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Sermons on Genesis (Page 2)

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

“Nachash” means A SHINY DIVINER, one who gave out divine information. That’s exactly what Eve is getting from this divine being, divine information.
ANOTHER SPIRITUAL BEING THAT WE ENCOUNTERED IN THE GARDEN IS THE CHERUBIM.
The tempter in the Garden, that serpent of old, also known as the Devil is not a cherubim, but rather a Seraphim.
Seraphim: The meaning of the Hebrew word for “seraphim” is ‘FIERY SERPENT.”
Seraphim are reptilian/serpentine beings, also known in the Bible as watchers. There are good seraphim who PROCLAIM the Holiness of God and there are wicked seraphim who rebelled against the Most High at various times, and who became the pagan gods of the other nations.
Brian Godawa in “Enoch Primordial Appendix” explains:
“In Hebrew, satan is prefixed by the definite article HA which makes it translate more accurately as THE SATAN, or THE ACCUSER.
In the New Testament Greek, Satan is prefixed by the definite article HO, carrying the same result of THE SATAN as the adversary or the accuser.”
Why is all this important to know? Answer:
For way too long we have been taught that Satan was the highest cherub in God’s heavenly host, a worship leader with the name of Lucifer, who long before the Garden of Eden, rebelled by trying to usurp God’s seat of authority in heaven. He wanted to be “like God”. He was then cast out of heaven with one third of the angels and fell to earth, where he tempted Eve in the Garden as a snake, and now he is “Prince and Power of the air”, over the earth.
Lucifer was actually a Latin translation for the Hebrew words HELEL BEN SHAHAR, which means “Morningstar”, known to the ancients as the planet Venus.
“Satan occurs 27 times in the Hebrew Bible. Ten of those occurrences are without the article. Of these ten occurrences, seven refer to human beings and two refer to the Angel of Yahweh. That means nine of the ten instances clearly do not refer to the Devil or proper personal name, Satan.”
Peggy L.Day (An adversary in Heaven: Satan in the Hebrew Bible)

GOD CANNOT BE DEFEATED

Final Thoughts from last week:
• Eden was lost, God intends that it be restored
• His rule and His kingdom will return in its full scope when Jesus comes back and God creates a new heaven and earth.
• In the meantime, we can spread the truth of God and the gospel of Jesus everywhere.
• Consciously thinking of ourselves as God’s representative – his imagers- mean the decisions we make matter.
• We are a glimpse either of life with God or of a life without God. There is no middle ground.
• Understanding this truth will have an impact on how we see each other and relate to each other.
• Racism has no place in God’s world. Injustice is incompatible with representing God. The abuse of power – at home, at work, or in government – is ungodly.
• God cares about how each of us represents him where we are. We either stand against the darkness, sharing the life God wants everyone to ultimately experience, or we don’t. The opportunity does not need to be spectacular; it just needs to be taken.
No wonder so many Christians today are totally confused what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, what it means to be A CHILD OF GOD, what it means to LIVE THE RESURRECTED LIFE TODAY. And certainly, most people don’t even believe that it is important to know all these things.
• Do we really need to know what happened in the Garden of Eden?
• Do we really need to know that the “serpent” in the Garden wasn’t really a member of the animal kingdom?
• Do we really need to know about the connection between Genesis 3, Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14?
• Do we really need to know what the Hebrew word NACHASH, translated “Serpent” really means?
• Do we really need to know what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote;
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the women was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing – if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” 1 Timothy 2:12-15
“the proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers – the context that PRODUCED the Bible.”
“We do not share the cognitive framework of the biblical writers. While the implications may seem uncomfortable, it is hermeneutically pointless to pretend otherwise.” Dr. Michael Heiser

FREEWILL IMAGERS

In is book “What love is this?” Dave Hunt writes:
“The Calvinist claims that God, in His sovereignty (if He so desires), could stop all sin and cause everyone always to keep the Ten Commandments perfectly. This would be possible only if man had no free will. If that were true, however, what would be the point of giving the Law? God could have controlled human thoughts, words, and deeds so that without even knowing the Law, everyone would do exactly what the Law required.
Incredibly, Calvinism teaches that God gave the Ten Commandments, caused man to break them, then damned him for doing so. The Bible is thereby turned into a charade, man into a puppet, and God into a monster whom the atheist rightly rejects.
C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity:
“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (…) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”
Dr. Michael Heiser:
“Despite the risk of evil, free will is a wonderful gift. God’s decision was a loving one. Understanding that requires only a consideration of the two alternatives:
1. Not having life at all
2. Being a mindless robot, capable only of obeying commands and responding to programming.
If our decisions were all coerced, how authentic would those “decisions” actually be? If love is coerced or programmed, is it really love? Is any such decision really a genuine decision at all? It isn’t. For a decision to be real, it must be made against an alternative that could be chosen. We all know the difference between freedom and coercion. The IRS doesn’t tell you that YOU MAY PERHAPS pay your taxes by April 15.
When you behave wrongly, where would the emotional healing of forgiveness be if the person you offended was merely programmed to say those words, or coerced to say them? Free will is a gift, despite the risk.”
The idea of God wanting us to join his divine family, to be part of his council and live in his presence, helps us understand some amazing things the Bible says:
• It explains why the Bible refers to believers as “sons of God” or “children of God” (John 1:12; 11:52; Galatians 3:26; 1 John 3:1-3
• It explains why believers are described as being “adopted” into God’s family (Galatians 4:5-6; Romans 8:14-16)
• It explains why we are said to be “heirs” of God and his kingdom (Galatians 4:7; Titus 3:7; James 2:5)
• It explains why we are “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4)
• It explains why, after Jesus returns, he says he will grant believers “to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7)
• It explains why he has promised to share the rule of the nations with us (Revelation 2:26-28)
Final Thoughts
• Eden was lost, God intends that it be restored.
• His rule and His kingdom will return in its full scope when Jesus comes back and God creates a new heaven and earth.
• In the meantime, we can spread the truth of God and the gospel of Jesus everywhere.
• Consciously thinking of ourselves as God’s representative – his imagers- mean the decisions we make matter.
• We are a glimpse either of life with God or of a life without God. There is no middle ground.
• Understanding this truth will have an impact on how we see each other and relate to each other.
• Racism has no place in God’s world. Injustice is incompatible with representing God. The abuse of power – at home, at work, or in government – is ungodly.
• God cares about how each of us represents him where we are. We either stand against the darkness, sharing the life God wants everyone to ultimately experience, or we don’t. The opportunity does not need to be spectacular; it just needs to be taken.

WHAT IS OUR DESTINY?

David Burnett in his MA Thesis titled: “Abraham’s Star-like Seed: Neglected Functional Elements in the Patriarchal Promise of Genesis 15”, states:
“Most Bible Interpreters take the promise of Genesis 15:5 as a numerical one. This is certainly the case, but here is a noteworthy stream of Second Temple Jewish interpretation – culminating in the New Testament – that considers the promise QUALITATIVE as well. The point is that believers, the children of Abraham through faith in the promised messianic seed, would not only be as numerous as the stars but would be made divine, as stars, the members of the heavenly host, were considered to be. Being made “like the stars” is part of the biblical theology of glorification or THEOSIS.”
“God does nothing but in answer to prayer.” John Wesley

WRESTLING with God

The life of Jacob covers HALF OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS. His birth is recorded in chapter 25 and his death is recorded in chapter 49. What we find between those two chapters are quite amazing stories about this man and the struggles he faced, because they are all pointing towards the struggles our forefathers faced and reveal the struggles or strongholds which we face today. Certainly, studying this man’s life will give us plenty of insight how NOT TO DO CERTAIN THINGS, and HOW TO DO CERTAIN THINGS IN LIFE.
God reveals Himself to Jacob and reaffirms the covenant He made with Abraham, Jacobs grandfather, promising Jacob that his offspring will be many and that the Promised Land will one day belong to his descendants. In this dream, Jacob sees something like a ladder or a stairway leading up to heaven. The Hebrew word translated “ladder” is SULLAM which simply means a connection between God and man.
What an encouragement to all of us who have been justified through faith in the work of God Himself through His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, who has become our ladder to heaven. Even after we became children of God, running from trouble, trying to ignore our strongholds, God comes along with a great encouragement, reminding us of the promises made long ago to our forefathers, reminding us that His promises and His covenant with us cannot be negated.
Jacob found out how the universal law of sowing and reaping is working its way through his life. He did not know that he had a stronghold of lying and deceiving, until he had to be on the receiving end of it. You see, our very own strongholds are not admitted as such until we are on the receiving end of it. Until someone else does the same thing to us and all of a sudden we can feel the pain, the hurt, the disappointment.
Jacob was still dealing and wheeling. Anxious for his life, he came up with the idea to bribe his brother with gifts of a caravan of goodies. He hoped he can pacify his brother. Once everything he could do was done, finally Jacob was physically exhausted and alone in the wilderness. He feared for his life. He was convinced that he would face death after the messengers he sent out came back to Jacob saying: We came to your brother Esau, and he also is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him. At this moment Jacob realized that he is powerless to control his fate. With his father-in-law behind him and Esau before him, he was now too spent to struggle any longer. In the process, Jacob the deceiver received a new name, ISRAEL. But that is not all. The most important part of this struggle comes at the end. It was when God wrestled with Jacob that Jacob’s stronghold was taken down and demolished. And it was after his stronghold was demolished that GOD BLESSED HIM.
“… Jacob’s divine encounter at the Jabbok River was a magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.” Frederick Buechner

Walking With God

The question is: Was this walk with God the exclusive privilege of a few super saints? Did God pre ordain who can walk with him and who cannot walk with him? Could it be that many people who call themselves Christians cannot walk with God, because they have never been born into God’s family by the Holy Spirit? And so it is with those who believe by having put their faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ instead of counting on their religious self-effort.
What assurance do I have that I am a child of God?
“The quality of a man’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field.” Vince Lombardi
There is no such thing as a secular job or sacred job. 7 days a week we are all responsible to glorify God by OBEDIENCE TO HIM. That’s walking with God.

The Blessings of Goshen

Joseph divinely positioned and prepared for such a time as this by God himself, he is inviting his family to move to Egypt, and there they would live in a land called Goshen, which means: ‘DRAWING NEAR’.
But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. In other words, Jacob and his entire clan was exposed to incredible evil. That’s one of the reasons God wanted Jacob and his family to be separated from these people. When they went down to Goshen, the place was prepared by God for them. When we draw near to God, which means we are separated from the wickedness of this world. The Hebrew writer is telling us that Jesus’ blood allows us to enter into God’s presence at any time. There are blessings in Goshen, blessings we can only receive when we DRAW NEAR TO GOD. Separation from the ways of the world. Provision by God Himself. Protection from the judgment of God upon this world.

Are You Bearing God’s Image?

I would say, Joseph was bearing God’s image. This does not mean that Joseph was perfect. No human being is, except the man of God, Jesus Christ. Bearing God’s image means: Having a powerful faith in God and a positive response to others.
Judah and his brothers went from intellectual faith, to emotional faith, and eventually to transforming faith.They are now bearing the image of God. They are now acting according to God’s Word. Now it’s not just faith, now it’s faith that works according to God’s Word.
They all passed the exam of attitudes.
Humanly speaking, the average Christian would not bear God’s image when faced with people who have done them such wrong. We would demand from the guilty to feel some of the humiliation and shame we felt when they did wrong. We know that they don’t deserve anything good coming their way. BUT LISTEN TO JOSEPH, a man who bears the image of God.