(The video of this sermon can be seen by going to ... www.cowetanazarene.org/videos.html)
My calling as a Christian is to live the kind of life Jesus of Nazareth has laid out for me, showing His love and grace in everything I do, say, and think. That is such a huge task for me, I often fail to some degree or other. But because of His great love for me, He has offered me a full pardon for everything I do wrong and for everything I do that is not quite right.
My calling as a preacher is to give you the information that is found in the Bible so that you can know God and live for Him, too. That, also, is a daunting task, but one that I will try to live up to with all my heart, soul, and mind.
That being said, let us begin at the beginning of the Bible, in the Old Testament. Many people are afraid of the Old Testament because they do not know who’s who or what’s what. But once we learn about the people and the places, it actually draws us into the story by giving us reference points we can understand so we can then put the pieces together properly.
When we understand who Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were, and when we can tell the difference between a Hittite and a parasite, the story of God starts to become a living adventure. We will get to know that these were real people and real places and then we will realize that these things actually took place in human history and were not just a bunch of “once upon a time” fairy tales.
You have heard many people say that the Bible was just written by men. That is true, but these men wrote what God had inspired them to write. They had allowed God to work in their lives in the most powerful of ways, and they became the human instruments used in telling others the story of our Creator.
This series of sermons will take you from GENESIS all the way through REVELATION, and will take a long time to complete. I will include many pictures as aids to help you get acquainted with the material we will be covering and intermixed in with these sermons, will also be sermons on the relevant events that happen from time to time.
This coming year will be full of information that you will find not only interesting, but intriguing as well.
So, sit back, relax, and get ready to hear the most exciting story you have ever heard; and the most exciting adventure you will ever have the ability to witness. Get ready to hear the wonderful story about your God and how He took a desolate desert land full of wayward people and turned them into His very own, and how He did it.
(Show picture the expansive deserts of Israel with ancient people if you can. This may help your congregation have a feel for how Israel was then, and what the people looked like and did then, also.)
The first theme of the Bible is that God is present, and He is present in the lives of those people He created. He is working in everything we do, continually giving us the call to come back to Him. And that leads to the second main theme of the Bible; the theme of redemption. God offers us complete redemption if we will allow Him to be the authority in our lives.
Some have referred to this theme of redemption as the thread that is woven through the entire Bible, starting with the fall of Adam and Eve, and continuing to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ - and then on through the End Times. It has to do with the provision of salvation. It shows how we made a choice to turn our backs on and reject God as our leader, but that He continues to love us with a love so great we cannot understand. And through that love, He has made a way for us to come back to Him and not be accountable for the things we have done that are against His nature.
In understanding the Bible, it is a must that we have a basic understanding of the Old Testament so that we will be able to understand the New Testament. The New Testament tells us about redemption of sin, a sacrifice made in love, and the gift of atonement to bring us back in line with God. All of which have their beginnings and roots in the Old Testament.
I am praying that God will use these studies to speak to your hearts and challenge you to walk even closer with Him that ever before.
The Old Testament is divided into four basic sections. The first is the Pentateuch, or the Law. Some refer to it as the Torah, which is the Hebrew word for law.
The second section is the books of History, which tells about the establishment of a nation; a nation called Israel. The third section is the books of Poetry. They deal with the personal aspirations, or the heart, of God’s children.
The fourth and last section of the Old Testament is the books of Prophecy, as they look forward to the future hope of that nation and the future coming of the promised Messiah, who would fulfill all the promises of God. The Old Testament therefore, becomes a book of promise. The promise of a future Savior who would come and save the people. That Savior is Jesus Christ, and He is revealed in the New Testament.
So now you can start to see how having a basic understanding of the Old Testament will help us understand what the New Testament really means to us in our attempts to understand and please God.
Please open your bibles to GENESIS 1:1, and follow along as we go through it. I have included extra inserts in your bulletins so you can take notes if you like.
The story of God begins with these words: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
This shows the whole focus of the Bible is God, and it shows that He is the Creator of everything in existence. We must understand that before we can have any kind of understanding on anything else we will cover. We do not argue the case of God; we assume the existence of God and pick it up from that point.
GENESIS actually means “beginning”, and this book tells of the beginning of mankind and the beginnings of the Jewish nation, and it goes on to tell us about how God begins to provide for those who wish to follow Him.
The book of GENESIS is divided into two parts. Chapters 1 thru 11 deal with four great events that happened, and chapters 12 thru 50 tell us about four great people. Four events and four people.
The four events are: the Creation of everything; the Fall of mankind; the Flood; and the beginning of the nation of Israel. Those four events in the first section of GENESIS set the very nature of everything else that follows throughout the rest of the Old Testament.
The second section of GENESIS deals with four great people, or the forefathers of the nation of Israel. They were Abraham, his son Isaac, his son Jacob and then Joseph. The family that God chose to begin a nation of peoples He would call His own. And in each of their lives, we see the delicate work of a loving God, challenging them, directing them, and protecting them.
In the New Testament, in HEBREWS 13:8, we are told that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. And since Jesus is 1/3 of the Godhead, we know that all of the Trinity is the same throughout time. God never changes. And in that, we see how God worked in their lives to help them, and we know that He still works in our lives today as well, for the same reasons.
(Show picture of the formless world on the screen. This may help them to get a feel of how Earth was before God created those things that are upon the world.)
Continuing where we left off in GENESIS 1:2, it says
“The earth had no form and was empty. Darkness covered the ocean and God’s Spirit was moving over the waters.”
These words tell us that God created the earth from nothing. He did not take pre-existing material to from this planet as there was none. He literally made it from … nothing. He spoke it into existence. That sounds pretty extraordinary to us, but we must remember that our God is past the ordinary. And He can do all things.
The smallest particle known to man is called a “quark”. It is so small, that to see it, they must magnify it tens of thousands of times. Everything in existence has these quarks in them, except living flesh. Rocks have them, wood has them, water has them, and so forth. How can something so small be so intriguing?
With modern day technology, they have found a way to split the quark in half. And in each quark, they have found one thing: A single sound wave. Where did the sound wave come from and how did it get embedded in everything?
Do you remember in LUKE 19, that as Jesus came down into Jerusalem in the Triumphal Entry, His followers were rejoicing and making so much noise that the Pharisees told Jesus to quiet them down? What was Jesus’ reply?
In LUKE 19:40, Jesus said,
“If they were to be kept quiet, even the stones along the path would burst forth in rejoicing.”
What did He mean? Could it have something to do with the one sound wave that is in each quark contained in the rocks? And could it be that the sound wave was embedded in them as God spoke the world into existence? And if so, how did Jesus know this back then when they had no technology? He could have only know this if He were God.
And so, in six days, God spoke creation into existence; instantaneously and without it being changed from one thing to another. It wasn’t anything, yet our God created it into everything.
Those who do not believe claim that the earth is millions upon millions of years old and everything came about by evolution. But think about that. If a person makes something, they make it so it can be used immediately, not somewhere later down the road. And God did the same thing. He made the earth ready to be used. He did not half make it and then let it age for eons before it could be used.
In verse 3, God says, “Let there be light and there was light”, and in verse 4, we see that “it was good and God separated the light from the darkness.” And it continues on from there, telling how God spoke things into existence. He spoke everything into being with the sound of His voice … except humans. Is that the reason living flesh has no quarks in it; because God did not speak us into existence?
In GENESIS 1:26, it begins telling how God created mankind. Rather than speak us into existence, He used His own hands, getting down into the clay and He formed us in His image. That does not mean we look like God, but that we are made to be as He is. God loved us enough to personally use His hands to make us and then rather than just speak life into us, He personally blew the breath of life into us. Imagine that! God loved us so much, He gave us the breath of life by gently kissing each one of us!
You ask, then, why some do not believe in God. They do not believe in God because their pride will not let them accept things they cannot understand or explain, so they deny His existence altogether. But when that person’s life is pushed to the very brink of death, the only thing they cry out is for help from God.
We have self-awareness, but we also have God-awareness. We are aware of who we are, and down in our heart we are aware of who God is, even if we do not admit it to ourselves. God’s essence and nature are put into our hearts and souls.
The opening Scriptures of chapter one denounce atheism. They do not tell us that in the beginning nobody was there, they say that in the beginning God was there. They speak against evolution. They do not say in the beginning we started to evolve. They say in the beginning, God created each form of life unto itself – not over millions of years but instantaneously, or in a moment. And the Scriptures do not say that many gods made us. They say God, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, created us.
And so, God created the first man. He named him “Adam”. In Hebrew, the name Adam literally means “made from the red clay”. God created man and bound him to this earth as part of the earth, but instilled in man a soul which is bound to Heaven.
Going into chapter two, we find that Adam’s job was to care for the most perfect place on earth; a garden called Eden. It was made especially for man to dwell in and Adam had charge over it. In this garden, Adam named all the other living creatures. But God soon saw that Adam needed another human to associate with; someone he could share is life with. And so God then caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep, and took a bone from Adam’s side and from that bone, created that other human, a woman and called her Eve.
In the first two chapters of GENESIS, we have the picture that God created an entire universe and in that universe, He made a place that would be home to man. When that place was finished, He created man to live in it.
And what we find is that God and man loved one another and walked in perfect fellowship with one another. And starting in chapter three, we start seeing how Satan also interacts with man to try and destroy what God has done.
In GENESIS 3:1, it immediately shows Satan to be a serpent. Evil in its very nature and the first thing Satan does is propose a question to Eve. He asked, “Did God really tell you to not eat fruit from every tree in the garden?” That question enters doubt into the mind of man for the very first time.
In verse 2, Eve responded by saying, “We may eat from the trees in this garden, but God told us not to eat, or even touch, the fruit from this tree or we would surely die.” Eve repeated the words of God to the devil, but the devil came back and denied God’s word and then said something that played into Eve’s pride.
In verses 4 and 5, He said to her,
“You will not die! God knows that if you eat from this tree, your eyes will be open and you will be just like God.”
We find that lie has been around since then, even in our world today. Many people believe that we are just like God, or they say we are God. Nothing could be further from the truth, since God is God and we are only His creation.
Satan continues to do the same kind of work in our lives today as He did in Even’s life. He confuses and causes doubt as to what God said, and then he distorts the truth of God’s Word and then he outright denies the truth of what God said.
Man was created in a good state. Maybe not a righteous state, but a good state. We read so far that after God created things, He looked and saw His creation as “good”. But when Satan is introduced into the picture, he brings sin.
Scripture tells us that they ate the forbidden fruit. The kind of fruit they ate does not matter. The Bible doesn’t tell us if it was an apple, a grapefruit, or a head of lettuce. What is important, however, is they decided in their hearts that what they wanted was ultimately more important to them than what God wanted.
In verse 6, it is recorded that when Eve looked at the fruit, “it was pleasant to the eye”. That bit of self-interest put together with what Satan had told her about the fruit being good to eat and that it would make her wise like God, was all it took for her to make a decision: Follow God or follow Satan.
In this verse it says that she ate of the fruit first, and then she gave some to Adam who was with her at the time, and he then ate of it, too. Apparently, he was with her when she talked to the snake, but kept quiet, even when he saw Eve committing what God said not to commit. Scripture says she was deceived into sinning, but it clearly shows that Adam sinned willingly.
Never the less, they both had made a choice to turn away from God and follow something else. That was the breaking of the relationship and that was where sin was cast in the lives of humans. And it was caused by the same trio of things that sin is always comprised of: The lust of our flesh – the lust of our eyes – and the pride in our hearts.
When Eve at the fruit and did not die physically, she probably thought all was well and she was home free. What she did not realize is that she did die at that moment. She died to her spirit. It instantly fell away from God and at that precise moment in time, she died spiritually. And the same thing happened then with Adam. And as soon as they did that, their eyes had been opened, but what they saw was not what they had hoped for.
Verse 7 tells us that when they saw what they had done, they were ashamed. They sewed leaves together to hide their nakedness. I believe that the nakedness they were ashamed of was really their spiritual nakedness now. They realized that God would know the depth of their actions and they were panicked.
Verse 8 says that when they heard God approaching in the cool of the day, they didn’t run up to meet Him as they had done before, but rather, they hid from him in the bushes, afraid of having to face up to their actions.
God knew what they had done and when He asked Adam why he had done it, Adam did what we too often do today – we find a way to blame somebody else for the wrong we have done. Adam blamed Eve by telling God it was the woman’s fault, the woman God had given him. Talk about throwing your mate under the bus to save your own skin! He said she had given the fruit to him and he ate it – like he was perfectly innocent in all this.
When God asked Eve why she did that, she blamed the serpent, saying, “He tricked me into eating it.”
Both Adam and Eve had conveniently forgot that they had been created with intelligence and could have chosen not to eat the fruit, but it is always much easier to do what we want, and then blame another – like it was all because of them, not ourselves.
For the first time, God has to step in and counter sin so that He can eventually put in place the one way for us to get out of sin. And when God steps in, He creates something else …. it is called “consequences” and along with consequences comes something called “personal responsibility”. We must face up and take ownership of those things we choose to do wrong in, and then accept the consequences of our sin.
God starts a series of actions to hold Adam and Eve personally accountable for what they had chosen to do. The first thing He does is hold the snake responsible and by doing so, it shows that God is the supreme authority and not the devil.
In GENESIS 3:14-15, God said to the serpent,
“Because you did this, a curse will be put on you. You will be cursed as no other animal, tame or wild, will ever be. You will crawl forever on your stomach through the dust and you will eat of that dust all the days of your life.
“I will make you and the woman enemies of each other by placing hostility and enmity between you and her. Your descendants and her descendants will also be enemies of each other.
And then God quickly gives the serpent a long-ranging prophecy of sorts. He tells the devil that “one of the her seeds will crush the serpents head and the serpent would strike the seed’s heel.”
In verse 16, God then says to the woman,
“I will increase your problems dramatically when you are pregnant and when you give birth I will increase your pain. You will also have a great desire to control, or lord over, your husband, but he will be the ruler over you.”
And in verse 17, God turns to the man and says,
“You listened to what your wife told you and you obeyed her by eating of the forbidden fruit, so I will also put a curse on you. The ground you work on will be very hard to work on and will produce little fruit. You will be in pain as you work the ground for the rest of your life. And when you die, you will return to the ground. You are dust and you shall return to dust.”
God had given His wrath out to Satan and to two humans who had purposely disobeyed Him. But we also find something somewhat strange to us. And that is even though He is punishing them, He still loves them enough to help them.
In verse 21, we see God made clothes for them to wear from the hides of animals. Certainly, we see His great love for mankind in this action, but there is something else we see here that often becomes overlooked.
Sin had occurred and death had to be given. But since God loved man so much, He allowed the blood of something else be spilled. The blood of the animals who were killed for their coats.
Everything in the Old Testament is a precursor of things yet to come in the New Testament. Here, in GENESIS 3, we see the signs of what Jesus Christ will do for us thousands of years later. He will have His blood spilled for our sins and in this action, mankind will also receive the covering of protection; God’s protection afforded through Salvation through a belief in Jesus as a personal Savior.
(Show picture of a receipt.)
What do you see on the screen? It is a receipt, isn’t it? What does that receipt tell you? It says that what you are carrying around is paid for. You owe nothing more on it. The cross is our receipt that we owe nothing more on the payment of our sins. The entire debt has been destroyed.
And the animal skins that covered Adam and Eve were their receipts that their sin had been covered likewise.
In GENESIS 3:23, we see the direct consequences of our sin. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden and God put Cherubim on the garden’s eastern border. This kept people from gaining entrance again and getting to the Tree of Life.
Cherubim are particularly powerful spiritual beings that are from God.
There’s the story of how Adam was out hunting with two of his boys one time and they happened upon the Garden of Eden where he had previously been told to leave. Adam just stopped and for a long time stood there and looked with tears in his eyes.
One of his boys asked him why he was crying, and Adam said, “That’s where we used to live until your mother ate us out of house and home.”
We jest about all kins of things, even things in the Bible, but reality is quite different. God held Adam personally accountable for his sin, but He also went with him to protect Him and continue to have a personal relationship with Adam. It was different and not the same as it had been, but God still provided that. And even though we may be held accountable for our sin, God continues to offer us a personal relationship with Him, too … but it is through a belief in Jesus Christ as our Savior. He is our covering just as the hides were Adam and Eve’s coverings.
We will continue with our study through the Bible, but I wanted to open this series with an overview that would give us the knowledge that God did create, and that God does love, and God still pursues; and when we stop being rebellious and begin to be obedient, all of the blessings in the heavenly realm are waiting for us to take them.
Closing Prayer.
* Bible verses quoted in the Paraphrased Version, New International Version, and the Expanded Bible New Century Version.
