Genesis is the book of beginnings — the foundation upon which all of Scripture is built. The word “Genesis” comes from the Greek word meaning “origin” or “beginning.”

In this section we explore the key themes, characters, and covenants — the binding promises God makes with His people — that emerge from Genesis and set the trajectory for the entire biblical narrative. Every major theme in Scripture finds its seed in these opening chapters.

Part one  ·  1:1 – 11:26  ·  The primitive history of mankind

The Creation  1:1 – 2:25

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water.

Genesis 1:1–2  ·  God’s Word

Note that the six days of creation are to be taken literally. Each is described as having an evening and a morning — the Hebrew way of speaking of a day of twenty-four hours. And the Sabbath command looks back to this as its foundation, speaking of it as simple historical fact:

In six days the LORD made heaven, earth, and the sea, along with everything in them. He didn’t work on the seventh day.

Exodus 20:11  ·  God’s Word  ·  see also 31:17

Note the progression of the creative work

The first three days make the realms. The last three fill them.

From day four, those areas are given their completion. Read the two halves against each other and the order is not a list — it is a house being built and then furnished.

Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, in our likeness…” So God created humans in his image. In the image of God he created them. He created them male and female.

Genesis 1:26–27  ·  God’s Word

Note that chapter 2 is not a second creation account. It focuses more directly on the creation of man, describing that event in greater detail (2:7).

The garden was a place for man to be in fellowship with God

God never intended Adam to stay in the garden. The command was fill the earth and subdue it — the garden was a starting point, not a destination.

And the garden is the beginning of the tabernacle, the temple and the church. Follow the line: Cain and Abel come here to worship and present their offering before the LORD; God sets cherubim to guard access to the tree of life, as they would later be embroidered over the way into the holy place. The pattern runs garden → tabernacle → temple → church — and the home is modelled on the same thing.

Man was created on Friday afternoon

Which means his first full day was a Sabbath — a day of rest. We work toward the weekend; God gave man rest first and sent him out to work from it. That order never changes in Scripture, and it is worth noticing on the sixth page of the Bible.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing… Then God blessed the seventh day and set it apart as holy.

Genesis 2:2–3  ·  God’s Word

The fall to the flood  3:1 – 5:32

The first word after the fall is shame. Man is shamed in his nakedness — and God’s first act is to go looking for him, and then to clothe him at the cost of an animal’s life (3:21).

In the cool of the evening, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking around in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees in the garden. The LORD God called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?”

Genesis 3:8–9  ·  God’s Word

And in the sentence passed on the serpent there is a promise, which is the first one in the Bible:

I will make your descendants and her descendant hostile toward each other. He will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel.

Genesis 3:15  ·  God’s Word

Trace the two genealogies carefully

This is the thing most readers skim, and it carries the argument of the chapters.

• The line of Seth, who replaced Abel, leads eventually to Noah, and through him to Abraham and to Jesus. This lineage is prophetic. See Lineage from Adam to Jacob.
• The line of Cain describes the increasing corruption of the pre-flood world — and God had warned him at the start of it: “sin is lying outside your door ready to attack. It wants to control you, but you must master it” (4:7).

The flood  6:1 – 9:29

The LORD saw how evil humans had become on the earth. All day long their deepest thoughts were nothing but evil. The LORD was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and he was heartbroken.

Genesis 6:5–6  ·  God’s Word

Note from the text that it was a universal flood — of such depth that it could cover Mount Ararat, allowing the ark to sail above it.

• The flood falls 1,656 years from Adam. Long enough to feel like ancient history, short enough that Adam’s grandson was still alive when Noah was born. The memory of Eden was still first-hand.
• The animals: two of every unclean kind, fourteen of every clean kind.
• Forty days. Four times ten — four for the universal, ten for completeness and fullness.

And the new world begins the way the old one ended: man is shamed in his nakedness. Noah steps off the ark into a washed earth, plants a vineyard, and ends up drunk and uncovered in it. We cannot blame our environment. The problem came through the door with us.

I will never again curse the ground because of humans, even though from birth their hearts are set on nothing but evil… As long as the earth exists, planting and harvesting, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never stop.

Genesis 8:21–22  ·  God’s Word

The flood to Abraham  10:1 – 11:26

The nations spread out from Noah’s three sons — and one man in that list is worth stopping for. Nimrod & the Table of Nations takes that up in full.

Then Babel, where the ambition is stated out loud:

Let’s build a city for ourselves and a tower with its top in the sky. Let’s make a name for ourselves so that we won’t become scattered all over the face of the earth.

Genesis 11:4  ·  God’s Word

They wanted a great name, and they wanted not to be scattered. They were scattered, and they are remembered for the failure.

Part two  ·  11:27 – 50:26  ·  The patriarchs

And immediately after Babel, God gives to one man, unasked, the very thing the tower was built to seize:

I will make you a great nation, I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing… Through you every family on earth will be blessed.

Genesis 12:2–3  ·  God’s Word

A great name, given rather than grasped — and the scattering answered by a blessing that goes out to every family on earth. Everything from here to the end of the Bible is the working out of that promise. It is picked up in The Patriarchs, and its terms are set out on The Covenant: Old and New.

What you will find in this section

• Creation — The beginning of everything I need to know about life and salvation
• The Fall — Not the eating of a fruit — the claim to decide good and evil for ourselves
• Noah and the Flood — A rescue, a new world — and the same old heart walking off the boat
• The Patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph — God building a people out of ordinary men
• The Covenant: Old and New — How the promise made to Abraham grows into the fullness of the New Covenant
• World of the Patriarchs — A geographic overview of the ancient Near East and its modern setting
• Abraham — The Father of a Nation — Tracing the journeys of the man through whom every nation would be blessed
• The Covenant Cut with Abraham — Genesis 15 — the strangest scene in his life, and the one everything rests on
• Covenant Name: Infinite Supply — Yahweh Jireh — the God who sees, and therefore provides
• Isaac — The quiet one between two large men — and the proof that the promise survives a generation
• Jacob and Esau — Twins who could not both carry the promise — and the quarrel that outlived them by a thousand years
• Old Testament Timeline — A visual overview of the entire Old Testament period, from Adam to Malachi
• Lineage from Adam to Jacob — The genealogical thread through which God built the nation of Israel
• Nimrod & the Table of Nations — The post-flood world, the spirit of Babylon, and its shadow across Revelation
• Joseph — How the family of promise ended up in Egypt — and the sentence that explains it

Begin with The Patriarchs.