Author: Bryan Richardson

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 7:1-4, 17-24; 8:1-5, 13-16, 20-22 (day three)

“Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.”  The images of a smiling Noah in his floating petting zoo adorning the wallpaper of many a toddler’s room will fade away when we consider for a few moments the actual account of this family’s journey through the deluge.  For instance, the family members conceivably kept personal possessions during their voyage.  But the culture from which those possessions had come was gone.  They had not only lost everything, they had lost the frame of reference for everything.  This family could not rely on any of those markers of place.  The only thing that remained the same was a person: God.  They restarted the human race from that eternal reference point.  What can you and I do when we begin with God?

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 6 (day three) 

“The Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth.”  God apparently told Moses, who wrote down this account, that the thoughts and feelings which arose in his mind as he regarded the rebellion of the human race were what Moses—and all humankind—would understand best as regret.  Maybe the word “regret” is only the nearest approximation that is understandable to a finite mind.  Whatever kind of movement occurs in God’s mind in response to the lives of morally responsible creatures, it arises from the one reality of God’s person that does not deviate from its intended aim: love.  God will not turn aside from, and cannot be made to turn aside from, love.  In love he exists, he creates, he punishes, he redeems.  Your plans will stand only when they stand firmly within God’s sovereign love.

Re:Verse reading–Genesis 4:1-16; 25-26 (day three) 

“At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord.”  This new shining world of self-made men turned out to be neither new nor shining.  The old serpent had sold humanity a bill of goods, and the luster was already off.  And now, men began to wonder if God was still there.  Had he left them?  In the succeeding passages, Genesis tells of faltering, unsteady, tenuous voices seeking God’s whereabouts and wrestling with half-forgotten stories of the days when God walked with men.  Through all those generations, the Bible reveals that God is indeed still here, there, and everywhere, placing himself within reach of all who will address him.  God does not forget men, men forget God.  May we remember him.  Today.

Re:Verse reading–Genesis 3:8-24  (day three)

“He must not be allowed to…take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”  The man and woman had taken on knowledge that they could not manage, thereby condemning the human race to every kind of evil that results from power without wisdom.  And as punishment, God kicked them out of the garden.  But was it punishment?  Is this ejection from Eden rather God’s mercy in action, rescuing us from an almost unimaginable outcome?  Let’s do a thought experiment.  If in their state of acquaintance with evil, they had also taken on immortality, what kind of existence would that have been?  Living forever as beings subject to evil would have been living forever in hell.  This is not the end that God had determined for his creation.  God loves–while we were yet sinners.

Re:Verse reading–Genesis 3:1-7  (day three)

“The woman saw that the fruit of the tree was… desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.”  Within God’s life, desire occupies its rightful place of service to the other aspects of his character.  In our sin-corrupted lives, by contrast, we have elevated desire to a position of authority.  This is a position it is incapable of occupying well.  It was never meant to serve in place of reason.  It is a poor substitute for thinking.  It is a disaster when confused with love.  Here’s the history of sin in two words: I want.  Here’s the path back to purity in eight words: Not what I want, but what you want.  Which of these do you find yourself expressing?

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18-25 (day three)

“Let them rule…over all the earth.”  The destiny of man to rule over the created order bookends the Bible.  In Genesis and in Revelation, we discover God’s explicit intention that we become the kind of people who can be entrusted to rule.  And let us understand: To rule isn’t to sit on a throne and bark orders.  Rather, to rule is to have say over the flourishing of creation—to allocate resources and design systems and execute processes that realize the potential God has built into the universe.  Such an endeavor requires wisdom.  Ruling without wisdom results in…the kind of world we live in right now.  Let us get quickly to God and seek from him the wisdom that we will need to reign with him in this age and in the age to come.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 2:4-17 (day three)

“In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  The potential to do evil isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.  If we cannot will to do evil, then we cannot will to love.  Is evil therefore necessary?  No.  It is not necessary, it is possible.  It is possible for human beings because we have the capacity to reason, to choose.  The aim of God is not that we would do things right because we are incapable of evil.  It is that we would do righteousness because we do not desire evil.  And so, a question: What do you desire?

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 1:14-25; 2:1-3 (day three)  

“Let [the lights] serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.”  The universe is not merely a structure made of well-ordered subatomic particles and energy.  There is more to it that the fact that it exists.  Moses teaches us that the question “What is it for? (or, more precisely, “Who is it for”) is a perfectly appropriate one.  Some might answer that question by saying, “It is for God.”  It seems that even God would say that is an incomplete answer—that it is for man as well.  Those “sacred times, and days and years” are markers for us, helping us to know God and to know one another, to grow, and to love.  It takes time to be a human.  God built time into this universe for that very purpose.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 1:1-13 (day three)

“God created the heavens and the earth.”  Open any older edition of the King James Version Bible, and you’ll see that the first book of the Old Testament carries this heading: “The First Book of Moses, Commonly Called Genesis”.  The Hebrews used to understand that the universe submits to the person of God himself, but 430 years in Egypt had all but eradicated that knowledge.  The cosmology, ethical system, and culture of the Egyptians had set the parameters of their thinking, leaving them to believe that they were at the mercy of the world around them.  But Moses re-introduced them to the Maker of the heavens and the earth, revealing to them that human beings are not at the mercy of the universe, but at the mercy of God.  Have you forgotten that?