the God of Genesis

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

inner earthquakes and hellfire

Today I resurrected the old @halliewrites Instagram account that I started about six years ago, right when I was working hard on my first book and building up a community around the Bible180 Challenge. I was 24 years old, had been married four years, and had no children. These were only the earliest days of Instagram stories and reels didn’t yet exist, so the entirety of my presence can be found in a handful of photo posts with captions. Looking back at those posts, for me, is like a glimpse into the story of a young woman I met once, but barely remember.

But because I lived it, I can read the paragraphs in between the posts that the true outside observer will never see.

Can you tell that in the space between the first post and the second, the life I thought I had exploded?

Do you sense that between the colorless self-portrait and the phone camera snap of the last autumn leaves, I nearly gave up and walked away?

And in the caption beneath the bachelor button at the top of the grid—dated June 8, 2019—can you hear the shaking breaths of someone who survived, but still desperately fears that a survivor is all she will ever be again?

I may barely remember that person, but I will never forget that fear. I thought I had been permanently shelved, sidelined by God, and that I was doomed to waste the rest of my life because what I believed were my best years had been ruined by grief. If I wasn’t going to get to change the world as a young, free, childless Proverbs 31 wife, when would I ever have the chance?

But what I said in that caption rings true: “God works slowly. He’s a farmer, not a magician.”

I’ve aged 5 years and had two babies since then. I’ve continued to write, even though many times it seemed pointless. And I’ve been learning that no one changes the world without first navigating the earthquake within themselves.

I think I am just now learning to yield to the seismic shifts of the Holy Spirit in me. I don’t expect to be out there massively changing the world anytime soon, especially since the world that’s most important to me right now is that of my 3-year-old and my 6-month-old. But my heart is overflowing with thanksgiving for God’s grace and goodness that has gone with me at every step, even when I was sure He was the one trying to lead me over the edge.

I’m so thankful that I was born in the year 1994. A little earlier, and I’m fairly certain I would have been caught in the farce of idealistic Christian mommy blogging, hot on the heels of extreme purity culture. A little later, and I would have been buying into the deceptive appeal of today’s “tradwife” crowd. I missed them both by just a little, and thank God.

I’m so thankful I got married at 20 years old. Although processing through the sense that I couldn’t really have a fair choice in the matter at such a young age has been fraught, I know that God was gracious to teach me some very important things a lot earlier than I might otherwise have had the opportunity to learn. I lost less of my life to the lies.

I’m so thankful I married the person I did. I can’t imagine anyone else being able to weather these existential storms with me so humbly. The Holy Spirit is leading us as we walk after Christ together, side by side, and there is nothing more gloriously kingdom-of-heaven-like than that.

I praise and glorify God my Father that He did not allow me to stay the same, even when the process of change felt like traversing hellfire. His vision for me has been far greater, in the real and important ways, than my vision for myself ever was.

one God and one mediator

My very favorite childhood movie is the original Pirates of the Caribbean. Toward the climax of that iconic film, when Captain Jack Sparrow is attempting to double-cross both Commodore Norrington and Captain Barbossa so that he can secure his freedom, his ship, and his revenge in one fell swoop, the Royal Navy soldier Murtogg asks, “Why aren’t we doin’ what—what Mr. Sparrow said? With the cannons and all?”

Commodore Norrington responds, “Because it was Mr. Sparrow who said it.”

Since I started writing out and publicly sharing my thought process for how and why I’ve shifted away from my long-held belief in strict complementarianism, I’ve had the privilege of participating in some fascinating conversations with both men and women on this topic—some of them in agreement (or at least open to agreement) with me, and some of them strongly disagreeing.

But one common, and unfortunately unsurprising, theme has emerged from these conversations which I think illustrates the insidiousness of the complementarian doctrine: Wise and God-fearing women are becoming suspicious of their own communication with God through the Holy Spirit solely “because it was a woman who said it,” as if the Holy Spirit can only speak and act in their lives through the umbrella authority of a man.

And that’s dangerous territory.

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, Himself human.”

1 Timothy 2:5 HCSB

For example, I’ve noticed that when Christian women talk about their role as wives or women of the church, they will invariably think of some instance where they weren’t “submissive enough” to male authority, and things didn’t go well for them. Even women I’ve spoken with who knew they were being called by God and equipped with His wisdom would see something go awry and think, “This is because I’m trying to lead, and I shouldn’t be, because I’m a woman.”

Or wives who have had serious reservations about their husband’s choices for their family would simply go along with it, things would turn out okay, and they’d think, “God blessed me because I obeyed my husband, even when he was being foolish.”

Thus, submission is no longer a beautiful opportunity for each of us to voluntarily imitate Christ toward one another (as Paul teaches in Philippians 2 and Ephesians 5), but rather a weapon that anyone can whip out to slash holes in a woman’s trust in the voice of the Spirit who dwells within her. It’s the serpent in the Garden all over again: “Did God really say…?” And to question the questioning just comes across as even greater defiance. So we are silenced.

But I’m done being silent, so I’ll ask anyway: What if some of the things that went wrong under the woman’s leadership happened not because she shouldn’t have been leading but because, unlike Barak when he followed Deborah, the men “under” her lacked the humility to follow her? Or because things simply go wrong sometimes, no matter who is in charge?

And what if God has called a wife to protect her home and family even when it means putting her foot down on her husband’s foolishness, like Abigail when she defied Nabal? What if wifely submission is actually not another facet of prosperity theology, directly proportional to the measure of your blessing?

When we teach that the primary role of women is subjection to men (at minimum, to their own husbands), we inevitably end up with men who feel very little need to actively seek the guidance of God (because it’s implied that they have God’s blessing on their decisions simply by being male) and with women who feel they need not only the guidance of God, but must also take the extra step of getting approval from their husbands or other relevant male authority figures. The ultimate result across the board is that the voice of God Himself is diminished or even dismissed.

Hear me when I say: A wife’s submission to her husband is good. A husband’s submission to his wife is good. Christians’ submission to fellow Christians, to Christ, and to worldly governments and authorities is good. Submissiveness, humility, and peacemaking are key characteristics of Christ and outworkings of the Spirit that Paul encouraged the early churches to strive for.

Pigeonholing all women into a place of perpetual, one-sided, mandated submission to their husbands and/or other men merely because they are women is not good. At best, it leads to an unhealthy hierarchical dynamic that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reflect the full image of God. And at worst, it sets human men in the place of Christ as mediators between women and God, leading to deception, disobedience, abuse, and even idolatry.

Let us tread carefully.