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.
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.
Genesis chapter one opens in nothingness. Well, not exactly nothing – God existed and the first verse of Genesis lets us know that God is a creator because it says that God created the Heavens and the Earth. When God first created the Earth though, it was void, meaning it had nothing on it. It was essentially a shapeless void, but in its shapelessness the Spirit of God hovered over the Earth which makes me believe that there was peace on Earth. For there to be World peace, there had to be nothing in the World to mess it up. All of this existed before time began.
In fact, it is not until verse five that the idea of time even becomes a concept with the first day. It is also interesting that the first day begins with evening and then morning, which makes sense in our current time keeping practice of midnight being the start of the new day. Before time existed though, the Heavens, Earth, darkness, waters, and light were created. Those things are timeless, precious and seemingly have no end in our time since they had no beginning in our time.
The first day, God created Day and Night. On the second day, God created the seas and the sky. Day three showed us the creation of land on Earth, plants, fruit trees, and vegetation. All of this was a setup for life to inhabit the Earth, God was making a way for what was to come. And God saw that all of what was created was good.
On the fourth day, we see the creation of seasons and years (more time keeping), the sun and moon are put in place, noting that the sun is the greater light to rule the day and the moon is the lesser light to rule the night, and ending with the stars.
Day five shows us the creation of sea creatures and birds. God also created reproduction on this day as it is the first time we see the directive for a creature/created being to be fruitful and multiple. That also lets us know that the created can also create amongst themselves.
On day six, we see the creation of animals, but more relevant to us, we see the creation of humanity. God creates us in his own image, as noted in verse 27. So far we have seen that God is powerful, a creator, and has the ability to produce good things. If humans are created in the image of God, then they have similar attributes. Additionally, God gives humans a blessing both allowing them to reproduce (be fruitful and multiply) and giving them dominion over all the creatures on Earth (except other humans, I don’t see that written in the text). Verses 29 and 30 also seem to set the scene for all living creatures to be vegetarians, Seeing as how God gave them all of the plants to eat from. I imagine also that if God gave them food and they had their first meal, the Earth experienced the first farts, pees and poops on this sixth day. In all of that, God looked over all that was created and saw it all as good.
For six days at least, everything on Earth was good. God looked after everything to make sure of that. He let the midnight oil burn for six days to set everything up for humanity. Can you imagine if the first humans were created before food? Or before land existed? How different things might have turned out! But it seems that the Creator set things up in a very particular order, for things to happen in a very particular way, to allow for humans to not only survive, but thrive.
It’s important as people to know our origin story. Not just the primal where did humans come from story, but our own personal ones so that we can know that if even one thing happened out of order in our parents’ meeting, if our grandparents had decided to not have children, if somewhere down the line our great-great-great-grand-somebody hadn’t decided to move out of the city they were born in to look for better opportunities, if Neo in The Matrix had taken the blue pill instead of the red one, if a butterfly had flapped it’s wings at the wrong moment, if even one small detail had been different, we might not be here right now reading this blog. And that being said, if you weren’t here right now, someone else’s future might not exist either.
If there’s one thing to take away from chapter one of Genesis, it’s that God is a creator who created everything for a purpose with humanity in mind and that includes you.
Coffee House Word 