Why do we study genesis

God created a good and orderly world. We live in a time when we are confused about what it means to be human and whether or not human beings have dignity and worth. When we look at how we treat immigrants, the elderly, the mentally handicapped, unborn children, and the poor, it becomes immediately evident that we need a crash course in understanding the image of God. In our current cultural climate, most people are convinced that the people who disagree with them are the problem with the world.

Liberals will point to conservatives, arguing that their policies are harming people and damaging the planet. Conservatives will wag their fingers at liberals, accusing them of using government power to stamp our freedom and using the courts to undermine the moral fabric of our nation. Genesis shows us the character and power of God. We see who he is, what he can do, and how he relates to the people he made. Understanding who he has revealed himself to be will help us gain a better understanding of who we are and how we are to live in this world.

Genesis reveals God as the creator of the world. God did not create the world out of a need that he had, but rather for his own glory and for our joy. In creation, God speaks the world into existence out of absolutely nothing, showing us both his eternal power and limitless beauty. God also shows himself to be holy in Genesis. He calls sin into account and righteously deals with disobedience. He banished Adam and Eve from the garden.

Or His anger over sin? Or the way He fulfilled His promises to everyone? Awareness of each of these characteristics should evoke worship. Remember that the Lord is strong, faithful, and just.

And His desire to bless His creation will one day be fully realized. View Chuck Swindoll's chart of Genesis , which divides the book into major sections and highlights themes and key verses. Who wrote the book? Where are we? Why is Genesis so important? What's the big idea? You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content Q. Why is it important to study the book of Genesis? Share this: Twitter Facebook.

Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. As a result, we have a responsibility to care consciously for all that God has put in our care. Being a relational creature carries moral responsibility. Because we are made in the image of a relational God, we are inherently relational ourselves. We are made for relationships with God himself and also with other people. All of his creative acts had been called "good" or "very good," and this is the first time that God pronounces something "not good.

When Eve arrives, Adam is filled with joy. After this one instance, all new people will continue to come out of the flesh of other human beings, but born by women rather than men. Although this may sound like a purely erotic or family matter, it is also a working relationship. The word helper indicates that, like Adam, she will be tending the garden.

To be a helper means to work. Someone who is not working is not helping. To be a partner means to work with someone, in relationship. Clearly, an ezer is not a subordinate. It is a tragic consequence of the Fall Gen. Relationships are not incidental to work; they are essential. Work serves as a place of deep and meaningful relationships, under the proper conditions at least. A yoke is what makes it possible for two oxen to work together.

In Christ, people may truly work together as God intended when he made Eve and Adam as co-workers. For more on yoking, see the section on 2 Corinthians in the Theology of Work Commentary. A crucial aspect of relationship modeled by God himself is delegation of authority.

God delegated the naming of the animals to Adam, and the transfer of authority was genuine. Much of the past fifty years of development in the fields of leadership and management has come in the form of delegating authority, empowering workers, and fostering teamwork.

The foundation of this kind of development has been in Genesis all along, though Christians have not always noticed it. Many people form their closest relationships when some kind of work—whether paid or not—provides a common purpose and goal. In turn, working relationships make it possible to create the vast, complex array of goods and services beyond the capacity of any individual to produce.

Without relationships at work, there are no automobiles, no computers, no postal services, no legislatures, no stores, no schools, no hunting for game larger than one person can bring down. And without the intimate relationship between a man and a woman, there are no future people to do the work God gives.

Our work and our community are thoroughly intertwined gifts from God. Together they provide the means for us to be fruitful and multiply in every sense of the words. Francis A. God could have created everything imaginable and filled the earth himself. It is remarkable that God trusts us to carry out this amazing task of building on the good earth he has given us.

Through our work God brings forth food and drink, products and services, knowledge and beauty, organizations and communities, growth and health, and praise and glory to himself. A word about beauty is in order. This is not surprising, since people, being in the image of God, are inherently beautiful. Inherently, beauty is not a waste of resources, or a distraction from more important work, or a flower doomed to fade away at the end of the age.

Christian communities do well at appreciating the beauty of music with words about Jesus. Perhaps we could do better at valuing all kinds of true beauty. A good question to ask ourselves is whether we are working more productively and beautifully.

History is full of examples of people whose Christian faith resulted in amazing accomplishments. If our work feels fruitless next to theirs, the answer lies not in self-judgment, but in hope, prayer, and growth in the company of the people of God.

No matter what barriers we face—from within or without—by the power of God we can do more good than we could ever imagine. Both are creative enterprises that give specific activities to people created in the image of the Creator. By growing things and developing culture, we are indeed fruitful.

We bring forth the resources needed to support a growing population and to increase the productivity of creation. We develop the means to fill, yet not overfill, the earth.

We need not imagine that gardening and naming animals are the only tasks suitable for human beings. Work is forever rooted in God's design for human life. It is an avenue to contribute to the common good and as a means of providing for ourselves, our families, and those we can bless with our generosity. An important though sometimes overlooked aspect of God at work in creation is the vast imagination that could create everything from exotic sea life to elephants and rhinoceroses.

While theologians have created varying lists of those characteristics of God that have been given to us that bear the divine image, imagination is surely a gift from God we see at work all around us in our workspaces as well as in our homes.

Much of the work we do uses our imagination in some way. We tighten bolts on an assembly line truck and we imagine that truck out on the open road. We open a document on our laptop and imagine the story we're about to write. Mozart imagined a sonata and Beethoven imagined a symphony. Picasso imagined Guernica before picking up his brushes to work on that painting. Tesla and Edison imagined harnessing electricity, and today we have light in the darkness and myriad appliances, electronics, and equipment.

Someone somewhere imagined virtually everything surrounding us. Most of the jobs people hold exist because someone could imagine a job-creating product or process in the workplace. Yet imagination takes work to realize, and after imagination comes the work of bringing the product into being.

Actually, in practice the imagination and the realization often occur in intertwined processes. Picasso said of his Guernica , "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Jr. Waltke, eds. While this quote is widely repeated, its source is elusive. Whether or not it is genuine, it expresses a reality well known to artists of all kinds.

Since we are created in God's image, God provides for our needs. God has no needs, or if he does he has the power to meet them all on his own. God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

Without him, our work is nothing. We cannot bring ourselves to life. We cannot even provide for our own maintenance. We do not have to depend on our own ability or on the vagaries of circumstance to meet our need. The second cycle of the creation account shows us something of how God provides for our needs. He prepares the earth to be productive when we apply our work to it. Though we till, God is the original planter. In addition to food, God has created the earth with resources to support everything we need to be fruitful and multiply.

He gives us a multitude of rivers providing water, ores yielding stone and metal materials, and precursors to the means of economic exchange Gen. Even when we synthesize new elements and molecules or when we reshuffle DNA among organisms or create artificial cells, we are working with the matter and energy that God brought into being for us.

Did God rest because he was exhausted, or did he rest to offer us image-bearers a model cycle of work and rest? Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. While religious people over the centuries tended to pile up regulations defining what constituted keeping the Sabbath, Jesus said clearly that God made the Sabbath for us—for our benefit Mark What are we to learn from this?

Read more here about a new study regarding rhythms of rest and work done at the Boston Consulting Group by two professors from Harvard Business School. It showed that when the assumption that everyone needs to be always available was collectively challenged, not only could individuals take time off, but their work actually benefited.

Harvard Business Review may show an ad and require registration in order to view the article. When, like God, we stop our work on whatever is our seventh day, we acknowledge that our life is not defined only by work or productivity. Walter Brueggemann put it this way, "Sabbath provides a visible testimony that God is at the center of life—that human production and consumption take place in a world ordered, blessed, and restrained by the God of all creation. Otherwise, we live with the illusion that life is completely under human control.

Part of making Sabbath a regular part of our work life acknowledges that God is ultimately at the center of life. Further discussions of Sabbath, rest, and work can be found in the sections on "Mark ," "Mark ," "Luke ," and "Luke " in the Theology of Work Commentary. Having blessed human beings by his own example of observing workdays and Sabbaths, God equips Adam and Eve with specific instructions about the limits of their work.

In the midst of the Garden of Eden, God plants two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil Gen. The latter tree is off limits. God tells Adam, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" Gen. Various hypotheses are found in the general commentaries, and we need not settle on an answer here.

For our purposes, it is enough to observe that not everything that can be done should be done. If we want to work with God, rather than against him, we must choose to observe the limits God sets, rather than realizing everything possible in creation.

Francis Schaeffer has pointed out that God didn't give Adam and Eve a choice between a good tree and an evil tree, but a choice whether or not to acquire the knowledge of evil.

They already knew good, of course. In making that tree, God opened up the possibility of evil, but in doing so God validated choice. All love is bound up in choice; without choice the word love is meaningless. God expects that those in relationship with him will be capable of respecting the limits that bring about good in creation.

Human creativity, for example, arises as much from limits as from opportunities. Architects find inspiration from the limits of time, money, space, materials, and purpose imposed by the client. Painters find creative expression by accepting the limits of the media with which they choose to work, beginning with the limitations of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. Writers find brilliance when they face page and word limits.

How do you avoid failure? A lot of people come to a crisis in their lives that forces them to recognize their shortcomings. Jim Moats claims, "I believe that failure is the least efficient method for discovering limitations. The human body has great yet limited strength, endurance, and capacity to work. There are limits to healthy eating and exercise.