Overview of Genesis

Genesis means beginning. Genesis is the beginning of God's story - "His story". The Bible should be thought of as one book with one author with one central theme. That theme is God's personality and relationship with His most prominent creation, man, and most specifically His redemption of man through a deliverer. Genesis tells the beginning of this story: How God created all things, how man came into being, how man fell from God's fellowship, and how God promised to restore him. The rest of the book and the rest of the Bible for that matter is devoted to the lineage of man's deliverer which was promised to the first man and his seed. The following is a list of events in Genesis and an explanation of how they relate to the theme of the deliver coming to restore man.

Adam and Eve - God promised a son to deliver them

Cain and Abel - Abel- the next in the lineage of the deliver was slain. Satan attempts to keep theDeliver from coming

Birth of Seth - God gives a son to replace Abel to bring the deliverer

Noah and the Flood - God spares the race for the sake of the promise that he will send a deliverer

Babel - Man's attempt to get to God with out a deliverer

Abraham - Abraham is in the deliverer's lineage, the "Father of the Faithful" or those who will benefit from the Deliverer, and God confirms and enlarges upon the promise to him

Isaac - Old age and inevitable death a childless Abraham threatens the lineage, but God gives him seed in his old age.

Jacob - God continues to fulfill His promise despite the sinfulness of Jacob who begets the twelve tribes.

Joseph - Joseph is as good as dead yet rises up as leader in Egypt to save the world from death including the lineage of the deliver and foreshadows the Deliverer yet to come.

Genesis lays the foundation for the rest of the Bible. In it God establishes who He is, what He is like, and what He expects from us. All of man's most fundamental and universal questions are answered in this book: Is there a god? Where did we come from? What is morality? What happens when this life is over? Are we accountable to a supreme power? By the end of Genesis one has already accepted or rejected the truths found in the rest of the Bible.

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