The Story so Far Part: 1 From Creation to Fall

So we are right in the middle of the ordering, but what this list does not account for is the length and portion that these sections are of the whole Bible.

The Torah, The Prophets and The Writings are a staggering 77.5% of the Bible!

The Gospels are 11 %

The Acts of the Apostles are 3%

The Letters are 7%

Revelation is 1.5%

So the whole New Testament (NT) is only 22.5% of the Bible.

What are some reflections that you may have right now? Based on what is said?

So today I want to focus on what has happened in the story so far, there is no way we can talk about something that is more than 75% into the story and hope to understand.

Most of us would not watch a movie that is nearly at the end but we do that with Scripture all the time! It is my goal with this study to firmly place where everything is in the story.

Think of it like in a series on Netflix…previously on “The Biblical Drama”

We believe the Bible is one unified story that leads to Jesus.

We believe that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever!

We are going to see how God, from the very beginning has been on a path of redemption for everyone!

The Beginning

Historical Backdrop

The Church has historically had a rocky relationship with Judaism, Jews and therefore anything distinctly Jew-ish.

For example letters and books in the NT that had a distinctly Jew-ish flavour were largely ignored or classed as second tier, so Johannine (writings by John, Gospel 1,2,3 John and Revelation) literature, letter to the Hebrews and James tended to not be looked at favourably.

Now this did not happen just because of one singular reason, remember these are real people in a real place at a real time.

Some reason why this happened:

A new movement always seeks to separate from the original. This was not untrue of Christianity.

Some of the Jewish Leaders of the time were persecuting Christians, this was mainly because of two reasons:

Some Jewish leaders didn’t like the Jesus Movement because they thought it was blasphemy and some because it decentralised their power

Think Paul for the Former and the Sanhedrin for the Latter

Some Jewish leaders thought it would upset the balance of peace between Judea and Rome which was tentative at best. Remember in Rome, you had to have official permission to worship and you had to worship Caesar as god (this is known as the imperial cult). Turns out Jews didn’t agree to that and had permission to not worship Caesar but they still had to pay tribute to him for the privilege of having him rule them.

We have to appreciate this would have made a conflict for Christians. On one hand you want to be separate but on the other if you aren’t Jews…then you no longer have permission to not worship Caesar as god. It was a dilemma for sure.

There were at the time Greeks who liked the Jewish faith and way of wisdom, they were called “God fearers” but they in no way wanted to experience circumcision. (This is why Paul struggled on this topic so much because a large percentage of early Greek converts to Christianity were among this group of “God-fearers”) As you can imagine this became a major point of contest.

In 70 AD Rome had enough of the Jews and sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, so naturally you would not want to be associated with that in any way.

Therefore anything Jewish fell far out of favour in the empire and no one would want to be imitating anything that might make you get killed. Makes Sense.

This came with consequences, the majority of Christians at this point at the end of the first century were Greek Gentiles (Non-Jews). So no one passed down the Jewish teachings, the understandings or otherwise. This was made worse that people did not actively want them.

Once Christianity became the religion of the empire things just got out of hand and quickly.

You had whole tribes of people thousands and thousands being conquered militarily and force converted to Christianity and they were thinking Jesus was now their new war god. Seriously…this is what the early church had to deal with, but the church themselves disconnected from their Jewish roots and had to effectively make it up as they went.

Further history did not make this better.

However in the last 60 - 100 years due to major finds in Archeology and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls there has been a fresh re-invigoration of reestablishing our Jewish roots and it has been eye-opening (for me personally) but also for all Christians to see that many of our traditional interpretations were just so far off the mark.

So it is from this understanding and perspective that we are going to start into the wonderful world of being students of the Word.

Complete Jewish Bible Title Page

ברוך אתה יהוה אלהינו מלך העולם אשר נותן תורת־אמת ובשורת־ישועה לעמו ישראל ולכל העמים על־ידי בנו ישוע המשיח אדוננו.

Praised are you, Adonai our God, King of the universe, who gives the Torah of truth and the Good News of salvation to his people Israel and to all the peoples through his son Yeshua the Messiah, our Lord.

Any good story worth telling starts at the beginning.

The first eleven chapters of the Bible are called the Primeval Period which just means of the “earliest time”

It recounts the foundational stories or myths.

Myth - a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.

So let’s dive into the story

Genesis opens with the most organised chapter in the whole of the Bible. We must remember from the last session that the Bible is literary art. It is designed to communicate through multiple angles and means. We may think that books are just ordered chronologically with the main point at the end. That is not the way the Bible is organised, designed or otherwise.

Like last week we said Gen 1 is 1 set of seven words then the structure of days with days 1 - 3 giving form and days 4 - 6 filling them fixing the issue from verse 2:

Genesis 1:2 NIV

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Now the word for deep here is Tehom (תְּהוֹם, tehom)

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Tehom

A Hebrew word often used for the depths of the ocean or with reference to a great and destructive amount of water (see Ezek 31:15).

Tehom may refer to the chaotic primeval ocean (Gen 1:2), to one of the sources of water in the great flood (Gen 7:11), to the waters of the sea (Isa 51:10; Psa 107:26), or to waters that bring death and destruction (Exod 15:5; Ezek 26:19). A common Semitic word for “sea” may lie behind the Hebrew tehom and the Akkadian Tiamat (see HALOT, s.v. תְּהוֹם, tehom). The possible connection is important since Tiamat figures prominently as Marduk’s adversary in the Mesopotamian creation epic, Enuma Elish. Tehom is sometimes used in biblical contexts that evoke this common imagery from ancient Near Eastern mythology (e.g., the Chaoskampf motif).

Then the Spirit of God comes and now the word for water is הַמָּֽיִם׃ ma’yim which is just neutral water that can be used for an abundance of good and nourishment and otherwise.

So just from reflection from one verse in Torah we can see God’s whole character, He enters into Chaos to Create Peace.

This whole chapter is God ordering chaos into something where life can flourish!

Faithlife Study Bible Chapter 1

darkness Throughout the Bible darkness represents evil or calamity. Here, darkness refers to the unformed and unfilled conditions of the material of v. 1.

So there are a couple of things that God is specifically taking care of Chaos Waters (seas), Darkness and so on. Let’s take a quick look at Revelation.

Revelation 21:1 NIV

1 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

The New International Version Chapter 21

22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

Revelation 22:5 NIV

5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

John in the book of Revelation is intentionally using Genesis 1 language to illustrate what New Creation was revealed to him to be like. The fundamental forces that oppose God’s good creation will not be present. This is just one of a multitude of ways that Scripture tells us the same story using a different strategy so that hopefully we will understand the message.

See the whole story of the Bible was just told by using a couple of verses at the beginning and end of the Scriptures. What does everyone think about this so far?

This is just one of thousands of references > 22,000 cross references in the Bible of Scripture quoting and referencing other Scripture.

We haven’t even really gone into Chapter 2 yet!

Humanity and the Fall

Genesis 2 really shows creation from the view of the land.

It is like looking at a diamond from a different angle and seeing a different glittering, same diamond, just a different perspective

Genesis 2:7–9 CJB

7 Then Adonai, God, formed a person [Hebrew: adam] from the dust of the ground [Hebrew: adamah] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. 8 Adonai, God, planted a garden toward the east, in ‘Eden, and there he put the person whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground Adonai, God, caused to grow every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So what just happened?

God breathed on something with no life (us), created life from death and then put that new life into a beautiful garden that God had made that means Paradise/Garden of Delight.

Now we see the same message repeating from Genesis 1 God is a life from death Creator who gave something that was dead (us) purpose and new life in a place of blessing. This is the Gospel Message, life from death with new purpose in a land of blessing and delight.

So we see from these passages that this is not trying to tell us recorded history, but rather it is telling us WHO GOD IS, what is He like?

He is a God of Love who reaches into the chaos and makes peace and beauty.

So it should not surprise us by the time we get to Genesis 3 that when Adam and Eve fall, God does not pull away from them, but instead engages in the mission of redeeming His people and beautiful creation because we have just been told in each of the previous chapters that this God does exactly that!

So here is the scene after the fall:

Tell Fall story Adam to God and Eve, Eve to the snake, God curses ground and snake. Mans work on the ground is equated to Womens work in being fruitful and multiplying.

First Messianic Prophesy

Genesis 3:15 NIV

15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

Did Adam and Eve die?

In a sense yes they did. See Life is with God, It is a proximity matter, the only thing that gives us life as we have learned in this story is the Spirit of God. Without that Spirit, we are dirt. So having life even now, is a gift from God, He sustains us, we do not have life from ourselves nor is it absent from His active will. Adam and Eve separated from the source of Life and in this particular case it was a blessing, because if Adam and Eve had taken of the Tree of Life they would have lived forever in a fallen state which would have been a curse for them!

Big concept, how are we doing?

From here the rest of the scroll of Genesis we see the consequences of Sin playing out exactly as God has said from a Human perspective.

But what we see is in fact God carrying on His commitment to see His plan for redemption through!

Now in fairness people spend their whole professional lives digging through the book of Genesis and have more than a whole lifetime of work, so we will not be able to plumb the depths of this today.

Something we see which is important that God does is He starts making formal contracts with people called Covenants.

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Covenant

COVENANT (בְּרִית, berith; διαθήκη, diathēkē). A sacred kinship bond between two parties, ratified by swearing an oath. Covenant making was a widespread custom throughout the ancient Near East and Graeco-Roman culture, serving as a means to forge sociopolitical bonds between individuals or groups. God’s covenants are prominent in every period of salvation history. Divine covenants reveal the saving plan of God for establishing communion with Israel and the nations, ultimately fulfilled by the death and resurrection of Christ.

God makes an important covenant with Noah which is really an amazing story that proves a couple of things:

Complete Jewish Bible Chapter 8

21 ADONAI smelled the sweet aroma, and ADONAI said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, since the imaginings of a person’s heart are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy all living things, as I have done. 22 So long as the earth exists, sowing time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.”

The heart of man is evil from birth

Destroying everyone except those that are righteous does not fix the problem because righteous is not static.

God’s judgement is meant to purify and often He will accelerate the timeline to help this. (Will discuss this much more in depth later)

From there we see the same pattern continue, the earth fills with violence and arrogance leading to the confusing of the people at Babel.

From there God chose one family to carry on the Rescue Plan.

So in all of this we have the basic plot, conflict and resolution strategy all set up! We are only eleven chapters into the Bible and already we know the whole of the story or at least it’s bones.

The Creation God, El Shaddai, God Almighty, who is the fixer of Chaos and the Life-bringer has engaged in the mission of redeeming His people even though they have proven time and time again intent on hurting | Killing themselves and destroying God’s good creation. How is Adonai going to pull this off? Stay tuned.

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