GENESIS - 13
The Beginning of the Gospel
What would you think if you knew someone was thinking about building a house and was going to start with the roof? What would you say if he told you he was quite happy working his way down to the floor? And what would you further say if he told you that was as far as he would go, with no digging of any foundations? Well, you would come to only one conclusion - the plan was sheer madness.
We are thinking this time about the “Beginning of the Gospel”. When it comes to the preaching of the Good News of Jesus Christ we have to lay a proper foundation. True preaching of the Gospel rightly urges people to repent of their sins and trust in Christ, but what is the urgency in all that if the hearers have no idea of what sin is and what it has done to us? Why be concerned about God as Judge if there is no general belief in God as our Maker? If we all evolved from primeval slime over millions of years, where is the need for God at all? If there is no God who made us, and made all things, then there can be no absolute laws from God that we have broken.
Furthermore, why fear death and then the judgement if death is just a natural part of the evolutionary process to which we all contribute our little bit? If we survive at all is it just in the influence we have had or in our children whom we pass on as a further stage of evolution? Why should I feel guilty about my sins if it is just in my genes, in my inherited nature and I am programmed that way?
Many people think this way; perhaps you do. These are the ideas that are being constantly fed to us today by the media, but the fact is they do not satisfy us deep down. The true and complete Gospel meets those needs for forgiveness and real purpose and meaning in our lives. There has to be that sense of need and that is why there has to be the laying of the foundations of understanding. We find these foundations in the book of beginnings - Genesis - right at the start of the Bible.
There are four foundational truths of the Good News of salvation that we are going to consider. They are: The Creation, The Fall, The Flood and The Promise. These are the four levels of the Gospel’s foundation, found in the opening chapters of Genesis, that are vital to our understanding of its message.
The first level to be laid down in our Gospel building is the fact that God is our Creator. We are not the outcome of the blind, chance forces of an impersonal Nature. The Bible teaches us that God made man, by an act of special creation, from the dust of the ground and by breathing into him the breath of life. Genesis chapter 2 tells us that “man became a living being.” Mankind was his crowning masterpiece on the face of the earth and the Psalmist reminds us that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Revelation chapter 4 verse 11 says: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”
So the very first principle to lay down as we face up to the claims of the Gospel is that we belong to God by right of creation. We are answerable to Him because it is He who has made us and not we ourselves. But that right is what is proudly resisted and obstinately rejected by man. He wants to be master of his own destiny, just as Adam and Eve did.
This brings us to the next foundational level to be laid down and it is “The fall of man.” By this I mean that tragic, disastrous fall from innocence and fellowship with their Creator that Adam and Eve had experienced at first. Through their disobedience, thinking they knew better than God, they went their own way and were driven from the paradise where they had been close to their Maker. As a result of Adam’s sin, physical and spiritual death became the lot of all mankind.
Present day science says that death is a part of the evolutionary process. Millions of years of death, it says, in various life forms, is what has brought us to where we are today and has made us what we are.
God’s Word, the Bible, says the exact opposite to this. Death is not natural to us; it was not part of God’s purpose for mankind.
It was imposed on us as a result of Adam’s sin and our every instinct is to hate it and fight it as something alien, an enemy that faces everyone of us.
Although physical death is tragedy enough, a far worse consequence of man’s fall into sin is spiritual death. At the dawn of creation the first man and woman were spiritually alive to God, able to commune with Him and enjoy his presence. With the entrance of sin into their natures their spirits died and that relationship and communion was broken. Whereas once they found it a natural thing to please God in all they thought, said and did, now it became unnatural. Their whole nature was inclined away from God, not towards Him. This is why we read in the New Testament that the natural state of man is that he is “dead in trespasses and sins.” Our sins have separated us from our Maker. It is the reason why the Lord Jesus Christ said that we must be “born again by God’s Spirit” and receive a new nature from God Himself.
The next layer of truth to be laid down is the reality of judgement. The world-wide flood of Noah’s day brings this home to us. That flood was a judgement on man’s wickedness.
Sadly, the story of Noah is often trivialised, but the reality is that this was a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Accounts of a universal flood can be found in the annals of a number of ancient civilisations and not just in the Bible. Rooted in man’s memory, and described in God’s Word, it serves to remind us that God cannot ignore the wickedness of mankind and that judgement is surely coming. It fell once, long ago, and will fall again, not by flood this time, but by fire. All who die in their sins will inevitably face the righteous judgement of God.
The final element of the Gospel foundation is “The Promise.”
We find this in Genesis chapter 3 verse 15 in the words of God to Satan. It is here that we have the first indication that a Saviour would come to destroy the tempter and bring deliverance: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heel.” In other words, someone born of a woman, born into the human race, would come as God’s provided deliverer.
We discovered last time Seth and his descendants were those who called on the name of the Lord, they were believers. Noah was one of these and it was from the line of his son Shem that Abraham came, the father of the Israelite nation. It was to Abraham that God gave the promise that a great nation would come from him, and out of that nation would come that one person who would be a blessing to the whole world. That promise, first hinted at in Genesis and repeated to Abraham and his descendants, was fulfilled many centuries later in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
These, then, are the foundation stones that lead us to an understanding of the Christian Gospel. God is our Creator and we are answerable to Him. We are all sinners by nature and practise and as such face judgement. But God, in his great love for those He made, promised a Saviour and that one is none other than his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Whatever your situation you need to believe in Him for peace with God, for Genesis reveals that everyone of us is a descendant of Adam. That is where it all started to go wrong, but in God’s mercy that is where it started to be put right. My prayer for you is that through this series from Genesis you will remember your Creator, come to see your need of Christ as your Saviour and come to God in repentance and faith, calling on Him for salvation.