Christ in Genesis

Christ is the Word who speaks creation into being. John opens his Gospel with the same three words Genesis opens with - "in the beginning" - and names the speaker: Jesus. Every "and God said" in this chapter is the voice of the Son. He is the light before the sun, the image humans are made after, and the rest the seventh day points to.

The garden is the first sanctuary, and Adam - placed in it to "dress and keep" - is the first priest. Christ is the second Adam who succeeds where the first falls, the bridegroom whose side is opened so the bride may come forth. The river that flowed out of Eden anticipates the river of life that flows out of the Lamb.

Christ is the seed of the woman promised in 3:15 - the first hint of the gospel in Scripture. The serpent strikes His heel at the cross; He crushes its head. The skins God makes to cover Adam and Eve are the first death after the fall, a substitute slain so the guilty might be clothed - a foreshadow of the Lamb who clothes us in righteousness.

Christ Connection - The Blood That Speaks

Hebrews 11:4 tells us: "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain." The difference was faith - Abel believed that worship required blood, something costly given up. Later the Hebrews passage links this directly to Christ: "to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel" (Heb. 12:24). Abel’s blood cries from the ground in Genesis 4:10. Jesus’ blood speaks a better word - not…

Genesis 5 is a genealogy, but it is built around one relentless word. Eight times, over men who lived eight and nine hundred years, the chapter tolls the same refrain - and he died (vv. 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 27, 31). It is the inventory of a dominion: by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men… death reigned from Adam (Rom. 5:12-14), the wages every name in the list is paying (Rom. 6:23). And into that drumbeat falls on…

Genesis 6 brings the world to the edge of judgment, and there, for the first time in all of Scripture, the word grace is spoken: But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD (v. 8). It stands against a verdict that could hardly be darker - every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (v. 5), an earth filled with violence (v. 11), all flesh having corrupted his way (v. 12) - and against a LORD who, seeing it, was grieved… at his heart (v.…

Genesis 7 is, before it is anything else, a chapter about a refuge and a door. The LORD does not order Noah to flee or to fend for himself; He says Come thou and all thy house into the ark (v. 1) - an invitation to enter where safety has already been built. The ark is the tevah , the sealed vessel that carries the faithful through the waters of judgment rather than around them; and the New Testament reads it as a picture of salvation, where few, that is, eight souls were s…

Genesis 8 turns on a single sentence: And God remembered Noah, and every living thing… that was with him in the ark (v. 1). In the language of Scripture, for God to remember is never to recall a thing forgotten; it is to turn toward His own in covenant faithfulness and act - the same word that runs through the song of the New Testament, where God hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy… to remember his holy covenant (Luke 1:54, 72), and th…

Christ Connection - Blood That Redeems

God establishes in this verse what blood means: it is the price of life. Centuries later, every animal sacrificed in the tabernacle and temple will witness to this -- blood poured out for sin, blood that covers. Paul names it directly: “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. 9:22). And in the Supper, Jesus hands His disciples the cup: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matt. 26:28). The value God places on human…

Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations - seventy peoples charted as they branch out of the one household of Noah after the Flood - and the apostle Paul reaches straight back to it when he stands on Mars’ hill: God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation (Acts 17:26). One humanity from one father, every nation named and held in God’s knowledge before a…

Genesis 11 sets two ways of seeking a name side by side, and the gospel turns on the difference. The whole earth, of one language, gathers on the plain of Shinar and resolves, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad (v. 4) - humanity united in proud self-exaltation, climbing toward heaven by its own effort. The LORD comes down, confounds their speech, and scatters them; the place is called…

Genesis 12 is the hinge of the whole Bible, the chapter where God answers the scattering of the nations at Babel by calling one man and making him the channel of blessing to them all. The sevenfold promise climbs to a single line that the New Testament treats as the gospel itself: in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed (v. 3). Paul says so outright - the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abra…

Genesis 13 sets two ways of looking at the world side by side, and the New Testament reaches for both. Abram holds the promise, and by every right the elder man should claim the best of the land; instead he refuses to quarrel and hands the first choice to his nephew - Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right (v. 9). That is the temper the Lord blesses: Blessed are the meek: for t…

Christ Connection - A Priest Forever

Hebrews 5, 6, and 7 spend three chapters on Melchizedek. The writer sees in him a type of Christ: a priest not from the line of Aaron, but of a higher order entirely. “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually” (Heb. 7:3). Jesus is “made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec” (Heb. 6:20). Psalm 110, the most-quoted psalm in the New Test…

Genesis 15 holds one of the most quoted sentences in all of Scripture: And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness (v. 6). The word of the LORD had come to Abram in a vision - Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward (v. 1) - and when Abram answered out of his childlessness, the LORD brought him outside and held up the night sky: Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them… So shall t…

Genesis 16 is the story of a slave woman in the wilderness who becomes the first person in all of Scripture to give God a name. Ten years after God promised Abram offspring as countless as the stars (Gen. 15), Sarai is still childless, and in her impatience she gives her Egyptian handmaid Hagar to Abram - a lawful custom of the age, but a shortcut around the promise that breeds only grief. Hagar conceives, despises her mistress, is dealt with harshly, and flees pregnant in…

Genesis 17 is the chapter where the promise to Abraham is sealed as an everlasting covenant , and the New Testament reaches back to it again and again to explain the Gospel itself. God appears and names Himself the Almighty God (v. 1), then binds Himself to Abraham and to thy seed after thee… for an everlasting covenant (v. 7). The apostle fixes on that one word seed and reads it all the way through to its end: Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He…

Genesis 18 opens with a line that gives the whole chapter its astonishing weight: the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre (v. 1). The God of heaven comes down to a tent door at noon, is received as a guest, has His feet washed, and eats beneath a tree with the man Scripture calls the Friend of God (Jas. 2:23; cf. 2 Chr. 20:7; Isa. 41:8). It is an early, startling light of the nearness of God - the same nearness that would one day come in the flesh, let His feet b…

Christ Connection - Grace that Grasps

Two strangers arrive at Lot's door, and he sees them and acts - not because he knows who they are, but because his conscience knows what he should do. Years later, Paul will write: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Heb. 13:2). The two who arrive in Sodom that night are not there to reward goodness or punish badness. They are sent on a mission of mercy. And Lot, despite being surrounded by evil, has not lost the re…

Genesis 20 is a chapter about a great believer’s failure and a greater faithfulness that covers it. Abraham - the man whom God had called, to whom the promise of a son and a multitude of nations was sworn - repeats in Gerar the very half-truth he had told in Egypt years before (Gen. 12:10-20): And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister (v. 2). Fear drives the bearer of the promise to endanger the very wife through whom the promised seed must come. The text does n…

Christ Connection - The Joy of the Impossible

Sarah laughs at the promise; Isaac is born. Paul later tells the story of two sons - one born of flesh, one born of promise - and applies it to the old covenant and the new (Gal. 4:21-31). Isaac is the son of laughter, the son of what God alone could do. He is the type of everyone the gospel is for: those who have waited past the age of trying, who have given up on themselves, and who discover that God was never waiting for them to deserve it. The laughter of Sarah is the…

Abraham binds his only son, the son he loves, on a hill in the land of Moriah and lifts the knife. The ram caught in the thicket dies in Isaac’s place. Two thousand years later, on the same range of hills, the Father did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all. Genesis 22 is the Old Testament’s clearest picture of the cross.

Genesis 23 is a funeral, and the most quietly faithful chapter in the Abraham story. Sarah dies at 127 in Hebron, and the man to whom God has promised the whole land of Canaan as an everlasting possession discovers that he owns none of it - not enough even to bury his wife. So Abraham stands before the children of Heth and names himself with painful honesty: I am a stranger and a sojourner with you (v. 4) - ger v’toshav , a resident-alien with standing but no inheritance.…

Christ Connection - The Bride Who Has Not Seen the Bridegroom

Rebekah goes to marry a man she has never seen. She has not heard his voice or looked into his eyes. And yet the chapter frames this not as blindness but as faith. Peter will later say of believers in Christ: "Whom having not seen, ye love" (1 Peter 1:8). The Church is a bride who has not yet seen her Bridegroom face to face, and yet she says "I will go." The servant in the chapter is often read as a picture of the Holy Spirit - bringing gifts, bearing witness, moving towa…

Christ Connection - Gathered to His People

Abraham is “gathered to his people” - a phrase the Bible uses repeatedly for death, but one that suggests more than the grave. The fathers were not raised into a kingdom they could not see. Hebrews 11:13 reads: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Christ is the promise they all died seeing. In Him, the gathe…

Christ Connection - I Will Be With You

The words are simple, but they carry the weight of every covenant God has ever made. "I will be with thee." Emmanuel. God-with-us. When Jesus sends His disciples into hostile territory, He says the same thing: "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20). The promise is not that the way will be easy - famine will still come, wells will still be stopped - but that you will not face it alone. Isaac's steadfastness rests on a presence, not a provis…

Christ Connection - The Pattern of God’s Choosing

Jacob is deceiving his way into a blessing that God has already promised he would have (25:23-“the elder shall serve the younger”). The promise is given. The deception is unnecessary. Yet God, watching Jacob put on goatskins and a dead man’s garments, does not stop him. And later, when Jacob meets God face-to-face at Peniel (32:28), God does not take the blessing back. He renames Jacob “Israel.” The New Testament says Jesus came not for the righteous but for sinners (Matt.…

Genesis 28 holds one of the great Christ-images of the Old Testament, and the Lord Jesus claimed it for Himself in so many words. Jacob, fleeing for his life with a thief’s guilt on him, lies down at sunset with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it , with the LORD standing above it (vv. 12-13). Long after, the Lord said to Nathanael, Hereafter ye sha…

Christ Connection - Love That Labors

Jacob labors seven years for the bride he loves, and the years seem like days. Christ, Bridegroom of the Church, labors through all of history for His bride-and the apostle Paul quotes this very verse to describe it: Christ "loved the church, and gave himself for it" (Eph. 5:25). The years from creation to the cross to the age to come are, from the perspective of eternity, a labor of love. His seven years-or seven thousand-are rendered nothing by the measure of His love. W…

Christ Connection - The Barren Woman Who Bears

Rachel cries, “Give me children, or else I die.” Across the Bible, God has a pattern of choosing barren women-Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth-and opening their wombs not in the timing they demanded but in His. Hannah will sing, “The barren hath borne seven; and she that hath many children is waxed feeble” (1 Sam. 2:5). Rachel will finally bear Joseph and then Benjamin, and it is Rachel’s own line-through Joseph’s two tribes-that becomes the mightiest in Israel. The delay was not…

Christ Connection - The Mediator Between Brothers

God intervenes in the confrontation before it happens. He speaks to Laban and puts a boundary around what Laban is allowed to say. This is the first function of a mediator--not to resolve everything, but to prevent the stronger party from destroying the weaker. Christ, in His role as Judge, stands between sinful humanity and the holiness of God in precisely this way: He does not eliminate justice, but He prevents our condemnation from being final. “If any man sin, we have…

Christ Connection - The Unworthy Servant

Jacob prays, I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies. That prayer echoes through all of Scripture. The centurion says it to Jesus: “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof” (Matt. 8:8). The publican prays it: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). And Paul writes, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Tim. 1:15). The recognition that we deserve nothing is not the end of the prayer. It is the beginni…

Genesis 33 sets two faces against each other - the face of the dreaded brother and the face of God - and finds them, for a moment, to be the same. Jacob has spent twenty years fearing this meeting; he arranges his family for the worst and bows seven times in the dust. And then the long-rehearsed terror dissolves: Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept (v. 4). It is the very picture the Lord would one day choose for the F…

Genesis 34 is a chapter to be read with grief rather than vindication, and the Christ it points to is the One who answers a world like this without becoming what it is. A young woman, Dinah, is violated by Shechem (v. 2); her brothers answer the wrong with a deeper wrong, bending the covenant sign of circumcision into a trap and slaughtering an entire city while its men lie defenseless (vv. 13-29). The narrative does not approve any of it. The same Jacob who is silent here…

Christ Connection - The Seed of Israel

God promises Israel: “a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins.” (35:11). Centuries later, Matthew traces Jesus’ lineage back to Abraham and Jacob: “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). The promised Messiah comes as the King from the loins of Israel - a King not of an earthly empire, but of a kingdom that will never end (Luke 1:33). Jacob strove with God and held fast; the Seed of Israel will sit…

Genesis 36 is a chapter of names - the wives, sons, chiefs, and kings of Esau, who is Edom - and at first glance it seems to hold no Christ at all. But it carries one of Scripture’s steadiest testimonies: God keeps every word He speaks. Long before, the LORD had told Rebekah of the twins in her womb, Two nations are in thy womb… and the elder shall serve the younger (Gen. 25:23), and to the patriarch the promise ran that kings would come of his body. Here that word…

Joseph is the beloved son sent by his father to his brothers, who reject him, strip him of his coat, and sell him for silver - and through his suffering ends up saving his family from death. The pattern is the gospel before the gospel: the rejected son becomes the deliverer.

Christ Connection - The Seal That Cannot Be Denied

Tamar holds up Judah’s signet and asks him to discern. Matthew 16:18 uses the same Greek root- ekklesia built on the rock, and Peter holding the keys. In the Old Testament, the signet ring was the sign of authority entrusted: Pharaoh gave Joseph his signet (Gen. 41:42). Judah gave his signet to Tamar-a widow fighting for her life, claiming her covenant due. When the king of glory stands at the judgment-not to condemn, but to reveal truth-He will not need to accuse. We will…

Genesis 39 is governed by one refrain - the LORD was with Joseph (vv. 2, 3, 21, 23) - sounded over the slave in a great man’s house and over the prisoner in a dungeon alike, and it reads forward to the name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us (Matt. 1:23), and to the promise I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Heb. 13:5). At the heart of the chapter stands Joseph’s refusal of Potiphar’s wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God…

Genesis 40 sets a righteous man, unjustly imprisoned, between two condemned men - and the shape of the scene quietly anticipates a greater Sufferer. Joseph claims nothing for himself; he points away from his own gift to its source: Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you (v. 8). To one prisoner he speaks a word of life and restoration - within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore thee unto thy place (v. 13) - and to the other a wo…

Christ Connection - The Spirit Recognized

Pharaoh says what no human authority had said to Joseph before: "Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?" The Spirit of God in Joseph is visible enough for a foreign king to name it. This is what happens when you have been broken and rebuilt by God - you carry something that does not require a title or a credential to be recognized. Paul names it centuries later: "Now we have received... the spirit which is of God; that we might know the thin…

Christ Connection - He Came to His Own

“He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). The brothers stand in front of the one who saves them and do not see him. A pattern Israel will repeat with Messiah. The Saviour comes veiled - in a servant’s form, in judgment, in mystery - and the people He has come to rescue do not recognize Him. The distance between who Christ is and who we see will be the distance of the whole Gospel until at last we see Him as He is.

Christ Connection - The Surety of a Better Covenant

Judah pledges, “of my hand shalt thou require him.” Hebrews later echoes this: “By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament” (Heb. 7:22). Judah is willing to be held accountable for Benjamin’s safety - if the boy does not return, Judah himself will be liable. Christ takes that pledge and makes it eternal. He stands as surety not for one brother but for all brothers, not for a return to Egypt but for return to the Father. And unlike Judah, He will pay the price…

Christ Connection - God Who Finds Out

Judah says, "God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants." He is confessing to more than the cup. He is confessing to what the cup represents - the silver their father paid for, the brother they sold, the decades of concealment. Before Joseph even announces his identity, God is working through Judah’s conscience. Paul writes: "Be sure your sin will find you out" (Num. 32:23). But that finding is mercy. Unconfessed sin spreads. Confessed sin heals. Judah’s words are the…

Christ Connection - Alive and Sending

The pattern is exact. The brothers come home saying "Joseph is yet alive" - just as the disciples came out of the grave saying "Christ is risen." Jacob cannot believe it at first - just as the disciples and Mary Magdalene doubted. But then Jacob sees the wagons Joseph sent - the practical fruit of Joseph’s love and authority - just as we see the risen Christ’s gifts: the Spirit sent at Pentecost, the bread and wine of His presence, the work of His kingdom spreading through…

Genesis 46 turns on a single promise spoken to a fearful old man at the edge of the land. Israel stops at Beer-sheba and offers sacrifice, and God speaks in the visions of the night: fear not to go down into Egypt; for I will there make of thee a great nation: I will go down with thee into Egypt; and I will also surely bring thee up again (vv. 3-4). The word is never only descent; it is always also the pledge to bring up again. The New Testament speaks of One who lives out…

Christ Connection - Few and Evil Days

Jacob’s words are bleak: “few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” He is not exaggerating - he has lived through famine, family betrayal, exile, loss. And yet he is blessed. James echoes him centuries later: “What is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14). The Bible does not pretend the world is not broken. Christ did not come to a perfect world. He came to one where days are few and often ha…

Christ Connection - Covenant Passed Down

Jacob is about to do something that Hebrews will later cite as an act of faith: “By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph” (Heb. 11:21). Faith is not certainty about the future. Faith is seeing the God who made a promise and trusting His hand to keep it, even through the hands of those who come after. Jesus is the One through whom all the promises converge. And salvation is the inheritance of those who believe - an everlasting possession He cann…

Christ Connection - Shiloh: The Prophecy

Verse 10 contains one of the Old Testament’s most-debated and most-hopeful verses: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." The word Shiloh (Hebrew שִׁילֹה) has three readings in the Jewish and Christian tradition: (a) a place name (the later sanctuary city); (b) "he whose right it is" or "he comes whose right it is" (the reading of the Septuagint and Vulgate); (c)…

Genesis ends on the deepest statement of providence in the book, and the New Testament hears the cross in it. The brothers had sold Joseph into Egypt to be rid of him; years later, with their father dead and their fear returned, Joseph weeps over them and says, Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive (v. 20). The same single verb stands behind both halves of the sentence - what the brothers devi…