Month: January 2020

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Genesis 1-3 – what I called Scene One – ended with Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden. Scene Two opens with the beginning of their new lives.
They started a family with whatever hopes and dreams they had. I can’t say for sure but I doubt their plan included one of their boys killing his brother. So right away one of the early, practical, real world actions recorded after the fall is murder.
This story weighs on me; it seems so unfair.
Abel is the good brother – he reveres and he obeys the Lord. And he gets killed. His short life comes to an early end. He doesn’t get to live out his days.
Cain is a man who disregards the Lord and he definitely hates his brother. But even though he kills a good man he gets to live. Sure, he’s punished with a curse, and getting cursed isn’t such a great thing to be saddled with. But to me the curse doesn’t seem like vindication enough. Cain gets to live out his life, gets to have a family, his family will go on to be ranchers, musicians, metal-workers. Meanwhile Abel is dead in the ground.
Something isn’t right about this. It just doesn’t seem to be fair.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

The bible can be divided in different ways. One is to break it down into two scenes:

Scene One – Genesis 1 – 3
Scene Two – Genesis 4 – Revelation 22.

I read all of Scene One today. It’s about how things were in our world a long time ago, and then how things turned over. Life in Scene One was good, and then it wasn’t good. What happened in Scene One makes it just about the saddest story in the history of the world.
Tomorrow I’ll start reading Scene Two – and I’ll be reading it for the rest of the year. It’s about how things are in the world now. Today I saw how things were; tomorrow I’ll begin seeing how things are.
I have trouble imagining what life in Scene One was like, everything being good and all. But I don’t have any trouble recognizing Scene Two. I look at the news, look out the window, look in the mirror and see a busted-up landscape of broken-down good.
In the first scene the good God made a fine home for Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve burned it to the ground, more or less. Now in Scene Two I’m left sifting through the raw materials of my inheritance, ashes of a significantly inferior world.