Bible Reading Challenge Week 1

Greetings all! You made it through the first full week of September. My family is now full swing in the routine of school and school-year activities. It’s busy, but it’s a good busy – full of opportunities for hard work, physical activities, and joyful fellowship.

This is the first full recap post for the Bible Reading Challenge reading plan, covering the last week’s readings. If you are just reading this, you can still jump in and this plan will always start you at today’s reading. Get into the Word!

One quick note before diving in: these recaps are in no way meant to be an exhaustive recap of the passages listed. Given that each week will cover somewhere around 30-40 chapters, it would be quite the task to do so. Since my goal here is not to write my own commentary, I will instead just be providing some things that struck me while going through the readings for the week.

May God richly bless your time in His Word!

Week 1 Readings

• Genesis 1-20
• John 1-11

Genesis 1-20

In looking at the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2, I noticed that He fairly regularly creates through division or separation. We read in Gen 1:2 that there was already darkness. He then creates light, and separates it from the darkness, dividing the day into two parts (“evening and morning”). He then divides the waters above and the waters below to create the sky. Next he separates water from land to create the dry ground of the Earth. After each step of creation we hear the refrain, “God saw that it was good,” that is until we hear God say “It is not good that man should be alone.” Then the final creation through division comes when God divides Adam to create Eve, resulting in the first bit of love poetry the world ever knew.

I was also struck by how big of a role “the ground” plays in the first nine chapters of Genesis. It is the initial building block – as plants grow from it, and man and beast alike were created from it. It is cursed through the fall of man, where it also becomes the place man returns after death. In the account of Cain and Able, Cain is a worker of the ground until he murders his brother Able (whose blood cries out for justice from the ground), when he is cursed and driven away from the ground. After the flood, in which God destroys almost all flesh by reversing the third day of creation for a time (water covers everything again), God says he will “never again curse the ground because of man.”

I was also discussing with my wife a somewhat more random item from this section. When reading the genealogies, comparing the ones before the flood with those after, the lifespans diminish pretty rapidly. Before the flood, it was normal to live 900+ years. Noah himself lives 950. However Noah’s son Shem only lives 600 years. Shem’s son Arpachshad lives 438 years. After two more generations, it has dropped down to 239 years for Peleg. I can imagine this would have been disconcerting to say the least. This also means that Noah and his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson Abraham were alive at the same time! It seems that God allowed for long lifespans to continue for a while to more rapidly grow the population of the world after the flood.

John 1-11

One of the nice things with how this plan is put together is that you read the creation account in Genesis on the same day you read John 1. We here see that it was more specifically the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, the Word, who created the world. We also have the light-darkness dichotomy of the Genesis account applied to the spiritual state of man. The world is in spiritual darkness until the creator entered His creation. The Word became flesh. The true light entered the darkness. In response many continued to love the darkness (3:19), but those who follow Jesus “will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (8:12).

Christ is light and in Him there is no darkness. The incarnation of Christ, the entrance of the true light into the world, again creates through division. He divides those who love the darkness from those he came to save and imparted the light of life to. The light reveals the deeds of men. We are called, in faith, to follow Christ boldly in the light of the true day.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Steven C