The whole bible can be divided into 2 segments: 1) Gen 1-11 - Beginnings (beginnings of man, earth, sin, etc). 2) Gen 12 - Rev 22 - it's the story of redemption. God created man to deal with the darkness that was on the earth - He made man to do battle with Satan.
When God told Adam to take dominion over all the earth that included Satan too.
When God wants to touch His material universe He does it through the portal of man. If it happens any other way it is called a miracle.
God made man to be His weapon of warfare against Satan and the battleground is the earth!
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil meant that man could determine what was good and what was evil - this was the great temptation. Eating from this tree replaced God with you, because you yourself become the judge between good and evil.
God put the tree there to give Adam an opportunity to put his faith in Him - this is the only thing that pleases God.
Satan tempted Eve - the anatomy of sin: Untruth leads to Unfaith leads to Disobedience leads to Curse. The anatomy of redemption: Truth leads to Faith leads to Obedience leads to Blessing.
Truth & Blessing are not "things" - they are not "its" - they are a PERSON. God Almighty.
Adam abandoned his place of responsibility and lost all authority over Eve, so she sinned and he did too.
Sin now entered into the equation - it separated man from God.
Sin always intensifies and it always extensifies. So God needed to do something about sin.
The same phrase in Gen 3:16 is the same one God used with Cain in the next chapter - when a man vacates his responsibility he loses all authority. The woman would now desire to have authority over the man, and the man's desire will be to just let it happen. This was the result of sin.
Sin extensified to a point where God wanted to start over, so he wiped out the face of the earth with a flood - Genesis 6.
Everything starts over with Noah, but then in Genesis 11 God needed to deal with sin again, so he confuses the language at Babel and thus ended the story of Beginnings.
Now, in Genesis 12, God gives His plan for redemption. He was going to bring about redemption for man through a man. He chose Abram!
The most quoted OT verse in the NT (it was quoted 14 times) - Psalm 110:1 - "The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for Your feet." This was used in reference to Jesus sitting at God's right hand. God was telling Jesus to sit down and stay down until He makes Jesus' enemies a footstool under His feet. Man would be the weapon God uses to accomplish this.
God was going to send Jesus to the earth but He first wanted to prepare the way for Him to come, so He needed a chosen people to bring Jesus through - the Jews
Abraham was the first of "God's chosen people"
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Gen 1-12 (1/23/14)
Beginnings
January 23, 2014 • Benham Brothers
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Lessons From Genesis