The Book of Beginnings
There is no book in all the world quite like this one, Dear Reader. Genesis is the great seed-plot of Scripture, the soil out of which every other book will grow. Nearly every doctrine that the rest of the Bible will unfold, God, creation, man, sin, death, judgment, redemption, covenant, the promise of a Redeemer, is planted here in these fifty chapters, sometimes in full flower and sometimes as a single seed waiting on later revelation to bring it up. If you do not understand Genesis, you will not understand your Bible. Strike at the root here, and the whole tree begins to wither; that is precisely why this book has been attacked more fiercely than perhaps any other.
Our English title comes from the Greek of the Septuagint, genesis, meaning "origin, source, beginning." But the Hebrew Bible, as is its custom, names the book after its very first word: בְּרֵאשִׁית (bərēshît), "in the beginning." Both names point to the same truth: this is the book of firsts. Here is the first day, the first man, the first marriage, the first sin, the first death, the first promise, the first family, the first nations, and the first faint dawn of the gospel itself.
Genesis is the book of beginnings, but it is more than a record of how things started. It is the opening movement of the great drama of redemption. The book moves with deliberate purpose from the wide to the narrow: from the universe, to the earth, to the human race, to one family, to one man, Abraham, through whom God will bless all the families of the earth. Watch that funnel, for it is the shape of the whole book.
And the golden thread that ties it all together is given to us early, in the third chapter, in what the old divines called the protoevangelium, the "first gospel." There, in the very sentence of judgment upon the serpent, God promises that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). Genesis is not merely about where the world came from. It is about where the Redeemer came from.
Fifty chapters, two great movements
Part One · Primeval History (chs. 1–11)
Part Two · Patriarchal History (chs. 12–50)
