Bible Reading

The Book of Genesis - A Must for Bible Reading

If you have read and studied the last two lessons that I have published, accept that God is; in a believing faith and likewise accept that He has spoken through the Bible as His Holy inspired Word, I would encourage you to read and study it. I would encourage you to take thirty minutes out of your day to do so. Set your alarm thirty minutes earlier or spend this time at the end of the day. There is no other way that I know of to compliment God than to start our day reading or meditating (thinking, reflecting) in His Word. Likewise, before ending our day to do the same. I know of people who have purchased the Bible on audio tape. By using a pillow speaker attached to a portable tape player, they listen to God’s Word read as they go to sleep.

If you are a novice student or reader your most likely question is where do I start? I would suggest at the beginning. The book of Genesis is a book of beginnings. If we do not properly understand and have faith in the book of Genesis, it is extremely difficult to ever come to a full knowledge of the rest of the scriptures. Once you understand, or even get a glimmer of understanding of the book of Genesis, it will be like a light turned on in your brain.

God is the author of a grand plan, even from the first day of creation. This is important. Some believe that God set in motion the world, and then allowed it to develop without any further action on the part of God. This is not exactly the case. It is true that individuals have the choice to choose good or evil, but God still has a plan.

As we read the creation account, we see the plan of God for the physical world, and how that God made it so that all things worked well together. When we read of the creation of the universe, and couple that with the findings of scientists today, we get an idea of how great and Almighty our God is. Consider that just our universe contains the Milky Way, which within itself contains over 30,000,000,000 suns, many of them larger than our own sun. Our sun is a million and 1/2 times larger than the earth. It would take 200,000 light years to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other. There are at least 100,000 galaxies like the Milky Way, some of them millions of light-years apart. What we can know scientifically about space may only be a tiny speck of what is beyond. God created all of these planets, stars, suns, galaxies, and universes.
When you read of the creation of the man and then the woman, you see the beginning of the greatest human institution, that of the home. Here is made possible the procreation of the human race. There are two important laws that God gave at this time. We are introduced to morale law regarding marriage; one man and one woman bound together for life. The other law was that they were not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As long as they obeyed this law they remained innocent before God, and was given the promise of life. If they disobeyed they were to die. At this time we find Satan introduced in the form of a serpent that chose to deceive the woman first and her to deceive the man. Although Adam was responsible for Eve he negated that responsibility, thus sin (disobedience to God) was introduced. We also find the first animal sacrifice in God providing them with a covering. As a consequence of their disobedience they were cast from the Garden, the presence of God. No longer having access to the tree of Life mankind would now experience spiritual and physical death. But God had a plan and in the Garden of Eden, we see the first promise (prophecy) of a Saviour of mankind. God made the following pronouncement to Satan in Gen 3:15 "and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."

All of this occurs within the first three chapters of this Book of Genesis. In the next five chapters we see the beginning and the consequences of evil’s influence upon mankind. Genesis tells us of the 1st murder, when Cain slew Abel. We see that even in the early days of man's history that God required worship. One brother worshiped as God required. The other chose to do it his way. Result, God rejected it, envy and anger leads to murder. God confronted Cain and then we see God showing mercy. He could have required Cain’s life. However, instead He lays out Cain’s consequences.

Another younger brother, Seth followed after God. With Cain representing evil and Seth representing righteousness Genesis tells of evil’s influences over mankind growing worse and worse until God decided to destroy all that would not repent. Only Noah and his family were receptive to God's message and faithful enough to be save by water. We see this referred to in the New Testament. (1 Peter 3:18-22) This will not be the only time that God will use water to separate good from evil, old from new, or past into the future. More will be said about this in future lessons. Genesis tells of the building of the ark and the punishment meted out to all but 8 souls of all mankind.

There are a number of lessons one can choose and elaborate on in these eight chapters. Lessons on the influence of sin, finding God’s pleasure in striving to remain righteous in His ways, the need to for obedience and the results, would any have been saved if Noah had chose to change any of the instructions God gave Him, and more.

Genesis tells of the procreation of our current races of man from the family of Noah, of the tower of Babel, where God gave the various foreign tongues or languages to man, thus dividing them up into various races of peoples.

We will pick up the further events in our next lesson as we start with chapter nine.

This and a future lesson has been adapted and expanded from a lesson on Bible reading written by Joe McLure and is used with his permission.