Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 11th, 2015 | Route 66 - Genesis

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January 11th, 2015 | Route 66 - Genesis · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: How about that?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't that a great rendition of Nat King Cole's song?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Among other things.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I will be asked by some.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I saw, I was standing in the back, I saw some people looking at each other going, who is that?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I married it up, definitely.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Especially when it came to drama.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very proud to be married to her.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, that Nat King Cole song.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll take that as applause for a decision I made a long time ago.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, before Nat King Cole sang his songs, you know everybody called it Route 66?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's how influential that song was.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wish Nat was here.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's passed on.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure he'd be glad to change the words if he heard that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the words we've uh obviously changed a little bit since Nat King Cole's day.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: He recorded that song first in 1946.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the way we've changed some of them, in case you missed it, these are the original lyrics.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you ever plan to live the best, Melody sang, Travel My Way, Take the Highway, that's the best.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Get your kicks on Route 66.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It winds from instead of Chicago to LA, more than 2,000 miles away.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It winds from Old to New Testament, more than 2,000 verses in the print.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, instead of now you go through St.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Louis or St.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Louis, now you start at creation.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just stop there because that's where we're going to start today.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, we're going to take a stop, our first stop along the journey, which is Route 66, we're going to stop in the book of Genesis.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, open it to the very first chapter of Genesis in our road trip through the Bible.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um I have to confess to you that as a preacher, um there is uh the the fact um uh when I was doing my doctoral uh uh uh uh interview after after I'd presented this 66 books project, this preaching project, the faculty at uh Trinity Evangelical Vinity School asked me, they were just curious, what were the hardest books for you to preach?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Genesis was one of the top three.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine why.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not a rest stop at all.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's got 50 chapters, which makes it one of the longest books of the Bible, has 20,500 words in Hebrew, has about 25,000 in English.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's got all these different Bible characters.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it has six of the most famous ones.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's the first one?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Adam, right?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and then it's got who's the flood guy?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Noah, and then you have the nation Israel started by Abraham and his son is, and then his Isaac's son is Jacob and Jacob's famous son, about whom there's more material in Genesis 37 to 50 than about any other character in the whole Bible.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Joseph, right.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you have all these, and by the way, people get so confused about these characters in Genesis.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you watch Jay Leno interviewing people on the and back when he'd interview people on the street, or when I would read, my dad wrote the uh entry quizzes for Bible schools across the country when I was growing up, and I collated them and he'd ask these basic questions.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Phil, and who's this?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because Bible schools want to know how much kids knew out of high school so that then they could test again at the end of the three, four years and find out how much they'd taught them.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the answers were astounding, you know, as crazy as uh, you know, some of the famous answers Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or the first commandment in the Bible was Eve commanding Adam to eat the apple, right?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or that Noah's wife was Joan of the Ark.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or that Lot's wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night, you know.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's just some of the people get really confused about that.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: But um, so this book is just so full of different.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in fact, you will hear uh uh people say, theologians say, every single doctrine in the Bible finds its beginning, finds its root in the book of Genesis.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's difficult, uh, as someone asked me downstairs a moment ago, how do you preach through the whole book of Genesis in 35 minutes?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I don't.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna go two hours.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I said, I said, I don't know.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But let's just start with the very first verse of the Bible.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Grab your study sheet on the front of the study sheet where I have the key word of Genesis, which is what?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: B, starts the letter B-E-G, beginning.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you may want to, if you've got children, you may want to teach them the single keyword of each book in the Bible.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or when I was growing up, my dad and mom had me memorize one key verse out of every of all the six, six books of the Bible, the key verse of this book, Genesis 1-1, say it together.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And think for a moment, if you had to write the lead sentence for the Bible, I mean, what would you write?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, journalists struggle to find a good lead sentence or an opener, you know, and an article, editors are always after journalists to come up with a good lead.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: James Thurber, uh-huh, 50, 70 years ago, a comedian or whatever, first was a journalist.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And his uh his editor was always on him to write shorter, crisper.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think he lost a job when the lead sentence he wrote about about a death in the community was dead.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way they found John Smith this morning.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a little bit too crisp.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I do like the sports writer who had to come up with a lead sentence for he was asked to go to a classical uh uh symphony or something and write an article on that.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sports writer.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So so he said uh um you know the the high school orchestra uh played Beethoven last night, Beethoven lost, you know.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So but but God by inspiration come can't inspired this lead sentence, in the beginning God.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those four words, powerful words, in the beginning God, which is why I chose uh really as the theme of Genesis and the title of this message, Everything Begins with God.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Creation, it begins with God.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: The nation Israel, which begins in this book, it begins with God.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Salvation, it begins with God.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everything begins with God.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is the melody that occurs over and over and over again through this book.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this melody, I think, shows itself, uh, if you flip over your study sheet, shows itself in four ways, in four songs.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are four songs: a song of creation, the omnipotent God creates all things.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's a song of the nation, sovereign God selects a people for his own.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a song about blessing, the righteous God blesses the good and curses the evil.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a song of salvation, the gracious God saves his desperate people.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to take you through that this morning.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um, feel free to read over the front anytime.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, if you're listening to this, if you're watching this online, if you're hearing this, whatever, you all you have to do is go on to Topeka Bible Church's website, type Topeka Bible Church into your search engine.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It'll take you to our church, and you can you can look at all these sheets and everything.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: These are on the website.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or just type in discoverTbc.com, which is the name of our website.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, you'll also find already Leota has has put on there uh the book of Exodus for next week.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You want to prepare for next week.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: She's got Exodus uh with a title, with uh also she's listed the chapters that I'm recommending that you read if you want to read ahead of time for Exodus, including the time it takes to read each chapter, you know, if you if you're an average reader.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So uh check out our website, you'll find all of our stuff on the website.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: But what I want to do is I want to go uh to the back of the sheet and I want to talk to you about four amazing uh, you know, the seed plot of the Bible here has these four amazing themes that I think are can be life-changing if you understand them, okay?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: First, the omnipotent God creates all things.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, now I'm talking about especially chapters one and two.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The omnipotent God creates all things.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Men and women down through the ages have looked at the beauty of the night sky, or marveled at the glory of uh of a waterfall, or you know, been uh been stunned to silence by the roar of the ocean or the beautiful mountain peaks, and have said, where did this all come from?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the stupidest answers to that question have come in recent years, answers which would have made all ancient peoples roll on the ground in laughter.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday I I turned on, I watched a YouTube TV show called Cosmos from the 1970s.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and that show uh began with uh with a view as if you were going out in the universe with stars flying by and so forth, and the music was swelling, and then all of a sudden you heard the deep, uh wonderful voice of of the astronomer Carl Sagan, whose show it was, and reverently and ridiculously, I think, you heard these words beginning the show.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: The cosmos is all that is, or all that ever was, and all that ever will be.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking, okay, until the last 50 years, there's nobody that wouldn't have thought that that was the stupidest thing they ever heard.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I couldn't help thinking of Romans 1, declaring themselves to be wise, they became fools.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: A well-known philosopher said the best answer to such a statement like that is to fix that person a delicious meal and then ask him if he believes that there's a cook.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because this creation has a cook, and he is an omnipotent cook.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we read in Genesis chapter 1 that out of the chaos of the universe, he spoke order.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Let there be light, and there was light.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: That was day one.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then in day two, he he separated, you know, he created sort of the heavens and then the oceans that that controlled the whole earth at that point.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then in day three, he separated land out of the oceans.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: There was dry land for the first time.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Then days four, five, and six, he filled days one, two, and three.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, Genesis one, two says the universe was unformed and unfilled.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: He formed the whole thing, days one through three, and then he fills it in days four, five, and six.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let there be light corresponds with he creates the sun and the moon and the stars in day four.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: You have the oceans and the sky in day two.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly you have the fish of the ocean and the birds of the sky created in day five.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You have the dry land in day three.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now you have the land animals, including man, created on day six of this beautiful pattern.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what you have is just astounding that God, that God, everything that you and I see begins with God.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, not everyone says so nowadays, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have a bunch of scientists now, some of them Christians, many of them Christians, who are arguing that intelligent design be taught in the schools.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't have to mention God, but just that there is an intelligent source to it.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But this idea is incredibly and strongly and staunchly opposed by three groups, by politics and science and by education, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was really glad that about seven years ago, six years ago, a movie came out, Ben Stein, who is a liar and a speechwriter for Gerald Ford and for Richard Nixon, and also you may recognize him as a well-known actor, came out with a movie called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is, no intelligent design allowed.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, subtitled Big Science is Kicking Smart New Ideas Out of School.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what he did is he decided to go straight to some of the leading atheistic evolutionary scientists in the world and ask them how they believed that life began.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's an awful question to ask a smart person because scientists will admit what Darwin said, which which is they would say it had to start with a living cell.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, back in maybe in Darwin's day, the living cell didn't seem to be that complicated, but we now know as as one famous scientist named Richard Dawkins, an atheist, evolutionary scientist, England, as he says, a single living cell is just it's like the biggest supercomputer you ever heard of.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a labyrinth and it's just this incredible make your head blow apart, so complicated.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and by the way, so so so um whoops, put in some extra pictures here.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: But but Ben Stein, so he goes and interviews Richard Dawkins.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's one of the people he interviews, and he said, so if the single cell, which is essential for the doctrine of evolution, if that's so complicated, it's like a supercomputer as you wrote in your book, do you think that could have come about by random time chance mutation?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And Dawkins says, well, no, that's that's implausible.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, where in the world then did you do you think that life began if it if if if you know if it couldn't have come by chance, there it is.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So where, you know?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Dawkins' answer was, well, I he kind of agrees with Francis Crick, uh, another atheistic philosopher, the sort of the discoverer of the DNA molecule, DNA uh double helix.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I think that maybe an alien race, there may be another civilization out there that came up with it and sort of sent it to our earth, you know, and Ben Stein in a voiceover goes, oh, okay, so intelligent design is okay so long as it's an alien and not God.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just just what what you're listening to is just seems absolutely crazy.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Ben Stein, who's a Jewish, uh uh, you know, a Jewish guy, is just uh and a funny guy, very outspoken, was interviewed by CNN.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he's more blunt than most of us would be.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: In his CNN interview, he said, evolution says that lightning struck a mud puddle, and bam, out of it came a fully equipped Boeing 747.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if anyone dares challenge this theory, they are persecuted.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the point of Genesis 1 is is, and by the way, he also says as a Jew, there's only one other society in history that has ever believed in Darwinism and tried to squelch every opponent to it, and that is a society that killed six million Jews.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: So he says this this becomes very personal for me.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So uh that's that's point number one, that creation comes from God, and when you argue against God being the creator, you are arguing, says C.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's like cutting off the branch that you are sitting on.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you say no to God, you're arguing against the very power that makes you able to say no.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's point number one.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Everything begins with God, and uh everything was created by an omnipotent God.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, the sovereign God selects, selects, or chooses a people for his own.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: You see this theme uh in Genesis all over the place.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: This choosing.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: God chooses Abram to make a nation is the most famous time.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now the Lord chose Abram, he said to Abram, and you find him choosing Abram and then choosing Isaac.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: He has a choice, doesn't he?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because who's Isaac's older brother?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Ishmael.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And normally, always in ancient societies, you choose the oldest.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense to you, but he chooses Isaac.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then he chooses Isaac's, not his firstborn, right?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's his firstborn's name?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Esau.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, he chooses Jacob.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then he chooses Joseph.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and you find as you go through Genesis, this strange thing about God's selection process.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not normal.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: His selection process is not the same as ours.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Think for a moment of that uh uh anybody who knows business at all knows that one of the uh business changing that uh the you know books that every everybody in business knows was Good to Great, written 10, 12, 13 years ago by by uh you know Jim Collins.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in that book, there's uh, you know, a couple famous ideas that you still hear constantly, every week, every month, you know, uh uh around the world.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and one of those great ideas in Good to Great is that he says the first job of leaders is to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: You will still hear uh businessmen, CEOs, and so forth saying, uh we've got some of the wrong people on the bus, we need to get them off, we need to get the right people on the bus, we need to hire the right people.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that makes great sense in business.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that God doesn't seem to follow that logical philosophy.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't pick the most powerful people, doesn't pick the smartest people in Genesis, he doesn't pick the best-looking people, he picks people, picks people like Abraham, who we know is nothing special.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're told elsewhere in the Old Testament he was an idolater, and he lived, you know, 500 miles away in present-day Babylon, and God just calls him, picks him.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then you got Abraham's son Isaac.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: You and I would have picked Ishmael, who is the athlete, who is the father of the Arab tribes, and he's older and he's cool.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Isaac is this passive, wimpy guy.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You see, you see his whole story from the time he's a child to older.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody else runs his life, his wife, his children.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't ever seem able to make his own decisions.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a man's man, he's uh he's a wimp.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: But God chooses him, and then God chooses not Esau, who's the man of the outdoors, who's the guy we'd have a TV show about, chooses Jacob, you know, uh who's a liar and a sort of a slime ball, a little bit, and a deceiver, you know, is always trying to pull one over on you.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: But now listen, the one thing in common with all of those people that God chooses is each of them believed that everything begins with God.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham, Genesis 15, it's on the front side of your study sheet, believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Isaac as versus Ishmael.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Ishmael mocked God.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Isaac believed God, was willing to die on the mountain for God.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He may have been a liar and a deceiver, but his older brother Esau, remember, cared so little about spiritual things, he would have preferred a dollar bill in his pocket or a bowl of soup.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so God passed him by and chose Jacob because Jacob had a heart for him.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the common element here that the sovereign God selects a people for his own.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, he doesn't select the way that we select.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell that just by looking out here.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm about half of you are really good looking, but the other half, I mean, really, you're in the good half, by the way.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just telling you.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or strong or smart.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have exceptions, you know.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: I I exult in the fact that my quarterback, University of Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariotto, that Heisman Trophy winner, that he's an outspoken Christian.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or that Russell Wilson, I wasn't rooting for him to win the Seattle Superhawks, you know, the Seattle Seahawks last night.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: But but he's an outspoken Christian.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: So once in a while, you have these athletes and you have these movie stars, you have these other people that do, but the but you know what?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's still true.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: God says there's just a few of them.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: God's choices, our selections are not like our selections.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Brothers consider your calling.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Paul says, not many are wise.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: 1 Corinthians 1, 26 to 29.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not many are powerful, not many of noble birth.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, God's chosen what's foolish in the world to shame the wise.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: God's chosen what's weak in the world to shame the strong.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's chosen what's insignificant, despised, to bring to nothing, what's viewed as something.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: So no one can boast in his presence.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: The sovereign God selects a people for his own.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Aren't you glad that he doesn't only choose the best-looking, the strongest, and the smartest?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Say amen.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, those of you that didn't say that, you think that you're part of the other group.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: You got a pride of lions problem.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, number three, Genesis.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: The righteous God blesses the good and curses the evil.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Confession here.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: There was a wrestling match on the wrestling mat of my decision this week as to whether I would choose the word beginning as the theme word of Genesis or the word bless, because the word bless or blessing is regarded by many scholars as the theme word of Genesis.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's all through this book, this idea of blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the reason, by the way, I chose beginning is that it's more God-centered and blessing is more man-centered.
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  SPEAKER_00: But but I'm I'm telling you right now that this idea of blessing is just everywhere in this book of Genesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: Chapter one, God ends up blessing Adam and Eve, says, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: Chapter three, remember after they go the other way, now comes the curses.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lord God says to the serpent, you are cursed more than anyone else, says to the woman.
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  SPEAKER_00: Labor pain says to Adam, ground is cursed because of you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Work's gonna be hard from now on.
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  SPEAKER_00: But chapter one, he brings them back.
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  SPEAKER_00: He blesses Noah and his sons.
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  SPEAKER_00: Be fruitful.
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  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 12 is the theme passage, perhaps, of the Pentateuch, these three verses, and they are full of blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: You have two imperatives and six blessings.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first imperative or command is Abe, go from your land, your relatives, your father's house to the land I'll show you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do that?
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  SPEAKER_00: Three blessings.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'll make you into a great nation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Number two, I will bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Three, I will make your name great.
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  SPEAKER_00: But you're blessed in order to be a blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: So be a blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: End of verse two.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then three more blessings.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will bless those who bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'll curse those who treat you with contempt.
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  SPEAKER_00: All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Blessing, but for the rest of Genesis, chapters 12 through 50, it's God opening the spigot of his blessing on Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and their wives and their herds, their flocks, the land, everything.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just astounding.
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  SPEAKER_00: But you have this universe, this sort of personal promise, I want to bless you, and then I'm going to bless the nation through you, and then I want to bless the entire world through your seed, which of course ended up being Jesus Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, if you don't have to curse Jesus Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to curse Jesus Christ to be cursed by God forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: In other words, in hell.
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  SPEAKER_00: All you have to do is ignore him.
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  SPEAKER_00: All you have to do is treat him with contempt.
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  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: The book of Genesis then is about a spigot of blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the default uh, the default uh category, the spigot is on.
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  SPEAKER_00: God turns on the spigot of blessing for the people that he has chosen.
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  SPEAKER_00: The people who sitting here have chosen, have the people who have come to God by faith in his son Jesus Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: God wants to bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's a message in Genesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem is that sometimes that spigot gets turned off in Genesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, what happened?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, in every case, you can see what happened as they turned away from God.
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  SPEAKER_00: They disobeyed God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is where the blessing and curse theme interacts with this other theme of good and evil.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because God has put a law inside the universe that says He will always bless the good and he will curse the evil.
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  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, one of the themes in my radio program in 106.9 is regularly I will try to encourage people to realize there is such a thing as good, and there is such a thing as evil.
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  SPEAKER_00: For I know the studies show that when university students are quizzed, is there can you name anyone or anything that is evil in the world?
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  SPEAKER_00: They can only name one thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's Hitler.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is this sort of a relativism that says that, well, really nothing's wrong, nothing's right, you know, more than anything else, because it's all in your own mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has their own preferences.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so one of my goals is one of the themes of Genesis, there is a right, and there is a wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so you say, well, what happened?
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  SPEAKER_00: Where'd the blessing go?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, the blessing was stopped.
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  SPEAKER_00: As long as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph do good, the blessings flow.
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  SPEAKER_00: But when they do evil, the blessings stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it becomes a kind of choice that you and I have as well.
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  SPEAKER_00: God's default position with you, with people today, with his children, his blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: He wants to bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: He will bless you.
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  SPEAKER_00: But there is this other law that he has put in the universe, which is that wisdom gets rewarded and folly gets punished, which is that good gets his blessing and evil gets his punishment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Blessing or curse, you can choose.
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  SPEAKER_00: The final lesson is that the gracious God saves his desperate people.
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  SPEAKER_00: So we have the lesson of salvation here.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this lesson has to go with the previous because the three heroines of Genesis ask God repeatedly, how come I'm not getting blessed since I love you?
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  SPEAKER_00: How come, says Sarah?
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  SPEAKER_00: How come, says Rebecca?
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  SPEAKER_00: How come, says Rachel, you're not blessing me with a child?
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  SPEAKER_00: What's going on here?
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  SPEAKER_00: I haven't done anything wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's a question that so many good and righteous people ask today.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why do bad things happen to good people?
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the answers in Genesis is that blessing will come, but it may be delayed by God's will or by the sins of others.
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  SPEAKER_00: It may be postponed.
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  SPEAKER_00: It gets postponed for decades with Sarah.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a little bit less time with Rebecca and less with Rachel.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the end is that God says, you get desperate, you cry out to me, I will come in, I will save you.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's how this book ends.
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  SPEAKER_00: Joseph turns to his brothers and he says, you know, you held me down.
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  SPEAKER_00: I loved God, but for decades, I mean, you put me in a pit, and then I was in a prison and I was nearly died, and so forth.
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  SPEAKER_00: You meant it, here's the good and evil theme, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
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  SPEAKER_00: God breaks in.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he turns evil into good.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then he pours out his blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's the book of Genesis, wonderful book.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that book tells us that everything begins with God.
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  SPEAKER_00: And now the question is, of course, does it really in your life?
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything in your life, your relationships, your friendship, your marriage, your work, your money, do all of those things begin with God?
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  SPEAKER_00: Do you go back to God and all of those things?
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  SPEAKER_00: If you withhold from God those parts of your life, then what you're saying is that everything doesn't begin with God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of these things begin with me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of these things I don't want God to have anything to do with.
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  SPEAKER_00: There must be a decision, I think, in your life, and I think this is a message of the book of Genesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will submit to the authority of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will do everything I do for the glory of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will live my life as though everything begins with God.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Twain, famous writer, atheist, was fetid.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was praised in the, you know, early in his life and in the middle of his life for being such a famous writer.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loved him.
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  SPEAKER_00: One time there was a huge party and had all these influential, famous luminaries and so forth.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were coming up and telling him how much he meant to them and how great he was.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is over a hundred years ago and so forth.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as the luminaries left and so forth, as the famous people, the dignitaries left, his his daughter came and she was holding his hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when they'd left, she looked up at him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Goes the story.
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  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Daddy, you know everybody but God, don't you?
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  SPEAKER_00: How tragic wouldn't it be to live your life knowing everybody but God.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the fact of the matter is that everything begins with God.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
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  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you for this uh for this book, and thank you for drawing us back to yourself in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for promising us a blessing, letting us know that that's what you want to do in our lives, reminding us that a blessing flows when we're close to you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pray for desperate people in this room.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are people I know here who are desperate for a variety of reasons.
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  SPEAKER_00: I pray that you would hear their cries, that you would deliver them, you would save them, you would bless them.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
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  SPEAKER_00: Amen.