Genesis chapter 11 opens with the building of a great city, Babel. Everyone spoke one language and worked together to build a great city with a giant tower that would reach to the heavens and place them on the same level as God. They wanted to make a name for themselves, they wanted to be famous, but God was not having this. He came down to see the tower (meaning that it didn’t reach the heavens) and was displeased. Seeing what man was capable of (both good and evil), He made them all speak different languages so it would be harder for them to work together.
Have you ever been working on something for your own glory and come up against a brick wall? I know I have. Almost every time I lose sight of God’s plans for me and I start working on my own plans for wealth or success, something seems to get in the way and my plans go down in flames. In the moment I am very frustrated and disappointed, but when I take a step back, I see how the things I have achieved in life and the path that God has me on are far better than the plans I made for myself.
After the story of the great city destroyed by language barriers, chapter 11 continues the genealogy account showing us the family lines from Noah to Abram (later Abraham, the father of Israel). This is a set up to show how the Israelites came from the lineage of Noah, originating back to Adam in the Garden. It’s a precurser to the story that is to come.
It’s easy to skip over the names and generations listed in this chapter (or any other one) because it’s not action packed and doesn’t always hold our attention, but can you imagine how crazy our lives would be if it was non-stop action? You would be praying for a break and you might miss some important information along the way. All of this is leading to the story that God wants us to tell. The story of His people. The story of your people. The story of you.
Be encouraged, your story has just begun and yet there are generations before you who have lived life, shared their wisdom and prepared the way for you to live the life God designed especially for you.
Genesis chapter 10 is a look into how the Earth was repopulated after the Flood. Through the sons of Noah, we see 70 different nations emerge spreading all across the Earth. From the East to the West, from the Amorites to the Philistines and all the nations in between, the Earth once again has been populated. With that, we also see that God is the God of all people.
From Noah’s descendants, we see that even the nations that later went on to battle and become enemies of the Israelites came from the same blood line. And to go back even further, before Noah, all of humanity originated from Adam and Eve. This genealogy account further shows that.
We also see that life went on even after Noah’s missteps and Ham’s poor judgement. God did not wipe out their family line, in fact He even allowed for great people to come from their family line like Nimrod the great hunter and eventually Abraham the father of many nations.
What I particularly like about this chapter is that we are all related. We all came from the same family line, under the same God, and although we have branched out and have our own languages and values, our origin story is the same. We have great people in our family line and some not so great people. Everyone is human, we all make mistakes, some people are amazing and some are amazingly horrible, but we all bleed the same blood.
Be encouraged, for you come from a great family tree that was designed by the Creator Himself! This is just the beginning. This is your origin story!
In Genesis chapter 9, we see that Noah and his family have left the ark and God has blessed them and told them to go forth and multiply, just as He told Adam and Eve in the garden. The Earth had been wiped clean of all humanity and it was Noah’s sons who were to repopulate. In addition to this, God commands mankind to look after the Earth, all the animals, He allows them to eat the animals now as long as they drain the blood from the animals (no drinking blood and do not torture the animals, kill them humanely), and lastly God says that anyone who murders someone is to be killed. He ends His instructions by retelling Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply.
After He gives instructions, God makes a promise that he will never take out the whole Earth again by a flood. To show a sign of his promise, He put a rainbow in the sky. What comfort that must have been to these lone survivors of the great flood. I wonder how many times they saw rain and though the flood might happen again, but then saw the rainbow and were relieved by God’s promise.
As with most things in life, after an amazing life changing moment or a great travesty, life went back to normal and people reverted back to known behaviors. Noah planted a vineyard and got drunk. It doesn’t say why this happened or how Noah was feeling or what led him to this, it just says that he got drunk and laid uncovered (naked) in his tent. This was not how a great man, the only man who found favor with God in wicked times, was supposed to act. He was supposed to be great all the time, and yet we see his humanness. We see him act differently than we expect. Despite the excuse or the reason, we only see the action.
Now does this mean that God took away His promise from Noah or that He was mad and punished Noah? No, in fact the text doesn’t make any mention to God’s feelings on this situation. Additionally, we still see rainbows in the sky to this day and are reminded of God’s promise. What we do see are consequences and an aftermath that happens as a result of Noah’s actions though.
We are told that Noah’s youngest son sees his nakedness and tells his brothers. The brothers cover their father with a garment and never see the nakedness of their father. After Noah wakes up, he learns what happened and curses (Noah curses, not God) his youngest son for what he did.
Now there is a lot of speculation on what actually happened and why it was so bad. Here’s what I know. Noah’s youngest son saw something and did nothing about it except to tell others. The older boys covered their father and didn’t look. It could be as simple as that. Nakedness implies a level of vulnerability and especially if Noah was in a drunken state, he was not himself and was probably even more vulnerable than normal. The youngest son did not protect this vulnerability, but the older ones did without asking for specifics or digging into the matter. They did not need to see what state their father was in, they just covered him.
That is what family is supposed to do. When you are at your lowest point, when you have misstepped, when you have found yourself in a vulnerable place, family is there to cover you no questions asked. Family might mean different things to everyone. It could be your family of origin, your close friends, or other believers, but family are those you are familiar with that surround you. They won’t be perfect all the time, but they will cover you and you need to cover them too.
Be encouraged, we have all survived the floods of life, we see the rainbow promise in the sky that God won’t wipe out His creation, and your family (even the family you have in believers just reading this post) will cover you and pray for you. You were made in God’s image and are fearfully and wonderfully made and there is nothing you can do to make God forget His promise or His people. Be blessed.
In Genesis chapter 8, we see an end to the flood. While the flood continued for 150 days, it took 261 days for the flood to calm. And when the waters calm, Noah is cautious and sends birds (first an unclean bird – a raven, then a clean bird – a dove) out of the ark to scout the region and see if there is dry land. The dove came back, after a second trip, with an olive branch in it’s beak signaling that the land had dried and the storm was over. In today’s society, we see a dove with an olive branch as a sing of peace and when fights happen, we say that we should “extend an olive branch” to signal peace. I’m sure that for Noah and his family, seeing the olive branch that the dove brought back was a sign of peace for them too.
But still, Noah and his family (and all of the animals, we can’t forget them) waited for 7 more days on the ark before sending the dove out again. When the dove didn’t return to the ark, Noah knew that the time of judgment was over.
I’m sure when Noah and his family came out of the ark, they kissed the land that they thought they may never see again. Noah made a burnt offering to God, being grateful to Him for his and his family’s safety. God was pleased and said that He would never again curse the ground like that again.
Have you every gone through a season of life where you thought the storm would never end, that the world around you would always be flooded and you would never see the safety of dry land again? I know I have, but when I start to feel like that, I remind myself that I am alive. If I am alive, that means I didn’t drown in the waters surrounding me. It means God gave me an ark, a shelter from the flood. The other thing I need to remind myself of is that it won’t rain forever. The storm will pass, the flood will subside and I will see dry land once more. Be encouraged, God loves you enough to provide you with a way to survive even the biggest of storms!
In Genesis chapter 7, Noah and his family are shut into the ark with all of the animals. God told Noah to take 7 pairs of clean animals, or animals that can be used for sacrifice, and 2 of every unclean animal and then He shut them all in the ark, sealing their safety.
And it rains for 40 days and 40 nights. And after it rains, they have to stay in the ark for another 150 days because the Earth was still flooded. That’s 190 days in tight quarters with only your immediate family and a whole bunch of animals.
Before the rain came, there was a seven day waiting period. 7 days where anyone could have come and knocked on the door of the ark and asked to be let in. 7 days where the people of the Earth could have seen impending doom and asked for a second chance. That’s not what happened though. The rains came, flooded the Earth and took out all of humanity except for those on the ark. Noah and his family were the only ones marked safe during the storm.
Now I don’t know about any of you, but if I was lucky enough to be one of the survivors, I would have gone crazy. They would have renamed Cabin Fever after me and called it Ark Fever. Being stuck in a boat with a bunch of animals (and animal poop) with only a limited amount of people to be around and an even more limited number of activities would have driven me up the wall. God did not make me to live in an ark, but sometimes it feels like it.
Although God hasn’t flooded the Earth to wipe out all that is bad, He has definitely flooded my life to get the same results. There have surely been seasons where God has said “pack up your things, get on this boat, you’re the only one I’m saving.” Sometimes there’s people in the boat with me. And just when I’m about to go mad, just when it feels like I will never see dry land again, the rain stops and the flood waters retreat and I get to try again. So be encouraged! Even when we are in the storms of life, there is hope because it won’t rain forever and you are not alone in the storm.
In Genesis chapter 6, we see that the Earth is becoming a popular place and the human race is quickly multiplying. While this is happening and God watches as the world grows and changes, He decides to limit human life to 125 years. While that is still a long life span for us, compared to the people of the previous chapter who lived for hundreds of years, 125 seems quite young. We are also told that during this time, there were giants and there were mighty men, or heroes.
During this time, God saw that the heart of man overall was wicked, evil, and it hurt His heart. Have you ever looked at someone you cared for greatly only to see them making poor choices and acting out of sorts? That hurts in a place so deep, it makes you want to turn away from them rather than to look and see that pain day in and day out. The same pain, I imagine, plagued God and He decided to destroy the Earth rather than to watch the wicked prevail.
But God looked at Noah and only saw love. He was moved to act in mercy for the one who found grace in His eyes. And so, God spoke to Noah and told him what His plan was. He was going to destroy the Earth with a flood, but He was going to give Noah and his family a way out by allowing them to build an ark for shelter from the flood.
God gave them a specific plan on how to build the ark and who should go in it. Noah and his family was to be saved along with 2 of every living creature on the Earth, except the Unicorns… just kidding! But you’ll have to read it for yourself to know for sure.
Now wouldn’t it be great if God just gave us specific plans for our lives? But here’s the thing, we have to be obedient in that. Noah knew God, walked with God, found favor with God, listened to God and when he was told to build an ark, he did so.
There is a funny joke that goes something like this… A man finds himself on the roof of his house staring at the water that is rising all around him during a storm. Another man in a boat comes by and say “Hey, this is a really bad storm, come with me on my boat and I will take you to safety.” The man on the roof says, “No, no. I’m okay, God will save me.” So the boat goes away and the water begins to rise. A while later a man on a jet ski comes by and says, “Hey, this is a really bad storm, come with me on my jet ski and I will take you to safety.” The man on the roof says, “No, no. I’m okay, God will save me.” So the jet ski goes away and the storm rages on. A long while later, a helicopter comes by and over a mega phone says, “Sir, you need to come with us, you won’t survive on the roof.” The man on the roof says, “No, no. I’m okay, God will save me.” And then, he dies.
The man goes up to Heaven and standing before God he says, “God, I was patient and waited for you to save me, but you never came. Why did you let me die?” and God says, “I sent you a boat, a jet ski and a helicopter. Why didn’t you let me save you?”
The moral of that story is that sometimes God sends you a boat and sometimes He tells you to build it. Either way, don’t allow yourself to drown in your inability to move.
Chapter 5 of Genesis is all about family ties and genealogy. On the surface, it is a list of names and ages that seems boring and easy to skip over. Who cares if so-and-so’s great-grandfather lived to be 900 and had a wooden leg, where is the action? The drama? Where is the storyline?
In a society that craves more and more action and suspense, more “realistic” or gruesome depictions of violence and needs a new image on screen every 3-5 seconds or so, it can be difficult to find the importance in the seemingly mundane. Occasionally, you’ll find a rare long shot in a movie that goes on for a bit, but chances are you squirm in your seat if there’s not a lot of action going on in that scene. Similarly, unless you are reading a tweet that is 140 characters or less, longer written material has a hard time keeping people’s attention span these days. I’m here to say that sometimes when you skip over the “boring parts”, you can miss some important plot points.
In the first few lines of the text, we are reminded that humans were created in God’s image and that he created male and female with no distinction of inequality amongst the sexes. The following verses tell us that the descendants of Adam lived very long lives, but it does not give us a great description of their lives or achievements aside from their ages. There are a few exceptions we will get to, but it is something to think about that these people were important enough to mention in the Bible, but that none of their achievements or hobbies or anything really about them was mentioned.
I think for many of us, that is our fear. That we will die “having accomplished nothing”. That no one will remember us. There is one notable man in this text though that had more written about him that the others. Enoch.
Enoch is the only one in this chapter that is said to have walked with God. And as a result, Enoch did not die. It says that God took him. He got the red carpet treatment and walked with God straight into heaven. Now that is a notable achievement! And it doesn’t even seem that Enoch was trying to accomplish anything, or that his goal was to get into heaven. Enoch just did what he regularly did, walked with God.
After Enoch, we meet Methuselah who is the oldest man in the text at age 969. It seems that God was patient with mankind, allowing their lifespans to be long as they figured out how to function on Earth. Many times throughout history, we see people longing for and trying to accomplish immortality. My question is why? Even this man who lived for almost 1,000 years is only mentioned because he lived, had a child that continued the blood line and then died.
In comparison to Enoch, I think there is a lesson to learn here. It is not the number of years you have lived on this Earth that are important, but what you have done with the years you have been given. The quality of life, of what you have chosen to do with you life, is what is important.
The last part of the text leads us to a man named Noah. Now, we will get more into Noah’s story in a later chapter, but it is good to note Noah’s significance here. Noah is the only person in this chapter to have the meaning of his name explained. Verse 29 says, “And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.” Noah’s name sounds similar to the Hebrew word for rest, and so it seems that his father believed that Noah would come and give the people rest from the curse of Adam (back in chapter 3 of Genesis).
All of that being said, just remember that there is significance in everything, even the chapters in your life that seem boring or unimportant. Sometimes those boring chapters can be a set up for the adventure that is yet to come!
Genesis chapter 4 is the first chapter that begins outside of the Garden. In chapter 3, we saw man disobey God and be dealt the consequence of having to leave the Garden, but with a promise – that woman would birth a son who would crush the serpent under foot. In the first verse of chapter 4, we see that Eve bars a son named Cain and she thanks the Lord for him. She also gives birth to a son named Abel. For 2 adults who never had a childhood, having 2 boys must have been challenging.
Now the text let’s us know that these sons were different from one another. The first born, Cain, tilled the ground. Basically, he grew crops from the ground. And Abel was a shepherd, he had to care for animals. Aside from that, their jobs, they had the same upbringing, the same parents, the same environment, the same everything.
After some time, each boy brought an offering to God. Cain brought some of the fruit that he had grown and Abel brought the first of his flock as an offering. Now it doesn’t say why, but God had regard for Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. So Cain got angry.
It was probably jealousy and anger and a bunch of complicated emotions that Cain didn’t know how to deal with. Cain, it would seem, felt less than because God had no regard for his offering. I have been in those positions before where you see other people getting the praise or the rewards that you want and you feel less than. Sometimes that jealousy and anger drives you to great lengths to get that which you desire. Now desire in itself isn’t always bad, but the lengths to which you go to achieve it is usually where we get ourselves into trouble. For Cain, it drove him to kill his brother.
Before that happened, God spoke with Cain. He asked him why he was angry and tried to give him some advice. Did Cain listen? No. He was consumed by his anger at that point. So many times when we are angry, we can’t hear the voice of reason around us. We just want to be right, or to have things be what we deem as “fair”, or just generally want things to go our way. To have humility and say, I was wrong, let me try again could stop this angry train from going off the tracks, but too many times that’s not the path we seek.
So Cain calls his brother out into the field and kills him.
Cain becomes the first murderer and has to deal with his own guilt and the consequences. Initially when God asks Cain where Abel is, Cain tries to say “I don’t know, am I in charge of him”? But God calls him out and tells Cain that He knows what he did. So he tells Cain that he is going to be cursed and have to wander the Earth as a fugitive. Cain fears for his life, but the Lord marks him and tells him that if anyone kills him, they will be punished 7 times worse. And God puts a mark on Cain so everyone will know. Then Cain leaves the presence of God.
Now the interesting thing to me is that the text says that Cain left the presence of the Lord. I don’t recall in the previous verses God saying that Cain couldn’t be with God anymore or talk to him or anything, it just said that he was going to be a wanderer. Isn’t that usually what happens though? We do something wrong, we receive the consequences and then we run away from God. What would have happened if Cain had said that he messed up, that he sinned, that he was sorry and that he didn’t want to leave God’s side. What would have happened if he had asked God for help to become a better person?
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The rest of the chapter tells us of the family tree of Cain and of the new family tree of Adam and Eve. It shows us that life goes on. It doesn’t mean that Adam and Eve weren’t still grieving the loss of Abel or weren’t still mad at Cain. It just means that they didn’t let those feeling paralyze them in their tracks.
Sometimes we get so down on ourselves that it drives us to inaction. But here’s the thing, life goes on. Cain had to deal with the consequences of his sin, but he also birthed a city and was a father to those that have livestock, that play music, that are blacksmiths. Even when we feel at our worst, we can still produce good things.
Genesis chapter three opens by introducing us to a new character, the Serpent. The text tells us that the Serpent was more crafty or subtle than any of the other creatures. Just like with any good story, this is a set up to introduce us to the antagonist. And the antagonist is almost always a snake!
The first thing this snake does is go up to a woman and make her doubt what she knew to be true. He asked, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” Basically, did God say you can’t eat anything in the garden? The answer is no, that’s not what God said. God gave a very specific qualification that humans could eat of any tree except the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. If we look back in chapter two of Genesis, we will notice that God gave this directive to man before woman was created, so man had to have told woman at some point because she responds to the Serpent by saying that they can’t eat or touch the fruit or else they will die. Now that’s not exactly what God said, he said they couldn’t eat the fruit, but he didn’t say anything about not touching it, so there’s already a misunderstanding of the word of God.
So the Serpent continues with his mind games and tells the woman that she’ll be like God if she eats the fruit and of course she won’t die. So she looked at the tree (don’t our eyes always get us into trouble?) and liked what she saw, so she ate the fruit and then shared some with her husband. Sharing is caring!!
The sneaky sneaky snake cornered this poor woman to spew his lies. My question is, where was the man in all of this? His woman was talking to a snake and he doesn’t pop up on the scene until she offers him some food? Really. After that, the Serpent pretty much flees the scene and leaves the man and woman to figure out life themselves. He just sort of showed up to cause trouble and then dipped out.
Once the man and woman ate of the fruit, they realized that they were naked so they tried to cover up with some fig leaves. Back in chapter two, they were naked and unashamed, so now they’re clothed and ashamed. Something is wrong here.
The next thing that happens is that God shows up on the scene. He strolls through the garden in the cool of the day and the man and woman hide from him because they know they messed up. And God, already knowing what went down called to them to see how they would react. Immediately, everyone starts playing the blame game. The woman blames the Serpent, the man blames the woman and God (“The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat”), I imagine the Serpent is looking around like “Who me?” Shame will do that to you, make you afraid, make you hide, make you play the blame game.
The thing that gets me is that NOBODY took responsibility for what went down. NOBODY said, hey yeah actually it was me, I messed up. NOBODY stood up for anyone else. NOBODY owned what they did. They all just pointed fingers. And that led to God punishing them all.
To the Serpent, He cursed him to crawl on the Earth and be trampled on by man. To the woman, He increased (multiplied) her pain in childbirth and made her desires about her husband. And to the man, He cursed the ground that man is to work on, telling him he will need to sweat (work hard) to eat and that he was born from nothing (dust) and will die and be nothing (dust).
After this, God shows compassion for the humans. He clothes them in animal skin. That must have been a lot more comfortable that fig leaves. After the humans had some comfort, God enforced the last consequence to their actions. He kicked them out of the garden and placed an angel with a flaming sword there to stand guard so they couldn’t return. Man and woman, now named Adam and Eve, had to make their home else where. And for anyone who has ever moved to a new city, it is hard to leave the place you loved for the unknown.
The thing about temptation is it will develop you or destroy you.
Your character is made through trials and how you learn to (or not to) handle them. Some choices that I have made in life have caused me to absolutely crumble, but the lessons I have learned from those moments have been tattooed on my heart. In life, we can either own up to the choices we have made and deal with the suffering head on, or we can play the blame game and see how far that takes us. Regardless, we are not perfect and will mess up along the way just like the first humans.
Be encouraged though! God shows us in this first temptation in Scripture that although there are consequences to our disobedience, we can still live, we can be happy and we can still talk with God. All is not lost. Life goes on.
Genesis chapter two begins with God resting. Previously in chapter one, we saw God labor for six days. Now that the work has been finished verse two tells us, “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.” (KJV). It is interesting that this is the first principle that God teaches man. Just the day before, man was created and given food and dominion. The very next day, God shows man how to take a break after working hard, that there is more to life than work. And more importantly, God marked this time of rest as holy.
The rest of the chapter departs from this principle and jumps into a retelling of how God formed man. It begins by showing us the set up, that God watered the land to prepare the buffet of vegetation for man and animal to roam the land. Then, in verse seven it says that God formed man from the dust of the ground. Literally from dirt, from nothingness, God created something and breathed life into it. The dirt we walk on, that we pay no attention to except when we sweep it out of our house, that very same dirt that forms the land we walk on, God turned into human life.
After that, God makes a home for the man in the Garden of Eden. There was both food for the man to eat and trees that were there to look beautiful. God not only cares about man’s physical needs, but also his mental and emotional needs. The practical and the beautiful were combined to help create man’s dwelling place. And within that dwelling place also existed the tree of life and the tree of good and evil. To me that shows that God trusted man to be surrounded by life and by knowledge.
The chapter goes on to show all of the attributes and goods in the garden, it was by no means a small place to be able to hold the four rivers that flowed from it, the gold, the trees and all the other goods of the land. With the vastness of the garden, God put man to work the land. I imagine that man understood how to work well, after having witnessed the work of God. The one charge that God gave man was to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or he would die.
Now I don’t know about anyone else, but when someone tells me not to do something I automatically start to think about the thing that I can’t do instead of all of the things I can do. The only thing man was told not to do was to eat of one particular tree. That is it. Every other tree you can eat from, you can hang out in the land, check out the gold in Havilah, swim in any of the four rivers, and if that wasn’t enough God also decides to form a helper for man so he’s not alone. That’s A LOT of things you can do, and just the one small thing you can’t do. More on that one thing later.
In looking for a helper for man, God formed every creature imaginable. And he let man name them, so man got to be part of the creative process. If you don’t believe that man and God got to be creative together, take a look at the platypus.
After man spent some time in the biblical tinder game of swiping left on a bunch of creatures and not finding his match, God literally created the perfect woman for him. God made man go to sleep so He could do the work that was needed to be done without interference and took a rib from the man (who doesn’t love ribs?) in order to form his mate. Man’s perfect mate, his helper, had been a part of him the whole time. And that is the last thing God creates. Woman. The culmination of creation.
Man acknowledges that Woman came from his flesh and bones and says the phrase “at last”. After waiting and seeing so many creatures, he saw the one that was familiar, comfortable, and part of him. And the word tells us that man will leave his parents for his wife and that the two become one flesh.
The chapter ends by telling us that both man and woman were naked and not ashamed. To be naked is to be vulnerable, open, hiding nothing, no covering or protection. The fact that they could be naked together tells me that there was a level of trust and openness that existed between them. They felt comfortable in their own skin.
Oh to feel comfortable in your own skin! That is the dream, but many of us don’t live that dream. We let the world tell us who we are and how we should feel. Let me tell you something though. God created us to be us. We are not platypuses or cats or ostriches or any other creature. We are also not Spartacus, Cleopatra, King Nebuchadnezzar, Jackie Robinson, or Meryl Streep (unless in fact you are Meryl Streep reading this, in which case disregard my last and congrats on the Oscar I am sure you are nominated for just for reading this).
You were created to be YOU!!!
God breathed life into your lungs. He formed you out of nothingness and saw that you were a precious gift to the Earth. Don’t focus on the one tree you can’t eat from. Be naked and unashamed as you dance, prance, sing, shout, jump and run through the amazing garden you live in! Keep your focus on all that has been given to you and all that you have been created to do and don’t be ashamed.
Coffee House Word 