Gen 1-14

strange beginnings

(genesis 1-14)

Jason Procopio

Welcome back to Genesis! 

We did a series on the gospel in Genesis back in 2016; at that time we saw the first twelve chapters of the book over several weeks. We did it that way simply because Genesis is a really long book (50 chapters); if we’d just kept going we’d probably still be in the book today. So before starting it again, we’ll need to do a review of what we saw last time.

But before that… Why should we study the book of Genesis? Why is it important?

Simply put, Genesis gives us the foundation for everything that comes after. We’ve talked about this before, but think of a movie you’ve seen a hundred times, so if you’re flipping through channels on TV (those of you who still watch normal TV), and you see it’s on, you can jump in at any point and enjoy it. You can do that because you’ve seen it a hundred times—you already know the story.

A lot of Christians approach the Bible the way they’ll approach a playlist on Spotify, skipping through until they find a song they like. They pick up their Bibles, and they know that the Old Testament is kind of difficult, so they skip ahead to the New Testament, and they’ll only read the gospels and the letters. (Maybe Psalms and Proverbs too.)

The problem is that without the beginning of the story, there’s an awful lot of things that just don’t make sense—or maybe you understand it, but there’s a whole level of meaning that you’ll miss, because you don’t know the story that comes before.

Genesis lays the foundation for everything that comes after. It sets up themes that pay off in the gospels; it introduces concepts that are profoundly important for understanding what God does in the gospels, and why he does it. It introduces characters that the New Testament refers to over and over again. And most importantly, it shows us who God is, and how he interacts with his people—and that doesn’t change, from the Old to the New Testament.

Now of course, Genesis isn’t without its difficulties. It presents a world which is (obviously) very different from our own; people we see there have customs and habits and reflexes we would never have. So some of the things we see here will be really strange for us. But the intention behind the things we see—the reasons why God wants to communicate these things to his people—are still the same as they always were.

So like I said, in our previous series on this book four years ago, we looked at the first twelve chapters of Genesis, showing how even from the very beginning, we can see the seeds of the gospel planted there.

So here’s what we’re going to do today—this is going to be a very unusual message. We’re going to start by looking at a bit of background on the book, very quickly, just to orient us. 

Then we’re going to do a very quick overview of what we see in chapters 1-11. (We won’t see everything, of course, so if you’ve never read the book, I’d encourage you to go read those chapters this week; you could probably read them all in an hour.) 

After that we’re going to slow down a bit and look at chapters 12 to 14 in a little more detail. And then finally, we’re going to take a huge step back and finish by looking at what these first chapters of the book of Genesis tell us about God, and why those things matter.

Background

The book of Genesis is the first book in what is called the Pentateuch—the first five books we see in the Bible. (The word “Genesis” simply means “beginning.”)The Bible itself most often refers to these five books as “the Law of Moses” (so when we see the words “the Law of Moses” in the Bible, it’s probably not only referring to the law God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, but all of the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). 

Jesus himself says in Luke 24 that the author of this book is Moses. Moses most likely wrote it during the forty years that Israel was in the wilderness, after they left Egypt, and before they entered the Promised Land of Canaan. It’s likely that Moses drew from other sources—oral or otherwise—in his narrative; but that doesn’t change the fact that the Holy Spirit was inspiring Moses when he was writing (as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3).

Now there’s something we need to understand before we get into this book. The literary genre in which this book is written is historical narrative. That doesn’t mean there’s no allegory or poetry to be found in here, but that when writing historical narrative, the authors’ intent is always to convince people that these things happened. These aren’t fictional characters acting out a symbolic story; these are real people, who really did these things.

But of course not everything they did is here. It’s important to note that we don’t think of history today in the same way that ancient authors did. Their main goal wasn’t simply to write down objective, historical fact, but to recount things that happened in such a way as to convince their readers of a particular truth. 

We don’t like that idea—it sounds a little too much like propaganda—but we’re naïve if we think the same thing doesn’t happen today. In every history that is written, the author is making choices about what to include and what to leave out, because they can’t possibly include everything that happened. And when they make those choices, they have a reason for it; they are trying to convince their readers of a particular truth. That doesn’t mean that what they say isn’t true, just that they have a goal in mind.

And Moses’s goal here is to tell the people of Israel how they came to be in Egypt (which is where the book of Exodus begins). 

Now with that background in mind, let’s look at what we see in the eleven chapters—all of which we covered in our previous series on Genesis 1-12.

Overview: Chapters 1-11

The Bible begins with a verse that nearly everyone has heard before. Genesis 1.1:  

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

There is a lot of debate about whether Genesis 1 describes what literally happened in detail (Did God REALLY create everything that exists in 7 days of 24 hours?), or whether it is a poetic rendering of a process that took a lot more time. In the end, it doesn’t really matter—what matters is that, however he did it, GOD CREATED EVERYTHING. With a word, he creates something out of nothing—and that something is everything. He is the Creator of heaven and earth. Of the entire universe.

In Genesis 1 we see God proceeding very methodically in the creation of everything. And then in chapter 2, we kind of zoom in on the creation of humanity. God creates the first man and the first woman, and together, they are given this mandate to protect the earth and to work it and keep it. 

Then in chapter 3, everything changes. The serpent arrives (who is Satan in disguise), and tricks the man and woman by twisting God’s words and convincing them that if they disobey him by doing the one thing God had told them not to do—eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—then they will be like God. They will be wise. They will, essentially, be emancipated from God’s reign (even though God’s reign has never been anything but good for them). 

So they eat of the fruit, and suddenly they are no longer innocent. Their eyes are opened (in a sense), and they realize that they’re naked, and they try to hide. God comes and asks the man what happened; he blames it on the woman, who blames it on the serpent. 

So God pronounces judgment on all three. He says that the creation will now work against them—the earth itself will work against the man when he tries to cultivate it, and family will work against the woman: there will be conflict within and conflict without. And to the serpent, he pronounces a first prophecy which the church father called the “first gospel”—in v. 15, he says,  

15  I will put enmity between you and the woman, 

and between your offspring and her offspring; 

he shall bruise your head, 

and you shall bruise his heel.

In other words, Satan, you’re going to get your licks in, but one day will come a man (a human being, born of a woman) who will crush your head.

At the moment of man’s fall, sin enters the world—sin which is, quite simply, the instinct to rebel against God as the man and the woman did. And that sin infects everything—all of creation, as we see quickly after. 

In chapter 4, Adam and Eve have kids, and one of those brothers—Cain—kills the other—Abel. So right there: with person number three, we have the first murder. God banishes Cain to a faraway land, but again, he shows him grace and promises to protect him.

After, in chapter 5, we have a long list of Adam’s descendants—the earth (at least that part of it) is populated in short order. And—also in short order—sin gets a stranglehold on humanity. By the time we arrive in chapter 6, we see (6.5):  

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

This sin is something that God cannot abide, and so he vows to judge humanity, to judge the earth. But he also promises to show grace to one man—Noah—and his family. He commands Noah to build a huge boat, an ark, in which God will bring two of every kind of animal. Noah and his sons build this ark (it takes a long time), and God brings in two of every kind of animal, male and female (except the fish, they were presumably okay). 

And in chapter 7, God sends a massive flood which covers the whole earth and wipes out all life which was not sealed up in that boat. The flood continues for forty days, essentially wiping away every last trace of sin’s effects on the earth. The waters recede in chapter 8, Noah and his family and the animals leave the ark, and we have a new beginning. 

But Noah is no less a sinner than the men and women who came before him; as soon as they leave the boat (in chapter 9), Noah’s sin shows itself once again (and the sin of one of his sons), so we see that fundamentally, nothing has changed in the heart of man. God isn’t surprised by this—he says in 8.21 that even after the flood, the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Even so, God promises to never again destroy the earth in the same way. 

In chapter 10, we see all the nations descended from Noah over several hundred years. And in chapter 11, we arrive at the tower of Babel. Everyone was living in the same general area; they all spoke the same language, and they stuck together. They are filled with pride, and in their pride, they decide to build a massive edifice reaching toward heaven, a testament to their own power and might. So God essentially limits their hubris—he confuses their languages, so that they can’t understand one another. And they are dispersed throughout the whole world.

Now at the end of chapter 11, we have yet another list of descendants—this time, the descendants of Shem, Noah’s son. The reason his descendants are given is because at the end of that list we arrive at a man named Abram; and Abram is going to be the subject of chapters 12 through 22, and a central figure throughout the rest of the whole Bible.

Chapter 12: The Call of Abram 

Now from here, let’s take a minute and actually read. Genesis 12.1-3:  

12 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 

Obviously, we’re not going to have time to preach through the details of this text; we did that back in 2016, chapter 12 was the last message in that series.

But just to recap quickly… If you hadn’t noticed up to now, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are dark. The first people in creation rebel against God and sin literally poisons the entire world. There is death, there is pain, there is murder. And then there is judgment. Man’s sin is judged, first in the flood, and then again in a different way at the tower of Babel. In the first eleven chapters, pretty much all we see is sin, and judgment, and more sin. You get some glimpses of hope here and there—in God’s judgment of the serpent in chapter 3, in God’s preserving Noah and his family—but for the most part it’s a pretty bleak picture of what humanity is like. 

What we need to understand is that this is how the story could have gone from there on out. God was under zero obligation to do anything besides punish humanity for their rebellion and their corruption. All of human history could have basically been a loop of the kind of things we see in the first eleven chapters.

But in chapter 12, in the call God makes to Abram, God flips the script. Rather than promising to judge humanity without mercy (which is what humanity deserves), God promises to bless humanity. He says in v. 3, In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. This was hinted at in chapter 3, and it was hinted at several times after, when God gives Adam and Eve another son, Seth; when he shows grace to Noah, and to Noah’s family. But we don’t see a clear-cut turn until this point, in chapter 12.

You know how when you’re reading a book or watching a movie, and you don’t quite get what’s going on here, and then finally you come to one scene in which you receive the one vital piece of information that makes you say, Oh okay, NOW I see where this is going. Genesis 12 is that scene. 

Now just a couple of things to note here. 

Firstly, Abram is a pagan. He’s not an Israelite. Remember, at this point, the Israelites don’t exist yet; the Hebrews don’t exist yet. They don’t come in until the birth of Abraham’s grandchildren, and even then, the people of Israel are descendants of his grandson Jacob (whom God renamed “Israel”). In other words, God had no binding covenant with Abram (not yet, anyway); he could have chosen to call anyone out in this way. But he chose Abram. 

Secondly, Abram had no children. His wife Sarai was barren (we see in 11.30). This would have been catastrophic for a family (particularly for a woman) in the ancient world; it was a source of immense shame. So Abram and Sarai had no kids, but with them was Abram’s nephew Lot, whom they seem to have adopted.

Thirdly, Abram lived in community. At the time, everyone did. You were born into a family, and you lived with that family until you married into another one (if you were a woman), or until you died (if you were a man). This was Abram’s life up to that point. And yet, God tells him to leave his country, his family, and his father’s house, and to go elsewhere. God calls him to leave behind the entire support structure he had for his family. 

And on top of that, God doesn’t tell him where he’s going. He says (v. 1):  

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

This would have been an incredibly difficult call to obey. Not only is God calling him to leave behind his entire world—his family—but he’s not telling him where he’s headed, or what he’ll find when he gets there. All he has is a promise from God which comes with the call (v. 2):  

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

In other words, God’s not asking Abram to leave anything behind that he won’t receive again, better than before. He’s leaving his family, but God promises to make him a family (and let’s just set aside for a moment the fact that Sarai can’t have children). 

So, incredibly, Abram does what God tells him to. He leaves his father and his father’s family in Haran, takes Sarai and Lot and their possessions and their servants, and they head towards the land of Canaan. When they get to a specific place in Canaan—Shechem, at the oak of Moreh—God tells Abram to look around and says (v. 7), To your offspring I will give this land. Which is pretty surprising because—as we see just before in v. 6—at this time, there are people living there. 

So there are a lot of unknowns here. At this point it’s still very unclear how God is ever going to bring about what he says he will.

But Abram trusts what God says. He keeps moving on, and at a certain point, he stops and builds an altar to the Lord, to worship him. 

Now after the first nine verses of chapter 12, it could be easy to begin idealizing Abram as a man of incredible faith, afraid of nothing, willing to do anything God says. (And that is exactly how he is often described in church.) But in the second half of chapter 12, we are disabused of that idea pretty quickly. There’s a famine in the land, so Abram takes his family down to Egypt, where there’s food. And he realizes that he may have made a mistake, because Sarai’s a beautiful woman, and the Egyptians (who were apparently this brutal) would kill him so that they could steal her. So he tells Sarai to say that she’s his sister. 

I personally can understand why he would lie. It’s not good, but I'm almost willing to give him a pass on that.

The next part, though, is incredible—someone tells the Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, that Sarai is beautiful, so he takes her from Abram, and takes her into his house, presumably as his wife. So Abram is just about the worst husband ever at this point (he’s in a tough spot, but still—if you see this coming, you leave).

And even so, God makes it really clear that when he decides to use someone for his purposes, he will make sure that his plan isn’t derailed. He sends plagues to Pharaoh’s house until somehow Pharaoh figures out what happened, gives Sarai back to Abram, and sends them away.

Abram and the kings (chapters 13-14)

Now in chapter 13, Abram and his family go back to the same place they were before, where he had built the altar, between Bethel and Ai. And there, Abram begins to settle in. He tells Lot to decide where he wants to settle for himself. Lot looks around, chooses the best spot for himself, and moves his tent to Sodom. (We see in v. 13 a hint at what’s coming: The men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.)

And at the end of chapter 13, God reiterates his previous promise to Abram (v. 14):  

14 The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, 15 for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. 17 Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” 18 So Abram moved his tent and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord. 

Once again, this promise is beyond crazy. Now he’s not just talking about making Abram a great nation; he’s literally talking about giving the land to Abram’s “offspring.” Before, it would have been possible to imagine that God would fulfill his promise through Lot. But clearly this isn’t what God had in mind.

Now at this point we see a crazy episode that I loved when I was a kid—basically, Abram becomes Rambo. 

There is a war between the king of Sodom (where Lot is living) and several other kings—four kings against five. Sodom is defeated, and Lot is taken captive. Someone escapes and tells Abram that his nephew is now a prisoner of war. So Abram gathers three hundred men (who have been trained for battle, presumably by Abram), and with those three hundred men he goes in and defeats the enemies who defeated Sodom. So all of the P.O.W.s, including Lot, are released. This is obviously an incredible testament to God’s power to fight with and for his people, and I really wish I had time to see this in more detail, but there’s something more important we have to see.

In v. 17-24 we see two kings respond to Abram’s victory. The king of Sodom coldly demands that Abram not take the P.O.W.s for himself, but that they be returned. Abram insists he had no intention of keeping anything. 

The other king in question is a king named Melchizedek. Unlike the king of Sodom, Melchizedek throws a banquet in honor of Abram, thanking God for delivering his enemies into his hand. And Abram gives him a tenth of all of the spoils of war.

The reason these two kings are contrasted in this way is because they play out the two kinds of reactions to God’s people we see predicted in 12.3. The king of Sodom receives nothing more than what he had just lost (and if we know what comes later for Sodom, we know that the “curse” predicted in 12.3 will come down on him). Melchizedek, on the other hand, blesses Abram, and is blessed in return. 

We never see Melchizedek again in the book of Genesis, but in Psalm 110 we see that his memory has been placed high in the minds of the people of Israel.

More importantly, the author of Hebrews describes Melchizedek as a forerunner of Jesus Christ. Why is that? He’s not an Israelite. He’s not a part of Abram’s family. And yet, as we see in v. 18, he is “priest of God Most High.”

This is salvation by divine mandate—God decides who will serve him, and how they will do it. He did this with Melchizedek; he did it with Abram too. And he did the same thing with Christ, who was born in the right family, but who (until his adulthood) was seen as an ordinary carpenter from an ordinary town in Israel—not a king. 

God’s sovereignty over the story he is writing is written in the DNA of the Bible from the beginning. He decides whom he will use, and he decides whom he will bless.

Seeing God’s Story 

And that is the point. 

This story begins, as the Bible begins, in a very surprising way—and it lets us know what we can expect from here on out. 

The call to Abram, and his migration, and his blessing, are incredibly important—and particularly pertinent today, because today is Palm Sunday.

God called Abram and said, “Go to the land that I will show you,” in order that the whole earth be blessed through him. God promised a blessing for the earth, and set in motion the events which would lead to that blessing being fulfilled.

These events culminate in the coming of Christ. Jesus Christ came to the earth that he created, and what does he do? He takes the promise of blessing God gave to Abram, and he applies it—he brings the blessing promised to Abram with him. And the way in which he goes about it is, again, unusual.

In fact, everything we see here (and later) highlights the unusual means God uses to bring about his plan.

What do we see? We see God creating the world, blessing the world he created…and then we see the world fall. We see the first murder…and then grace given to the murderer. We see God’s judgment on sin in the flood…and then the renewal of creation, when God made the waters descend and preserved Noah and his family. We see judgment on sin again at Babel, when God confuses the people’s language…and we will see restoration much later, in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit comes upon the apostles and gives them the ability to proclaim the gospel in the languages of those foreigners surrounding them.

We see God call Abram to go into an unknown land for an unknown reason. (Moses’s contemporaries would know what that land was, and what that reason was, because it’s where they were going…but Abram himself didn’t know.) We see God’s promise to bless the entire earth through the descendants of a fatherless old man and his barren wife.

We see Abram blessed by Melchizedek, who is (by all normal metrics) a pagan king, and yet who is priest of the Most High God. 

Looking at it from the outside, none of this makes sense. These are not things we would expect. The people living these stories would never have been able to look at what was happening to them and say, “Okay, I see what God’s doing here.” 

And that trend—God’s using unexpected and surprising means to fulfill his promises and plans—continues all throughout the Bible: through the Judges, through the Kings, through King David, the division of the kingdom, the exile of the people, and their being conquered and occupied by foreign enemies.

This trend continues all the way to the time of the New Testament, when we see Jesus Christ arrive on the scene. Today is Palm Sunday—what do we remember on Palm Sunday? We remember Jesus, entering Jerusalem and being welcomed by the Galilean crowds as their King. They know that he is the One through whom the promise given by God to Abram will come to pass. And he too brings the blessing in an unexpected way—not with horses and chariots, entertaining with kings and priests; but rather, on a donkey, being welcomed by ordinary people.

And then, a very short time later, Jesus is handed over to a different crowd—not to be worshiped as God or celebrated as King, but to be crucified as a criminal in the place of his people.

What is the point of all of this? God accomplishes his plan as he sees fit; he accomplishes his plan perfectly; and his plan is rarely what we would expect.

God does not pick the best people to fulfill his plans; he picks weak and sinful people, and makes them fit to be used by him, to fulfill his plans and to keep his promises. 

I said earlier that Moses’s goal in writing the book of Genesis is to answer the question, “How did the people of Israel arrive in Egypt?” But there is another question he’s answering in chapters 12 to 22, in the story of Abraham, and it is much more fundamental: “How did the people of God become the people of God?” And the answer to that question is just as relevant for us today as it was for them, all those years ago.

Because Jesus told us that these books are ultimately about him. He is the way God made the people of God the people of God; he is the way we were brought into this great, global family. He lived our life and suffered our death, that we might be reconciled to God. He chose to give us his Spirit and open our eyes to the beauty of God’s plan, and to draw us into that plan by saving us. Everything we see here points us forward in time to Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises to Abram.

So as we continue over these next nine weeks in the story of Abram (who will become Abraham), let us keep our eyes on Christ. Because in Christ, Abraham’s story is our story; the story of God’s people is the story of us. And when we understand what God did for us in the past, we can much more clearly understand what God is still doing in us now.