Genesis 12-50

 SONG LYRIC OF THE WEEK:

May or may not be connect to the Bible study, but just fun to exercise the mind.

Bonus points if you can somehow connected the lyrics to the Bible study.

Band: Rush

Song: Subdivisions 

1982

Subdivisions

In the high school halls

In the shopping malls

Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions

In the basement bars

In the backs of cars

Be cool or be cast out

Any escape might help to smooth

The unattractive truth

But the suburbs have no charms to soothe

The restless dreams of youth

Some will sell their dreams for small desires

Genesis 12-50

We're walking through the book of Genesis, which is made up of these two main parts. First part begins in the garden where we watch humanity spiral downward in self-destruction. The first part ends in the Tower of Babel where a rebellious humanity is scattered by God.

The second part of Genesis zooms in and focuses on just one family. This is the middle of the story and links the two parts of Genesis together and helps us understand what the whole book is all about.

So how do we get from the Tower of Babel to the story here in the middle?

After the scattering at Babel, there's a genealogy, and it follows one of the tribes all the way down to this one guy named Abraham.

God starts making all these promises to Abraham, like he's going to bless him and give him a ton of kids. And he says that through him and his family, all the nations of the earth are now going to find God's blessing. 

So basically, God is trying to restore humanity back to the goodness of the garden and to his original intentions for the world. 

Note: This is also Gods plan for the rest of the Biblical story. This is why the book of Revelation ends with a new garden but mixed with a city with a river and a tree of life

So it's like his rescue plan for humanity, and that's why the whole second half of Genesis is about this one family.

So you have Abraham, and then he has a son Isaac, who has Jacob, and then Jacob has twelve sons. And to each generation, God renews his promise to bless them and all nations through them.

Because of this promise to use this family to rescue the world, one might think you can read these stories as examples of how to be a good person.

But actually, for the most part, this family is totally dysfunctional. So for example, let's go back to Abraham. This whole story is about God giving him and his wife Sarah a family, but two different times he basically gives Sarah away to other men by denying that she's even his wife.

And then Sarah gets impatient about having a son, and so she makes Abraham sleep with her Egyptian servant girl, which then causes all of these other problems in the family. 

Then the two get really old, and you begin to think that there's no way they're going to have a kid of their own. But then, miraculously, they do with Isaac.

Then Isaac has two sons, Esau and Jacob. And it seems like things are going pretty well but Jacob, the younger brother, wants the family's inheritance, which belongs to Esau the older brother. So he devises a plan where he’s going to steal it from his father Isaac, who at this point in the story is now old and blind.

Jacob will wrestle with a stranger who ends up being an angel. Jacob puts up a good fight even while injured, and refuses to let go until the angel blesses him. After that God renames Jacob to Israel which means “one who wrestles with God.”

Jacob goes on from there to have twelve sons, big family. But Jacob loves his eleventh son, Joseph, way more than all the others. And so he gives him a special, technicolor dream coat. (bad joke). 

His brothers started to come to hate Joseph. So much so that they plan on killing him. But they decided that they would not profit from murder, so instead they sold Joseph as a slave for Egypt.

Note: Remember that earlier in the story Abraham and Sarah gets impatient about having a son, and so she makes Abraham sleep with her Egyptian servant girl, which then causes all of these other problems in the family. 

Now, while in Egypt, through a crazy series of events, Joseph goes from being in a prison cell to becoming the second-in-command.

And so Later on, the whole middle east falls into this food shortage.  Egypt is saved because of the leadership of Joesph.

Joseph's brothers, they come down to Egypt looking for food. When they arrive, they will find out that Joseph is now a powerful person.

It is the guy they sold into slavery who will save them from starving to death.

These are the great-grandchildren of Abraham who have done this heinous act to their brother, but God has transformed their evil into something good.

And that's exactly what Joseph says towards the end of Genesis.

"You guys planned all of this for evil, but God planned it for good to save people's lives.”

These words conclude the book because they actually summarize the message of the whole story so far. Humans keep choosing evil, and as we read we are thinking they're disrupting God's plan, but God keeps turning their evil back into good. And somehow he’s going to use this family to restore humanity back to the garden.

Genesis foreshadows the story of every book after it in the Biblical narrative. People will try to do good, or worse do what is good in their own eyes and fall short. But God promises that through grace, all things shaw be restored.

As Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is near”.