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Bible Study on Genesis - #1 -
- All right, here we are.
Genesis, first lesson.
The title of the series
is Genesis, the Foundation Book of the Bible.
And I want to mention also that we're gonna be using
a resource book, or I have used a resource book,
entitled The Genesis Record by Dr. Henry Morris,
and so there's a lot of material that I'll be talking about
that I have used his book for,
and if you want to go further or deeper
or you want more information, I highly recommend this book.
You can get it from the library or get it online,
so on and so forth.
This class that we're doing is not going to be
a line by line study
because if we did a line by line study of Genesis
with its 50 chapters, we'd be here two or three years.
So we're not gonna do a line by line study.
We're going to try to take important sections
out of every chapter to follow a main theme
all the way through the book
so that you'll be very familiar with the book.
We'll try to answer some of those questions
that come from the book itself,
but mainly we're gonna try to reflect
the main theme of Genesis and work our way through.
Everybody's got a worksheet that you have
and those who may be watching this on video
or online on our BibleTalk.tv, you can go to BibleTalk.tv
and you can download the printout,
even the transcript eventually for your use,
and, of course, that's absolutely free.
All right, major objectives in this study.
I have three particular objectives.
First of all, to build faith.
Build your faith in this book as an inspired work of God.
Of all the books in the Bible,
it seems that Genesis is the one that is attacked most often
as being non-inspired, or it's a myth or it's a fairy tale.
It's dismissed, especially in the modern day,
so I want us to have confidence and faith
that this is an inspired book of God.
Second objective, to answer
some of the commonly asked questions about Genesis.
I mean, who wrote it?
It's at the beginning of time.
Who was there to write it?
And so on and so forth.
So we'll trace the history of how it was written
and other questions that stem from this particular book
and then thirdly, understand the importance
and the purpose of this book as part of the Bible.
Why did God give us the book of Genesis?
Very important.
Now as I say, you can stop me and ask questions,
make comments as we go along.
If there's something that you think of
or perhaps a question or something
that maybe you can add to the class as to what we're doing,
please don't be shy.
I'm glad to take your input.
All right, let's talk about the importance
of the book of Genesis.
Every book of the Bible is inspired by God.
Paul says this, among other places,
but Paul says this in 2 Timothy chapter 3:16.
The entire work of God is inspired.
All Scripture, rather, is inspired by God.
That's the way he says it.
All Scripture.
Notice he says all Scripture, not just some Scripture.
And especially when Paul was writing this in 2 Timothy,
not all of the New Testament had been recorded.
So he was referring back to the what we call
the Old Testament, and he was saying all of it is inspired,
not just the prophets,
not just the first five books of the Bible,
all of it is inspired,
and that remains true even to this day.
Now in the New Testament, the Gospels and the book of Acts,
they're these kind of books,
the kind of books that help us understand
the rest of the books.
If we didn't have the Gospels,
we'd have a hard time understanding the book of Romans
or the book of Ephesians, right?
So the Gospels and the book of Acts really give us
the basis for understanding all of the other epistles
and the book of Revelation.
Well, in the same way, the point I'm making is
the book of Genesis really helps us understand
the rest of the Bible.
If we didn't have the book of Genesis,
a lot of the things that we teach wouldn't make any sense.
So in the Old Testament, no other book is more fundamental
to understanding not only the Old Testament,
but the New Testament and the rest of human history
as the book of Genesis.
Now, the reason for this is that Genesis is the book
which contains the vital information
concerning the origin of all things
and therefore the meaning of all things.
These things would not be accessible to us
if God had not revealed
and preserved them in the book of Genesis.
Matter of fact, the word genesis means origins.
So what you're reading when you read the book of Genesis
is you're reading the book of origins.
Where do things come from?
So historians and scientists, they can only speculate
about the origins of life and culture and nations,
but the Bible actually contains this information
so that we can look back and see an accurate picture
of the world at its beginning before recorded history
actually began.
And so the book of Genesis describes in detail
14 origins that cover the beginning of time
to the formation of a people
to carry out God's plan of salvation.
A lot of people say,
"Well, I don't see this nation mentioned in Genesis
"and that nation mentioned."
Well, the purpose of Genesis was to explain
the origin of many things,
including the origin of God's people,
not just the origin of how various nations were formed,
but basically the origin of God's people.
That's the theme that runs through the entire Bible,
doesn't it?
We see different nations come and go here and there,
but the Bible is really just interested in showing us
God's people and what happened to them.
The rest of the history is simply a backdrop to that.
So these origins that I'm talking about here
are the foundations from which we can understand
our societies as well as our environment
and even the spiritual condition that we're in today.
So this lesson here tonight,
I'm just gonna briefly go over all of these origins.
All right, ready?
So Genesis, origins, first origin,
Genesis gives us the origin of the universe.
Only the book of Genesis accounts for the origin
of matter, space, and time.
Every other religious system,
every other scientific system or philosophy,
every one of them begins with eternal matter or energy
in some form that is somehow developed
into our present state.
So the theory of evolution starts with what?
Well, it starts with the Big Bang, it starts there,
but the Bible starts even before then.
The origin.
Where did the Big Bang come from?
How did that start?
So only the Bible gives an account
of where original matter actually came from.
Okay? All right.
Genesis gives us the origin of order and complexity.
Universal observation has stated
that orderly and complex things tend to naturally devolve
into disorder and decay, right?
Something starts nice.
Your brand new car, right?
And this has happened to me.
My brand new car, it's working perfectly.
It's a GM product, what could possibly go wrong, right?
[audience laughs]
And I'm driving it and there's a truck that goes by
and I hear "Pick!"
and you know what's happened to my new car, right?
I've got a chip in my window,
staring me right between the eyes.
There goes my new car.
And that's the same with everything.
Our new carpets, everything brand new begins to devolve.
And so the Bible gives us the origin
of order and complexity.
Where did the order begin?
We know that in nature, in people, and in objects,
everything eventually falls apart.
Genesis provides the source for the establishment
of the original order and complexity of life.
This is important because all we're able to study
is the rate of decay, not the origin of order.
Did you ever think of that?
Scientists, what they're studying,
is how things are falling apart.
That's all they can do.
All they can do with the stars is count them.
All they can do with the stars is tell us how far they are
or how fast they're disintegrating.
That's all they do.
That's all they can measure.
But the Bible gives us where these stars began
and how they began.
Where man began, where everything began,
and so the Bible gives us the origin
of order and complexity.
Number three, the Bible gives us
the origin of the solar system.
Genesis, therefore.
So science, as I say, can count and study the stars,
but science has not found a satisfactory explanation
for the beginning of the stars.
What's the best they can do?
This is the latest best, right?
That I've read anyways.
The latest best that they've come up with is the Big Bang.
That's the latest theory, believe it or not.
The Big Bang.
It all started with a Big Bang.
Nobody can explain, well, what made it go bang?
Nobody can explain, well, where did it come from?
Where did the things that made it go boom,
where did they come from?
Scientists simply put that aside.
They say, well, you know, it was always there.
That's usually the answer.
Matter was always there and then one day, boom,
it blew up and then it evolved into who we are today.
The thing that we have to remember
is that the Big Bang is not a cause, it's an effect.
So the world's greatest scientists, some of them are saying,
this effect is what caused everything that we have.
That doesn't make any sense, doesn't it?
But Genesis, on the other hand, explains when and how
the solar system was created
and more importantly, it explains why it was created.
Why it was created.
Next, Genesis explains the origin of the atmosphere
and the hydrosphere.
The combination of liquid water and oxygen and nitrogen,
that kind of atmosphere that sustains life
has only been found in its present state here on Earth.
I mean, scientists say they've looked
as far as they can look and they still haven't found it.
Genesis explains again the how, the who, and the why
that this unique mixture came to be, if you wish,
here on Earth.
So the origin of our environment that we have
that sustains this kind of life.
Genesis explains the origin of life itself,
how living systems could develop from non-living chemicals.
Today continues to be a mystery
to materialistic philosophers and will always be.
In other words, if you're thinking is that animate objects--
We're animate, right?
Right, we're animate.
We're animated.
We move, we think, we feel.
How a creature like us comes from an inanimate object.
How can we come from a rock or a piece of dirt?
And yet, evolution teaches that,
that in the beginning there were just inanimate objects
and yet somehow these inanimate objects came together
and rubbed up against each other.
You know I'm being simplistic here, of course,
but somehow these inanimate objects
produced animate objects, living objects.
In other words, a bird came from a rock.
Again, I'm simplifying it,
but basically that's what is being explained.
Genesis, on the other hand, explains the process
and the order of the appearance of living things on Earth,
from inanimate to animate
and what happened, how this happened.
Number six, Genesis explains the origin of man.
This Bible book provides the true answer
as to the origin of man.
Now universal observation states
that complex things tend to decay and become disorganized,
but in the face of this, evolutionists try to explain
that in the midst of this universal experience,
the most complex and orderly creature, man,
has actually arrived in the reverse order.
In other words, from decay and disorganization has come man.
[laughs] You see how crazy that is?
So from decay and disorganization
comes complexity and order.
Well, that's just nonsensical.
Genesis explains the origin of man
as a perfectly complex and orderly being at his creation
and then joining the creation in its eventual demise.
And it also gives the reason why.
In other words, Genesis explains that man began
as perfect, complex, competent,
and then began to disintegrate.
Evolution turns that upside down
and says there was disintegration and decay,
and from disintegration and decay came man, and guess what?
While everything else on Earth is going to pot,
man is getting better.
He's evolving.
Again, doesn't make any sense,
and Genesis explains to us how the world began
and how man began as a complex, perfectly created creature,
or human being, put it that way,
and then with time, began to disintegrate.
And Genesis tells us why this happened.
Number seven, the origin of marriage.
Again, Genesis records the universal and stable institution
of marriage and the home
in a monogamous, patriarchal, stable society.
That's what Genesis presents.
Polygamy, infanticide, adultery, pedophilia, divorce,
homosexuality, all of these things come later
as this original model began to disintegrate.
I know sometimes it's a little discouraging.
We look at our society.
Gay marriage is being legalized in various states.
We see all kinds of immorality being applauded in the media
and so on and so forth, but it goes back a long time.
It's not just our generation.
Not just our generation.
If we want to see sin, go back to when the Roman Empire
[laughs] existed.
You'll see a very decadent, cruel society.
The beauty of Genesis when we read it is we find out
why this has happened, what's going on.
All right, number eight, moving on.
The origin of evil.
The cause and effect model is demonstrated in Genesis
showing how evil not only entered the world
and it entered the world as a concession to free will,
but also how it caused the ultimate degeneration of a world
originally created as perfect.
And so Genesis not only explains
the origin of decay through evil,
but it also introduces God's ultimate plan
to deal with the evil in the world, all in Genesis.
Amazing book.
Number nine, the origin of language.
The gulf between the chattering of animals
and the abstract, symbolic systems of man
is completely unbridgeable by the evolutionary process.
Evolutionists have not explained to us yet
how monkeys or dolphins or whatever went from the gibberish
that they speak
to the intelligent, logical,
moral thinking that humans--
You know, they can't find the missing link.
They can't find the link between the two.
Now you can teach an animal to mimic sound.
You can teach an animal to repeat conditional responses.
Parakeets say all kinds of things, right?
But you cannot train an animal to give an opinion
and I've never seen a cat tell time.
I always tell people I'll believe in evolution
when I see a cat being able to say,
"Hey, it's 20 after 12:00.
"Time for lunch."
[audience laughs]
Okay, so we're unique in that way
and Genesis explains and accounts not only
for language in general, but also for national language.
Why are there different languages?
Genesis has the seed of understanding
as to why that happened and how it came to be.
Some people say, "You expect me to believe
"that Tower of Babel thing?
"You expect me to believe all of that?
"So fantastic to believe."
And I say not any more fantastic to believe that
than to believe that all of this world here
came about simply because of an accident.
Every accident that I have ever witnessed in my entire life
has always caused trouble.
We say we had an accident,
something gets broken or spilled or damaged.
To say that all of the complexity of life
is the result of accident, accidental,
what they call time and chance.
Time and chance.
If you want to believe in time and chance, go ahead.
The argument is if you give it enough time
and enough combinations,
eventually you'll come up with a human being.
Really?
I don't think so.
All right, keep moving, number 10.
The origin of government.
Genesis gives the account of the development
of the orderly maintenance of society,
and as a matter of fact, in Genesis,
you have every stage in the process.
It begins with the patriarchal age, with the patriarchs,
were the head of families.
Moves on to the tribal stage.
Moves on to the national stage, then the worldwide stage.
Genesis explains the normal--
and the word evolution isn't a dirty word, by the way.
Things do evolve.
People evolve, things evolve,
but what we're talking about is development.
So Genesis gives us the natural development of government.
It also gives us the origin of culture.
It describes the beginning of the main entities
which we now associate with organized culture,
and I mentioned a few, urbanization, metallurgy, music,
navigation, textiles, agriculture, animal husbandry,
writing, education, ceramics,
all of these things are described in Genesis.
The beginning of culture and what develops culture.
Number 12, the origin of nations.
Scholars today recognize the unity of the human race.
That's the big discovery, by the way.
The latest discovery is that, you know what?
All human beings come from the same root.
Didn't used to be like that.
The evolutionists, you know, there's branches,
this type of human, that type of human,
and this type of human kind of survived,
this type of human died out.
That was the original thinking.
Now all of a sudden archeologists are finding,
and not just archeologists, but biologists,
who are studying the human cells, are realizing,
well, wait a minute,
all human beings all come from one source.
Not only that, they say we're finding out that
that one source is somewhere in Northern Africa,
the Middle East.
[laughs]
They can't deny it.
That's what they're finding.
The science speaks for itself.
Well, the Bible has given us that story.
It's called Adam and Eve.
It's called the garden.
And we know somewhere where it is.
And so science is simply proving
what Genesis has been teaching for years,
and only the book of Genesis explains this
in adequate fashion.
The book of Genesis gives us the origin of religion.
There are a lot of different religions in the world,
but all share the idea that there must be an ultimate truth
and some sort of direction in life.
Genesis explains the origin of this characteristic
of man's consciousness as well as the origin of true worship
and the true God of all origins.
And so we find how religion begins in the book of Genesis
and how it becomes mutated as different things
go off in different directions.
And finally, number 14, the origin of the chosen people.
No other people have had
such a long and sustained historical background as the Jews.
Genesis gives the origin and the purpose
that this nation was to play in God's overall plan.
Now the book of Genesis talks about other cultures
and other nations,
but focuses really on the Jewish nation.
And so the book of Genesis is the foundation
of true history, true science and philosophy
because it describes where we came from
and how we arrived at where we are today
spiritually and physically.
All right, one other little point I want to make here
and that is Genesis and the Bible itself.
Not only does Genesis provide a foundation
for our understanding of the created world and society itself,
it also is a foundational book for the understanding
of the rest of the Bible.
Now I don't state that as just a personal opinion.
The Bible also makes this point.
People like Adam and Noah and Abraham and Jacob
are continually referred to
throughout the rest of the Bible.
Without the Genesis, we would not know their role
or their purpose in God's plan.
So remember that when people are trying to dismiss Genesis
as a myth and so on and so forth.
If you eliminate Genesis, you don't have the foundation book
of the Bible.
Did you know that there are over 200 quotations or allusions
to Genesis that are in the New Testament?
200 times we quote Genesis.
Every one of the New Testament authors refers to a passage
in Genesis 1 to 11.
Every one of them.
Jesus himself refers to Genesis chapter 1 to 11
at least six different times.
I mean, if Jesus himself is quoting Genesis,
we should be very careful before we dismiss that
as an important book.
Now I say this because there's a great effort in the world
and sometimes by some in the church
to mythologize the book of Genesis,
especially the parts dealing with creation.
Genesis was written as a sober and fact-based history
of the origin of the world and man.
When we try to reduce any part of it to myth or allegory,
we undermine our faith
because the foundation of our faith begins in Genesis.
After all, Paul says, "All Scripture is inspired by God."
All includes Genesis, okay?
Very important.
Now you'll notice, there's a list on the back
of your worksheets,
and as I mentioned before, at the beginning,
those of you who are watching this on video,
you can go to BibleTalk.tv and just go to the Genesis series
and at the Genesis series, you can download the worksheet
and perhaps even later on, the transcript of this lesson,
but for those of you who are in the live class here,
a wonderful list here.
Scientific facts or principle in one column.
The date that they were discovered by man, by scientists,
in the middle column,
but where they were spoken of in the Bible
in the right column.
So for example, that there is an infinite number of stars.
This was discovered, the idea of this was discovered,
in 1940, put forth as a scientific proposal in 1940,
but it's already stated in Genesis 15,
and by the way, Genesis was written,
I'm getting ahead of myself.
We'll talk about this in another class,
but Genesis was written by Moses.
He's the one that put it together from oral records
and so on and so forth,
and Moses lived 1,400 years before Christ,
roughly 1,400 years.
So we're talking 3,400 years ago,
the Bible's already talking about this idea of the stars.
I'm not gonna read it all to you.
You can read them there, but what's really interesting to me
is the idea that air has weight
and this was scientifically discovered
and proposed in the 16th century,
and yet it's written about in Job chapter 28.
Or that oceans contain fresh water springs,
discovered in 1920, but mentioned in Job 38.
So there's 20, 30 different examples of this,
and this is just a very short list
of these particular things.
Okay, so that's our introductory lesson to Genesis.
We haven't touched the text yet.
I just wanted to give you an idea
that we're not talking about Genesis as a myth.
It's an inspired work of God.
The Hebrew writer says to us, what?
That we believe how?
By faith that God created what is from what is not.
So the Bible tells us you're to believe what God gives us
in the book of Genesis not through reasoning,
but through faith.
Through faith.
And faith is accepting God's Word at His word.
I believe what God is telling me here.
Why? Because He's asking me to accept it as such.
But there's plenty of information and plenty of proof
that demonstrates that Genesis is an inspired book
and we'll get into that and the great stories in there
about the patriarchs and how all this fits together
to point to Christ.
All right, well, that's our class for this time.
We'll get into the next lesson next time we meet.
Thank you very much.
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