Episode Details

Prayer

Almighty God your word gives life and brings light and life to all mankind. We pray that as we read your word now, please speak to us by your Holy Spirit. Please renew our minds. Conform us to your desires in our life. Lord, help us. Show us our sins. Strengthen us and be merciful to us. We ask for your blessing and help now as we open your word in Jesus' name. Amen.

Reading

Genesis 2:4.

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

Meditation

As we begin our meditation today, let me give you a little lesson in Hebrew! There’s an important Hebrew word that you need to understand to make sense of the Book of Genesis, and that word is: “Toledot”. It’s right there in verse four: “These are the generations of…”. That phrase translates this word “Toledot”. There are ten toledots in the book of Genesis, ten narratives, if you like. We’re accustomed to thinking of Genesis as being made up of fifty chapters, but those chapter divisions weren’t inserted until 12th century. No, think of Genesis as ten toledots, and the first of those toledots starts right here in 2:4 with the Edenic Narrative (the next one starts in chapter five).

Now these toledots are designed to do something, to trace the story of different people across the Book of Genesis. Chapter five gives us the Toledot of Adam, chapter 6:9 gives us the Toledot of Noah, chapter ten gives us the Toledot of the sons of Noah, and so on. If you can understand this, you are beginning to think a little bit more like a Hebrew! Basically what a Toledot does is it tells us what became of something. What become of Adam, what became of Noah. But here in 2:4, our Toledot, it’s a little different. We don’t learn about what became of anyone in particular here, which is what the other Toledots do. This first Toledot gives us the story of what became of the heavens and the earth: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

As Moses penned these words, and the people of Israel, who were about to enter the promised land, read and heard them, they would understand where they came from. They would understand what the world was, what humanity was, who God was, and what God was doing in the world – why he made the world.

Be ye doers of the word…

Now let me pause here for a moment, and let’s ask ourselves a question: Why in the world do we need to know about Toledots? Well, let me tell you why, it’s because Toledots direct us to Christ. Why do we need the Book of Genesis? What difference does it make to our lives? In the first place, it makes sense of our lives. If your memory was completely wiped right now, you would have no direction in life. You would have no idea about what to do. You couldn’t find your way home, you wouldn’t know what a home is, you would be sitting in a room full of strangers, and you would be utterly confused and probably scared. Tou wouldn’t know what to do because there would be no reference point in your understanding.

The stories of our lives, as we recall that story, gives us reference points to direct us how to live. It’s an essential part of our view of the world – or worldview. Now that’s true on an individual level, without your personal memory you would be in all sorts of trouble. But it’s also true on a cosmic level. The difference in lifestyle between an atheist and a Christian is significant, and those differences are fundamentally formed by the basic worldview that each person has. An atheist has a completely different conception of the world and history than what we do as Christians, and that conception significantly changes the kinds of decisions they make and the way that they live. The same could be sa