10 Jan Don’t Start with You. Do Start with God.
Genesis 1:1 – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
If you stacked up all the books written in the history of the world as a mountain and had to pick a handful to rest as the summit, you’d have to include the book of Genesis. In its pages we encounter God our Creator, a holy and an unholy angel, gender and marriage, our first parents, the fall of humanity into sin, the first promise of Jesus’ coming to conquer Satan, the first death, the judgment of sin in the Flood, the scattering of people into nations and languages, and God’s grace in the calling to Abraham and working through his family to bring forth Jesus Christ as the blessing to all nations of the earth. Genesis closes with one of the greatest stories of God’s providence and human forgiveness in the life of Joseph and his flawed family.
Before we can understand what went wrong in our world and how it can be fixed, we have to understand who God is, how He made us and our world, what we have done to wreck the world, and God’s plan to create a new earth.
The Bible is the most translated, published, read, influential and opposed library of books in the history of the world. Imagine sitting down to write the opening lines knowing they would shape human history and serve as the foundation for Christianity, which would become the largest and longest-lasting movement of any kind in the history of the world! Where would you begin?
Moses, who wrote Genesis, inspired by the Spirit, starts aptly, “In the beginning God…”
Practically, the first thing we learn in the Bible is that you cannot understand anyone or anything unless you start with God. God must be first in our priorities, first in our days, first in our schedules, first in our marriages, first in our families, first in our finances, first in our work, and first in our hearts and minds.
Just as the Bible starts with God, and reveals how everything goes wrong without God, we too need to start every aspect of our life with God and have nothing separated from God. This is the power-packed principle in the first line of Genesis, which means “beginning”. Simply stated, don’t start with you. Do start with God.
To help you study the book of Genesis with us, we have the first of three free e-book study guides here.
What are you most excited to study in Genesis this year? Pray for all that God will teach you through this incredible book of the Bible.
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