Utumishi Blog

It was great to spend some time in the early chapters of Genesis amid the beauty of creation a few weeks ago.  I’ve noticed (I don’t know how representative my experience is) that it is quite common for Kenyan preachers to refer back to Genesis 1-3 when preaching on diverse subjects and texts elsewhere in the Bible.  So perhaps in a sermon on contentment or sin or salvation the preacher will take us back to the Garden or the Serpent or the Tree of Life.  This is such a helpful impulse.  In narrative terms the first three chapters of the Bible give us the setting, the main characters and the crisis (problem) which the whole of the rest of the story will concern.  Here in the beginning are the foundations for so many doctrines, all of which are under attack, especially in the West:

• God as primary
• God as Trinity
• God as Creator
• God as speaker
• God as judge
• God as artist and lover of diversity and abundance and order
• God as vastly gracious
• Man as creature under Creator
• Man as made in the image of God
• Men and women equal in status and complementary
• Humanity descended from a single man
• Man as worker with divinely-given work – to serve and extend his Kingdom
• Marriage as God-given for his work – sex in the service of God
• God desiring intimacy with man – God as the seeker and missionary
• The Fall as disobedience, rejection, rebellion, pride and especially Faithlessness
• The Fall as the context within which we now live
• The Fall as The Big Problem for all humanity – enmity, curse, exclusion, death
• Salvation comes from God and is by a man

Which have I left out?  Maybe we’ll have a chance to flesh some of these out in future posts but just one example for now.  There is a stream of teaching popular in many theological colleges in the West which argues that Jesus came to deal primarily with the problem of Israel’s national sin and curse and spiritual exile.  He saw himself as the representative of Israel.  He died the death that idolatrous Israel deserved.  Israel in turn is representative of the world, a microcosm of its sin.  So in this sense Jesus died for the world.  There is much that is helpful in this argument.  As we have been reading through Luke as a staff team we have been struck by how Jesus is very clearly presented as the fulfilment of Jewish hopes (e.g. Luke 1:68-79).  The prophecy of Isaiah in particular is never far from the surface.  Jesus is indeed the perfect Israel (e.g. Luke 4:1-13).  He has indeed come to provide the greater Exodus (Luke 9:31).  But that’s not the whole story.  It’s bigger and better and more basic than that.  The Bible does not begin at Genesis 12 but at Genesis 1.  Luke traces Jesus’ legal lineage back not only to Abraham but to Adam (Luke 3:23-38 cf. Mat. 1:1-16).  Jesus is not only perfect Israel but the second Adam as he resists the Serpent’s temptations (Luke 4:1-13).  He has come not only to deal with the curse and exile of Israel but The Curse and The Exile from the Edenic presence of God.  As he died he opened the way back to Paradise and not just for the nation of Israel but for an individual criminal like me (Luke 23:43).  He tore down the curtain embroidered with the cherubim guard (Luke 23:45 cf. Ex. 26:31-34; Gen. 3:24) and rose on the first day to begin the New Creation (Luke 24:1).  Whereas the new teaching over-complicates the gospel and makes it an issue of membership of the people of God, it’s really very simple – as simple as 3-2-1. 

I remember I once walked into the wrong screen at a cinema and was surprised when the film ended somewhat obscurely 40 minutes later.  I didn’t get it because I hadn’t seen the opening scenes.  If we don’t keep returning to Genesis 1-3 then the Bible will make little sense and we’ll have a wrong view of God, ourselves, our world and the gospel.