- All right, here we are. Genesis, first lesson. The title of the series is Genesis, the Foundation
Book of the Bible. And I want to mention also
that we're gonna be using a resource book, or I
have used a resource book, entitled The Genesis
Record by Dr. Henry Morris, and so there's a lot of material
that I'll be talking about that I have used his book for, and if you want to go further or deeper or you want more information,
I highly recommend this book. You can get it from the
library or get it online, so on and so forth. Great book. This class that we're
doing is not going to be a line by line study because if we did a line
by line study of Genesis with its 50 chapters, we'd
be here two or three years. So we're not gonna do
a line by line study. We're going to try to
take important sections out of every chapter
to follow a main theme all the way through the book so that you'll be very
familiar with the book. We'll try to answer
some of those questions that come from the book itself, but mainly we're gonna try to reflect the main theme of Genesis
and work our way through. Everybody's got a worksheet that you have and those who may be
watching this on video or online on our BibleTalk.tv,
you can go to BibleTalk.tv and you can download the printout, even the transcript
eventually for your use, and, of course, that's absolutely free. All right, major objectives in this study. I have three particular objectives. First of all, to build faith. Build your faith in this book
as an inspired work of God. Of all the books in the Bible, it seems that Genesis is the
one that is attacked most often as being non-inspired, or it's
a myth or it's a fairy tale. It's dismissed, especially
in the modern day, so I want us to have confidence and faith that this is an inspired book of God. Second objective, to answer some of the commonly asked
questions about Genesis. I mean, who wrote it? It's at the beginning of time. Who was there to write it? And so on and so forth. So we'll trace the history
of how it was written and other questions that stem
from this particular book and then thirdly,
understand the importance and the purpose of this
book as part of the Bible. Why did God give us the book of Genesis? Very important. Now as I say, you can
stop me and ask questions, make comments as we go along. If there's something that you think of or perhaps a question or something that maybe you can add to the
class as to what we're doing, please don't be shy. I'm glad to take your input. All right, let's talk about the importance of the book of Genesis. Every book of the Bible
is inspired by God. Paul says this, among other places, but Paul says this in
2 Timothy chapter 3:16. The entire work of God is inspired. All Scripture, rather, is inspired by God. That's the way he says it. All Scripture. Notice he says all Scripture,
not just some Scripture. And especially when Paul was
writing this in 2 Timothy, not all of the New
Testament had been recorded. So he was referring
back to the what we call the Old Testament, and he was
saying all of it is inspired, not just the prophets, not just the first five
books of the Bible, all of it is inspired, and that remains true even to this day. Now in the New Testament, the
Gospels and the book of Acts, they're these kind of books, the kind of books that help us understand the rest of the books. If we didn't have the Gospels, we'd have a hard time
understanding the book of Romans or the book of Ephesians, right? So the Gospels and the
book of Acts really give us the basis for understanding
all of the other epistles and the book of Revelation. Well, in the same way,
the point I'm making is the book of Genesis
really helps us understand the rest of the Bible. If we didn't have the book of Genesis, a lot of the things that we
teach wouldn't make any sense. So in the Old Testament, no
other book is more fundamental to understanding not
only the Old Testament, but the New Testament and
the rest of human history as the book of Genesis. Now, the reason for this
is that Genesis is the book which contains the vital information concerning the origin of all things and therefore the meaning of all things. These things would not be accessible to us if God had not revealed and preserved them in the book of Genesis. Matter of fact, the word
genesis means origins. So what you're reading when
you read the book of Genesis is you're reading the book of origins. Where do things come from? So historians and scientists,
they can only speculate about the origins of life
and culture and nations, but the Bible actually
contains this information so that we can look back
and see an accurate picture of the world at its beginning
before recorded history actually began. And so the book of Genesis
describes in detail 14 origins that cover
the beginning of time to the formation of a people to carry out God's plan of salvation. A lot of people say, "Well, I don't see this
nation mentioned in Genesis "and that nation mentioned." Well, the purpose of
Genesis was to explain the origin of many things, including the origin of God's people, not just the origin of how
various nations were formed, but basically the origin of God's people. That's the theme that runs
through the entire Bible, doesn't it? We see different nations
come and go here and there, but the Bible is really just
interested in showing us God's people and what happened to them. The rest of the history is
simply a backdrop to that. So these origins that
I'm talking about here are the foundations from
which we can understand our societies as well as our environment and even the spiritual
condition that we're in today. So this lesson here tonight, I'm just gonna briefly go
over all of these origins. All right, ready? So Genesis, origins, first origin, Genesis gives us the
origin of the universe. Only the book of Genesis
accounts for the origin of matter, space, and time. Every other religious system, every other scientific
system or philosophy, every one of them begins
with eternal matter or energy in some form that is somehow developed into our present state. So the theory of evolution
starts with what? Well, it starts with the
Big Bang, it starts there, but the Bible starts even before then. The origin. Where did the Big Bang come from? How did that start? So only the Bible gives an account of where original matter
actually came from. Okay? All right. Genesis gives us the origin
of order and complexity. Universal observation has stated that orderly and complex things
tend to naturally devolve into disorder and decay, right? Something starts nice. Your brand new car, right? And this has happened to me. My brand new car, it's working perfectly. It's a GM product, what could
possibly go wrong, right? [audience laughs] And I'm driving it and
there's a truck that goes by and I hear "Pick!" and you know what's happened
to my new car, right? I've got a chip in my window, staring me right between the eyes. There goes my new car. And that's the same with everything. Our new carpets, everything
brand new begins to devolve. And so the Bible gives us the origin of order and complexity. Where did the order begin? We know that in nature,
in people, and in objects, everything eventually falls apart. Genesis provides the source
for the establishment of the original order
and complexity of life. This is important because
all we're able to study is the rate of decay,
not the origin of order. Did you ever think of that? Scientists, what they're studying, is how things are falling apart. That's all they can do. All they can do with
the stars is count them. All they can do with the stars
is tell us how far they are or how fast they're disintegrating. That's all they do. That's all they can measure. But the Bible gives us
where these stars began and how they began. Where man began, where everything began, and so the Bible gives us the origin of order and complexity. Number three, the Bible gives us the origin of the solar system. Genesis, therefore. So science, as I say, can
count and study the stars, but science has not found
a satisfactory explanation for the beginning of the stars. What's the best they can do? This is the latest best, right? That I've read anyways. The latest best that they've
come up with is the Big Bang. That's the latest theory,
believe it or not. The Big Bang. It all started with a Big Bang. Nobody can explain, well,
what made it go bang? Nobody can explain, well,
where did it come from? Where did the things that made it go boom, where did they come from? Scientists simply put that aside. They say, well, you know,
it was always there. That's usually the answer. Matter was always there
and then one day, boom, it blew up and then it
evolved into who we are today. The thing that we have to remember is that the Big Bang is not
a cause, it's an effect. So the world's greatest scientists,
some of them are saying, this effect is what caused
everything that we have. That doesn't make any sense, doesn't it? But Genesis, on the other
hand, explains when and how the solar system was created and more importantly, it
explains why it was created. Why it was created. Next, Genesis explains the
origin of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. The combination of liquid
water and oxygen and nitrogen, that kind of atmosphere that sustains life has only been found in its
present state here on Earth. I mean, scientists say they've looked as far as they can look and
they still haven't found it. Genesis explains again the
how, the who, and the why that this unique mixture
came to be, if you wish, here on Earth. So the origin of our
environment that we have that sustains this kind of life. Genesis explains the
origin of life itself, how living systems could develop
from non-living chemicals. Today continues to be a mystery to materialistic philosophers
and will always be. In other words, if you're
thinking is that animate objects-- We're animate, right? Right, we're animate. We're animated. We move, we think, we feel. How a creature like us comes
from an inanimate object. How can we come from a
rock or a piece of dirt? And yet, evolution teaches that, that in the beginning there
were just inanimate objects and yet somehow these
inanimate objects came together and rubbed up against each other. You know I'm being
simplistic here, of course, but somehow these inanimate objects produced animate objects, living objects. In other words, a bird came from a rock. Again, I'm simplifying it, but basically that's
what is being explained. Genesis, on the other
hand, explains the process and the order of the appearance
of living things on Earth, from inanimate to animate and what happened, how this happened. Number six, Genesis
explains the origin of man. This Bible book provides the true answer as to the origin of man. Now universal observation states that complex things tend to
decay and become disorganized, but in the face of this,
evolutionists try to explain that in the midst of this
universal experience, the most complex and
orderly creature, man, has actually arrived in the reverse order. In other words, from decay and
disorganization has come man. [laughs] You see how crazy that is? So from decay and disorganization comes complexity and order. Well, that's just nonsensical. Genesis explains the origin of man as a perfectly complex and
orderly being at his creation and then joining the creation
in its eventual demise. And it also gives the reason why. In other words, Genesis
explains that man began as perfect, complex, competent, and then began to disintegrate. Evolution turns that upside down and says there was
disintegration and decay, and from disintegration and
decay came man, and guess what? While everything else on
Earth is going to pot, man is getting better. He's evolving. Again, doesn't make any sense, and Genesis explains to
us how the world began and how man began as a complex,
perfectly created creature, or human being, put it that way, and then with time, began to disintegrate. And Genesis tells us why this happened. Number seven, the origin of marriage. Again, Genesis records the
universal and stable institution of marriage and the home in a monogamous,
patriarchal, stable society. That's what Genesis presents. Polygamy, infanticide,
adultery, pedophilia, divorce, homosexuality, all of
these things come later as this original model
began to disintegrate. I know sometimes it's
a little discouraging. We look at our society. Gay marriage is being
legalized in various states. We see all kinds of immorality
being applauded in the media and so on and so forth, but
it goes back a long time. It's not just our generation. Not just our generation. If we want to see sin, go
back to when the Roman Empire [laughs] existed. You'll see a very decadent, cruel society. The beauty of Genesis when
we read it is we find out why this has happened, what's going on. All right, number eight, moving on. The origin of evil. The cause and effect model
is demonstrated in Genesis showing how evil not
only entered the world and it entered the world as
a concession to free will, but also how it caused the
ultimate degeneration of a world originally created as perfect. And so Genesis not only explains the origin of decay through evil, but it also introduces God's ultimate plan to deal with the evil in
the world, all in Genesis. Amazing book. Number nine, the origin of language. The gulf between the chattering of animals and the abstract, symbolic systems of man is completely unbridgeable
by the evolutionary process. Evolutionists have not explained to us yet how monkeys or dolphins or
whatever went from the gibberish that they speak to the intelligent, logical, moral thinking that humans-- You know, they can't
find the missing link. They can't find the link between the two. Now you can teach an
animal to mimic sound. You can teach an animal to
repeat conditional responses. Parakeets say all kinds of things, right? But you cannot train an
animal to give an opinion and I've never seen a cat tell time. I always tell people
I'll believe in evolution when I see a cat being able to say, "Hey, it's 20 after 12:00. "Time for lunch." [audience laughs] Okay, so we're unique in that way and Genesis explains and accounts not only for language in general, but
also for national language. Why are there different languages? Genesis has the seed of understanding as to why that happened
and how it came to be. Some people say, "You expect me to believe "that Tower of Babel thing? "You expect me to believe all of that? "So fantastic to believe." And I say not any more
fantastic to believe that than to believe that
all of this world here came about simply because of an accident. Every accident that I have ever
witnessed in my entire life has always caused trouble. We say we had an accident, something gets broken
or spilled or damaged. To say that all of the complexity of life is the result of accident, accidental, what they call time and chance. Time and chance. If you want to believe in
time and chance, go ahead. The argument is if you give it enough time and enough combinations, eventually you'll come
up with a human being. Really? I don't think so. All right, keep moving, number 10. The origin of government. Genesis gives the account
of the development of the orderly maintenance of society, and as a matter of fact, in Genesis, you have every stage in the process. It begins with the patriarchal
age, with the patriarchs, were the head of families. Moves on to the tribal stage. Moves on to the national stage,
then the worldwide stage. Genesis explains the normal-- and the word evolution isn't
a dirty word, by the way. Things do evolve. People evolve, things evolve, but what we're talking
about is development. So Genesis gives us the natural
development of government. It also gives us the origin of culture. It describes the beginning
of the main entities which we now associate
with organized culture, and I mentioned a few,
urbanization, metallurgy, music, navigation, textiles,
agriculture, animal husbandry, writing, education, ceramics, all of these things are
described in Genesis. The beginning of culture
and what develops culture. Number 12, the origin of nations. Scholars today recognize
the unity of the human race. That's the big discovery, by the way. The latest discovery
is that, you know what? All human beings come from the same root. Didn't used to be like that. The evolutionists, you
know, there's branches, this type of human, that type of human, and this type of human kind of survived, this type of human died out. That was the original thinking. Now all of a sudden
archeologists are finding, and not just archeologists,
but biologists, who are studying the human
cells, are realizing, well, wait a minute, all human beings all come from one source. Not only that, they say
we're finding out that that one source is somewhere
in Northern Africa, the Middle East. [laughs] They can't deny it. That's what they're finding. The science speaks for itself. Well, the Bible has given us that story. It's called Adam and Eve. It's called the garden. And we know somewhere where it is. And so science is simply proving what Genesis has been teaching for years, and only the book of Genesis explains this in adequate fashion. The book of Genesis gives
us the origin of religion. There are a lot of different
religions in the world, but all share the idea that
there must be an ultimate truth and some sort of direction in life. Genesis explains the origin
of this characteristic of man's consciousness as well
as the origin of true worship and the true God of all origins. And so we find how religion
begins in the book of Genesis and how it becomes mutated
as different things go off in different directions. And finally, number 14, the
origin of the chosen people. No other people have had such a long and sustained
historical background as the Jews. Genesis gives the origin and the purpose that this nation was to
play in God's overall plan. Now the book of Genesis
talks about other cultures and other nations, but focuses really on the Jewish nation. And so the book of
Genesis is the foundation of true history, true
science and philosophy because it describes where we came from and how we arrived at where we are today spiritually and physically. All right, one other little
point I want to make here and that is Genesis and the Bible itself. Not only does Genesis provide a foundation for our understanding of the created
world and society itself, it also is a foundational
book for the understanding of the rest of the Bible. Now I don't state that as
just a personal opinion. The Bible also makes this point. People like Adam and Noah
and Abraham and Jacob are continually referred to throughout the rest of the Bible. Without the Genesis, we
would not know their role or their purpose in God's plan. So remember that when people
are trying to dismiss Genesis as a myth and so on and so forth. If you eliminate Genesis, you
don't have the foundation book of the Bible. Did you know that there are
over 200 quotations or allusions to Genesis that are in the New Testament? 200 times we quote Genesis. Every one of the New Testament
authors refers to a passage in Genesis 1 to 11. Every one of them. Jesus himself refers to
Genesis chapter 1 to 11 at least six different times. I mean, if Jesus himself
is quoting Genesis, we should be very careful
before we dismiss that as an important book. Now I say this because there's
a great effort in the world and sometimes by some in the church to mythologize the book of Genesis, especially the parts
dealing with creation. Genesis was written as a
sober and fact-based history of the origin of the world and man. When we try to reduce any part
of it to myth or allegory, we undermine our faith because the foundation of
our faith begins in Genesis. After all, Paul says, "All
Scripture is inspired by God." All includes Genesis, okay? Very important. Now you'll notice,
there's a list on the back of your worksheets, and as I mentioned
before, at the beginning, those of you who are
watching this on video, you can go to BibleTalk.tv and
just go to the Genesis series and at the Genesis series,
you can download the worksheet and perhaps even later on,
the transcript of this lesson, but for those of you who
are in the live class here, a wonderful list here. Scientific facts or
principle in one column. The date that they were
discovered by man, by scientists, in the middle column, but where they were spoken of in the Bible in the right column. So for example, that there is
an infinite number of stars. This was discovered, the
idea of this was discovered, in 1940, put forth as a
scientific proposal in 1940, but it's already stated in Genesis 15, and by the way, Genesis was written, I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll talk about this in another class, but Genesis was written by Moses. He's the one that put it
together from oral records and so on and so forth, and Moses lived 1,400 years before Christ, roughly 1,400 years. So we're talking 3,400 years ago, the Bible's already talking
about this idea of the stars. I'm not gonna read it all to you. You can read them there, but
what's really interesting to me is the idea that air has weight and this was scientifically discovered and proposed in the 16th century, and yet it's written
about in Job chapter 28. Or that oceans contain
fresh water springs, discovered in 1920, but
mentioned in Job 38. So there's 20, 30
different examples of this, and this is just a very short list of these particular things. Okay, so that's our
introductory lesson to Genesis. We haven't touched the text yet. I just wanted to give you an idea that we're not talking
about Genesis as a myth. It's an inspired work of God. The Hebrew writer says to us, what? That we believe how? By faith that God created
what is from what is not. So the Bible tells us you're
to believe what God gives us in the book of Genesis
not through reasoning, but through faith. Through faith. And faith is accepting
God's Word at His word. I believe what God is telling me here. Why? Because He's asking
me to accept it as such. But there's plenty of
information and plenty of proof that demonstrates that
Genesis is an inspired book and we'll get into that and
the great stories in there about the patriarchs and
how all this fits together to point to Christ. All right, well, that's
our class for this time. We'll get into the next
lesson next time we meet. Thank you very much.
