DECEMBER 1 GENESIS 3:14–21
God doesn’t wait too long to reveal the biblical narrative. The whole story is in compressed form in the first three chapters of Genesis.
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enesis begins with the most brilliant, mind-bending, and heart-engaging introduction to a book ever written. God knows how much we need the creation-to-destiny themes of the biblical narrative in order to make sense of our lives, so he lovingly gives us those dominant themes right up front. The beginning of the Bible is wonderful, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, caution- ary, and hope-instilling all at once. Since God created us to be meaning-makers, he immediately presents us with the wonderful and awful realities that we need to understand in order to make proper sense of who we are and what life is really all about. The opening chapters of Genesis have three foundational themes. 1. In the center of all that is, there is a God of incalculable glory. The first four words of Genesis say it all: “In the beginning, God.” Here is the ultimate fact through which every other fact of life is properly understood. There is a God. He is the Creator of everything that exists. He is glorious in power, authority, wisdom, sovereignty, and love. Since we are his creatures, knowing him, loving him, wor- shiping him, and obeying him define our identity, meaning, and purpose as human beings. 2. Sin is the ultimate human tragedy. Its legacy is destruction and death. Genesis 3 is the most horrible, saddest chapter ever writ- ten. In an act of outrageous rebellion, Adam and Eve stepped over God’s wise and holy boundaries, ushering in a horrible plague of iniquity that would infect every human heart. Because sin is a mat- ter of the heart, we are confronted in this narrative with the fact
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