Seed Bed of Genesis

Grok created image “In the Beginning”

Last Days Content Found “In the Beginning”
From the Seed Bed of Genesis Part 1

I began to reread the Genesis chapters about God’s call on each of the Patriarchs beginning with Abram wanting to confirm the accuracy of my memory and verify my facts. It was to make sure the article I was writing, the Barren Matriarchs of Israel, was true to the biblical account. The details of how Abram’s call by God was necessary. As I began to reread about Abram’s call, I found much, much more than I had ever seen before. It was supposed to be a ‘quick’ fact check but God had other plans. When I came upon The War of the Kings it was out of nowhere! I did not remember ever really seeing it, but as I saw it now, it was clear to me it had application for the days we live in. The deeper I studied the brief account, the more convinced I became that it was something we needed to know for the days we live.

That discovery made me slow down in my reread of Genesis to take a more focused sweep of God’s “seed bed” of all his plans. In the past I learned that God progressively revealed His plans throughout the Bible and throughout the expanse of human history. Genesis is the seed bed of the main thing God is doing among us. He is creating a family. Genesis is the account of the first human beings God chose for His family. That makes their experiences of critical importance to us because He is still in the process of forming us for His family too.

God’s purpose in calling out Abram is the same purpose He called you out too: ‘in order to form a more perfect union’. We are to be a unity of Jew and the peoples of the nations who are God’s family. It is a family that transcends the families of Adam and Eve. God is going to restore the Garden of Eden for a family He has formed for Himself. Whether you are a Messianic Jew or a Christian in any nation, it will serve us well to look earnestly at the way God “formed” the first individuals chosen to be in His family.  

Referring to accounts in Numbers 16 and 25, Paul tells the Corinthian church, 1 Cor 10:1-4,

“I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud, and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. “

The scripture did not say in vain: their lives were recorded to be examples for us who followed in covenant faith in Jesus. Paul tells them explicitly a few verses later in 10:11: 

“Now these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

Paul was not saying all Israel failed in these passages, but he was saying that even though miraculous things happened to them all, but not all of them made it to the Promised Land. This is what he does not want us to be unaware of “on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

The accounts of how God formed the earliest members of His family take us through their failures and how their lives teach them to overcome those flaws. Even so, we tend to ‘lionize’ biblical figures. The truth is they were people just like us. Flawed and in need of transformation of God’s ‘pottery wheel’ in order to make us a worthy vessel in His family. That is why we should look closely at how their relationships with God and with others progressed during their lifetimes.

In forty-three years of Bible study, including deep study of Genesis in particular, today reading these specific passages of Genesis, I am seeing many things I never noticed before. That’s good! Our spiritual growth is indicated by God continuing to reveal things in His Word we have not seen before. It is not dependent upon our own reading and comprehension skills; God reveals to us more as we incorporate into our lives the things He has already shown us.

James 2:26 says, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.”  If our faith is not incorporated into our lives, then we surely we are not living in faith. Jesus said of that state, “Therefore take heed how you hear. For whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.” — Luke 8:18
 
Back in 1982 after returning to faith I read the Bible through five times the first year. I’m not bragging. I was drowning and I knew the Bible was my lifeline from God. A year or two later while pouring over my Bible in bed with reference books laid open all around me, God spoke to me in my heart. I heard Him say He would show me things when I read His Word. He certainly has. When I am reading the Word of God, I’m not trying to fulfill a Bible reading plan. What I truly want if for the Bible to read me! I want to be washed with the water of the Word. I can’t claim that every period of my life since 1982 that I have been pressing in, but thankfully the low dips were limited and God never deserted me. In my personal last days, I am as driven to know God’s Word as I was in my beginning.

Before returning to God as an adult I could not make much sense of the Bible. The words of Jesus were especially confounding to me because they sounded like a lot of disconnected statements all thrown together. I could not connect the dots to see a unified stream of consciousness. What a joy when God opens our eyes in His word to grasp what He is speaking to us.

Even so “looking for something new” is not my goal. The Bible is our life line. Only when we understand a word or a passage we have not understood before, are we blessed with the treasures of the abundant life Jesus promised us. John 10:10 says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it in all its abundance.”

Whatever God shows me not just about me, it is about who He is. When I know that, I really have something of great value to share with others. Everybody has an interpretation, but only some have moved to a heart’s desire to know Him for who He really is.

What God has been showing me lately has accelerated so greatly in the past number of weeks it has been hard for me to keep up. In those times I just try to take notes and save my research links so I can return to explore and dig deeper.

This whole series in Genesis has been like that. I have starts on several chapters of what I’m discovering but have not been able to finish any of them yet. I do have a strong urgency to communicate these things. I believe they are “now words” meant to help people now. That is why I have decided to start publishing the chapter piecemeal. As soon as first section is done, I will publish it on my blog. Then move to the next portion I need to share. By the end of these studies I will have gone through each of the Genesis accounts of the patriarchs and matriarchs with a view for what we need to know for our days in these “last days.”

The major theme I see emerging is about how God chose certain individuals to begin to establish His own family line within mankind. He is going to restore what was destroyed in the Fall of Mankind.

We can’t choose our families, but God can. Not every human being belongs to God’s family but we can learn a lot by looking closely at how God sorted it out by choosing, then refining flawed human beings. In Genesis He began to chose to individuals He would make into a People, the only people bearing His name among all the nations. From them would be God’s firstborn Son to extend salvation to all the peoples of the earth. His family members among the People of Israel remain His family. They are the ones who learned how to put Him first in their lives. That is what God was forming them to do – choose wisely in life.

The matter of free will choice is so important to God. If we will not choose Him, we will not be part of His family. God is not looking for reluctant or forced compliance; He is looking for family as family is meant to be. He is looking for those who will choose Him and His ways.

Each person God called in Genesis to be a patriarch in the family of God – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – were being fashioned by God not just to be the People Israel, but to be the Jewish part of the Family of God on the earth. God has never stopped adding Jews to the Jewish part of His family. In fact in the past 100 years God has begun increasingly to add Jews back into His family line. This will increase even more in the coming years as Jews return from the exile to the restored State of Israel. That is because God promised that the Jewish part of His family in large numbers  will be restored spiritually within the Promised Land. The restoration of Israel is shown to be done in stages according to Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of the Dry Bones.

As Christians, we are also God’s family by faith in Jesus. This is the same faith in Israel’s Messiah that Jews have come into since the days Jesus walked in human flesh. Jesus was a Jew then and He is still a Jew now. In Yeshua’s second coming this Jesus Christians love will return as the Lion of the Tribe Judah.

Today Jews come to faith BY FAITH in Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah. They belong to the family of Israel but also the family of God by faith in Yeshua. That is a driver among the Messianic Jews who minister in Israel: they want all their countrymen to be rejoined spiritually to God. It only comes by faith in Yeshua. He is the only door to salvation, even for the Jews, many of whom are still blinded by the veil that covers their eyes – and not only theirs but over all peoples:

“And He will destroy on this mountain (Zion) the surface of the covering cast over all people, And the veil that is spread over all nations.” Isaiah 25:7  

Christians who are in God’s family from all the nations are as the book of Romans explains “wild branches” grafted in to the Family Tree of God – the one God started in Genesis with Abram.

The tree we have been grafted into is the natural tree of faith in Israel. So in every sense Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are our Patriarchs too. Likewise, the Matriarchs are our spiritual family too. Their life journeys with God are ours and hold great revelation for our own life journeys with God. We are blessed by seeking out these insights and we curse ourselves regarding them as useless information of a covenant God discarded.

I believe Christians would be astonished to see how similar the lives of the Hebrew family of God are to their own lives spiritually. The Word of God tells us that what happened to the men and women of God in Scripture were written as examples to us. Many Christians refuse to embrace that word and forsake God’s guidance even though their stories are meant to provide insight for our present day lives. It is a common yet enormous misunderstanding for any Christian who believes only the New Testament applies to them. All of God’s Word is for us, as  2 Timothy 3:16 says, it is “God-breathed.”

It is important to share these insights considering the times we are living in. The Genesis accounts are last days instruction hiding in plain sight. In light of some of the harsher prophetic scriptures for the future set before us, we can find comfort in the beginnings of God’s family tree that relate to us today. Genesis is an amazing spiritual treasure trove of the past, present and future.   

I want to especially encourage my Israeli believer friends who are in the frontlines currently deep into the furies and challenges of the devil’s war path, there is so much hope in the beginnings for the endings. In Isaiah 40 God says, “Comfort you, comfort you My people, says your God.” There is nothing more comforting to the Jewish people than what God has spoken as promises to them. This is true of one of the first ‘finds’ from Genesis that I want to share.

God, who knows the end from the beginning, provided insights in Genesis showing how He clears our path of enemies. At times we remain completely unaware of what He has done! It is good news that not only what we know and see He has done for us, there are things we have no inkling of how He dealt with enemies we will no longer have to deal with. Talk about leveling the playing field!  We are not facing impossible odds alone because He has already taken some of the worst of our enemies out already. These are things we may never even know about. Yet we can be certain of this: When we must fight to win, God has already removed the worst of our enemies so we can win. We never face overwhelming odds with God leading us into battle.

I saw a beautiful example of that a few weeks when suddenly a short passage detailed a war of the kings in Abram’s times. I could not find any other mention of this specific war but looking into it further it seemed to hold implications for the last days. That is why I called this part a chapter Last Days Content Found “In the Beginning.” Part 2 coming soon. I can’t wait to hear what you think about it.