Chapter one
THE GOD O F CREATION
(Genesis 1)
Like many a modern parent faced with raising children in a confusing world
of drugs, disasters, and mind-bending ideas, Moses must have had his
concerns. Certainly God did. The book of Exodus tells us about the
beginnings of the nation of Israel under the leadership of Moses, the man of
God. It records their last-minute rescue through the sea and their camping
trip in the desert of Sinai. But that is just the beginning. These former slaves
must enter into a land inhabited by people who would make Hell’s Angels
seem like Sunday school teachers. As the patriarch lay down to sleep at
night, he must have worried about this people he was leading. They had
every mark of early adolescence about them, yet they needed a stability few
adults ever achieve. Sure, they had witnessed God’s power to plague and
decimate the Egyptians. They had passed through the sea without muddying
their feet. But had they really become the people of Yahweh in heart and
mind?
How do you prepare a people to avoid the degrading tentacles of a
deteriorated culture? How do you lay a foundation for a worthwhile life?
What alloy do you use to strengthen their discernment and motivate them
toward a better way? The answer is torah. Torah simply means instruction.
The Torah came to be the name for the first five books of the Bible, Genesis
through Deuteronomy. As we open the Bible we encounter that instruction
—teaching given to prepare the Israelite people for their encounter with
gross paganism. But oh, what teaching! No dull classroom recitation here.
These are stories. And understanding the history in them is not the boring
calisthenics of learning names, dates, and places but involvement with
dynamic and crucial events giving us insight into life itself.