To wrap up our meeting in Sunday School last week, our class took a quick look at Genesis 5 to better understand the purpose of the author including a genealogy. Why Read a Genealogy? The genealogy is inserted to help the reader track the line from Adam and Eve to the next potential candidate to be the promised seed from Genesis 3:15. The genealogy is used as a bridge for the narrative that allows the story to progress in a linear fashion. The author uses repetition to fastforward the reader through several generations, and making any differences in the repetitious parts really stand out. Recap of the Creation of Man The author of the Pentateuch reminds the reader of what was learned about m
Genesis 3 ends with Adam and Eve being driven out of the garden by God. Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - then God proclaimed the consequence of sin. As we looked earlier this week, we saw that Genesis 3:15 shows God providing a glimmer of hope in a seed of woman that will strike the serpents head and will have his heel struck by the serpent. Immediately after the garden narrative is completed, the very first verse explains that Adam and Eve got started right away at trying to fulfill this prophecy by creating the awaited seed. Adam was intimate with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, "I have had a male child wit
Adam and his wife disobeyed God, listened to the serpent, and ate from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Immediately "the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loinclothes for themselves" (Genesis 3:7). The next verses portray sin's consequences, but in verse 21 we see God do something interesting - "The LORD God made clothing out of skins for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them. Wait a minute! Where did the skins come from?? Did God just sacrifice an animal after Adam and Eve sinned to cover them? So if the penalty for sin is death, and we see over and over again in the Old Testament that an animal is sacr
Adam and the woman ate from the tree. They realized they were naked, so they covered themselves with leaves and hid from God. God called out to the man, pursuing him, and asked where he was. In what is called, chiastic structure, the author of Genesis begins to track God's conversation with Adam, the woman, and the serpent. Each person God spoke with blamed someone else for their disobedience. We see in the image shown on the right that the pattern for God's conversation centers on his comments directed at the serpent in verses 14 and 15. In chiastic structure in literature, typically the structure is designed to accent or highlight something found in the middle. Then the LORD God said t
Saturday night our church will host a Wild Game Dinner. Our speaker will be Dr. David Alan Black from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary!! I had the privilege of taking 4 courses from Dr. Black while I was working on my Master of Divinity. He was my Greek and New Testament professor, but anyone that ever spent 30 seconds with Dr. Black knows that his heart is to teach Christ and fulfilling the Great Commission. I am extremely excited to have Dr. Black coming to visit Old Fort Baptist Church, as his ministry has radically altered my path in life. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Black has taken up a few new hobbies recently, and one of them is running. He has challenged me and several fro
God's Command In Genesis 2, God specifically commands: "You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die" (Genesis 2:16-17). This command is quite intriguing. In the garden before the fall and the entrance of sin in the world, God is referencing a tree that has knowledge of evil (evil existed before the fall?) and proclaimed a punishment of death for disobedience to His command. The reader is introduced to a cunning serpent in the first verse of Genesis 3, and it does not take long to learn that this serpent has deceiving intentions. The cunning serpent asks Eve, "Di
