Lessons from the Early Chapters of Genesis
Adam's Descendants and the Garden of Eden are great puzzles to both “higher” and “lower” critics. The first class, of course, do not believe the Bible. What is not in harmony with their reason or knowledge they treat as mythical, legendary, or allegorical. The second class forget that God has not given the record to satisfy man's curiosity, or to explain minute, unessential details. Whole generations and centuries are swept sometimes by a single sentence, all detail covered by one great fact. Nearly two thousand years are covered from that first week of Genesis I to the Flood in four short chapters, three of which relate almost exclusively to the first pair and their first three children; and much, very much, of detail is omitted. One correspondent sends a letter designed to prove that all five races originated at the beginning, but there is absolutely no evidence that the race was other than was Adam till after the Flood. What God designs that we shall get from those first chapters is the great moral lesson they teach. This lesson includes (1) God's creative power and goodness in calling the earth from chaos and darkness to cosmos and light, and fitting it for the home of man; and hence God's power to take man from the chaos and darkness of sin and death to the order and light of the Gospel of Christ; (2) God's wisdom in making one man the head of the race, and so teaching the divine principles of fatherhood and brotherhood; (3) the evils of sin, of inharmony with God, meaning ultimate separation, if persisted in; (4) God's goodness in giving man hope and help in his sinful condition; (5) the two great types of faith and unbelief, in Cain and Abel, and the fruit of each. Study these and other great moral lessons of Genesis, chapters 1 to 5, and be profited.