Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Genesis Chapters 1-3 - July 8, 2009

Well, we blogged through the New Testament last year...now it is time to take on the Old Testament. There are about three times as many chapters in the OT as there are in the NT, so we are going to be reading three chapters a day. That means there will be a lot of information, and I will not be able to cover as much in detail, so I am just going to be commenting on what really jumped out at me. I hope you will leave comments telling about how God spoke to you through the passage too.

1:26 - I am always drawn to the fact that God is referring to Himself in plural ("us", "our"). God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit have always existed and have always been one. The perfect community that has always existed. This brings even more power to the cross on which Jesus died, because he literally allows himself to be killed by his own creation so that he can save them. That's love.

2:3 - God made a day of rest and declared that it was holy. It is holy to stop...to rest in God...to be with your family - those things are holy. To pack your life so full of junk that you cannot even find time to breathe and connect with God is not holy...it is hellish.

2:25 - I truly believe this is one of the most beautiful verses in the bible. It says that Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. That is incredible! They are so comfortable in their own skin...they are so connected with who they are, that they don't even know they are naked. They know who they are and they know the God who created them and that is all they need. Since sin has come into the world, people have been searching for their identity. We look to other people and stuff and success, so that we can be more important than somebody else...so that we can be worth more. Adam and Eve understood how much they were worth and how much they were loved...I want to understand that.

3:21 - Death comes to paradise, because of Adam and Eve's sin. It says that God clothed them in animal skins, so He had to kill some animals to cover their shame. Sin always ends in death. Animals died to cover their shame, and as a final sacrifice, Jesus died to cover our sins and shame once and for all.

2 comments:

Joshiee said...

I love the connection you made in Genesis 3:21 with the sacrifice of an animal to cover someone's shame. There was something going on in my mind when I read that but I couldn't make the connection.
I really was confused by Genesis 3:15...
"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."
All because of the word "enmity". But I took some time out of my busy day (hah) and looked it up. There's some crazy stuff about the underlying literary meaning of this passage. Here's what this website "MessiahTruth" had to say about it, "According to the Christian point-of-view, this is a special verse because it points to Jesus as being the seed of a woman (Eve), i.e., the reference here is to a spiritual child and not to a direct physical/biological descendant, and that he will defeat (i.e., kill) Satan (of whom the serpent is the metaphorical representation)."
Now that's something I NEVER would have though of.

Brand al Thor said...

Good stuff Joshiee. Thanks for commenting. If you have seen The Passion of The Christ, Mel Gibson highlights this struggle you are talking about by showing Jesus stomp his heel down on a snake and killing it. I love that even from the first second of our sinfulness, God had a plan to make things right.