Reading Genesis for God's Mission
I was in the sixth grade when I had the assignment to give a presentation about my family tree. My dad absolutely went to town making me a poster-board display, complete with color-coded maps. My grandmother had at one time researched her family all the way back to Germany in the 1500s. It was in education in where I come from. There’s something to this process of discovery about where we come from that makes Genesis an essential piece for teaching us about God’s mission in the world.
If you've ever watched an episode of Henry Louis Gates's PBS show Finding Your Roots, this is what the book of Genesis is like. As we turn every page, we discover yet another colorful character that informs our own identity. Genesis is for finding our roots. It's for meeting our ancestors and for encountering all the pride and shame we may find along the way.
William Faulkner has famously written, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I've found that people make so much more sense once you meet their parents. It can be uncanny when you discover the source of those quirky mannerisms, expressions, or go-to jokes. There's something like that going on in Genesis. There are layers to the story Jesus, as well as our own journeys of faith, that only make sense when we give ourselves to this world we find in Genesis.
The story of God in Genesis
Genesis is first and foremost a story about God. God is the hero and central character of this story. Genesis seeks to answer the questions: Where do we come from? And, how did the world get like this? And the answer to these questions is simply "God." God made everything, but something has gone horribly wrong. Now God is actively at work putting everything back together again. This is the story of Genesis.
Every epic story has a beginning. This one begins with God's holy, creative announcement "Let there be light!" Our story is the story of the Church. The story of the Church is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Israel. And the story of Israel is the story of God, who made the world and who is putting the world back together again. Genesis provides for us the foundations of the story of God and the story of Israel.
Chapter 1 functions like a prologue that sets the stage, not just for the book of Genesis, but also the whole of the Pentateuch, as well as the whole story of the Bible. It’s the most important chapter in the whole Bible. Try reading chapter 1 and mentally substituting where you read "God" with "the God I'm going to tell you about." When we approach these pages of Scripture with questions like "What is God like? Is he good? Is he trustworthy?" rather than questions about the mechanics and science of creation, we prepare our hearts for a whole different kind of experience with Genesis and with the Bible. This is the story about the God who made the world and the God who is redeeming and restoring a vandalized world.
The story of the Church in Genesis
In the opening of her book Epic of Eden, Sandra Richter suggests that the contemporary church has a tragically forgetful condition, like Alzheimer's disease, when it comes to the people of Old Testament. She writes:
”The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease is that it robs a person of themselves by robbing them of their memory of their experiences and relationships... The church has a similar condition. Just as the Alzheimer's patient must ask the name of her own children, the church watches her ancestors walk through the door with a similar response. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are unknown and unnamed. The end result? The church does not know who she is, because she does not know who she was.”
In order to know who we are, we must patiently immerse ourselves in the stories within Genesis. This can be hard work. Genesis is an ancient document. We modern people are doing cross-cultural work when we open the pages of Genesis.
Apart from Moses, Abraham is the character from the Old Testament most frequently named in the New Testament. He's Paul's favorite example in his arguments for justification-by-faith in Romans and Galatians. When the writer of Matthew starts the story of Jesus with a genealogy, the first five of those generations we read about in Genesis. The story of Jesus and the story of the Church find their context within the narratives that flow out of Genesis. Challenging as reading Genesis can be, we shouldn't skip it, avoid it, or forget it. Genesis is the roots of the story.
Genesis and contemplative spirituality
How do we listen and respond to God? Nowhere else can we find such pure examples of men and women who listened to and responded to God—Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, Joseph. Here are our ancestors who lived with none of the spiritual resources we take for granted. They didn't go to church. They didn't read the Bible. There were no conferences, worship music, or podcasts to feed their soul. They never prayed the psalter. There were no traditions to lean on or buck against.
The Creator of the universe spoke to them, and they knew. How did they know? This is why Abraham is such a big deal in the New Testament. He's like "Patient Zero" when it comes to God's redemptive work breaking into the world, all because he simply says "yes." Today, we know how to say “yes” to God because we see how Abraham did it.
Genesis also shows us that walking with this God isn't always sunshine and roses. Some times the walk of faith is a bare-knuckled brawl. Our ancestor Jacob shows us that there are divine encounters that feel like an ambush by a bandit in the night that thereafter leave us with a limp. Meeting with God can leave us with scars.
Curiously, Genesis doesn't portray these heroes of faith as pious, holier-than-thou characters. These are normal people. Abraham's a liar, obsessed with his own self-preservation. Sarah scoffs when she hears God's plan. Isaac's a gullible simpleton. Jacob's a con-man, on the run for his life when God meets him. What does this say about the people God chooses to partner with? It should give us hope for you and me.
Fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, mothers Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, teach us to hear the voice of Yahweh. Teach us to say "yes" when we hear the voice.
Genesis and God's mission
Every good story has an "inciting event," that moment when the status quo is upset and the hero must decide to take action. If chapter 1 functions as a prologue, chapters 2 through 11 show the inciting event—not just a single "The Fall" story in Adam and Eve, but a series of spiraling stories about humanity's rebellion and brokenness. It's more than Adam and Eve. It's the conflict between Cain and Abel. It's the prideful violence of Lamech. It's the violent state of the world in Noah's day.
All of this prompts God to action. In Genesis 12 we find the most significant statement about God's mission in the Old Testament that should shape our imagination about what mission means for the whole rest of the story:
“Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”
This is what God intends for the world. God tells Abram that through his family (and the New Testament writers see this as Jesus), God intends to put the whole world back together again. And as with Noah before him, we don't see any conversation or dialogue from Abraham (compare with Moses and the burning bush). "So Abram departed as the LORD had instructed."
God wants to bless the world. The world broken by Sin and Death needs blessing, and God invites Abram and Abram's family to participate in this work. Genesis has so much to offer our imaginations when it comes to who God is and what God's mission in the world is.
If you want to dig deeper into Genesis, be sure to check these out:
Genesis for Everyone by John Goldingay
Genesis (Interpretation Commentary Series) by Walter Brueggemann
And for how Genesis fits into the bigger picture in the Old Testament story, this is also helpful:
The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra Richter