Wednesday, June 18, 2014

A Story for All Ages

Note: This post marks the beginning of a summer long series of devotions on the book of Genesis. Each Wednesday a new devotional will be posted.  These devotions are intended to be a companion to with Faith UMC's summer sermon series, "The Gospel According to Genesis" and the daily reading guide to Genesis.  You can access sermon online here and the daily reading guide here.

Imagine that you are an Israelite child, living in Babylon in 570 B.C.  Seventeen years ago your family was deported from Jerusalem when the Babylonian army laid siege to the city.  While you yourself have never stepped foot in Jerusalem, your parents always speak of the city with awe and reverence.  They tell you stories about how God created the heavens and the earth, and everything contained therein.  They speak of God’s goodness to humanity, and of humanity’s mistrust and disobedience to God.  They speak of a covenant God made with your ancestor Abraham, promising that through his family God would bring blessing to the whole world.  They recall that God promised the land of Jerusalem as an inheritance to Abraham’s family.
           
As you listen, you feel in your heart that these stories are your story.  While you weren't there when the world was created, you believe that you too were created by God.  While you never met Adam and Eve, you can relate to their mistrust of God and inability to keep God’s commands.  While you never met Abraham, you feel a kinship with him and a desire to be faithful to the covenant God started with him centuries ago.  You are a member of the people of Israel, and while all you have ever known is life in Babylon, you feel like your heart is in the Promised Land.
           
The book of Genesis was written so that the people of God from all generations might know where they come from, and their reason for existence.  Genesis – which means beginning – tells the story of God’s creation of the heavens and earth and of the beginning of God’s people, Israel.  The book is divided into two parts.  Chapters 1-11 tell a universal story about the creation and crisis of humankind.  They speak of humanity’s call to live in God’s image, how human sin distorts that image, and how the effects of sin spread so far across the earth, that God grieved the earth and laid waste to it by flood.

By the end of chapter 11, the story of Genesis has come to a major impasse.  A good and gracious God has created a good and beautiful world, but human sin continues to spread and disrupt God’s design, bringing death and destruction.  What will happen to world?  Will it die away, a victim of its own sin, or will God do something to rescue the creation?

The second part of Genesis, chapters 12-50, tells the story of what God does to redeem the world.  Rather than destroy the sinful world, God chooses to enter into relationship with a man called Abraham, promising to bring blessing to all the world through his family.  The story continues through four generations of Abraham’s family, showing how God remains faithful to the promise of blessing, even amid the continual failings of Abraham’s family.

This is the story of Genesis.  As the ancient Israelites knew from the beginning, the purpose of Genesis is not to provide a detailed historical account of the creation of the world.  Neither is it to provide scientific explanations for the various phenomena of the universe.  None of them expected Genesis 1 to be a literal account of the creation of the world, nor did they expect to be able to locate the bones of Adam and Eve in Mesopotamia.  Rather they knew that the purpose of Genesis is to convey the truth about the human condition and the good news about the God who loves the world too much to let it go.

As we enter into a summer long immersion in the book of Genesis, it’s important that we know what Genesis is for.  If we want to read every detail of the story as historical or scientific fact, we will quickly get frustrated and miss the point.  Many of the stories of Genesis, particularly in chapters 1-11, are full of symbolism and imagery that is not meant to represent what actually happened, as much as to convey truth about who God is and who we are.


As you read Genesis, pray that God would help you find yourself in these stories.  Pray that God would open your eyes to see God as he really is.  Pray that these stories would convict you of your own frailty and brokenness.  And above all, pray that these stories would become your story, that you too would believe that the same God who created the universe and called Abraham, is the God who created and called you.             

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