DECEMBER 1
GENESIS 3:14–21

Jesus is the grace of God come to earth.

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Genesis begins with the most brilliant, mind-bending, and
heart-engaging introduction to a book ever written. God
knows how much we need the creation-to-destiny themes of the
biblical narrative in order to make sense of our lives, so he lovingly
gives us those dominant themes right up front. The beginning of
the Bible is wonderful, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, cautionary,

and hope-instilling all at once. Since God created us to be mean-
ing-makers, he immediately presents us with the wonderful and

awful realties that we need to understand in order to make proper
sense of who we are and what life is really all about.
The opening chapters of Genesis have three foundational themes.
1. In the center of all that is, there is a God of incalculable glory. The
first four words of Genesis say it all: “In the beginning, God.” Here
is the ultimate fact through which every other fact of life is properly
understood. There is a God. He is the Creator of everything that
exists. He is glorious in power, authority, wisdom, sovereignty, and

love. Since we are his creatures, knowing him, loving him, wor-
shiping him, and obeying him define our identity, meaning, and

purpose as human beings.
2. Sin is the ultimate human tragedy. Its legacy is destruction and

death. Genesis 3 is the most horrible, saddest chapter ever writ-
ten. In an act of outrageous rebellion, Adam and Eve stepped over

God’s wise and holy boundaries, ushering in a horrible plague of

iniquity that would infect every human heart. Because sin is a mat-
ter of the heart, we are confronted in this narrative with the fact

that our greatest problem in life is us, and because it is, we have no
power to escape it on our own.

3. A Savior will come, crush the power of evil, and provide redemp-
tion for his people. The first three chapters of the Bible end with

glorious hope. We are encouraged to understand that sin is not
ultimate—God is. And he had already set a plan in motion to do

for us, through the Son to come, what we could not do for our-
selves. A second Adam would come, defeat temptation, crush the

evil one, and restore us to God. As soon as sin rears its ugly face,
redemption is promised. What grace!
It really is true that three themes course through God’s amazing
word: creation, fall, and redemption. They form the lens through
which we can look at and understand everything in our lives. What
a sweet grace it is that immediately in his word God makes himself
known, alerts us to the tragedy of sin, and welcomes us into the
hope of the saving grace to be found in the seed of the woman, his
Son, the Lord Jesus. We are left with the riches of a single truth
that is the core of everything the Bible has to say: because God is a
God of grace, mercy really will triumph over judgment.

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Prayer

Creator God, I praise you for the glory and beauty of this world that
you have made. And I praise you for the glory and beauty of your
Son, who has come to rescue us from our sin, which has so marred
this world. Thank you that he has accomplished all that the first
Adam could not. In Jesus’s name, amen.