Overview of Genesis 1-11

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God and the Garden

The storyline of Genesis has two main parts. Chapters 1-11 are about God and the world he created. Chapters 12-50 have to do with God and Abraham’s family. The story starts in Genesis 1, as God turns darkness to order. He created everything and then created human beings. This was deliberate, though, as he created them in his image, which means as a reflection of his character, and representative of his rule. They were to take care of the world and harness creation’s potential to yield beauty and order.

Once humanity is created, God blesses them and gives them the garden. At the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they are given free will, and thereby given a choice. They can either trust God’s definition of good and evil, or they can take autonomy, and define it themselves. We are given the message here that, “To turn against God is to embrace death because you’re rebelling against the giver of life.” And that is exactly what they did.

The serpent convinces them to sin, and the poems God provides describe how a human will step on the snake’s head, but the snake will bite the heel of the human (Genesis 3:15). This is where God tells us that even though we rebelled, he promises to rescue us. However, Ada and Eve are still met with consequences that their lives would be made difficult- at home, work, with their spouses, etc.

After the Garden

Chapters 3-11 describe the spiral of human relationships. First, we meet Cain and Abel. Cain is so jealous of his brother that he murders him, against God’s command. Cain goes on to build a city full of violence and hate. Then, there is a story of the “Sons of God,” who are either evil angels or kings claiming they are from divine descent. They had many wives and created large, hateful armies. All of these terrible places that humans kept creating in God’s kingdom broke his heart.

This leads us to the flood. God was so brokenhearted and distraught over humanity and the good world they’d ruined that he flooded the earth, but saved Noah, as he was still living for God, along with his family. God repeated the divine prayer and told Noah to go out into the world and spread his message. However, Noah messed up as well – when he got drunk in his vineyard and his son, Ham, did something “shameful” to him in his tent by looking upon his father’s naked body.

Finally, in chapter eleven, Babylon is built by Mesopotamians. They create the “brick,” which is awesome technology for the time. They use it, though, to build a new tower as tall as the heavens, and they are full of pride, greed, and needed to be humbled. God did that when he scattered them from each other.

The point is that God continually gives humanity a chance, but humanity keeps messing up. We live in a “good” world that we have turned bad. But we are shown in Genesis 1-11 that a human, at some point, would come along and rescue us and that God would not let us fall into death forever. That human is Jesus Christ.