the God of Genesis
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I’ve been reading through the Bible in 180 days almost every year since I got married 10 years ago. It’s been so good—flying high over the surface of God’s Word from January to the end of June, sometimes with a large group of fellow readers and sometimes with a small one. Some years it’s been lots of audio Bible; some years it’s been pages of personal notetaking; some years it’s been writing out insights daily or weekly for those reading along with me. I’ve learned so much about the structure of the Bible, the character of God, and the story of Jesus as the Savior of Creation.
With that big-picture foundation in place, I knew it was finally time to dive deep again. And what better place to start than the prologue of the story?
Every day in January, I read through Genesis 1-11, discovering questions and curiosities, noticing truths about who God is, learning new things about who God made me to be, and realizing what a different world we could all live in if we knew the God of Genesis.
He’s a God of order.
The Creation story doesn’t tell us how He made a material universe out of a blank void, but rather how His Spirit formed an orderly world out of a chaotic wasteland. He carefully separated out the different components of the world—light from darkness, sky from waters, land from seas, day from night—and grouped together the different life forms into their kinds: vegetation, sea creatures, birds, and animals. The pinnacle of it all, human beings who were made in His likeness, He created as one and yet also in two: male and female.
He wants to collaborate with humans.
Instead of creating the earth to be a space for Him to practice dictatorial tyranny, He commissioned His image bearers to rule over it together and to participate in the ongoing activities of life-making and ground-working.
He is a gentle parent.
When His image bearers were deceived and betrayed Him, He didn’t get angry. He didn’t make harsh threats. He didn’t leave them alone to think about what they’d done, He didn’t strike them dead on the spot, He didn’t shame them for their stupidity or their nakedness. Instead, God sought them out, heard them, cared for them, and covered their shame.
He models both grace and boundaries.
There were clear consequences for Adam and Eve’s sin, and they were upheld graciously as protective boundaries, not punitively as wrathful punishment. The same gracious boundaries led to the catastrophic Flood—not because God hated or wanted to destroy what He had made, but because the earth was so corrupted that it must be cleansed.
He is clear and direct.
We don’t have to guess or infer or hope to figure out what He wants. When He called humankind to rule over Creation, He said it directly and repeated it several times. When He received Cain’s subpar offering, He clearly communicated how Cain could do what was right. When He made a covenant with Noah, He spelled out the exact terms.
There is so much more, an endless wealth of truth to be mined from these first eleven chapters of the Bible. This month, I’m zeroing in on Genesis 1, and already overwhelmed by the beauty of how God created our world and how the Spirit inspired the Biblical authors to record it.
If you want to join me in any of this, here’s the plan I made (and here’s the notetaking journal I’m using):
January: Read Genesis 1-11 daily
February: Read Genesis 1 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
March: Read Genesis 2 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
April: Read Genesis 3 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
May: Read Genesis 4 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
June: Read Genesis 5 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
July: Read Genesis 6 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
August: Read Genesis 7 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
September: Read Genesis 8 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
October: Read Genesis 9 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
November: Read Genesis 10 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
December: Read Genesis 11 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly
