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In the beginning...

A long time ago when I used to go to cinemas to watch films, I walked into the wrong screen at a multiplex cinema and was surprised when the film ended somewhat obscurely 40 minutes later.  I didn’t get it because I hadn’t seen the opening scenes.  If we don’t keep returning to Genesis 1-3 then the Bible will make little sense and we’ll have a wrong view of God, ourselves, our world and the gospel. 
I’ve noticed (I don’t know how representative my experience is) that it is quite common for Kenyan preachers to refer back to Genesis 1-3 when preaching on diverse subjects and texts elsewhere in the Bible.  So perhaps in a sermon on contentment or sin or salvation the preacher will take us back to the Garden or the Serpent or the Tree of Life.  This is such a helpful impulse.  In narrative terms the first three chapters of the Bible give us the setting, the main characters and the crisis (problem) which the whole of the rest of the story will concern.  Here in the beginning are the foundations for so many doctrines, all of which are under attack, especially in the West:
  • God as primary – in the beginning God…
  • God as Trinity – let us…
  • God as Creator
  • God as speaker (we talk about this on Utumishi wa Neno)
  • God as artist and lover of diversity and abundance and order
  • God as vastly gracious
  • Darkness and then light, evening and then morning
  • The theme of fruitfulness, trees, seed
  • The theme of separating the waters
  • Man as creature under Creator
  • Man as made in the image of God
  • Men and women equal in status and complementary
  • Humanity descended from a single man
  • Adam as king, priest and prophet
  • The promise that you will surely die
  • Marriage as God-given for his work – sex in the service of God
  • The ground-level LORD God who walks in the garden
  • God desiring intimacy with man – God as the seeker and missionary
  • The Fall as disobedience, rejection, rebellion, pride and especially Faithlessness
  • The Fall as the context within which we now live
  • The Fall as The Big Problem for all humanity – enmity, curse, exclusion, death
  • Salvation comes from God and is by a man
And many more…

A couple of reasons why it’s important to read the Bible from Genesis 1 not starting with Genesis 12:
  1. It’s a global problem not just Israel’s problem. There is a stream of teaching popular in many theological colleges in the West which argues that Jesus came to deal primarily with the problem of Israel’s national sin and curse and spiritual exile.  He saw himself as the representative of Israel.  He died the death that idolatrous Israel deserved.  There is much that is helpful in this argument.  In Luke’s Gospel for example Jesus is very clearly presented as the fulfilment of Jewish hopes (e.g. Luke 1:68-79).  The prophecy of Isaiah in particular is never far from the surface.  Jesus is indeed the perfect Israel (e.g. Luke 4:1-13).  He has indeed come to provide the greater Exodus (Luke 9:31).  But that’s not the whole story.  It’s bigger and better and more basic than that.  Luke traces Jesus’ legal lineage back not only to Abraham but to Adam (Luke 3:23-38 cf. Mat. 1:1-16).  Jesus is not only perfect Israel but the second Adam as he resists the Serpent’s temptations (Luke 4:1-13).  He has come not only to deal with the curse and exile of Israel but The Curse and The Exile from the Edenic presence of God.  As he died he opened the way back to Paradise and not just for the nation of Israel but for an individual criminal like me (Luke 23:43).  He tore down the curtain embroidered with the cherubim guard (Luke 23:45 cf. Ex. 26:31-34; Gen. 3:24) and rose on the first day to begin the New Creation (Luke 24:1).  
  2. The mission of God is about the serpent crusher. Start with Genesis 12 and we might think that the mission of God is all about a people, a land and a blessing (with Christ coming along to help bring that about). This understanding of mission tends to be rather light on judgement and not very tightly focused on Jesus. In contrast start with Genesis 1-3 and we see that Son of God is there from the beginning (Gen. 3:8), sin is against him, and he is the one who will sort it out through the Cross – God-born-of-woman bruised that he might crush Satan (Gen. 3:15). So God’s mission is blessing – yes – but blessing in the Seed, blessing instead of curse, blessing as the curse is taken by the Seed, blessing in being back with Him. So what is our mission going to be? Well we can’t defeat Satan, we can’t take the curse of the world, we can’t be God-born-of-woman. But we can point to Him, preach Him, lead others to Him.

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