Hey, so imagine you pick up a new novel and you're reading it, and then you come to find out that the first chapter has been torn out by somebody.
So you don't really know who these people are, how they relate to each other, you don't know how the story began. How did the story begin? And today we're looking at the Bible and how its story began. And that's Genesis. We need Genesis to understand the whole story today.
On More Than Inc.
Well, welcome to our dining room table again. This is Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And this is More Than Inc., and we're glad you've joined us. You know, if you've been listening to our live broadcast from KUTR in Utah, you probably left us last week promising you that we would continue on in John and go into chapter 18 of John.
That's a little secret. Those weren't live. Those were not live shows, but we finished off on John 17, the great priestly prayer of Jesus. And we had always intended in this new year in 2026 to start off in the book of Genesis. And so that's what we're going to do today.
You're in the front end of the talk on Genesis. And so we're not going to cover a lot of Genesis today, but we're going to do sort of an overview and maybe see if we can tickle out some issues that people have. Either issues about questions they've never had answered that should come from Genesis or different kinds of reluctances about why to study Genesis.
Well, or maybe even what. What kind of questions do we look to Genesis for a proper answer to? Exactly. Because I think a lot of people are confused at that point. They go to Genesis looking for something that it was never intended to communicate.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're going to try and do a 30,000-foot view of it today and see if we can actually entice you to come back next week. Oh, I just instead of you saying, oh, I'm not going to listen to that. That's just Genesis stuff.
So let's do that today.
So you don't need to pull out your Bibles unless you want to check some stuff, but we're just going to look at it. There's 50 chapters in Genesis. And so everyone's very familiar with the opening words. In the beginning. In the beginning.
Yeah, God created.
So let's take a look at, let's start with the creation account because that's actually in the very front end of this. In fact, just I'll tell you a quick story. Years ago, I was sitting next to a fellow at dinner. He had just recently left the religion of his youth and his early adulthood. And I was asking him, you know, why is it that you haven't become a Christian?
Because he was still struggling with what I believed and stuff like that. Why is it you haven't become a Christian? Because there's so much about the historical part of the reality of the Bible and archaeological evidence, all this kind of stuff. I said, but you're still, something's horrible. Holding you back.
So, as I sat next to him, I turned to him and said, So, what is it, Tom? What is it that's holding you back? And he thought for a second and he looked at me and said, The first 11 chapters of Genesis. And I said, What? That's pretty interesting.
What's your problem? Because after chapter 11, we'll find out. It's a very much it's a biography story of Abraham and his descendants. But the first 11 chapters are really quite different in all the 50 chapters of Genesis. And he says, It's because I have a hard time accepting some of the crazy things in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
So, let's talk about those first 11 chapters.
Well, yeah, that's pretty interesting because that kind of touches on probably my first question: why should we study Genesis at all? At all. Because in those first 11 chapters, they're utterly foundational to the whole story of the Bible, right? It tells us about the beginning of everything. Yeah, everything.
The origin of the universe, the origin of mankind, the origin of trouble, the origin of redemption. What went wrong? How is God going to fix it? That all begins to appear in chapters 1 to 11, but it's not intended as a scientific document. No, but we do try and treat it like a scientific document.
It does say there's a very beginning, specific beginning point. God began everything at a certain point, but it's not anti-scientific, it's just not written. For the scientific information, it's written for a different kind of information. Yeah, and when we get into the nuts and bolts of the creation account, we'll talk about that at length because I think a lot of people not only approach the creation parts of Genesis wrong, but they're asking all the wrong questions. Looking for something that it's not written to address.
But you're right. It turns out Genesis is a foundational document for the entire Bible. When we say in the beginning, well, this is the in the beginning document. I mean, one, for instance, is the fact that when Jesus is asked about an issue about marriage and divorce, he references the second chapter of Genesis. That's right.
Jesus quoted Genesis a lot. Right. This is his proof text. In fact, I went back and checked on it. Not only that particular case, isn't it crazy to think that when Jesus is going to answer about divorce and marriage, he goes to the second chapter of Genesis, and that's the only place he goes.
Yeah.
So this is bedrock kind of stuff of Jesus quoting from it. And I looked in the entire New Testament that. Genesis is referenced 165 times in the New Testament. Absolutely.
So, all the roots of everything you've ever read in the New Testament are rooted right here in what we're going to read. In fact, some gigantic issues like where did sin come from? What's the fall? What is redemption all about? What is justification about?
All those things are wrapped together in that. Who is God and who is man? Who is man, right? I mean, that's pretty central. Don't we all, when we're growing up, or start asking, you know, where did I come from and why am I here?
Right, right. Not, you know, who were my parents, but bigger than that, where do I fit in the universe I can perceive? Yeah, is there a big purpose? But we learn so much in Genesis about the personality of God, about the personhood of God. I mean, these are not trivial issues.
This isn't just static, very old history. This is foundational to everything that we believe in the entire Bible. It's all rooted back in Genesis.
So, if you don't have a good handle on Genesis, you may be missing some of the best. Kind of information to tie together your beliefs because they actually all start right here.
Well, okay, they start here, but they don't fully develop here. No. And that's important to understand, too, that in Genesis, all the major themes of the Bible are laid out, but they are not fully unfolded. We don't find in Genesis the answer to everything we might want to know. Right.
We've got to read a couple thousand years worth of development in order to really get a full picture. But it all is pointing to Christ, God's redemptive solution to what went wrong in the very beginning. Yeah.
And, you know, that brings us, you know, everyone knows to expect the creation account, and we'll look at that in detail, ask what I think is better questions. But right after that, it's pivotal on everything. When we talk about sin, you've got to understand about the fall, the fall of mankind, what happened in the Garden of Eden, all that kind of stuff. And it's not symbolic. I mean, it's supposed to tell you something really profoundly true about our natures, about Adam and Eve's nature, about the problem in this story in Genesis about sin.
Sin enters the story.
Now, what are we going to do?
Well, and it's interesting since you referenced someone having left another religious system earlier as we were talking, that the creation and the fall account are the earliest, are the places where so many of the cults begin. To step away from reality. They redefine what happened in the beginning. They redefine the fall, that singular event that broke fellowship between God and man. Right, right.
And just in the singular reading of Genesis, like you were saying, you may not get a full picture of sin, but you understand where it started. And I think Paul does probably some of the best jobs later on when he talks, especially in Romans, about what happened. And about, I mean, he draws us parallel to the fact that through the one man Adam, sin came into the world, and then through the one man, Jesus, it was dealt with. And so if you don't understand, well, so what happened with Adam again?
Well, okay, we're all familiar with artwork that portrays Eve with an apple. Right? But the scripture, as the whole story unfolds, never lays the fault for that event on Eve. It always is laid directly on Adam. And that's something that we get the story of it.
In Genesis, but we don't get the full unpacking of it until much later on in the story. Yeah.
Yeah.
And the inevitable question will rise, and this has come up many times in my last couple of decades where we live: you know, am I personally cursed because of what Adam did? Isn't Adam, isn't it his problem? It's not my problem. And how does that come so many years later to me? How does that work?
Ooh, that's interesting. And we throw that word curse around without really understanding what it actually means. It is a statement of woe, you are destined for trouble. It's not necessarily a vengeful, horrible forcing of something on someone. But it's a statement of direction you're moving.
Yeah, right. It's an outcome you should expect. Right. Yeah.
So after the fall account in the Garden of Eden and stuff like that, we have the growth of humanity. I mean, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger as you look at this. Still in the first 11 chapters after the fall, then what I call kind of the flood section, where mankind really goes bad.
Well, this is a fascinating section, though, when you really take time and go slowly through it.
So, we will do that because it kind of boy, there are seeds of world history there that we are still understanding today. Oh, this started way back then, right? Right, right. And you know, you know, in common kind of Sunday school lingo, we're all familiar with the little plastic toys with the giraffes and the hippopotamuses you put in the ark and stuff like that. And that's a real part of the story.
We think we know the story. Right. Right. But it turns out that the condition of mankind is really the bigger part of that story. What happened to mankind?
I mean, so much so that God looks at his creation of mankind and says, wow, their hearts are just constantly scheming to do evil continually. They're totally bent toward turning away from me all the time. Right. And so that gets us to the flood story. But mankind really messed up.
Okay, there are some really misunderstood things about the flood story, right? Rainbows, for one thing. What the heck is that about? Right, right. The animals, how could all the animals fit in the ark?
Right. And I discovered a couple of years ago when I began to lead a Bible study in Genesis with some women that so many of them got their view of the story of Noah from the movie Noah that had been produced maybe two or three years before that.
So it's probably been maybe eight or nine years now. But that was appalling to me that they assumed that the story they had seen on the Hollywood screen was the biblical story.
So that's something else that's going to benefit us from reading only the text. There was, I don't remember the movie well, but didn't they have some characters way out of the top of the story? Yeah, totally anachronistic. Yeah.
The guys who were with Noah that didn't show up in real life. Yeah, for hundreds of years. For a long time.
So it's just, it's just kind of crazy.
So let's look at the real story. That's what we're going to do is check out the flood and check out the problem that mankind had.
Now, after Noah and his sons and their wives all survive, then we're back to populating the earth again.
So we're still within the first 11 chapters.
Okay, but God had narrowed down. Down the population of the earth to this single family. Yes. Noah and his sons and their wives. Right.
And we start tracking actually the establishment of his sons and the different kinds of nations. That's not a good group, but the groups of people. That's the single word. Yeah, the people that come out of the sons of Noah. And this is the point at which we start getting genealogies.
Yes, yes. And we start getting a little more personal about these real people. And out of the three sons of Noah, one son, Shem. Shem is kind of highlighted. In fact, his name is the one that we get the word for the basic brood for Jews and for Arabs and stuff.
It's Semitic. Semites. Yeah, Semites.
So we're going to follow this train of Noah's son, Shem, and that will eventually take us out of the 11 chapters. And then after a crazy story about the Tower of Babel. And we'll spend some time on that. And if you've always wondered, what is the Tower of Babel about? Yeah.
So we'll look. At that, because that's really a fascinating thing. It's a fascinating thing. But when we get past Babel and we continue to follow the line of Shem, one of the sons of Noah, then we come to a particular descendant of Shem, and that particular descendant is Abraham. Except he's Abram when we're introduced to him.
His name has not been changed yet by his new relationship with God.
Well, I'm using the word everyone understands.
Well, it's important we know what period of time we're talking about by Abram and Sarai instead of Abraham and Sarah, because both of their names get changed in the text. And sometimes people aren't aware of that. Or why names get changed. That's right. Yeah.
It's not to protect the innocent.
Well, neither of them were terribly innocent, as we'll find out. Yeah, that's right. And that introduces an interesting thing because there from chapter 11, near the end of chapter 11, we start following Abraham. Abram, sorry. And we start following him.
And he has quite a unique relationship with God. I mean, I won't say totally unique because Noah had a similar relationship. But Abraham, fascinating guy. And so we're going to look at this developing relationship with Abram and how it is that he became kind of the father of the nation of Israel.
Okay, so stop right there for a second because let me just drop this into the conversation. Abram was not a Jew. Right. And a lot of times people don't even put that two and two together. There were no Jews at that time in history.
Yeah.
So when did the term start? That's right. So again, it's coming. It's coming. Are you curious yet?
It's coming. But there's no question that the nation of Israel considers Abram as their father. And genetically, he is. Genetically, he's the beginning. Genesis records that actual establishing of that relationship with God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's a fascinating guy to follow. And that'll start us off in chapter 11. Take us quite some time. Fascinating guy to follow. And of course, he has children.
He has loads of children. Yeah, so we're going to follow. We're going to follow Abram as he goes on with his wife Sarai and see what happens. But he does have a singular kind of relationship with God. And it's this Abram and his singular relationship.
What makes this relationship so important? We'll take a look at when we get there. And it's not because he was necessarily a very righteous man. In fact, he had many failings. No, but there's this single little statement about him that says Abram believed God.
Yes. And it was reckoned to him as righteousness. And that sets up immediately, oh my gosh, up till this point in the text, we really haven't run into that idea of being regarded as righteous by God. Humankind was regarded as unrighteous by God.
Well, yeah, and exactly. And so he'll follow him and we'll look at that. And Paul, Paul pretty much. formulates the book of Romans. Around that one statement you just made.
Yeah, Paul, when he's called on the Damascus road to Jesus and he realizes he's on the wrong path, he's persecuting the wrong person. He's actually persecuting the Messiah. Jesus is the Messiah. Then when he goes away for a while to get his head straight, he's trying to figure out what did he miss, what did he miss? And what he does is he goes back to Abram.
He goes back to the very beginning, the beginning with Abram, and asks himself, what is this guy? And how is it that he in some way found favor with God out of all the people of mankind at the time? What is so singular about this man? And Paul discovers that in that statement you just made and then develops the whole book of Romans. God makes a promise to Abraham.
Or Abram, and he believes it. Right. Even though it's a promise with no visible evidence at that time. And so, even though he can't see it, he believes the one who told him. And that's what gets him reckoned as righteous.
So, we're going to camp on that. Yeah, it's just very important. There is so much about in the New Testament when we talk about righteousness and what is the foundation for righteousness. How does that work? What is the foundation for how you're justified with God?
It all finds its way back inevitably to Abram. And what he did. To believe in God. Exactly. So, so those thoughts are not just New Testament thoughts, those are formative, foundational thoughts right here in Genesis.
Okay, so we said a minute ago that Abram had lots of children, and he did, but he had one singular son who came only through the activity of God granting him. This one Isaac, the one son who's called the son of promise. Right. The one God promised. All of the others were born.
Well, they were all born by natural means, but all the others were born, not necessarily promised by God. Isaac is the one God promised, and Isaac becomes the type of the only son. Yeah, yeah.
Which, again, is the beginning of this massive thought that will find its culmination in Jesus. Yeah.
So, as we go through the descendants of Abram, you know, we'll hit next on this son Isaac and how singular he is in so many ways. And it turns out that even with Isaac, whose name is connected to the idea of laughing? Laughter. What? You didn't know that?
Yeah, it is.
Well, who was laughing?
Well, we'll get there when we get there. But at that point, we're kind of around chapter 25 and 26. We're about halfway through Genesis at that point. We'll get to Isaac. But Isaac is, again, another fascinating guy.
And we'll spend a considerable amount of time looking at him. And understanding. But you mentioned the promise. And for me, this promise with quotes around it is kind of like another character in the entire thread of the life of Abram and his descendants. This promise, this promise.
There's a promise that's given to Abram. That promise continues on through the generations. It continues on through Isaac. It continues on through Isaac's son Jacob. And it keeps going through his sons.
So this promise is something you got to keep an eye out for because that promise is the thread of these ancestors. We're not studying these guys' families from Abram just because we like to talk about genealogies. That's not really at all. We're tracking the promise. We're tracking this promise with a capital P, a promise from God to Abram, which actually, fascinatingly, extends all the way to us who are believers in Jesus.
Today. That's right. Promise extends.
So you'll have to wait and see that because, again, if you're a believer and you have found salvation in Jesus, that promise started at Abram. Whoa.
So we'll get there.
So we got to Isaac, Isaac and his wife Rebecca. And then Isaac has some kids. And so they're next in the ancestry. Isaac is Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau.
Most people know some little bits of the story of Jacob and Esau. But, you know, I just want to interject here that these four men that we know as called the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, fascinating men. They all believed God. They all entered into the promise to Abraham. The promise is part of their story.
They were not flawless men. No way.
Some of them were utter scaliwags. No way.
Jacob. Talk about Jacob. A huge portion of the book is devoted to Jacob and his life and his 12 sons. Should be his middle name, Jacob Scaliwag. Yeah, Jacob the troublemaker.
But his 12 sons, from whom the entire nation of the Jews grew into the 12 tribes. That we know. Because his 12 sons became the fathers of 12 whole tribes of people who eventually grew into the nation, identified as the people of Israel, the Jews.
So you've heard of the 12 tribes of Israel, and you may not have known where they came from. Those are the 12 sons of Jacob.
Okay, so Jacob, his name gets changed to Israel. Israel. At one point in the story. What another name changed. Again, something people don't always connect.
Yeah.
So isn't that cool? And his name means something as well. You'll see him do something in the narrative story, and that's why his name is changed. Yeah, everybody actually knows that story to some degree. To some degree, to Jacob wrestled with.
Right, right. Sometimes it says an angel, but we'll get into that. Jacob had a wrestling match and his name got changed. Jacob had his name changed either. Anytime in the Old Testament, especially the prophets and stuff, they kind of use when they reference the nation of Israel in a shorthand way.
Sometimes they'll call Israel Jacob, and sometimes they'll call Israel Israel. You know, there's something interesting about that.
Sometimes when he's called Jacob, it's because in the larger context, God is talking about the wayward nature of the people. The scaliwaggy, scalliwaggy part of Jacob.
So you'll see those terms used interchangeably for certain reasons. But this is the same guy, same guy, and his descendants, right? And finally, one of the sons of Jacob, not the youngest, but the next youngest, he takes a spotlight at the end of Genesis, a lot of the end of Genesis. And that one son is Joseph. The son who had the coat of many colors.
That's right. You might have heard that the musical was written. You're right. That Joseph, one of the 12 sons of Jacob. And he becomes quite prominent and has, again, a singular career and role, not only in saving Egypt, but saving his descendants.
I mean, he's really fascinating in so many ways. And he prefigures Jesus himself. He acts just like Jesus.
So that when you come to faith in Jesus, if you know the Old Testament story in Genesis, you'll say, you know, Jesus is a lot like Joseph because, yeah, so it adds great color and richness to our understanding of even who Jesus is to look at the life of this next youngest son of Jacob, who's Joseph. And it turns out that when we get to the 50th chapter, the last closing lines of Genesis, we'll get, and I'll read it for you. Here's the last verse of Genesis. We talked about Joseph, so chapter 50, verse 26.
So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. Boom. The end of Genesis. But Exodus picks up right after you.
Just barely a breath. Yeah, yeah.
But you know, you just read the last chapter or the last verse of Genesis, but we never read the first verse. Oh, because I presume people knew it.
Well, yes and no.
Okay, so here's the thing. Here's 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.
God gets the first word, right? It opens on this blank stage, but God is speaking. Right, right. And God gets the last word. Right?
So, in between, we've got this incredible development of this huge story and the promise of redemption emerging. Getting clearer and clearer as the chapters unfold. Yeah, and it also, when we talk about God as creator, rather than that the universe accidentally happened to be. Right, right. When you have an intelligent, powerful creator like God Himself, and we look at this creation story, it very deliberately says something that, unless you sit back and think for a second, it doesn't hit you in the face.
And what hits you is: if someone made something, they made it for a Purpose. And so there's purpose that's that's really strongly connected with the idea that God created something. Like, for instance, I used to be a design engineer for HP and I would make circuits.
Well, I would make a circuit that has a purpose, nothing was accidental. And so you put this together.
So the purpose has to be fulfilled.
So the question you have to ask when you read Genesis is: if God started this ball rolling, if He created everything there is, He created not only the earth and the heavens and everything, but mankind Himself in a special kind of way, we'll see next time. If God did that, what is His purpose for making all this anyway? Because He's the creator. What's the point? What is He gonna do?
So this takes us out of what is today a kind of a secular scientific realm where everything is accidental, nothing has any purpose to it. Things just go all fought some jetsome, you know. But when you read the opening breath of Genesis, it says no. God created it, which means He's got a reason for doing this. And so discovering that reason will start to unfold as we go through Genesis.
And unless you know Genesis, You don't get that.
So I would encourage you, read the text. Yeah.
You know, for our purposes here, we're just going to hang in the text. What does it say and what does it not say? We'll observe and not stretch it out of all kinds of shape to say, well, because it doesn't say that, then something else must be true. Right. So, and I think you'll find that there's real benefit in staying right in the text.
We'll stay in the text and we'll also probably ask questions about the text you've never thought of before. And that's important as we look at this.
So anyway, I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we're glad you're with us. And we hope we've enticed you. Would you come back next week?
I hope so. We'll see you here on More Than Inc. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you are there, take a moment to drop us a note. Wow, everything had a beginning.
The Bible says that in the beginning. God created everything.
So we're going to start at the start. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. It's great. Thank you. Join us, won't you?
Bye. Bye. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.
