Book of Redemption

THE ANSWER to the question we left off with last time, why the unusual prominence given to Abraham and his son, grandson, and great grandson, in the greater part of Genesis, and his descendants in the entire Bible is evident when we remember why the Bible was written. Again, you might be asking why it was written; there’s at least a couple of reasons simple and foremost, the Bible is a book of redemption, and God’s plan of redemption must come through this nation which sprang from these four men, for “salvation is of the Jews.” However it was also written to show us the Father through Christ Jesus, the very reason, redemption is necessary. It was through the nation of Israel, the seed of Abraham, that God in His sovereign purpose was to give us our Bible, the revelation of Himself, His character and nature, and through this nation He was to give us our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. For this reason the Holy Spirit devoted only eleven chapters to approximately the first two thousand years of human history from the time of Adam’s fall. God wastes no time with the past, but speaks almost entirely concerning the future. This will become clear to you when you remember that only one verse in the entire Bible is devoted to telling us all that God deems necessary for us to know about where the world came from, and only one chapter in the Bible devoted to telling us where we human beings came from. All the rest of Scripture deals with the future of the world, and where we are going in relation to eternity.

The first verse of the Bible consisting of only seven words in the original and only ten in the English Bible is all that is needed for God to tell us how the world began. That verse, you almost everyone knowns. It is:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. – Genesis 1:1.

This is the whole and entire revelation of God concerning the origin of this earth. The rest of the Bible is occupied with the future of this world. I want you to know, this is not because God wants us ignorant of how creation came to be, but He wants us to understand the reason He created us in the first place, which always leads us forward towards eternity and not to looking back upon our past!

Adapted and Excerpts from Studies in the Life of Abraham by M. R. De Haan (1891-1964)
*Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.