I turned a lot of chapters of my life before I came to believe in the power of story. Now I’m eager for more people to ask narrative into their hearts.

Consider the case of historical fiction which may be responsible for more worldviews of more people than we appreciate. Virgil wrote The Aeneid in order to validate Rome and her Caesars as offspring of the gods. A Tale of Two Cities personifies the abuse and terror of anarchy during the French Revolution. Uncle Tom’s Cabin argues against seeing other human beings and “things.” These are fiction, but they carve thinking grooves that can be hard to jump from.

Sometimes fiction comes to be told as fact. In 1828 Washington Irving wrote a fictitious account of Columbus’s defending a round earth against misinformed priests and university professors titled The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. It was a mixture of fact and fiction with Irving himself admitting he was “apt to indulge in the imagination.” Its theme was the thrilling victory of a lone believer in a spherical earth over a united front of Bible-quoting, superstitious ignoramuses, convinced the earth was flat. Irving invented the picture of a young Columbus, a “simple mariner,” appearing before hooded theologians at the council of Salamanca, all of whom supposedly believed—according to Irving—that the earth was flat like a dinner plate.

There was, in fact, a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving’s account was make-believe. The well-known argument at the Council of Salamanca was a question of the distance between Europe and Japan. It had nothing to do with the shape of the earth. Irving took “dramatic license” to make the story more exciting. Yet within a century his version was printed in science and history textbooks as truth.

Maybe the single most powerful story told in the last two-hundred years is the story of evolution. It even includes pictures: a fish to a fish with legs to a monkey to a knuckle-dragger to an upright and proud man. It’s the ultimate rags to riches, goldfish to gold-digger story. It is a novel saga that fits the natural man’s need to get God out of the plot.

As God’s people, we don’t fight story with grammar and logic alone. We can use those tools, but we also use story, bona fide, honest-to-God stories. Stories aren’t bad. The gospel is a story. Christmas is a story. David and Goliath is a story. Most of the Bible is story, alongside of songs and proverbs and prophecies and epistles. We have the best stories. In fact, we have the ultimate story, the one to rule them all (which, yes, is a riff on “one ring to rule them all” from The Lord of the Rings trilogy).

Men like stories but they may not be great at reading them and learning the right lessons. So let’s take some time to get acquainted with the true creation story and how we should understand it.

Nothing would make sense without the book of Genesis. The other 65 books of the Bible would be incomprehensible, and ignoring or rejecting Genesis undermines everything that follows. The Law depends on Genesis. The seven day week depends on Genesis. The gospel depends on Genesis. And every view of the world apart from Scripture is incoherent. Without Genesis there is no purpose or meaning for life. There are no standards of truth, or beauty, or goodness. There is no hope.

The Genesis narrative answers all of those issues and more. The book of Genesis frames our beliefs through story. This morning we’re going to introduce Genesis by considering two components to the Book.

The Title of the Book: Genesis

As it says in the Good Book: every book has a title, or something like that. The title for the first book in our English Bibles is Genesis which derives from the Greek name for the book, Γένεσις, meaning “origin, generation, or beginning.” The original Hebrew title is the first phrase in Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning” (‏בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית). Genesis is the book of beginnings, of origins. It describes the start of human and family life, the first human sin, and the opening lines of God’s story of redemption as He makes a people for Himself.

Genesis is the first of the five books in the Pentateuch. The Greek word, “Pentateuch,” comes from pente (πέντε) “five,” and teuchos (τευχος) “volume”; so five-volumes. These five books are also called the Torah, the Hebrew word for “law,” because they contain the civil and religious laws of the nation. Genesis lays the foundation of the Torah, of the Old Testament, as well as all the inspired Scriptures.

The Genre of the Book: Narrative

Genesis belongs in the narrative genre. Genre is a French word that means “kind” and is used to describe different categories of music or literature. Narrative can be compared to other genres like poetry, prophecy, and wisdom literature in the Old Testament as well as letters in the New Testament.

Narrative is the most common genre in the Bible, comprising over 40% of the Old Testament. There is more narrative material than any other genre. That also means it is exceptionally important to pull our interpretation pants on right. More incorrect interpretation and application comes from narrative than perhaps any other genre.

But why so much narrative?

To the frequent question of why so much narrative material appears in Scripture, the most obvious answer is that no form of communication is more vivid…Given the vivid depiction of concrete persons and events, the listener is drawn into the actions, struggles, and solutions by a process of identification. (Walter Kaiser Jr., in Cracking Old Testament Codes, eds. Sandy & Giese, 69-70, emphasis added)

The story makes the ultimate teaching or ethical point all the more memorable, thus increasing our accountability. (Kaiser, ibid., 87)

Narratives are stories—purposeful stories retelling the historical events of the past that are intended to give meaning and direction for a given people in the present. (Fee & Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, 90)

So the answer is that humans love stories, we relate to stories, we remember stories, and we learn from stories. Narrative invites the readers to become insiders, leading the audience to come into God’s view of life. Biblical narratives are real, space-time events and experiences. They tell what actually happened, and do so with a divine perspective.

That may be the ultimate reason why there is so much narrative: God is an author. He is the best story-teller, even when He tells it through a human author.

The human instrument God used to write Genesis was Moses. Moses represents himself as a historian. He validates his material as much as possible by locating his story in time and space (2:10-14), tracing genealogies (5:1-32), giving evidence of various sorts that validate his history (11:9), and citing sources (5:1). All of this shows that he intended to write real history, not fictional folk tales or legends.

Nothing in Genesis is imaginary or fictional (see also 2 Peter 1:16). In fact, if it were fiction, Moses could have written a much more believable, cleaner story. Narrative is non-fiction in art form.

Narratives are NOT:

1. Cryptic CODES for us to decode

The “real” meaning of the Bible is not found by taking every fifth word or every ninth letter and stringing those characters together into new sentences. Whole books have been written claiming to find prophecies in the Torah of assassinations and significant world events by using mathematical formula. Those who hunt for coded messages usually search in narrative material because there are less benefits to claiming secret codes in songs and letters.

2. ALLEGORIES for us to find hidden meaning

An allegory is a story or poem that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning. The allegorical technique is less mathematical and more mystical. Take the story of Noah waiting to leave the ark in Genesis 8:6-12. Someone has claimed that Noah—representing God, sends a raven—representing unbelievers—who don’t come back because they are satisfied with sin, and then sends a dove—representing believers—who come back to the ark—representing heaven. Not only is this not even how the story goes, it also adds to the story.

3. MORAL LESSONS for us to follow

No Bible narrative was written specifically about you. …You can never assume that God expects you to do exactly the same thing as the Bible character did or to have the same things happen to you that happened to them. (Fee and Stuart, 105)

We must always figure out the point of the plot. Though narratives might illustrate a moral, they are typically not told to make us moral. The stories record what did happen, not always what should have happened.

There can be implicit teaching—not secret or hidden—in a text, where the author clearly wants us to learn something without using so many words. For example: creation reveals God’s creativity and capability and we must give glory to God for it.

Levels of Narrative Context

There are three levels of context in Old Testament narratives (as found in How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth).

Narratives tell us what it means to be the people of God, to have God’s worldview. Every level is part of His work.

The first and closest level, the ground level, is the story of persons and families that takes place over decades. The second level is the story of nations and groups of people that occurs over centuries. Starting in Genesis 12 the genesis of the nation of Israel becomes a major plot point. The third level of story considers the universal and eternal plot. We could call it the metanarrative.

David Wells defines the metanarrative as “an overarching structure that enables people to see the connections of its parts and where it’s all heading.” In other words, a metanarrative is a master story, a grand narrative, or a worldview. (Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, 74) It is a story about stories, encompassing and explaining all other ‘little stories.’ It is one story to rule them all, and it is the story of redemption.

Consider that Joseph being sold into slavery is not about how to deal with sibling rivalries. Joseph’s commitment to purity before God when Potiphar’s wife pursued him is an illustration about fleeing sexual immorality, but the point of the story is to get Joseph into prison so that Joseph can interpret the dreams of the cupbearer and cake-maker so that he can eventually interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. Joseph’s fall and rise brought the nation of Israel to Egypt for preservation, including Judah through whom Christ would come. It also set up the Exodus, upon which God Himself turns our attention as His faithfulness and power to deliver His people.

Jesus said that the OT “testifies about me” (John 5:39) and “beginning with Moses and the Prophets, He interpreted [to the disciples headed to Emmaus] in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27), speaking of the top level, not because every individual story or verse is talking about Him. That’s why “preaching Christ” from every Old Testament passage can be dangerous. Can we do that? The answer is “yes” and “no.”

Biblical narratives are not about the power of human ability. God is the hero on every level. His presence is pervasive. Joseph told Pharaoh that it was not in him to give interpretation of dreams, but from God (Genesis 41:16), and he knew God was behind all the events, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).

These are our people (think Hebrews 11) and this is is our history.

The Genesis Narrative

Narratives are all about the layout of scenes and development of plot as characters are introduced and analyzed by the narrator. Moses is a “happy, little, creator, weaver-man.”

Here is a chart of division and themes in the Genesis story from Talk Through the Bible by Bruce Wilkinson and Kenneth Boa (5) (with one row added about the spread of sin and redemption).

Since Moses framed the book by toledot, by “generations,” here is a comparison between the division of themes and generations in Genesis.

Conclusion

Biblical narrative draws us into the story, into God’s story, and begins to frame our beliefs as we understand and take on God’s perspective. Narrative vividly demonstrates God’s involvement, and effectively works to bring us inside His drawing room, at least to the extent that He reveals Himself.

Stories shape our thinking and attitudes—to shape our affections and our actions. Stories give us information, insight, instruction, and inspiration.

Doug Wilson’s one sentence summary of the story of the Bible:

Scripture tells us the story of how a Garden is transformed into a Garden City, but only after a dragon had turned that Garden into a howling wilderness, a haunt of owls and jackals, which lasted until an appointed warrior came to slay the dragon, giving up his life in the process, but with his blood effecting the transformation of the wilderness into the Garden City. What’s the Message of the Bible in One Sentence?

Moses told a story, God’s story, on purpose.