Selected Genesis

June 11, 2017

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

Download the Kids’ Korner.

The sermon starts at 15:15 in the audio file.

Or, A World of Glory and Repentance

I am regularly frustrated by commentary endings, and I have a similar frustration with most biographies I read as well. After spending so many hours studying a book of the Bible together with a commentator, understanding that the commentary writer himself has spent many hours studying and then writing his contribution, shouldn’t he offer some final thoughts? I suppose most of the book’s overview and purpose come while introducing rather than summarizing the book, but can nothing be corroborated better by the end? Is there nothing to celebrate? No more informed motivation for responding to the word of the Lord?

I suppose it is the preacher in me, but I certainly believe that some lessons learned looking back are appropriate before moving on to the next study. The history of redemption is not finished at the end of Genesis 50 by any stretch, but Genesis opens the story and deserves attention due to the trajectory it sets. So I am both excited to be done studying through it, and also to have one more wack with it.

I’ve been soaking in the juices of Genesis since the summer of 2008. I’d read it a number of times before and since, but really started marinating in it nine years ago. I wanted to study and teach Genesis for a variety of reasons, though initially it had a lot to do with simply wanting more exposure to the Old Testament. I was hearing an almost exclusive diet of New Testament teaching, and so were the sheep I was shepherding. After going through Ecclesiastes, Genesis seemed like the logical place to start for Old Testament narrative.

It also seemed like Genesis would be profitable for sake of equipping believers with the foundations of a world- and life-view. Even more perhaps in 2017 than in 2008, our culture is quite confused about origins and purpose, gender, relationships, morality, and “God.” To start at the beginning with what the Creator says about His creation, including us humans, sounded profitable for teaching.

There are certainly many cultural problems that Genesis addresses, but once we got into it I realized that there are also Christian cultural problems that Genesis rebukes and reproves. There are problems “out there,” in the world, but we have a lot of problems “in here,” in the church. Little did I know how much I needed to change. It may be impossible to estimate how many things are different in my own thinking, and how many things are just different now. My life is different, which has an effect on everywhere I take my life, including preaching.

The Bible is profitable for teaching, rebuke, reproof, and training in righteousness, and Genesis is the genesis of that. This morning’s message is not just a summary what Genesis teaches, but what Genesis calls us to repent from. Is it possible that no book of the Bible more convicting? Even for Bible-loving believers there are a number of foundation level problems that we must deal with, not just footnote problems. Though the word “repent” isn’t found in Genesis, here are five final calls to it.

Repent from Dualism.

As the apostle Peter once wrote, “I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder.” And C. S. Lewis wrote,

The key to my books is Donne’s maxim, “The heresies that men leave are hated most.” The things I assert most vigorously are those that I resisted long and accepted late.

Reminders are in order for those who, like myself, accepted dualism long and have only come to resist it late. By “dualism” I mean someone who disregards, if not despises, the things of earth in favor of spiritual or heavenly things. I didn’t think I was a dualist, certainly not to the extent some dualists have gone to of denying that God was born a man, that the body of Jesus must have been something like a hologram because [...]