We are excited to introduce you to Jen Wilkin’s latest study, God of Creation.
We normally post an excerpt from the Bible study book here for you to read, but this study is a little bit different from many of our Bible studies. We’ll let Jen tell you about it.
Check out this free sample to see what a week of study looks like.
Instead of an excerpt from the book, here’s an excerpt from a transcript of Jen’s video teaching:
I have two questions that we’re going to have to ask of ourselves, and they’re pretty basic questions. They’re questions that I think are good for us to ask at the beginning of any study like this, and they are first of all, why are we here? And I don’t mean the metaphysical version of that, although we are going to actually talk about that as we get further on into the study. We are going to talk about why are we here, but I need us to talk about why are we actually here to look at these first 11 chapters in the Book of Genesis. So my first goal is to address that question.
And my second is to answer the question, why should we study Genesis? Why should we even care? One of the most common things that I hear as I travel around the country, from women, is “I am afraid of the Old Testament. I’m not really sure what’s back there,” and many times women have spent their entire lives in the church, doing women’s Bible study in an organized format, and they’ve never spent time going back to the Old Testament to find out what is there. So part of what I want to accomplish in the 10 sessions that we’re going to have together is to demonstrate for you clearly and finally the vast importance of being familiar with what the Old Testament has to say.
First, let’s start with our first question, why are we here? We are here, obviously, to study 11 chapters in the Book of Genesis, 11 chapters that are called the primeval history, and that is an important task for us. I’m hoping that by the time you finish these 10 sessions, you will have a clear understanding of what is in those 11 chapters, but I also want something more for you. Every single time that I gather women to study the Bible, my hope is not just that you would know the passage or the chapters that we are spending time in by the time we finish the study, but that you would know better how to study any passage of Scripture when we’re done.
In my view, when you sit down to study the Bible you should be actively learning. Howard Hendricks, who’s a well-known Bible teacher-professor who taught at Dallas Theological Seminary for years, had a saying. He said, “Never do for your students what your students can do for themselves,” and that has become for me a watchword when it comes to putting together studies. I don’t want to simply tell you what is in here and tell you how to understand it. I want you to be thinking critically about the text, I want you to be drawing your own conclusions, and I want you to be flexing muscles that maybe you haven’t flexed in a long time, or maybe no one ever taught you how to flex with regard to how, not just we read the Bible, but how we read any book.
One of the things I like to point out to women is that the Bible is a book. That seems like a pretty obvious statement, right? I think no one would disagree with that. But oftentimes, we do not treat the Bible with the same respect that we would give to even a common textbook. So, for example, if you think back to your high school algebra class. Imagine if you had come in at the beginning of the semester and sat down at your desk and opened up your algebra textbook to the middle of chapter five and read a couple paragraphs out of the middle of chapter five and then asked yourself, “Hmm, now how should that change my life today?”
And then let’s say that you came back and you did that again the next day, that you flipped to chapter six and you read a few paragraphs out of there, and you said, “Now how should this change my life today?” And you came back the next day and you read from chapter two, and the next day and you read from chapter 10, and so on and so forth, and then you got to the end of the semester and your teacher handed out the final exam. How well would you do on the final exam? Probably not very well, right? Why? Because you didn’t read the textbook the way that it was intended to be read. It’s written in a particular way, it’s written at a particular level, depending on what year of school you’re in, by a particular person, at a particular time, for a particular purpose.
So when we sit down with a textbook, what do we do? We start at the beginning, and we read to the end, and we understand that what was said at the beginning is going to be built upon. It’s going to reach a conclusion at the end. There was order and purpose to the way that the book was constructed. Well, the same thing is true of the Bible. The Bible is much more than just a book, but it is certainly a book, and it is intended to be read and understood a certain way. So what I’m hoping that we will do as we move through these 10 weeks, is we will learn better tools for honoring the Bible as a book.
I think that’s a particular challenge when it comes to reading Genesis, because probably there are going to be portions of what we’re going to cover that you’re very familiar with. You’ve probably heard about them in Vacation Bible School if you’ve been in a church your whole life. You’re probably familiar with stories like the Tower of Babel. Everyone’s familiar with Noah, because of all the baby nurseries that are decorated with it, which is honestly a weird theme for a nursery if you really thought about it. But we’ll get to that in a few more sessions.
But why are we gathered here? We’re gathered here to study, so that we can learn who God is, and also so that we can be changed by that knowledge, because there is no true knowledge of self apart from the knowledge of God. I can’t think of a better 11 chapters for us to spend time in to understand the knowledge of who God is.
God reveals himself through Scripture, and when we see who He is, we are better able to understand ourselves. In fact, it’s the only way we can gain accurate knowledge of ourselves, is by first seeing who He is, because otherwise, if we choose a lesser comparison point with regard to the way we view ourselves—if I see myself as a merciful person, I can do pretty well with that as long as I’m surrounding myself with other human beings whose shortcomings in the mercy department I can point out. But when I see God’s mercy as revealed in the Scriptures, it changes the way that I can measure my own mercy, because He has an infinite mercy, and then I begin to see where I fall short.
And what happens? If I have the Holy Spirit indwelling me, I’m going to cry out for the Lord to deliver me. I’m going to ask Him to forgive me for where I’ve lacked mercy. So the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand-in-hand, and in a life of the believer, when we have a vision of God, high and lifted up, see ourselves in relation to that, the result will always be repentance, not just a confession of sin, but a genuine desire to be changed. So that’s what we are here for, to behold God in the Scriptures, to be changed by that knowledge, and along the way to begin to learn better tools for handling this most precious of books that has been given to us.
To purchase the study and to view a few teaching clips and a promo video click here.