From Beginning to Forever: Wrap Up

 Can you believe it's been two months since we started this study? I'm not sure I got out of it what I had hoped. I was looking for an overview of the Bible and seeing Jesus from beginning to end, but I think I got sidetracked by different things each day. I hardly ever wrote specifically about what the verse referred to. So, as I go about this wrap up, rather than writing about what I wrote about, I'm going to look at the verses I was given and see if I can get the big picture.

 Of course, if you're going to do an overview of the Bible, you're going to start in Genesis with creation. The first day we looked at God's work in creation, and how on the seventh day He rested. In the creation story we see Jesus, in fact we learn later in John 1:3 that everything that was made in creation was made by Jesus. Next, in Genesis 1:26-27, we hear God say to Himself, "Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness." Is Himself correct if He is three in one? Himselves? But I digress... As God is talking to Himself, he is having a group conversation because He is three in one - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Again, we see Jesus here as the Son. As we looked at Genesis 3:15 we read the first Messianic prophecy, or a prophecy that points to Jesus, the Messiah. In it, God promises, "And I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; he will strike your head and you will strike his heel." This points to how no matter how Satan attempted to take Jesus down, ultimately Jesus would be successful. Noah's story looked pretty bleak when he, his family, and every animal species on earth had spent months on a boat together floating around above the land. "But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and domestic animals that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to blow over the earth and the waters receded." Genesis 8:1. No matter how dark your situation, how impossible, Jesus sees you in it. He's there with you and hasn't left you alone. He will remember you and make a way. Then we came to the story of the Tower of Babel. People, as people do, came to think they could do it their way, that they had a better plan than God. This questionable construction project was doomed from the start, because the people had set their mind against God and were trying to do things on their own. For their own good, for our good, God knew He had to break that party up. He scattered the people who were building a monument to themselves, for their own glory, across the face of the earth and confused the language of the entire world. 

 Some time later there was a man named Abram that God had filled with a special, intense kind of faith, and God used Abram to show us what active faith looked like. Was he perfect? Far from it! But He believed, and God credited it to him as righteousness. When God told Abram to "Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you," Abram did. He set out on the road with no idea where he was going, except that God would show him. As he went along the way, a few different times God promised Abram that he would have descendants as numerous as the stars, and even though Abram and his wife were old and childless, he believed God. Once God had given Abram the child He had promised, God then called Abram to sacrifice that special son, and it's here that we see Jesus most portrayed in the life of Abram. God told Abram to sacrifice his one and only son, and then when Abram was faithful and about to follow through, God stopped him and gave him and alternate sacrifice instead. But God Himself knew that in order to save His people, He would have to go through with that sacrifice and offer up His own Only Begotten Son. Later, God would offer some of the same promises to Abram's grandson, Jacob, that He had given to Abram. Jacob was certainly not the picture of righteousness, his life was littered with sin from the beginning, and he saw some of the effects of his sin as it began to ripple into the future. Nevertheless, God promised to multiply Jacob's descendants and told him that nations and kings would come from him and they would inherit the land God had given to his grandfather, Abraham. Jacob's son, Joseph, went on to have a crazy life, one that some would see as cursed but God had set fires that burned for good.

 Genesis leaves off with the Israelites in Egypt, where they end up being turned into slaves. They lived in Egypt for more than 400 years before Moses came along. We looked into his story a little, but it was interesting that when Moses first encountered God in a burning bush in the wilderness, He asks Him for His name. God has had a lot of names in the Bible, and He could have legitimately given Moses any of them: Jehovah Jireh, Jehovah Rapha, Elohim and El Elyon just to name a few, but instead He told Moses, "I AM that I AM." Moses was asking which God was sending him to pharaoh, but God needed to get across to him that He was THE God, that there were no others. In order to convince Pharaoh to set His people free, God sent plagues on Egypt. As the plagues reached their culmination, God had Moses tell the people of Israel to paint their doorposts with the blood of their Passover lambs so that the spirit of death would pass over their households- a chilling portent of Jesus' sacrifice, our Passover lamb that God sent to save us. As God led His people out of Egypt, through Moses, they encountered many obstacles that, despite their unimaginable complexity, God walked them through by His might hand. The Israelites' time in the wilderness was long, 40 years in fact, but it was a time of testing and growth in which God taught them the importance of keeping Him first in their hearts. The path He made for them through the wilderness was challenging and they encountered much hardship, but He guided them into the knowledge that His path was best and they were not to swerve from it to the right or to the left. 

 As Israel settled into the promised land, the land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob their forefathers, they looked around and longed to have a king like the other nations around them did. Even though God saw this for what it was, a rejection of Him as their king, He gave them what they asked for. It didn't take long for them to see that what they asked for wasn't quite what they wanted, or what was best. Thankfully, God knew this and had them on a path to be able to see and appreciate the king He chose for them, a man after His own heart. No, King David was not a perfectly righteous king, but that wasn't what God was looking for. He wanted a man who could model for the people what it was like to have a heart fully committed to God. As the people continued to live in this land, God sent them both kings, like David, and prophets to show them how to live and how to honor God and keep Him first in their hearts. These prophets, like Isaiah, also pointed ahead to Jesus and the hope of salvation in Him. Some of these prophecies, like this one from Ezekiel, had both near term and end times promises in them, telling the people, and us, about what was to come.

 Over 300 of these prophecies pointed to what hearts had been designed to long for, and yet no one knew quite how it would come to pass - the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us (John 1:14). Jesus spent His ministry teaching us about His kingdom, an upside-down kingdom where whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Jesus will save it. Some of the things He taught were very difficult to understand. When Jesus taught His disciples that whoever believed in Him would live, even though he died, it was difficult to understand and yet Martha, one of Jesus' friends, believed it. The culmination of Jesus' ministry on earth was His sacrifice for our sins as He died in our place on the cross. The way in which He did this made it plain even to the unbelieving centurion who had born witness that Jesus was the Son of God. But praise God, Jesus' death on the cross was not the end because three days later He rose again! He spent 40 days appearing to people, encouraging and directing them, and then He left us with one final, great commission just before ascending into heaven: to go forth into all the world and make disciples for Him.

 The disciples were excited by the hope Jesus had given them, but He had cautioned them to wait until the Holy Spirit came. Jesus knew that they would need His presence with them to fulfill the mission He had given them. We learn a lot about the early church in the new testament but four practices stood out: teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. Thanks to Jesus' finished work on the cross, we are all now a part of the people of God, a gift of grace so that no one can boast. The Bible ends off with the book of Revelation, a picture God granted to John while he lived in exile on the island of Patmos. In it there is lots of imagery pointing to things to come, but the key is that it gives us something to look forward to.

Here's the Thing: My brain feels rather garbled lately. I struggle to maintain a thought, and any potential trains of thought are swiftly derailed. I had a hard time following the thread of this study as I went through it, but looking back God's beautiful plan of redemption is clear. I'm so grateful for His word and the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we can discern it!