The Bible is rightly called the Book of Books - it not only contains the quintessence of wisdom that is so necessary for us in our lives every day, but also contains answers to the main questions that every thinking person asks himself: who he is, where he comes from and why.
Message of love
And the Bible can be called a letter of God's love for humanity. This can definitely be said about the book of Genesis, which opens up the exciting pages of the Bible scriptures. The whole Bible is permeated with the rays of God's love - sometimes inspiring, then burning to pain. And this love is always unchanging and unconditional.
Why are the first fifty chapters of scripture called Genesis? The book tells about the origin of everything that once did not exist, but by the will of God arose. In addition to the physical aspect, there is a spiritual one: the Lord intends to devote a person not only to the secret of his origin, but also to give him a revelation about Himself, about his purpose and purpose.
From the first lines you can see what kind of creations Genesis is talking about. The book without special details, but expressively and capaciously represents the creation of heaven and earth, day and night, plants and animals and, finally, man as the crown of the whole creation. And then the book tells about the fall of man, about the history of human life outside of Eden, where once people could enjoy God's presence, about how the Jewish people arose from among the ancient people.
The chapters of Genesis can be conditionally divided into three ideological parts: Creation, Fall and Vocation. What are the main messages of each of them?
Creation
Scripture very beautifully tells how the Spirit of God trembled in the void and darkness above the abyss of water to give birth to life. The Spirit of God was the first and foremost condition for the emergence of life.
Similarly, the condition for the birth of our faith (and, therefore, life in its true sense) is the touch of God's Spirit.
Behind the trembling of the Spirit came the Word of God, which caused all that exists from nonexistence. In verse 7 of chapter 2, it is said that God made man out of “earthly dust” - this is a physical organ that makes it possible to interact with the material world.
But here it is said that the Creator breathed “the breath of life” into the nostrils of man - a spiritual internal organ that allows him to come in contact with God himself. What for? So that a person could not only perceive God, but communicate with Him in his spirit, because this is the purpose of our Creator. He wants us to be one with Him, to be able to express and represent Him on Earth, and therefore he breathed into us not something else, but his breath.
Two trees
For the pleasure of man, God settled him in Eden (this word is translated from Hebrew as “pleasure”). In the middle of the garden, God placed the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as Genesis 9 says in verse 2. The book also dramatically narrates that the Creator gave man the first commandment, which is connected not with moral laws, but with nutrition, because it depended on what exactly the person will take into himself. The Lord allowed to taste the fruits from any tree, including the tree of life, the prototype of which is divine life. But He forbade man to eat from the tree of knowledge, warning that this would lead to death. It was meant that it was not the body that died, but the spirit of man, which would entail his death in eternity. Created in God's image, a man and a woman were blessed to inhabit the Earth by descendants and to rule over it.
The fall
Everyone knows how the first people took advantage of their freedom . They were seduced by the cunning call of Satan, who turned a serpent, having a proud desire to know everything as gods. In doing so, they repeated the path of Satan himself, created initially by the very best angel in God's environment. So people challenged the Creator, cut themselves off from him. The scene of expulsion from Eden can be interpreted on the basis of this choice. Adam and Eve sinned and did not repent - the loving God appealed to them, but they again rejected Him. The result was the loss of all blessings, a man no longer had the right to the tree of life, so that, having tasted of it, he would not bring sin to eternity. He was already incapable of expressing and representing God in the midst of creation, which, thanks to the responsibility of man, was also subjected to the curse of death and fuss.
God did not leave the exiles; moreover, at that moment he made a precious promise to man about the Redeemer of Christ (chap. 3, verse 15). The interpretation of the book “Genesis” leads to the conclusion that man was again promised in Christ the blessings of the tree of life, but now the path to them was long and difficult, he lay through torment and decay. Suffering and death were now coming to Christ.
Vocation
A person with a defiled spirit was not easily given further history. The first descendants of Adam and Eve were Cain and Abel. The fratricide committed by Cain, led to the fact that the first culture and civilization were Cain, deprived of God, full of proud aspiration to do without Him. God could not count on descendants from the Cain family and gave Eve another son named Seth (that is, “appointed”). It was his descendants who were to follow God's path of salvation.
There were very few of them, these people who knew God and therefore saved themselves from the massive spiritual corruption that reigned on Earth in the antediluvian times. Having decided to free the earth from practicing the depravity and violence of mankind, God left the descendant of Seth - Noah and his family alive. Further, the book of Genesis tells of the sons and great-grandsons of Noah, among whom God elects Abraham, who became the ancestor of the Jewish people. “He walks with God,” and his son Isaac, who begat Jacob, and the last child is Joseph. Full of drama and events, the story of these people completes the chronicle called "Genesis." The book ends with the reign and death of Joseph in Egypt.
And then - the difficult story of the survival of God's people, their faithfulness and apostasy in other books of the Old Testament. Then - the Good News of the Savior and the amazing writings of Christ's disciples in the New Testament. And finally, the Apocalypse, where everything that is promised in "Genesis" is embodied.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” - a book by Milan Kundera
The post-modern novel of a Czech writer is not directly related to the content of the biblical book of Genesis. Unless he confirms once again how contradictory, confused and tragic the blind road that every person goes is, desperately dreaming of a lost paradise. The term "being" is interpreted here in the literal meaning - as what exists. According to the writer, being has “unbearable lightness” because our every act, like life itself, is not subject to the idea of “eternal return”. They are fleeting, which means they can not be subjected to either conviction or moral sentence.