The Wonder of Laughter (Gen 18:9-15; 21:1-7)

"Is anything too hard (wonderful) for the Lord?" (Gen 18:14)
"Sarah says, 'God has brought me laughter...'" (Gen 21:6)

Ty Cobb (1886-1961), the 1st man inducted into the baseball hall of fame, was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. At the close of his life, he reportedly said, "Life sucks!" Pictures of him in his old age is that of a very dark, angry, irritable, unapproachable, misanthropic (dislike of the human species) unhappy man with no trace of joy or laughter on his face. All of his fame, popularity, success and wealth did not generate any laughter in his soul. In his old age, perhaps progressively through out his life, he lost the ability to laugh. Can any man live without laughter?

Theme: Laughter. When God fulfilled his purpose for Sarah, God brought laughter to her. God transformed her previous laughter of skepticism/cynicism to "real" laughter from the grace of God.

Goal: When God fulfills his purpose/gives grace, God brings laughter to our soul.

Application: Do you experience the deep wonder of the grace of laughter?

How the Divine Deals with our Doubts (Gen 15:1-21)

"...how can I know...?" (Gen 15:8)

In response to people’s delight in his failure to win the 2011 NBA finals, LeBron James said this after he lost (June 12, 2011): ““All the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they have to get back to the real world at some point.”

He's not going to win any friends or fans by his careless defensive remarks as the loser. But what he says is true. Similarly, Henry Thoreau observed, "The masses of men lead lives of quiet desperation." From Genesis 15, we will see how God helped Abram face life in the real world of personal problems and quiet desperation.


Theme: God gives real confidence to Abram when he had humanly irresolvable doubts about God and about himself.


Goal: To plant confidence in God’s people when they are filled with their own doubts, sorrows and fears.


Application: Only the bloody cross of Jesus taking our sins upon himself enables us to live with real confidence in the real world, despite all of our doubts that are inevitable.

See The God Who Sees You (Gen 16:1-16)

"You are the God who sees me" (Gen 16:13).

What is a major theme of Genesis and of the entire Bible? Is it that good people do good things and God blesses and rewards them? Or is it something else?

Theme: Grace comes to those who do not deserve it, who do not seek it, who continually resist it, and who do not appreciate it even after they receive it.

Goal: Reflect upon our understanding of grace.

Application: Does the depth of sheer grace inform and touch and transform your heart and life?

3 major world religions look at Abraham as the model for courageous living, for authentic living, and for faithful living. Why did Abraham triumph? Gen 16:1-16, which is like a soap opera, shows that it is not because he is made of better stuff than we are. It shows Abraham to be a deeply flawed and very fallible human being, which is putting it mildly. Also, the English translations do not show the rawness and the brutality that is conveyed in the Hebrew. It beautifies, sanitizes and makes it PG or G that which was conveyed in Hebrew as R or even X rated.

3 Paramount Biblical Themes from God's Covenant with Abraham (Gen 12:1-3)

These 3 doctrines--grace, election, faith--may be among the most misunderstood, misconstrued and even maligned teachings in the Bible. This is what Graeme Goldsworthy, a highly respected Australian Anglican theologian specializing in the Old Testament and Biblical Theology, says.

1st, GRACE. As with Noah there is nothing special about Abraham that deserves the goodness of God in calling him into these blessings. He lived among pagans and responds with faith and obedience to the call of God. There is no hint that God was responding to Abraham's goodness. In fact, he lied about his wife twice, in order, so he thought, to preserve his life (Gen 12:11-20; 20:1-18). He showed lack of faith in God's promises and worked to undermine the promise that Sarah would be the mother of the promised descendants. It is clear from the biblical narrative that we cannot see God's goodness to Abraham as deserved. Rather, the biblical picture of God's free and sovereign grace is developed in God's call to Abraham (Gen 12:1-3).

2nd, ELECTION. Whenever God acts for the good of the people he is acting against what they deserve as rebellious sinners, and that action is grace. Election means that God chooses some and not others as objects of his grace. Rom 9:19-24 tells us that election works for God's glory, for it demonstrates divine sovereignty.

Man's Heart and Center (Gen 13:1-17)

Link to previous Genesis passages: The God Who Made Everything (Gen 1-2)  The Fall (Gen 3:1-24)  Sin, Grace and Salvation (Gen 4:1-16) Sin, Faith and Salvation (Gen 6:1-14)  Divine Judgment (Gen 6:5-13)  The Call of God (Gen 12:1-9)

My Story: I thought that graduating from medical school in Malaysia at age 22 in 1978 would validate my young life, and give me the happiness I desperately wanted for the rest of my life. But when I woke up on the 3rd day after graduation, expecting to still feel happy, the euphoria was gone. It really baffled me that my happiness lasted only 2 days! In light of Lot desiring the well-watered plain of the Jordan in this text, I was expecting that becoming a doctor would be my "garden of Eden," my "paradise," like "the garden of the Lord" to Lot (Gen 13:10). But I did not know that. So I thought I needed to be a physician in the U.S., the Mecca of Medicine. After 2 years of bone crushing effort, I made it to Chicago in 1980 with a sense of accomplishment and success. But again my joy was short lived. Painfully, I learned that becoming a doctor and coming to the U.S. could not fulfill my deepest inner longing beyond a few days. Next, I thought, "I need a woman!" All of this were my ever feeble attempts at getting back to "the garden of the Lord" without the Lord.

What does the account of Abram and Lot in Gen 13:1-17 teach about what can and cannot fulfill us human beings?

Questions on Genesis (1-2,3,4,6,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,21,27,28, 29)

General Articles: 

1. What is the point of Genesis?
2. Rethinking the phrase "Man Equals Mission" (Gen 1:26-28)

The God Who Made Everything (Gen 1:1-2:3)

1. What are some difficulties in studying the creation accounts in Genesis 1-2? How might we address them?
2. What is the author's message for Israel (the theme)? Why did he write this message to Israel (the goal)?
3. Who is God (Gen 1:1; Deut 6:4)? Why did God create the world (Ps 19:1-4; 1 Cor 10:31)? What does a talking God suggest? Could our God be a complex being, a complex unity (Gen 1:1-3;26)?
4. God created man in his own image (Gen 1:26-27). What are some similarities and differences between God and man?

Divine Judgment (Gen 6:5-13)

Theme: God's salvation (the ark) is always through judgment (the flood). There is never any salvation without judgment.

Goal: Understand the pain of God's heart in his judgment.

Application: To not despair because of God's judgment, nor apply God's judgment on others without grief or pain.

To countless people, the very idea of God's divine judgment is upsetting, outdated, and irrelevant to them personally and practically. They agree with Richard Dawkins who said, The God of the OT is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic (woman hater), homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal (killing one's child), pestilential (causing disease), megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic (denying pleasure), capriciously (impulsive) malevolent (doing evil) bully.

But 3 things in this account of God's divine judgment in the time of Noah may help us understand the utmost importance of God's judgment.

Sin, Grace and Salvation (Genesis 4:1-16)

"sin is crouching..." (Genesis 4:7)

Theme: When we do not know Grace, we functionally become Cain. When we know Grace, we become a sweet Abel.

Intro: Perhaps, the most striking question from the story of Cain and Abel is "Why did Cain murder his own lovely younger brother?"

A related contemporary question that has broad applicability to all people is, "Why are you upset, inwardly or outwardly, with a particular person?"

I'd like to suggest and propose that the answer to both questions is the same: We don't know Grace. Even though we Christians insist that we "understand" Grace, we do not apply it practically, functionally, emotionally, and experientially in the details of our life, especially when someone upsets us.

The Call of God (Genesis 11:27-12:9)

Theme: God calls his people to claim all nations as his kingdom (as Abraham did).

Goal: Soften and sensitize our hearts to the call of God.

Application: The call of God makes all the difference in the world in any man's life. Have you heard the call of God?

What made Abraham great was the call of God. What makes one's life great is the call of God. What makes one a Christian is the call of God. The call of God is what truly shapes a Christian life.

Some challenges in teaching/preaching this biblical narrative:

1. Avoid superficial "character-imitation" preaching.
2. Turning this text into a moral tale: God's call to Abram becomes God's call to everyone, and they, like Abram, must respond with unquestioning obedience. They apply God's unique call of Abram directly to everyone in the congregation, thus committing the error of generalizing and universalizing.
3. Spiritualizing the text: People must leave their "country," their old way of life, and go to the new life God will show them. This is not unbiblical, but it is not the message of this particular text. It fails to ask first what was the message the narrator intended to convey to Israel.