It's a Genesis World. We just live in it.
Learn to read the Bible in the context of Genesis
Last week, I wrote some initial thoughts on biblical-theological threads in the book of Ruth. After that post and preaching on Ruth 3 this Sunday, some people asked me, “How do you learn to read the Bible like that and see connections like that?”
There are a lot of helpful resources in the world today, and I don’t want to take away from any of them. But the best place to start for the average believer is simply to read and study Genesis over and over and over again.
Old Testament 1 with Dr. Draper
I took Old Testament 1 in my first semester at Boyce College in the fall of 2004. (Whoa. I just realized that was twenty years ago as I typed that!) The singular Charlie Draper, who has since gone to be with the Lord, was our professor in the chapel of Carver Hall. Dr. Draper spent the first six weeks of that semester on Genesis 1–3. He spent most of the remainder of the semester going through the rest of Genesis. His TA then had the difficult task of getting us all the way to Esther in the last two weeks of the course.
Whenever a student would ask why we were going so slowly, Dr. Draper would reply that the entire Bible is built on the book of Genesis, especially Genesis 1–3. Now that I teach undergraduate Old Testament survey, I don’t follow Dr. Draper’s pedagogical model, but I will never forget the lesson he was teaching us.
Allusions as Real Connections
We live in the world of Genesis, and the entire Bible is written within the world of Genesis. The theological categories that are formed in Genesis 1–3 and then expounded upon in Genesis 4–50 are the same theological categories that the entire Bible engages again and again and again, but even more importantly than that, they are the theological categories that interpret reality.
The Genesis world is the real world.
At first glance, the book of Ruth has almost nothing to do with Genesis other than perhaps the background to the Moabites. Enlightenment-influenced biblical scholarship has taught us to read the book in laboratory-level isolation out of fear that we might import our own ideas into the book.
But if we assume the author was intimately acquainted with Genesis (and possibly even had the book of Genesis memorized), then we can begin to see the allusions and echoes he makes to Genesis everywhere. And we do not see them as an imposition on the text, rather that the same God who was “in the beginning” has providentially controlled all the events in the book of Ruth and sovereignly inspired every word written by the human author to record those events.
These allusions and echoes, therefore, are not artificial. For example, in my sermon on Ruth 3, I wanted to make an allusion to my favorite musical, “Fiddler on the Roof”— “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Find me a find. Catch me a catch.” Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I forgot to make the allusion in both services, but let’s take this potential allusion as an example.
The allusion could exist because of the connection between Naomi’s matchmaking and the role of the matchmaker in Fiddler. However, that connection is not what we might call a “real connection.” It is simply a coincidental intersection of themes.
Genesis echoes and allusions are of a completely different order. They are “real connections” because we believe that the world created and ruled by God in Genesis is the real world that we live in. Ruth is written in the context of Genesis not simply because the author wanted to make a literary connection, rather the connection is the real connection that the story of Ruth took place in God’s world that has been broken by human sin. The connection is real because Genesis is the reality that we live in.
So if you want to understand any part of the Bible, you have to read and study Genesis well. If you want to understand your own life, you have to read and study Genesis well. Get to know Genesis backwards and forwards, and then read the Bible and all of life in the context of Genesis.
You can watch my sermon on Ruth 3 below or find it on the Overland Church podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you are interested in diving deeper into biblical theology, I’d like to invite you to join one of the Winter Cohorts of the Center for Evangelical Biblical Theology. These are online reading groups that will meet during December and January.
I’d love to have you join my cohort as we discuss Remarriage in Early Christianity by Andrew Das, but you really can’t go wrong with any of the options.
Genesis, yes! For sure. 100%. (but not just Genesis.)