In this week’s class presentation we are looking at our survey format for studying the books of the Bible, and we will cover some of the introductory parts of that format as we begin to survey the book of Genesis. This will complement our video lectures from Greg Koukl’s “Bible Fast Forward” series that can be found at str.org. You can make comments or ask questions here as well.

Watch this week’s class presentation here:

Presentation Notes

2024 A Case for the Bible: The Bible Fast Forward

Session Two: Introduction to A Survey of Genesis, Part 1

Introduction

Prayer cards: Take a minute and write your name on the index card provided, and add any special prayer request you might have. Exchange cards at the end of the class this evening.

At your table groups, answer the following:

Have What study Bible(s) have you decided to use and why?
Recite the Memory Verse:

¹⁶ All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NASB)

THE BIBLE FAST FORWARD – VIDEO LECTURE, SESSION TWO

Review and Reflection

Discuss…

1. What are some of the consequences of the ”Fall” and what did God promise to do about it?

2. How should we as Christians, think about spiritual warfare, and how should we respond to it?

BIBLE STUDY

Before we start our survey it is important to note…

(I’m not going to dive deep into this, we do a whole class on this in our other “Case for” series)

WE CAN HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE BIBLE – IT IS THE WORD OF GOD

1. It contains perfectly fulfilled prophecy – no book by mere humans can do that

2. It is consistent with all the things we observe in the world around us today, in the physical things we can see (it is scientifically authentic, not mystic or mythical)

3. It has an amazing unified thread of meaning – there are 66 books written by 40+ authors, over a period of 1500+ years, yet it contains one central theme, narrative and person of focus.

4. (It contains no errors) we can have confidence, through textual criticism, that the Bible has been translated and transmitted accurately over time; this is because we have so many ancient manuscripts with which to compare, we can weed out any variants that appear to the point of a 99.5% confidence in the reliability of the text – and when we look at ancient lectionaries and sermons of the early Church Fathers (leaders) we can increase that reliability to 100%.

5. When people read God’s Word it has a transforming affect on their lives as evidenced in million of personal testimonies.

In addition:

As one would do in a court of law, we can reference multiple eyewitness accounts, both friendly and hostile; we have outside historical and archeological support; and we have scholarly testimony from both Christian and non-Christian sources as to the literary excellence of the Bible!

We also use the acronym MAPS-S to help us remember some of these areas:

M = Manuscript evidence

A = Archeological questions

P = Prophecy fulfillment

S = Science authenticity

S = Saved lives over the centuries

Survey of the Bible – Format

Old Testament

Category:

Book:

1. Author: Who wrote the book and when?

2. Audience: Who was it written to?

3. Purpose: Why was it written?

4. Content: Outline form – What are the major themes? (Chapter by chapter)

5. Going Deeper: What are the major Covenants found in this book?

6. Finding Jesus: Where is Jesus – appearances, foreshadows or prophecies?

7. Application: How can this book and its teachings apply to us today?

8. The Shelf: What questions or comments do you have about this book?

FORMAT ANSWERS…

A Survey of the Old Testament: Category: Torah Book: Genesis

1. Author: Who wrote the book and when?

Moses: He is the author of the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Torah (Hebrew), Pentateuch (Greek), also known as the Books of Moses

God gave Moses all that is in the Torah at Mt. Sinai, and he wrote during the forty-year period of wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, ca. 1446-1406 BC

Biblical references for Moses’ authorship: Exodus 17:14, 24:2-4, 34:27; Numbers 33:1-2, Deuteronomy 31:9, Joshua 1:8, 2 Kings 21:8; and John 5:46-47

2. Audience: Who was it written to?

The Nation of Israel during their forty-year wilderness wanderings after the exodus from Egypt (prior to entering the Promised Land); and for them to teach the people of God for generations to come.

3. Purpose: Why was it written?

Genesis’ genre is mainly an historical narrative that records events from creation through the life and times of the Patriarchs, ending with Joseph and the Nation of Israel in Egypt
Moses wrote, under God’s direction, so that the Nation of Israel would know God and remember all that God had done from the beginning
The main purpose of this first book of the Bible is to teach and tell the story of God and His Kingdom, along with His sovereign purpose and promised rescue plan of salvation that would unfold through the Covenants beginning at the “Fall” in Genesis 3:15
To demonstrate the unfolding of God’s original Genesis 3:15 promise beginning with Abraham and the Abrahamic Covenant and continuing with his descendants who become the Nation of Israel

4. Content: Outline form – What are the major themes?

(Several ways to do this…)

Level 1: Sectional Overview

Level 2: Topical Overview

Level 3: Chapter by Chapter Subject Outline

Level 4: Subject Matter Outline with Notes

We will be using Level 3…

Level 3: Chapter by Chapter Subject Outline

Antediluvian period

Chapter 1: The Days of Creation

Chapter 2: The Seventh Day; A Deeper look at day six and the Creation of Man and Woman

Chapter 3: The Fall of Man, evil enters the world, and God’s Promise of Salvation

Chapter 4: Cain and Abel – the first murder and the escalation of evil

Chapter 5: Descendants of Adam – following the “Seed”

Chapter 6: The story of Noah and the corruption of Mankind

Chapter 7: The Flood – God’s judgment on evil

Chapter 8: The Flood subsides – a new Earth revealed

Chapter 9: Covenant of the Rainbow and the repopulation of the earth

Chapter 10: Descendants of Noah (Table of Nations) – following the “Seed”

Chapter 11: The Tower of Babel – Dispersion of the people and the lineage to Abram

my personal notes for Genesis 1-11

CHAPTER NOTES:

The first three chapters give us answers/reasons for many of the problems, and questions we face today, such as the problem of evolution, the problem of identity, the problem of evil…

1.“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth: Everything that exists as we know it began right there in the first verse of Genesis – TIME – FORCE – ENERGY – SPACE – MATTER. IT IS GOD’S STORY AND IT IS HIS CREATION… this addresses The problem of Evolution (vs. Creation – this includes the problem of scientism [the philosophical belief that science is king and can give us all we need to know based not on the scientific method, but an ideological philosophy] and the way we interpret the observable evidence in nature and the cosmos – this also includes arguments about the age of the earth – even within Christianity there are theories such as theistic evolution; old earth creationism; day-age theory; progressive creation; and the gap theory) I have made the rounds on all of those and have landed right back to a Biblical narrative/Biblical creation that is scientifically supported (same evidence, different interpretation) – for example, the fossil record does not show any evidence for the ape to man theory. All of the fossil in the fossil record are either fully ape, or fully man.

2.The problem of Identity – chapter two retells in detail (characteristic of Hebrew literature), the creation of Man and Woman on the sixth day (we are made in the image of God – male and female; Jesus in Matthew 19:4-5 refers back to this event “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”

3.The problem of Evil – God gave Adam and Eve freewill and they misused it by allowing Satan to deceive them; they chose pride over trusting and obeying God, and their descendants (us) are still suffering from this today – God immediately gives a promise of a rescue plan (Gen. 3:15) through the seed of the woman, and we follow that seed promise all the way through the OT, as we see over and over, Satan’s attempt to kill/stop this seed.

Genesis 1-3 answers life’s biggest question: Origin – purpose – destiny

Today we fail to look to God and His Word to help with our struggles and questions, yet there are timeless truths here – Science has become the secular god of today, yet science should be neutral, but it is being hijacked more and more for philosophical and ideological purposes more than ever before.

The original pursuit of science was to know God and His Creation, and that was the goal of most early scientists (just like a kid asking “how did you do that Dad? Let me try it). This was in all the first universities mottos and mission statements. Harvard’s (though they don’t use it) The original motto, “Truth (Veritas) for Christ (Christo) and the Church (Ecclesiae),” was adopted in 1692 and was a part of their original seal (in Latin). But over the last century or so, all the God centered universities have become secular and atheistic at core.

BUT, many of the biggest minds in places like Oxford, Stanford, USC, Yale and other Ivy League schools have left secular science and their ideologies and are now working in the field of creation science (ICR, AIG, CMI, etc.) because they have found more reasonable answers can be drawn from creation science than the secular arena. These are people now working in the fields of cosmology, biology, geology, archeology and more. The truth begins with a foundation built on God and His Word, and it is all grounded in Genesis.

4.The first murder – Cain kills his brother Abel (scholars say that this was Satan’s attempt to stop the seed promise that he thought was Abel??? speculation), and we read that evil only escalates, evidenced in the line of Cain to the point where God has to take action.

5.Adam and Eve have many other children (as they live long ages in this early period of time), including Seth who will be the carrier of the seed promise through to the person of Noah. Adam and Eve’s long life span answers the question of where did Cain get his wife? At the point in human history the DNA was relatively pure from God’s perfect creation, and there was not yet a mandate about close relatives marrying (that would come later in the Law), the purity in the DNA as we know today from mutations, would allow for long life spans. We see this decrease relatively quickly after the Flood, and normalize around the time of Moses.

6.Noah finds favor in God’s eyes, and God has Noah prepare for His judgment on the evil and corruption that had culminated in all humans at that time. It is interesting to note that we find this same language in Matthew 24:36-39 when Jesus says, speaking of His return and the end: 36 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. 37 For [y]the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not [z]understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

7.The worldwide Flood of Noah’s day is pivotal, because if true, and the Bible teaches it was (along with hundreds of flood stories in ancient cultures around the world) there is no way to really know what the earth and its topography was really like prior to that time. If we look at the language of chapter 7, we see a catastrophe of unthinkable proportions: We see massive eruptions, upheavals, torrential violent downpours that would have restructured the entire shape of the earth, include plate tectonics. Secular geologists agree with creationist on many of the interpretations of the worldwide landscapes we see today, including the layering of places like the Grand Canyon. The difference is mainly in the timeframe, with secular geologists citing millions of years in time, whereas creation scientists give a rapid laying down of the layers over just a few years as would be consistent with the Biblical text (to go deeper on this see references next page).

8.Ditto – the subsiding and runoff from the flood waters are exactly what we would expect in what we see in places like the Grand Canyon

9.The Noahcan Covenant is given with a promise of God never flooding the earth like that again, sealed by the sign of the rainbow

10.Table of Nations gives the lineage of Noah’s three sons, with an emphasis on Shem – why? He would be the carrier of the seed promise through now to Abraham (note: Shem = Semites, Semetic language – root of the Hebrew language)

11.Tower of Babel – God had told Noah to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth – they did not, but congregated (roughly a few hundred years after the flood) in an area that would be later known as Babylon. The people again rejected God and began building a tower to the heavens (zigerat), it was at this point God confused their language into different ones and they ultimately dispersed into groups of like-minded/same languages and began to fill the earth.

We will pick up here with the person of Abram and God’s unfolding Promise…

Join us next week as we continue our “Case for the Bible, The Bible Fast Forward!”

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You will not find this material in the public school curriculum even though it is based on solid evidence and grounded in research. It is ironic that following the evidence to where it leads stops at the door of our public schools as they will not let a “Divine footprint” in! Join us as we examine evidence for Christianity and learn how to become a thoughtful defender and ambassador of your faith.

Click into the resource page of this website to view many of the top Christian thinkers and apologists along with some of their work; connecting to these types of resources is essential in your Christian growth.

Please let me know what you think: Give feedback, ask questions or send concerns in the comment section of the blog.

Teri Dugan

TeriDugan@truthfaithandreason.com

1 Peter 3:15