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Great stories have got a great way of drawing you in. In fact, there's some stories that maybe you've read, maybe you haven't. If you've you've been in school, you've probably had to read some of these things, or maybe you've watched some of these of these movies, but uh here on the screen we've got a few examples for you. Um so who can tell me where this comes from? Call me Ishmael. Moby Dick, good job, you got it. How about this one? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. I'll stop there. Anybody know? Tele2 Cities, you got it. Well done. How about this one? What? That's for those non-readers in the room, right? How about this? I'm 36 years old, six years old. I love my family, I love baseball. This is from Matt. And uh and I'm about to become a farmer, but until I heard that voice, I'd never done a crazy thing in my whole life. You got it. You got it. Filled a dreams. How about another one here? I will tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I'm a liar, but history is written by those who have hung heroes. There we go. Nice accent there. Braveheart. That's right. Hello, my name's Forrest. Forrest Gump. You want a chocolate? Everybody knows that one, right? There we go. Forrest Gump, we got it. So here's the thing: every story that we connect to, every story that we really get into usually has something on the front end that lures us in. I've heard it said that's literally like someone grabbed you by the nostrils and pulled your nose into the book and you just couldn't take it out, right? But we all know that great stories have these great first lines. And over the next 12 weeks, we're going to be talking about the greatest story that exists. In fact, I would actually argue that every story that you and I enjoy, and every story that you and I read or watch on a TV screen actually borrows its storyline from this story. And it's the story of the Bible. It's the story of Genesis to Revelation in Scripture. In fact, the Bible, though maybe you don't see it this way, is actually one cohesive narrative, one story that has many, many parts, many pieces to the puzzle, if you will. And so if you've ever taken out a puzzle and thrown the pieces down on the table, and then you have the box over here. Have you ever tried to put together a puzzle without the box, without the picture? A little tricky, isn't it? You can still get the corners and the edge pieces and kind of then you start to put it in and you can put it together. But here's the thing: for many people, they've looked at pieces of the puzzle of the Bible, but never really stop to think about what's the big picture. So for the next 12 weeks, we're going to look at the big picture of the Bible. And the reason why this is so vitally important is because if you only see little glimpses, little snapshots, little snippets, if you will, from the text, sometimes you can get confused about what the Bible's trying to teach you. It's very possible to take the Bible and use it to do things that are actually not godly. There are things that don't actually point us to Christ, or things that don't actually lead us to follow Jesus with our lives. In fact, many people have used the Bible that way. They use the Bible as a book of rules to simply make people feel like they're not good enough and hammer them and but never give them the hope that we have in the Bible. Or they might take the Bible and they might use it to make a social case for a certain social cause. Or even in this country, sadly, people preach the Bible and used it to advocate slavery. But here's the thing: when you take the big picture, the whole story, you start to see something very fascinating. And I don't want to get ahead of us, so this morning we're going to dive in to the very beginning. And as I said, I believe every great story borrows its storyline ultimately from the story found in these pages of the Bible. And it starts with a great line that simply says this, Genesis 1.1. And if you happen to know it, you can say it with me, but if you don't, it's okay. Simply says this. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And we're going to take 30 minutes to walk through 50 chapters in Genesis. Do you think we can do it? Here we go. So, in the very beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth. It says that literally it took him six days to create, and he even rested on the seventh day. That he created the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and he created the trees and the flowers, he created the oceans, he created the streams, he created all that we see, all that we experience and all that we enjoy in this life. And he created all of that by simply speaking it into existence. By simply saying the word, by simply saying, let there be light. Let there be a moon. Let there be stars. Let there be fish. Let there be beasts of the fields and birds of the air. That's our God. That he just spoke into being the things that we see. Unbelievable. But he does something a little bit different when he gets to man, and he creates man out of the dust. And he takes some dust and he puts it all together and he forms this man and he breathes life into this man's nostrils. For some, they find that story all too hard to believe. But the Bible, the biblical account, simply says that God created everything that we see. Not only did he create it, but it says in the text that it was good. In Genesis 1, 26 and 27, he said this: God, as God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness, and they will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, and all the earth, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. And so God had a special connection for man and with man. He had a special role and responsibility because man, unlike all the rest of creation, was created in the very image of God, with the capacity to lead and to love, with a capacity to connect with the heart of God, to have a relationship with him, like we talked about last week, if you happen to be with us. And in Genesis 1.31, it simply says this God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Your life, your existence, is very good to God. And it's valuable. We know that everything was perfect because in Genesis 2.25 it simply tells us there that both the man and his wife were naked, yet they felt no shame. They were completely vulnerable before God and each other and yet felt no shame. There was nothing there. There was no fear, there was no uh shame, there was no guilt, there was no struggle with having a relationship, there were no walls, there were no barriers, there was nothing to separate the man and the woman. It was completely perfect, pristine, beautiful place, beautiful garden with all they needed to eat and survive and to enjoy all the pleasure that they needed. And it was perfect. God created it that way. But then we see in Genesis 3:1 that the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden? So here they are in this beautiful place with all these amazing things, all these creatures that Adam had named, and this enemy, who in the Bible we learned, we hear him call other names, Lucifer, Satan, the devil. He shows up on the scene in the form of a serpent, and he begins to deceive and he begins to mess with men. He begins to try to trick them into disobeying God and not trusting the heart of God, not believing that God's heart is for them. And so they buy into this lie and this little simple sin gives life and births death. They went from no shame to shame and blame. Shame that they had broken the heart of God, that they have disobeyed him, and blame to blame each other and to ultimately blame God for what he had given them, and that he even gave them the capacity, in some sense, to make a decision to disobey. And so that's through the first three chapters of Genesis. And God curses and he disciplines mankind. He steps in and he loves them, but instead of killing them, he disciplines. He kicks them out of the garden. They have to leave that place. He curses the ground so that it doesn't produce a crop like it was before. He he gives women birth, uh pain and childbirth. So they have to get these meds now so they can avoid that, right? He does all these things to discipline them and gives these curses, and yet he still loves them. He still pursues them, he still desires to have a relationship with them. So Adam and Eve, they're kicked out of the garden, they know each other intimately, and they conceive a child, and then they conceive another child. And by the fourth chapter of the Bible, we have our first murder. In the first family, one of the boys kills the other boy over a sacrifice and an offering. It's hard to believe, isn't it? That mankind so quickly dove off the cliff and went from this perfect, beautiful place to a place where one brother would kill another. In chapter 6, verse 5 and 6, it says that when the Lord saw that man's wickedness was widespread on the earth, and that every scheme in his mind and everything that he thought of was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord, catch this phrase, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. That man's sin, it grieved the heart of God. This was not what God created, this was not what God intended, this was not what God had hoped for. And yet mankind rebelled against God and they chose their own way and they chose to follow their own desire. So what happens? God decides I'm gonna start over. I'm gonna destroy the earth and I'm gonna use water to do that, and so he calls out a man named Noah. Even if you've not been in church much, almost everyone knows Noah. They've probably heard a story about him or seen his little boat and his little two by two animals marching into that boat. And so we get the story of Noah. And Noah is a man who lives in an area where they didn't see floods, they didn't see rain, they were in the desert. And God says, build this ark. Noah, build this boat. It's like, what's a boat? Okay. And Noah has faith, and he builds this ark, and he puts it together, and he does exactly what God says, and he takes the two by two, the animals that God tells him to put on the ark, and it rains for how long? 40 days and 40 nights. And it floods the earth. It says that the water came down from the sky, from the heavens, but it also came up from the ground and literally flooded the whole face of the planet. Flooded the earth. And it killed everything except for those animals that were with Noah on the ark, and it killed everything except all human beings except for Noah and his three sons. Sadly, Noah gets off the ark. He does celebrate at first and he praises God for what he's done. And then Noah just says, every other human being before him, he fails. He finds himself drunk and naked, out on the hillside, his sons have to cover his shame. I mean, seriously, if you if you were a Christian and you were trying to make your case for why you should believe the Bible, you shouldn't put these stories in there, right? And yet that's what's there, is this man Noah, who had just had amazing faith, and yet he falters. He fails. He struggles. And humanity, even after it had been basically the reset button had been pushed with this flood, they began to move more towards sin again. And even though there were consequences for the sin, the sin was not removed. And so chapter 11, verse 3 and 4 says this they said to each other, Come, let us make oven-fired bricks. And they used the brick for stone and the asphalt for mortar, and they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top to the sky, and let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth. And so humanity still tries to be God. Rather than submitting to God, rather than following God's ways, they try to decide they're going to be God, and they build this tower called the Tower of Babel. And as they build this tower, they say to themselves, we are great. We are awesome. We are worthy of worship. And all the while God sits and he waits. Again, heartbroken that the people that he loves and the people he created for a personal relationship with him have chosen to do their own thing, to go their own way, to pursue their own direction. And to this point, Genesis 1 through 11, the main storyline is really about the person of Adam as the original human being, the man he created in the garden in his image, designed to care for and nurture the earth, to rule over it, to be fruitful and multiply with his wife Eve. But here's the storyline if you're following along in the guide. Adam is called by God. He's created by God, sorry, created by God. But he sins and he destroys God's original plan for mankind. That's the story. That's the story of the first 11 chapters of Genesis. But thankfully, it doesn't end there. Thankfully, God stepped in and he created a plan to redeem mankind. He created a plan, he created a way to fix what man had broken. The fact that he hasn't given up on humanity at this point is really overwhelming. It's shocking. I mean, everything seems to point towards humanity spitting in the face of their creator, completely ignoring him, doing their own thing. And yet God pursues them. And he pursues them through a man named Abram. In Genesis 12, we pick up the story in verses 1, where it says this in verse 1 through 3 The Lord God said to Abram, Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on the earth will be blessed through you. Notice what it's what it doesn't say there. It doesn't say, because Abram, you are such a great guy. Abram, because you have your act together and you are such a great man, then I'm going to bless you, I'm going to use you. It just simply says that God chose Abraham, Abram at the time. And he says, I'm going to bless you, and I'm going to make you into a great nation. And so God begins that process. Abraham's 75 years old at that point. I don't think anyone in this room is 75 yet, but as you get to that age, probably thinking that life is kind of winding down. And yet God makes a promise that sounds like his life is winding up. In fact, 25 years later, we find Abram's promise being fulfilled in the form of a son. But before you ever get to that son, you see that Abram, a man who had heard from God directly, whose name had been changed to Abraham, he'd been told that he was going to be blessed and that his descendants were going to be as many as the numbers of the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. He didn't have a son. So he's like thinking, this is crazy talk. What does this mean? But it says in the scripture he believed God. He had faith. He believed. And as he had faith and as he believed, Abram still struggled with his own sin. He lied about his wife along the way as they were traveling through some of the wilderness. He still struggled to be a godly man, a faithful man in many ways. In fact, he and his wife even created a plan where they were going to figure out how to get a descendant since they hadn't had this descendant that God promised. And so his wife gives them his maidservant. It says, Have sex with her and have a child with her. And that maybe that's the way that God will fulfill his promise. And God all the while is sitting back saying, No, I've made a covenant, I made a promise, I'm going to fulfill it. And so, sure enough, God gives Abraham a son. You see, the storyline number two, this is critical to the book of Genesis and to the rest of the Bible, is that Abraham is called by God to father a nation to represent God to the world. God is going to use Abraham and his family to represent himself to the world. In Genesis 22, 17 and 18, he says again, I will bless you indeed, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the shore, and your offspring will possess the gates of their enemies. And the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring because you have obeyed my command. You see, because God did give him a son. He gave him a son named Isaac, and then he asked him to do something that absolutely blew my mind when I was a kid, and I heard this story. He asked Abraham to take this one son, Isaac, up onto the top of a mountain and to sacrifice him. Again, if I was trying to convince you to follow Jesus, I wouldn't probably tell you some of these stories. But they're in the Bible, and we shouldn't ignore them. And he tells Abraham, he says, Take him to the top of this mountain, and he says, I want you to sacrifice your son. And so Abraham, being a man of faith and being a man who trusted God at his word, he walks up to the top of the mountain with his son, all the while wondering what is going to happen. And his son, can you imagine? This little boy following his dad to the top of the hill and wondering, why are we taking these things up for sacrifice, Dad? What are we doing? Where are we going? Abraham draws back the knife, and before he can plunge the knife into his son, God stops him and says, Abraham, I've seen your heart is faithful. He says, I'm gonna bless you. He said, Don't kill your son. He provides a goat, and he sacrificed there. And God again blesses Abraham. Now Isaac has two sons. He grows up and he has two sons, Jacob and Esau. Esau is the red and hairy one, if you know anything about the Bible. And Jacob is the deceiver, he's a liar. And so Jacob swindles his brother out of his birthright and his blessing, which was a big deal during that day, because Esau was actually the firstborn, even though they were twins. And as Jacob gets the birthright and the blessing, he steals what was rightfully belonged to Esau. But even in all that, God is still at work. In fact, Isaac blesses Jacob, and that blessing that had been given through Abraham was now passed down to Jacob. In Genesis 28, 13 and 14, it says that Yahweh was standing there beside him, saying, I am Yahweh, the Lord, the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and I will give you and your offspring the land that you are now sleeping on, and your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out towards the west and the east and the north and the south, and all the peoples on the earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. Does that sound familiar? And now this is the blessing that's been passed down to Jacob. So Jacob's got to figure out what he's gonna do, and so he needs a wife. And so he goes to his family in a land not far away. Because that's what we do, right? We go to find a wife in our own family, right? Okay, maybe he's from Arkansas, I don't know. But um, but basically, that was for Sean and Abe. Um, he goes and he finds a wife who's a distant cousin. And as he gets his cousin, he decides he's going to marry this girl, and the father of this girl says, Hey, you're gonna have to work seven years. He's like, okay, so he works seven years, they have a wedding ceremony, and surprise of all surprises, he wakes up on his wedding after, the day after wedding morning, and it's the other sister that's in his bed. So he says to her, uh, he says to Laban, why did you trick me? He said, Well, work seven more years, and I'll give you my other daughter, the one that you really wanted. So he does. He works seven more years, and he gets the other daughter. So now he's married to two sisters. Crazy story yet? And so they decide they're gonna have a war on how fast they can have children, except for Rachel's unable to have kids. And so um uh Leah, she basically begins to have children, and God opens her womb, and she has some kids, and there's some up on the screen here: Reuben and Simeon and Levi, Judah and Issachar and Zebulun. And Rachel's unable to have children. She's really getting jealous, and she's really sad about this whole thing, and so she says, Well, I've got a servant, so I will give my servant to Jacob. And he has Dan and Nephtali. And then Leah says, Well, I've got a servant too, so let's do this. Let's let's give her him and my servant as well. And so she has Gad and Asher. And then Rachel finally got gracious to her, and he opens to her womb, and she has Joseph and Benjamin. Is this a crazy story? And so basically at this point, there's 12 sons, and these 12 sons become the 12 tribes of Israel. Because God changes Jacob's name to Israel in the process, and now you've got 12 tribes, and they all point back to these 12 boys. In the process, as you can probably imagine, there was already some dysfunction in the home. And so the boys decided they didn't really like Joseph because Joseph was the apple of his father's eye. And so uh Jacob gave Joseph a really amazing coat, and then Joseph did a great job by uh flaunting the fact that he not only had this coat, but that he had this dream that they would all bow down to him one day. So they decided to kill him. So they take him out into the wilderness. And they act like that he was killed by a wild animal. They take his cloak back to his dad and say he was killed, but actually they threw him in a pit and they sold him into slavery. And he goes to Egypt. And as he goes to Egypt, he's there and he's dealing with all kinds of hardships. He was working for a man named Potiphar, and even in the process of being there, Potiphar's wife, she lies about him and says that he tried to advance at her sexually, and so basically ends up getting thrown in jail. As he's in jail, he meets a couple of the people that work for the king, and he begins to interpret dreams. And in the story, ultimately they get back to the Pharaoh. And the Pharaoh has a vision. A vision that is about famine. And someone says, Hey, I know Joseph, this guy in the prison, he can tell you what's going on. He can tell you about dreams. He's done it for me, he'll do it for you. Calls him to himself, and sure enough, Joseph tells him what the dream is and what it means. And Pharaoh puts him second in command in the entire land. So here's one of the tribes of Israel, sons, the Joseph, that is now there, second in command in Egypt. Famine does come, it does hit the land. And ten of the boys who were just listed up there on the screen all come to Egypt trying to find food. And Joseph breaks down after some time, it's back and forth a little bit, and he forgives them, and he's gracious to them, even though he doesn't want to be, because these are the guys who threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery and told their father that he had died because of a wild animal. And so we get Joseph rising up, taking care of the family, and all twelve of the sons are now in Egypt with their father. Jacob eventually passes away, and Joseph in the end of Genesis passes away as well. And we get a little bit of the story in Genesis 50, verse 20, where Joseph says this before his life ends. You planned evil against me. God planned it for good to bring about the present result, the survival of many people. Therefore, don't be afraid. I will take care of you and your little ones. And he comforted them and he spoke kindly to them. Now, they're all there in Egypt, and the problem is fixed forever, right? The problem that started in the garden is now fixed forever, correct? Well, that's only 50 chapters. We got a lot more to go in this Bible. Because here's the thing, in Exodus chapter 1, verse 8, it says this: A new king who had not known Joseph came to power in Egypt, and he said to his people, Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we are. So the Egyptians assigned taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pitham and Ramses as supply cities for Pharaoh. So what did they do? They took the Israelite people who had gone there to get food during famine, and they made them slaves. And next week we'll pick up the story in this place, going into the book of Exodus. Let me ask you a question. Why does this story matter? Why is this story important for us? And for some of you in this room, maybe you're thinking, it's not. In fact, it's just a really strange story with some really jacked-up people. And I don't really see how this has anything to do with anything about me and God and life today in 2013. But let me just remind you of a couple things. First off, that when we think about worldview, our view of Genesis and our belief or not or unbelief in Genesis really shapes our worldview. Let me give you three questions that we see this and how it plays itself out. The first question that Genesis answers for us today is why does something exist instead of nothing? Why does something exist instead of nothing? Well, atheism would say, as a worldview, that there's no God, and so therefore, uh universe is a product of chance and time and space. Something's always existed, and it's just by chance. That's the atheistic perspective. And maybe some of you hold to that. I have some good friends that hold to that view. They've sat in my living room, they've sat in a coffee shop and talked to me, and they've told me this is what they believe. It's all just random chance. And maybe that's your view. Pantheists, like Hindus and Jainists and others in the Eastern religions, they would say that everything exists, that exists as God. Everything's God. So the idea here is just simply that we're God, you're God, creation's God, we're all gods. And we just worship everything because all of it's God. That's why in the land of India with Hinduism, they say there's over 300 million gods. Because anything and everything is on the table to worship when you believe that everything is a God. But what does the book of Genesis teach us? The book of Genesis teaches us that Christian theism focuses on a personal God who created all that exists from nothing, and he is separate from creation. He's not like us, he's God. He's the only one worthy of worship. He's the only one who's completely perfect and holy and right and good and true. Listen, as a pastor this morning, I can tell you I am a broken, broken person. I am messed up. I have issues. I don't know how else to say it, but I am a sinner and I rebel against God all the time in my life because I do not like him telling me what to do in my heart, in my brokenness. Thankfully, he is teaching me, he is growing me, he is helping me, I am learning. But only God is worthy of being worshipped as God. And there's not a person on this planet who needs to be in his place, who should be in his place, or be elevated to his position. He's God. Let me ask another question: why does man exist? Well, atheists would say man is only a product of chance in a closed universe. Pantheism would say, like all existence, man is manifestation of God. This is something we made up. Something we created on our own. Man made this idea. And Christian theism says this: man was created by God, distinct from all non-personal creation. And we were created distinct, which leads us to a third question. A third question that simply says this what is the basis for human dignity? And this is a question that's all over the place in our world today. How do we know that people matter? How can we say people's lives are valuable? Who do we decide is most valuable? And how do we determine whether or not we should fight to save a life? I mean, people who fight to save the lives of people in countries where they are being oppressed by their leaders and yet don't fight for the unborn. I know it's a big topic. I know it's a hefty thing to get into, but where do we decide that we are God? And where we decide when we get to cut people's lives off and when we don't get to cut people's lives off, and when we should protect life. See, atheism says because we're all the highest form of evolution, that's how we know we're important. That's how we know we're significant, is because we're the highest form of evolution. Pantheism says there's really nothing distinct between us. We're all just trying to become one God as God is. And theism says this: we are made in the image of God. Man exists for personal relationship with the Creator. We were made in the image of God, and man exists for himself, for God. For God. So here's the question. I could go through a bunch more worldview questions this morning, but if you don't believe the book of Genesis, if you don't buy the book of Genesis and the story that's there, it changes everything that you believe as a Christian. Because at the very beginning, we begin to understand that God has a purpose and a plan, that he's in charge, that we're not, that he's worthy of worship, we're not, that he's got a sovereignty, that's um, this holding this universe together, not us. And we can trust him and we can love him and we can follow him. But there's something even bigger today, and I want you to catch this. If you didn't catch anything else today, there's something way more significant here. Because even in the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, we see something hugely, hugely profound, and that is this: that mankind desperately needs a savior, a rescuer, a redeemer. And we are not him. I am not my own savior. I can never be good enough, you can never be good enough. You know how I know that? Because men like Abraham and Noah, and men like Jacob and Isaac and Joseph, men who were great men of God, who trusted God, and yet, you know what? They failed. They failed. And not only did they fail, but they died. They're gone. They're no longer with us. They can't save us. They couldn't save the people then, they can't save us now. But all of these stories are foreshadowing something amazing. And that is that one day, beginning all the way back in Genesis 3, God began a plan in motion to redeem mankind through the person, hey, spoiler alert, the hero, the main character of the Bible is Jesus. The main character of the Bible, and the hero of the Bible, the rescuer, the redeemer that we all need here is Jesus. Why is that so big of a deal? Why is it so important? Because here's the thing, I see so many human beings trying to save themselves, trying to rescue themselves. Well, if I can read the Bible enough, I can go to church enough, if I could do enough social justice, if I could give enough money away to the poor, if I could be a good enough dad, if I could be a good enough husband, if I could just be this, this, this, this, if I could make enough money, whatever it is, those are all things that we try to use to save us, but there's only one rescuer, there's only one Redeemer, and his name is Jesus. There's only one hero that we desperately need. As messed up some of the story is along the way. It's easy for us to look at that story and go, wow, that's messed up, but you know what? The truth of the matter is that we all have struggle. We all have issues, and we all need Jesus to save us. And thankfully, as we go through this story over the next 12 weeks, we're gonna see that he did. Don't save us.