The Beginning

Do you ever wonder why you believe what you do? Or where your most basic beliefs came from?

Sometimes it takes going back to the beginning to remember why: why we are the way we are, why we think the way we think, why we do the things we do, and why we believe what we believe about God, humanity, and the world. For Christians, going back to the beginning means turning the pages of our Bibles back to the book of Genesis. Here, we discover stories that provide the foundation for our most basic beliefs.

In our Groundwork series “The Beginning,” we’ll examine and discuss the opening chapters of Genesis to remind ourselves of the important details that inform our beliefs about God, about humanity, and about the world. For those of us who grew up reading paraphrases of these familiar stories in children’s Bibles might, we might be surprised by the details we encounter in our adult translations.

The Stories and the Beliefs

As we grow in faith and knowledge, it remains important to reread these stories in order to deepen our roots and sturdy our foundation.

How did the world begin? What is our role in it? The Creation story reminds us of our shared identity and purpose, and provides the basis for our Christian worldview.

The stories of the Fall, Cain and Abel, and the Tower of Babel explain our beliefs about sin—how sin entered the world, its pervasive nature, and the potentially treacherous relationship between sin and our humanity. These stories also depict what can happen in our individual and our communal lives when we try to live without God.

Finally, in both the stories of the Fall and the Flood we encounter God’s initial promises to his people, promises that are the bedrock for our beliefs about salvation. Together, the stories from the beginning of Genesis demonstrate why God’s salvation is necessary and why it’s impossible for us to come to salvation through our own human effort.

God’s Character

Most importantly, the opening stories of Genesis depict a consistency in God’s character, a faithful reliability that is there from the very beginning of time. I invite you to discover more about God’s love, grace, and faithfulness through all five episodes of our Groundwork series, “The Beginning”:

• Creation - Genesis 1-2
• The Fall - Genesis 3
• Cain and Abel - Genesis 4
• The Flood - Genesis 6-8
• The Tower of Babel - Genesis 11:1-9

...and together we’ll remember how God created all things, why humanity’s rebellion caused a break in our relationships with God, each other, and creation, and we’ll rejoice in the knowledge that God has a plan to save the world.