Genesis: an introduction

OK truth is I am being really slack, but here's the intro I wrote about Genesis:

Genesis is one of those books of the Bible that I have to admit having some negative feelings about, at least early on in my faith. Of all the 66 books that make up the old and new testament, it is this one that I had become majorly numb to. Are you, like me, numb to the wonders of the book of Genesis? It begins with the Sunday School that goes over the stories of creation and Noah and the flood a hundred times, sending you home with a hundred worksheets to colour in. Next are the children’s Bibles, with their multicoloured pictorial representations, again so often giving Noah and creation the big focus. And of course, who can forget the musical Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat, whose audio cassette my mother played to death, to the point where I knew many of the songs word for word. Yet for all its childish vivacity, as a young-in-faith adult Christian I remember finding very little of interest in Genesis, or indeed much of the Old Testament. It seemed to be somehow removed from the loving God, father of Jesus, who I was learning to know in my own faith. The Old Testament in general was something I all but ignored for a good ten years in my Christian walk; I just didn’t get how the God shown there matched up with the one I knew. However, over the last year or two, I have begun to see the beauty of the Old Testament, and through intent study have discovered that it is just as important, just as relevant, and just as fantastic as the New Testament, and so began my journey into Genesis.

Genesis (greek for ‘birth’ or ‘origin’) is where it all began, a historical account of the first days. The oldest copies we currently have are those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from between 150BC and AD 70. It tells the true stories of creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, and was itself written by Moses around 1450-1410 BC.

There is a lot to learn in Genesis, and there was barely a chapter that didn’t have some powerful message for me to learn. What I began to see as I studied, was that God was consistently presenting the same values and messages through the different people that the book focuses on; these points are just as relevant to today’s world as they were back then, so let me get on with showing them to you!