because in marriage there is the possibility of engaging with God in the creation process.
There is a kind of divine humility in this chapter. Though the man is able to commune with God, he isn’t expected to find fulfillment in God alone. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). We need God, but we also need one another.
PRAYER: Help me, I pray, to see every human being as part of my very being. Amen.
If marriage is part of the divine plan, how does a person who has not married, or is divorced or widowed, interpret her or his singleness?
| GENESIS 3–4; PSALMS 5–6 | Week 1, Day 3 |
When Genesis 2 ends, all is perfect; man and woman have each other, they are in communion with God, happily employed, and blessed with idyllic housing and food.
Then, enter the villain. He is known by a variety of names, but probably the most significant is Adversary or Accuser. He enters our story making accusations against God, but it is soon evident that the object of destruction is the human creature.
The sin, quite simply, is disobedience to God. What Adam and Eve wanted was itself admirable (as is often the case with sin); they wanted to “be like God.” But they pursued their goal in the wrong way.
The results were catastrophic. They found themselves distanced from God, from each other, from nature, and from their own selves.
The pain continued into the next generation, and it continues to our own time. All our deeds, for good or ill, have consequences. In Adam and Eve’s case, the tragedy grew monstrous when their older son murdered the younger.
But there’s a note of grace from the very beginning. When Adam and Eve sinned, they received a message that traditional scholars over the centuries have seen as a promise of the Messiah (3:15); and when godly Abel was killed, there was a birth of new hope in Seth.
PRAYER: Save me, O God, from the day of temptation; and if I fall, teach me to repent. Amen.
Analyze your personal experience of temptation by comparing it with Eve’s encounter with the serpent. What was Eve’s experience? What is yours?
| GENESIS 5–6; PSALM 7 | Week 1, Day 4 |
There’s much to be learned from reading an obituary column, chief of which is that we will all die. That, as Samuel Johnson would say, concentrates the attention. Genesis 5 is the first obituary column; its brief biographies are identical in their endings: and he died.
All but one. Enoch is a different sort of human being. In a setting of dying, he insisted on living, by means of his extraordinary communion with God.
Genesis 6 is an obituary column of another kind. It portrays a dead society. The smell of destruction is all about it, in proportions so ugly that “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually,” until at last “the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind.”
But here, too, there was an element of wondrous life, in the man named Noah. He “found favor in the sight of the LORD,” for with evil all around him, he was “blameless in his generation.” Further, he managed to communicate his goodness to his family, so that his wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law accepted his spiritual leadership.
No one else did, however. Though a New Testament writer calls Noah a “herald of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), his message was not heeded. Perhaps it was achievement enough to be good and godly in a thoroughly perverse time, even to the point of winning his own household.
PRAYER: Grant me, dear Savior, the grace to be a child of life, no matter how great the measure of death around me. Amen.
List several phrases from Genesis 6 that describe the degree of evil that characterized Noah’s time.
| GENESIS 7–8; PSALM 8 | Week 1, Day 5 |
If Hollywood were telling this story, a large share of the screen time would be invested in scenes of terrifying destruction. Genesis tells us the proportions of the rain (forty days and nights), the total involvement of nature (“the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened” [7:11]), and the long wait for the waters to subside; but there is no description of human terror or of vast areas of desolation.
Instead, the emphasis is on restoration. We are told much about what was saved of both animal and human life, and of the patience and faith with which Noah waited for an end to his journey. Then, a moving interaction between Noah and God. Noah builds an altar and presents a sacrifice to God, and God, in turn, expresses divine pleasure at Noah’s act. Never again, God vows, will there be such destruction; seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
In this scene of judgment the overriding quality is mercy. Judgment has come so a worse fate can be avoided. God’s judgments are never for pointless destruction or revenge, but for redemption.
So, too, the flood is not an end, but a beginning. And what a beginning it is! A human being in trusting worship, and God responding with the assurance of continuing mercy.
PRAYER: When I face judgment, dear Lord, help me to see it as redemption at work; in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Describe a rainbow experience in your life—that is, an occasion when a time of suffering or trial concluded with a bright new hope.
| GENESIS 9–11; PSALM 9 | Week 1, Day 6 |
The Bible is a book of new beginnings. When sin seems to have destroyed an age or an individual, there is always a place of starting again.
It is as if the flood had washed the earth clean for this new start. The “first generation” was told to “be fruitful . . . and fill the earth” (1:28); now Noah and his family are given the same instructions (9:1). And as if recalling the sins of Cain and Lamech, a warning is reiterated against the shedding of blood (9:6).
But things soon began to go wrong. Even as the rainbow of the covenant fades from view, Noah falls into drunkenness and one of his sons mocks his shame. Then, as the descendants of Noah multiply, a new spirit of rebellion appears: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens” (11:4). So the original sin repeats itself: A people would, by their own devices, become like God and perhaps even displace him.
Their effort ends in disarray. When we set ourselves against God, whether as a civilization or as individuals, we put ourselves out of joint with the very nature of things and we are captured by confusion. Not only is communication with others broken, but within our own souls we speak a multitude
