Hughes Genesis

Beginning and Blessing
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1732-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 704 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

The book of Genesis contains some of the most beautiful and well-known stories in the Bible: the garden, the flood, the tower of Babel, and the lives of the patriarchs. But these are more than just good stories. They lay the groundwork for God's relationship with humanity and for his plan for our salvation, making Genesis foundational to understanding everything else that happens in the Bible. Genesis reveals much about human nature and the nature of God. From the actions of the first man and woman, we see where our rebellious, sinful nature originates. And through the whole book we see the hand of a sovereign God who is loving and merciful, but also just and holy. Time and again in Genesis, God showers his grace upon undeserving humanity, giving us our first tastes of God's enduring faithfulness that shines throughout the entire Bible. R. Kent Hughes, respected pastor and author of many other commentaries in the Preaching the Word series, takes readers back to the beginning of the Bible and moves through Genesis with careful exegesis. He explores the superbly crafted structure of the book as well as the weighty themes it contains. For those who preach, teach, and study God's Word, this exceptionally detailed work will reveal much about the beginnings of God's great story.  Part of the Preaching the Word series.

R. Kent Hughes (DMin, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is senior pastor emeritus of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and former professor of practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hughes is also a founder of the Charles Simeon Trust, which conducts expository preaching conferences throughout North America and worldwide. He serves as the series editor for the Preaching the Word commentary series and is the author or coauthor of many books. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Spokane, Washington, and have four children and an ever-increasing number of grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hughes, R. Kent

Leseproben

1 Beginning GENESIS 1:1, 2 IT WAS THE CUSTOM IN ANCIENT TIMES to name a book by its opening word, which is what the Hebrews did in titling this initial Bible book Bereshith, which means “in the beginning.” When the Old Testament was translated into Greek about 250 B.C. the Greek equivalent of the title was rendered Genesis, which both the Latin and English translations have adopted letter for letter. It is an exquisitely perfect title because this book gives us the genesis (the beginning) of the doctrine of God, which rose to tower high over the pagan notions of the day. It is the genesis of the doctrine of creation, which likewise rose far above the crude mythologies of the surrounding nations. Genesis gives us the doctrine of man, demonstrating that from the beginning we are both wonderful and awful. The doctrine of salvation too has its genesis in Eden and its grand development throughout the whole book. Astounding! What we know about God, about creation, about ourselves, and about salvation begins in Genesis. It provides the theological pillars on which the rest of the Bible stands. Jesus, the Messiah, has his prophetic genesis in the opening chapters of Genesis (cf. 3:15). The importance of Genesis for the believing heart can hardly be overstated. At the same time, as deep and weighty as the book of Genesis is, it is no dry textbook. Its narratives of the garden, the flood, and the tower of Babel have captivated hearts for over three millennia and have provided inspiration for the world’s greatest poetry. The earthy, epic lives of Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob and Esau, and Joseph in Egypt are so primary and universal and so skillfully told that they have never ceased to enthrall listeners. The last decade of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first century produced a renewed public interest in the narratives of Genesis, and even a PBS special, and numbers of books on the shelves of popular bookstores. Genesis is in as literature. And what grand preaching material it is! An overview of Genesis reveals neatly structured themes. It is widely accepted that chapters 1—11 cover primeval history (the early history of Planet Earth) and chapters 12—50 patriarchal history (the history of Israel’s founding fathers). The famous Hebrew term toledoth, literally translated “generations of,” occurs ten times in Genesis. Five refer to primeval history and five to patriarchal history.1 Closer examination reveals that five of them variously introduce narratives, and five introduce genealogies.2 Genesis is finely crafted. Primeval history. The first eleven chapters, which give us the primeval history (universal history) of the world, do so by relating five stories that all have the same structure. The stories are of the fall, Cain, the sons of God marrying the daughters of man, the flood, and the tower of Babel. All five stories follow this fourfold pattern: a) Sin: the sin is described; b) Speech: there is a speech by God announcing the penalty; c) Grace: God brings grace to the situation to ease the misery due to sin; and d) Punishment: God punishes the sin. See an instructive chart on this in the footnotes.3 Here is amazing grace—amazing because though in all five stories there is an increasing avalanche of sin and resulting punishment that necessarily becomes increasingly severe, there is always more grace. Adam and Eve are punished, but God graciously withholds the death penalty. Cain is banished from his family, but God graces him with a mark of protection. The flood comes, but God graciously preserves the human race through Noah. Only in the case of Babel is the element of grace muted.4 Patriarchal history. But this lack serves to set up the continuation of grace during the following patriarchal section of Genesis 12—50. In this section Abraham receives the gracious promise that through him all the peoples of the world will be blessed (cf. 12:3). And then the patriarchal period unfolds the fulfilling of that gracious promise. Despite the patriarchs’ repeated sins, God’s promise stands. The salvation history of the patriarchal narratives functions as the gracious answer to mankind’s scattering at Babel.5 Genesis is about grace. The Apostle Paul’s aphorism, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20) sums up this major theme of Genesis. Genesis, far from being a faded page fallen from antiquity, breathes the grace of God. What a time we’re going to have as our souls are worked over by the sin-speech-grace-punishment pattern of chapters 1—11, and by the overall “where sin increases, grace abounds” theme of the whole book. This is good soul medicine—strong meat. It was grace from the beginning—in both primeval and patriarchal history. It always will be grace. Genesis also provides us with a grand revelation of God’s faithfulness as it recounts God’s fidelity over and over again in the lives of the patriarchs. We see that God remains faithful even when the people to whom the promises are made become the greatest threat to the fulfillment of the promise. Such is God’s faithfulness that the sinful, disordered lives of the promise-bearers can’t abort the promises. This is the way God has always been. The New Testament puts it this way: if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:13) Faithfulness is a primary reality about God—the Genesis reality. It’s nothing new, but it is everything. In regard to man, Genesis is eloquent: He is at the same time truly wonderful and truly awful. The bulk of Genesis affirms our terrible sinfulness. Even the best of the patriarchs are helpless, hopeless sinners. Not one ever comes to merit salvation. So we understand that from the first, salvation could come only through faith. Moses makes it clear that is how Abraham, the greatest of the patriarchs, was saved: “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul would allude to this multiple times in the New Testament, saying of Abraham in Romans, “The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe . . . so that righteousness would be counted to them as well” (4:11). There is only one way that fallen humanity can be saved—the Genesis way—by faith. There never has been another. Who wrote Genesis? The Scriptures, both Old Testament and New Testament, affirm that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis through Deuteronomy; cf. Exodus 17:14; Deuteronomy 31:24; Joshua 8:31; 2 Kings 14:6; Romans 10:5; and 2 Corinthians 3:15). Most significantly Jesus himself confirms Mosaic authorship (cf. John 5:45-47). Of course, Moses’ writing was somewhat revised and added to by others. Moses would have had a hard time writing Deuteronomy 34, the last chapter of the book, which describes his death!6 Internal biblical dating points to the late fifteenth century B.C. at the time of or following the exodus when Israel wandered in the wilderness.7 In the dynamic context of the wilderness journey, as God’s people dreamed of the promised land, they would naturally ask about Abraham and the patriarchs who had brought them down to Egypt. And beyond that they would ask about their ultimate origins. Thus God met Moses with his Word, giving him not only Genesis but what we call the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. As we now consider the opening lines of Genesis, we must carefully note that Israel had just escaped the oppressive polytheism of Egypt’s temples and pyramids with its solar and lunar gods. In Egypt, the pagan mythologies had opposed Israel’s monotheism. In opposition to a single creator, the Egyptians taught pantheism and shored up their beliefs with elaborate myths of love affairs and reproduction among the gods, of warfare marking out the heavens and the earth. Their priests annually mimed their myths, hoping that by reenacting them they would create life. And that was not without effect. Some of God’s people had succumbed to the lavish liturgies of the Nile. So Moses took them on. These opening lines would forever establish a true understanding about God, the universe, and humanity. Moses began with a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism over polytheism.8 His style was one of calm, majestic, measured grandeur. Moses did not condescend to mention the pagan worldviews but answered them through deliberate, solemn utterances that dismissed the opposing cosmologies by silence and subtle allusion:9 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (vv. 1, 2). The emphasis is threefold: first God, then the universe, and then the earth. God and the Beginning Derek Kidner, one-time warden of Tyndale House, Cambridge, has pointed out that it is no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible because his name here, Elohim, dominates the whole chapter—occurring some thirty-five times in all, so that it catches the reader’s eye again and again. Kidner’s point is that this section and indeed the entire book of Genesis is about God from first to last—and to read it any other way is to misread it.10 We...