The title Genesis means “beginnings.” You can detect the connection in words like “generate” or “generation.” The first book of the Bible is a record of the beginning things – the beginnings of creation, human beings, sin, salvation’s plan, the people of Israel, etc.
It is for this reason that Genesis is such an important book. I would suggest that one cannot be a follower of Christ without holding closely the truth revealed in this opening chapter of God’s story. This is important stuff! It sets the stage for the following acts of God’s drama in the world. You miss this - you build on a foundation of sand.
One of the earliest and most essential themes that emerges from this narrative is the movement of God over creation – from chaos to order. God is constantly fighting the entropy of creation and humanity. Ever since sin entered the picture, all things tend toward decay and disharmony. And God is in the process of transforming all things back to their created perfection. Someday a “new heaven and new earth” will be reality. See Revelation 21-22.
Much of that restoration will only be completed when Christ returns and God completes the re-creation of all things. But some restoration is a potential reality now. The deciding factor is our obedience to cooperate with God’s Spirit to see some of those things move toward accomplishment.
To help us determine the “things” that we can assist God in restoring, we can become students of the Genesis account. In those first two chapters the creation commands include:
- Filling the earth through reproduction – 1:28a
- Acting as God’s caretakers of the earth by ruling over it – 1:28b
- The enjoyment of creation – 2:16
- Defering to God for wisdom (eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was essentially a decision to take moral wisdom into our own hands) – 2:17
Other implications include:
- Committed marriage relationships – 2:24
- Relationships of honesty and openness, including our relationship to God - 2:25 and see 3:8-13
Once sin sliced into creation, a lot of things changed, and so the above lists are certainly not the whole picture. But these supply us with some “original intentions” of God’s perfect plan.
Go beyond that to discover the continued plan of God as it is unfolded through the life of Abraham and his family – a people used by God to bless the whole world – and you begin to see a purpose that is staggering in its size and beautiful in its impact.
Tons more could be said, but you and I are a part of that story that God is writing until the circle closes someday, and all things are made new again.
