Struggling to write crypto-related content, I came up with an idea to create a directory of messages taken from the Bible. In my main account, before today's #hpud article, the last article I published was fourteen days ago. In this account, which is my second son’s, nineteen days passed and still, I could not find the motivation to write any content.

Writing crypto-related articles requires more time to prepare since this is not the field, I am familiar with. In the case of biblical messages, I have been doing this for close to four decades already. So, this is a subject that I am most familiar with.

Searching for relevant tribes on Hive for this specific content, I think The Kingdom and Christian Fellowship are the most suitable. I am just wondering what specific tags I have to use for my content to appear in these communities.

Nevertheless, as I observed, the two communities above seem inactive so I decided to continue using the Cent tribe for this new writing project, not unless @anadolu would say that my content is inappropriate for the tribe. In that case, I will be looking for an alternative where I can post this type of content.

Starting from the Beginning

And so, what I intend to do is to start from the first book of the Bible. Since the messages I wrote were too long, I decided to divide them into several parts for readability purposes. This time, let me start with Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and the title I gave for this passage is “A Perfect World.”

I intentionally did not use the article “the” and did not attach “God’s,” to describe the kind of world that we find in the Bible simply because we are living in a pluralistic age. Instead, I want to present this perspective as one among many and let the readers decide whether this kind of view is reasonable or not.

We are living in a time when people don’t like the term “religion,” and instead prefer to use the word “worldview.” The perspective that I will be sharing in this study comes from a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Preliminary Considerations

A few remarks before I proceed to our text this morning.

In doing exegesis of any text in the Bible, after doing my initial work of grammatical and homiletical outline and having the feel of the meaning and the structure of the passage under study, I usually consult two other commentaries. One is Calvin’s Commentary and the other is the Word Biblical Commentary.

Despite the claim of some misinformed students that Calvin’s commentary is already outdated, I still find his insights solid and the reasoning is tight.

As for the Word Biblical Commentary, as far as my knowledge is concerned, I consider it to contain the consensus among biblical exegetes as to the plurality of opinion about the biblical text.

Preaching on Genesis, somehow, I feel the necessity to be apologetic not because of what I read but because of what I hear as to the current attitude to the Bible treating it just like any other book. I usually illustrate such an attitude that in old times, instead of allowing the Bible to examine the human heart, scholars now treat the Bible like a specimen that can be placed in the laboratory for dissection and scrutiny. It is as if what God says in the Bible is not clear and we need the consensus of experts to judge which part of the Bible is acceptable and which part is not.

Reading the WBC introduction to the book of Genesis, I was surprised to read the admission of Gordon J. Wenham. He said in 1987 that in approaching the book of Genesis, his mood was swinging between “elation” and “despair”. He feels elated at the privilege of writing a commentary on this very important text. At the same time, he feels despair due to “the impossibility of doing justice to the text, not to mention his capability of reading everything that other scholars have written about it.

Wenham feels inadequate in his task due to many unavoidable human limitations such as time, strength, and insights. If a scholar like Wenham could have such a feeling of inadequacy, how do you think a lesser scholar should feel in approaching a foundational text like the book of Genesis?

The good thing is despite his limitations, he still hopes that his work will provide assistance in helping readers understand Genesis better. Though I feel the same inadequacy, I don’t want to be overwhelmed by them. I think I have to adopt his attitude that despite the shortcomings in my preparation, I wish that the Lord will be pleased to use my study for you to understand the message of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3.

Though I preached this passage several times already, I recognize that sharing this message in a digital space like Hive is different from preaching it in a seminary or a local church. The audience is different. More is required from theological students when it comes to processing what you’re listening to than in the digital space and the members of the local church who are more preoccupied with the common affairs of life.

Another disclaimer is that at the outset, those who are familiar with Third Millennium Ministries will observe that I rely heavily on their exegesis of the text. I simply bypass the diverse hypothesis associated with traditional source criticism that started with the work of Wellhausen. Personally, if I follow the JEDP hypothesis as my starting point in the study of the Pentateuch, I think I will struggle to find the motivation to pursue such an activity.

As for the recent findings in literary criticism, I appreciate them. The task of any student of the Bible is not to confuse himself with the many sophisticated hypotheses on the subject but to understand the present form of the text. I think this is closer to the traditional approach. We could say that at least for two thousand years, the Body of Christ considered the final form of the text as the canonical and inspired text, on which the faithful meditated and used it as the basis to live the kind of life that pleases God.

With these lengthy preliminary statements, I now want to proceed to our text.

Introduction

The world today is now undergoing a serious threat to revert to chaos. Ecologically, global warming is a controversial issue among scientists and is now becoming highly politicized in international politics. Economically, many economists increasingly acknowledge the problem in the existing monetary system that somehow caused a few powerful men and women to introduce this idea of The Great Reset. Geopolitically, the hostility between Russia and the United States does not indicate any sign of slowing down due to the invasion of Ukraine. If trends like these will continue, its logical end is nothing but war. And war results in nothing but death, economic loss, and chaos.

This is the unfortunate state of the world today. This shows how far humans have strayed from the path that God laid down in the beginning.

In the beginning, God gave humanity the perfect world, which is a pattern of how we ought to live our lives. But in the arrogance of man, he dismissed such a world as either fictional or a utopian dream of primitive mankind. We don’t need such a world in the future when the fully evolved man will finally set himself free from such superstition.

The Bible gave us a different picture of the world. In the beginning, God gave us a perfect world but sin corrupted it. In this series, I would like to share with you a vision of this perfect world.

Grace and peace!