ACTS BIBLE
Creation week 12 · Genesis 1 - 11
The closing week turns the whole course back on the person in the chair.
Eleven chapters. A world spoken into being and called very good, a garden, a question, a curse, a murder, a genealogy of funerals, a flood, a covenant, seventy nations and a tower.
Then Genesis 12 begins and the camera narrows to one man from Ur, and it never widens again until the gospels. Everything after chapter 11 is the rescue operation. Everything before it is why one was needed.
This week does not add material. It asks what the material has done to you.
Here is the fair question after eleven weeks: does any of this actually matter for a person's salvation? People are saved every day who have never thought about a cubit or a half-life. Some of them believe the days were ages. Are we saying they are lost?
No, and it would be a serious error to say it. Nobody is justified by a correct chronology. A person is saved by trusting Christ, and God has saved a great many people who were wrong about Genesis, including people in this room and the man teaching it, about something.
So why spend a quarter on it?
Because doctrine is load-bearing, and you find out which walls were holding the roof up only when you take one out. The course thesis has been the answer from week one: if you understand who we were created to be, and how far nature has fallen, you will better understand the gravity of your salvation and the coming glory of his return. Not the fact of your salvation. Its gravity.
Genesis 1 to 11 is the bad news you have to know before the good news is good rather than merely pleasant. Take the fall out and grace is a kindness rather than a rescue. Take the flood out and judgment is a metaphor. Take Adam out and Paul's argument in Romans 5 loses the man it needs.1
Stoney ends the course on seven questions rather than a summary. They are the point of the whole quarter, and they are personal on purpose.
When do you ask, did God really say? That was the first question ever asked about God, and it was asked by something that already knew the answer.2 It rarely arrives as rebellion. It arrives as a reasonable question about whether the command really applies here.
How do you self-worship? Lamech wrote a song about it. The builders at Babel put it in brick. You will have a version, and it is usually the thing you defend fastest.
Do you live a life of repentance? Cain was warned before he acted, given a diagnosis and a way out, and never once expressed sorrow.3 He grieved the punishment. That is the difference between regret and repentance, and it is the whole distance between Cain and David.
What is your crazy example of living in faith? Noah built a boat for decades on dry ground in front of neighbours who could see him doing it. Hebrews lists him among those who acted on things not yet seen.4 What have you done that only makes sense if God is real?
Do you see the waste land? Romans says creation was subjected to decay and has been groaning ever since.5 Once you see it you cannot stop: the aging, the entropy, the funerals. The question is whether you have started calling it normal.
What is your Tower of Babel? The thing you are building to make a name. It is almost never obviously sinful, which is what makes it hard to spot.
How grounded in the reality of creation are you? Not how well can you argue it. How much does it change what you do on a Tuesday.
Four things, and every one of them is doing work later.
God speaks and it is. Creation by word, not by struggle or accident, which means the world has an author and therefore a meaning that was not voted on.
People are image-bearers. That is the basis for the law against murder, and it is the ground under every argument for human worth we have.6
Death is an intruder. It came in through one man's sin and it is going out through one man's obedience.7 If it were original equipment there would be nothing to undo.
The heart is the problem. God said it before the flood and again after, with the same words and opposite conclusions. Judgment does not change it. Environment does not change it. Only a new heart does, and God promised to give one.8
Four convictions run through this course because we put them there. One more runs through it whether anyone plans it or not, and by week twelve you can put a finger on it in nearly every chapter.
It starts as a question rather than a crime. The serpent asks whether God really said, and the woman answers by looking at the tree and deciding for herself what it was good for.9 Nothing has been eaten yet. The thing that matters has already happened, and it happened inside her.
One chapter on, God tells Cain to his face that sin is crouching at his door and wants him, and that he can rule over it.10 Cain hears the warning, hears the offer, and goes out to the field anyway. The problem was never a shortage of information.
By chapter six the diagnosis is one sentence long: every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil continually.11 That is the stated reason for the flood.
Now read Genesis 8:21, after the water has gone and the altar is built. The inclination of the human heart is evil from his youth.12 Word for word the same verdict about the same organ, and this time God gives it as the reason he will never do this again. The flood removed every wicked person on the earth and did not remove the wickedness, because the wickedness was aboard the boat.
Chapter nine proves it inside twenty verses. Chapter eleven shows it organised, a whole civilisation pooling its skill to make a name.13 The heart did not change.
Which is why the promise the prophets carry is not a better flood. I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the stony heart.14 Genesis states this problem for eleven chapters and never once solves it. It is not supposed to. It is the reason the rest of the book exists.
The Bible is our final authority. Eleven weeks of taking objections seriously and answering from the text rather than around it. That included correcting our own side twice: yom does not always mean twenty-four hours, and Nephilim appears in exactly two verses.
Christ's work is finished. The garden had a tree we were kept from and Revelation has a tree with its leaves out for healing. Between them is a man who lived the obedient life Adam did not, died the death Adam earned, and rose. It is finished means the debt these eleven chapters run up was paid in full.
God chooses. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Abram. Nobody in Genesis 1 to 11 is chosen for a quality the text bothers to praise beforehand. Noah found favour, and only then is he called righteous.15
Salvation is God's work from start to finish. God made the garments, shut the ark, set the bow, scattered the builders and called the man from Ur. Every move toward reconciliation in eleven chapters is his. We receive it, we don't author it.
You live in a world that was made good, broke on purpose, is winding down measurably, and is going to be put back by the one who made it.
That is not the story you were taught in school, and it is not a story you can hold at arm's length, because you are in it. Every person in that room carries the heart of Genesis 6:5 and the image of Genesis 1:27 at the same time, and both of those are the reason Christ came.
The last chapter of the Bible undoes the first three in order. No more curse, the tree of life again, and God dwelling with his people.16 Genesis is not the part of the Bible you get past. It is the part that tells you what is being repaired.
Where this goes next: The four convictions this course carried out of Genesis are the same four the History course carries through twenty centuries of the church. That class starts where this one stops: with people who had the book and had to decide whether they would let it be final.
Genesis 12:1. The LORD said to Abram: Go from your land, your relatives, and your father's house to the land that I will show you.
Eleven chapters of humanity failing, and then God speaks to one man and starts over, not by wiping the slate but by calling somebody. That is how he has done it ever since, and it is how he did it with you.
hardest. Say why.
miss most if you removed it?
what would it take to be able to?