear children, if any of those exist, then we just want to look at the Scripture, just come to it, and see the heart that God made one gender with a nurturing aspect that is unique and significant, and He intended it to be for a purpose. So what I'm getting at is this, we can come to Scripture with lots of background, lots of backstories, right? Some are good, some are bad, some are destructive, but we just want to come to Scripture with our spirit open, being filled with the Spirit. That's why I like that this study falls on the heels of our Walking in the Spirit study, where we really were encouraging us to be filled with the Spirit, because this is what Paul told the Romans in chapter 8. He said this, he said, those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. We need to approach God's Word with our spirits filled, with the eyes of the Spirit, with our minds set on the Spirit, because if our mind is set on the flesh, that's hostile to God, and we'll find all kinds of reasons to reject what it is that we're reading. Okay, just three more thoughts before I'm going to let you guys have some discussion time. The first one is authorship. Here comes the technical part for this morning. So it's not covered in your study guide, and I just want to read a quote from Hallie's Bible handbook, because this kind of tells us who wrote the book of Genesis. And it says this, the age-old Hebrew and Christian tradition is that Moses, guided of God, composed Genesis out of ancient documents existed in his day. Moses could have gotten this information by direct revelation from God or through such historical records as had been handed down from his forefathers. This is the age-old tradition that both Christians and Hebrews hold to, that it was Moses that composed the book of Genesis. And we're just going to hold to that as well, either through records that were made starting with Adam, through Shem, through Abraham and handed down, or it could have been revelation from God. I don't know, and it doesn't say. We're not told. Second thing, I want to give you just a few tips about your study time itself. Genesis is the fourth longest book in the Bible. And even though, like I told you, we're not going to use the rungs, chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we still have a lot of reading to do. And so I kind of want to warn you and prep you that it would be wise as you open your study guide and on the front page of each new week, it says days 1 through 4, and it kind of gives you an idea of how much reading is to be done. There's an average of 20 verses per day, but it goes all the way from 3 verses to 50 verses. So if you hit a day with 50 verses, that's a lot of reading to first read it and then go back and study it through with your study guide. So I want to just prep you to craft that time to be able to do it. Plus, some of you are OCD. And when you get to the end of one week and you realize, she skipped a chapter. I'm not going to skip a chapter. And you'll want time to read the things that we're not actually covering in our study guide. So take time for that too. And the last thing I want to encourage us about is prayer. This is called Women of the Word. It's sort of our brand. We want to be women of the word, but we want to be women of prayer too. I don't know about you, but it's much easier for me to be a woman of the word than it is to be a woman of prayer. I'm just naturally given more to study and reading than I am to prayer, maybe because I'm a doer and I like to do things. And so I'm always working on the other side. So if you're like me, I just want to exhort us. We want to, after our discussion time each week, we want to have a time that we can pray together. Many of you have been here and you know this model and your discussion leader will choose what's best for your table, how to pray. But I just want to exhort us, if you're a prayer warrior, then let your light shine. If you are entering into this learning curve with prayer, then listen to the prayer warriors. Listen to how they pray. Let them be a model and say, Lord, help me grow to be that model someday. But we want to carry each other's burdens. This is the place where we can pray for one another and pray for the things going on around us. There's so many things in our world going on around us. And so there's our introduction for this Bible study. This week you get to study chapters one and two of Genesis. It's all beautiful. It's all lovely for next week. And then the week after that, it's going to come crashing. I'll just give you a warning. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the gals that have been able to enter in. And Lord, I just pray that you would be with us through the next eight weeks as we look at what you want us to see, what you want to, how you want to relate to us. And Lord, open our eyes, open our eyes to something new. The joy of discovering new things that you've put in your word to reveal to us. And we can say, oh, that makes so much sense. So Father, be with us. We pray in Jesus name, amen.