Biblical Narratives — Genesis in English

The Beginning

The Old Testament begins with the sentence, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then it goes on to tell the magnificent story of how God created the entire universe, just by speaking it into place.

The Divine Decree

In the Bible, God tells us the story of how He has been pursuing and seeking a loving relationship with humanity…the people He created for Himself. He has been at it through all of human history. He created the universe to be the home of the human race.

Story 1: Bounding Light: The First Three Days

Try to picture this in your mind. Everything is darkness and chaos and confusion, an abyss of nothingness. But the Spirit of the Living God began to move, hovering and gliding over the mass of chaos like the flow of wind. He moved quietly through the spaces, bringing order, forming the structure of the earth and preparing the way.

Story 7: The Love of Adam

According to Scripture, every aspect of our universe came bounding out of the perfect will of God in an outpouring of energy, beauty, and the substantial, concrete things that make up our Reality.

Story 8: The Fall

When God created the first man and woman, they were the high point of all Creation (see Story 7 and Story 8 for the details). They were made in the image of God and given the high honor of acting as His appointed viceroys over His created order.

Story 10: Life Outside the Garden

The first man and woman brought a terrible curse upon themselves and upon the world. They would live in bondage to sin and their lives would end in death (see Story 7, Story 8, and Story 9 for the details). But when we continue to read their story, we see that the first man still had faith.

Story 37: Hagar’s Tears

Years of joy went by for Abraham and Sarah. Isaac learned to crawl and toddle around on his little feet. When he was two or three, they weaned him from his mother.

Story 39: The Faith of Abraham

For three days, Abraham did not waver in his faith. God had commanded him to do the unthinkable...to offer his own son as a sacrifice...the very son that God had promised him as a gift so many years before.

Story 42: Rebekah Comes Home

The Lord guided him to a beautiful young virgin named Rebekah as she took water from the village well. He knew she was the one for Isaac, and so he gave her bracelets of precious gold and asked to be taken back to her home. She ran ahead and told her mother everything that had happened during her time at the well.

Story 43: The Battling Sons of Rebekah

The LORD had a very unique and specific plan to bring salvation to humanity, and Abraham and Isaac were on board and willing to do what He willed.

Story 44 Isaac and Abraham, Cut from the Same Cloth

In the early days of Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage, long before they had their twin boys, they went through many trials and struggles. At one point, a great famine came upon the land. It grew more and more difficult to find enough to eat.

Story 46 The Blessing

Isaac was getting older. His eyes were becoming so weak that he was almost blind. He was a hundred, and his aging heart and limbs could not move about as they used to. He feared that the time of his death was coming. Before he was gone, he was determined to speak a blessing to Esau, his firstborn son.

Story 47 The Cost of Deception

What a sad and distorted picture of a family. Isaac, Esau, Rebekah, and Jacob each worked out of their own selfish ambition, competing over the powerful and potent blessing of the firstborn son. What great blessings and harmony they could have shared together if they had all submitted to the will of their faithful God.

Story 48 Jacob’s Flight

Esau was a bitter man. He had been foolish enough to let his brother trick him out of his birthright, and now Jacob had taken his father’s blessing, too. In his seething anger, he began to plot and scheme. As soon as Isaac died, he would get his revenge.

Story 49 Jacob Arrives at Uncle Laban’s Estate

Jacob continued on his journey. His trek led him away from the Land of Promise where his family faithfully waited on the LORD. He was heading back to the region that Abraham, his great and honorable grandfather, had left over a hundred years before when he was called by God into the wilderness.

Story 51 Life with Laban: Serving the Corrupt and Greedy

In those early days of his marriages, Jacob’s family had grown to eleven boys and a girl! For fourteen years, he worked as the chief shepherd for Laban so that he could marry Rachel and Leah. He had worked very hard, often in harsh weather and for long hours.

Story 52 Jacob Vents

Jacob had escaped from his uncle with all of his wives and children, their servants, flocks, and tents. Ten days into their journey back to the Promised Land, Laban and the men of his household caught up with them.

Story 56 Using the Things of God for Ungodly Things

Shechem had grown up in the brutal town that shared his name. It was a world where manipulation and corruption were the name of the game. And when it came to how a man should treat a woman, it was even more brutal still.

Story 57 The Altars of God: Jacob Returns to Bethel

The children of Abraham had earned a new kind of reputation. Abraham was a man of peace, venturing into war only to protect and defend. His military might had restored his neighbors from slavery and abject poverty.

Story 58 Jacob’s Favored Son

In all those years of Jacob’s travels, Esau had grown to a man of vast fortunes. The customs of his family had also changed. Esau did not marry women from Abraham’s heritage. His marriages to Canaanite women deeply connected his life and children to the Canaanite nations around him.