THIS SUNDAY! Join Element at Ferini Park in Los Alamos at 9:00am for ONE Church Service In The Park! All are welcome. Help us Celebrate together with Old Days.
Aaron Carlberg - January 6, 2013
49. Genesis 32:1-12 - The Prayer of a Righteous Man
For those who love Christ, righteousness is the standard. But there are no human means to achieve righteousness. The Church has long specialized in piety and chastity and temperance in the futile effort to attain righteousness apart from God. God called Abraham a friend and declared him righteous, but why? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Once again, in His loving pursuit of sinners, God has set the standard then graciously provided the means to achieve it. What will happen in God’s church when His people stop mimicking righteousness and start living it?
From Series: "Genesis"
he book of Genesis has a groove to it. It runs from poem to song to narrative to poem to song. The Book of Genesis has a unity to it that fits with the entire Torah (the Pentateuch or the first 5 books of scripture). There is a definitive strategy laid out and sometimes this leads to a narrative that isn’t always smooth and uniform. This has led many people to assume that Genesis was written by different authors and is a disjointed mess. For example, the short narrative about building the city of Babylon (Genesis 11:1-9) is almost entirely self-contained and shows little external relationship with other narratives within its immediate context…But the narrative plays a strategic role in the development of one of the major themes in the book: covenant and restoration. By placing a self-contained story between two genealogies the story actually shows the difference between what man desires “Let us make a name for ourselves” (11:4) and the central point of the patriarchal narratives--”and God said, “I will make your name great’” (12:2a). Thus the genealogies of “Shem” provide a narrative link between the story of the city of Babylon and the account of the call of Abraham. Far from being disjointed, Genesis is a literary masterpiece that weaves all the scriptures themes together in wonderful unity.
