Growing In Grace

In preparation for preaching through the Torah, I am reading through Genesis and also using this as an opportunity to practice my Hebrew reading skills. I begin by maladroitly working my way through part of a chapter in Hebrew and then I switch over to English when I see that I am running out of time. The reason I mention this reading routine is that some of the most fascinating things I find in the text come from being so poor at reading the original languages. When you are forced to read a text at the same pace a drunken sloth climbs up to bed you tend to see knots on the tree you had previously passed by with little or no interest. The passage for this morning was Genesis 20. This story comes after the debacle with Lot leaving Sodom and Gomorrah and the unspeakable foolishness of Lot's daughters in Genesis 19 (no doubt that horrific tale holds numerous applications for the necessity of catechizing our children in hopes that they will trust the Lord rather than their own str...

Most people are familiar with the Bible's opening line, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." From this verse we must recognize that before there was a beginning, God was. Clearly God could not have created something "in the beginning" if He was not already preexisting. John picks this theme up for us in the intro to his gospel. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John unfolds for us that this Word is the preexisting God come in the flesh as the God-man Jesus. John continues that everything was made "through" Him and, as the Genesis narrative continues to unfold the story of the creation account, we see that Adam was the crowning achievement of God's creation. Adam was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden and God told him to be fruitful and multiply by having dominion over the whole earth. The image is of Adam and Even expanding the perfection of the Garden to the e...