1440 - "The Method of Study Explained" Genesis 1-3

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1440. Today we're going to be looking at Genesis chapter one, Genesis Chapter 2, and Genesis Chapter 3 in relation to the great themes of Scripture. God as Creator, God as Redeemer. And we will see how God lays out his plan in the book of Genesis in the first two chapters for how he will reveal himself throughout all of the scriptures. And we're going to look at that momentarily. But before we do, I want to give a shout out and a praise to God for four new cities that have been added just today worldwide. One in Seoul, South Korea, a community within Seoul, and then a new community in Wales, the UK, Spencer, Tennessee, and Titusville, Pennsylvania. Thank you for tuning in to On the Way Podcast. I am so grateful to God to tell you, especially those of you who give so faithfully and who pray for me on a regular basis and pray for the outreach of this podcast. Listen, I'm amazed. I'm amazed that from my own study in my own home or in the church, or even if I'm away somewhere, I can record these podcasts and send them to my producer, Zach Cochran, and he can put these on platforms that cover all of the earth, major platforms, every major platform on earth we have to our availability. So the company we use it, they get these out and they go everywhere. And so now we're in a hundred and seventy nations, a hundred and seventy nations where the word of God is going out in English. You've got to remember that English is the world trade language, much like Greek was during the days of Alexander the Great, and after him, even during the Greco Roman period, when Latin was the official language of Rome, if you wanted to do business, yes, you needed to know Latin, but you really need to know Greek because everyone knew something of the Greek language enough to trade, just like English is today. And so we're in 170 nations, and uh we're in now four thousand two hundred and as of today, fifty cities. And so I'm so grateful to God that you are a part of this. Thank you for listening. And for those of you who say, well, now wait just a minute, you've already done a podcast that was something like that. Well, let me just remind you of something. We have this idea in the West that we've got to come up with something novel and new and spectacular every day. What we need to do is reiterate the great truths of Scripture. And I want to remind you that the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter said, I'm going to tell you and remind you of what you already know. And I'm going to remind you of the great truths that I have laid out before you that in many cases you know very well. But I can remember my godly grandmother who raised me and really took my two brothers and took me in as a seven-year-old boy, that in the last days of her life before I I left to go to Texas, my grandmother sang a couple of old hymns that were her favorites. One was There's a land that is fairer than day, and by faith we can see it afar. For the father waits over the way to prepare us a dwelling place there in the suite by and by. She used to sing that, and then when she wasn't singing it humming, and so it would stick in my mind. But the one the last hymn that I ever heard her sing was probably her favorite. And it was I love to tell the story of unseen things above, of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love. And we all know that that have been around hymn sings and have sung hymns in churches in days gone by. But one of the verses of that is the last verse that I ever remember hearing her sing was this I love to tell the story for those who know it best, for they seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. You see, I never tire of hearing about Jesus. I never tire of hearing about God's great redemptive plan. Because you see, the word of God and the plan of God and the person of God and his great works of redemption are so great that they're like a never-ending faceted diamond or jewel. And every way you turn it, there's something new. And we find new glory every time we're in the Word of God, something new that God speaks to our heart about, some new truth that's being unearthed. And so as we go through this, I want to get to Genesis 1 and 2 and 3. But before we do that, I want to tell you a story that really helps illustrate why I do what I do and teach the great panorama of God and then lower to a more detailed account and then finally to the granular truths of Scripture. And I believe that's the way I'll show you today that God wrote from Genesis onward. In uh about 2006, 2007, I was in the bookstore at Qumran because many times I'll let my guide take the groups, especially those that are new for the first time, because there's material that needs to be covered at Qumran. And uh what I usually do is show them what caves, where the first scrolls were found, even before we get into Qumran, because you can see it in the road coming up. And it's not the keyhole-shaped cave that everyone sees and you see pictures of. No, no, it's away from there. If I'm doing a study with pastors or with professors, then I will take them out and show them more of Qumran than what the guide will. But on this particular day, I was in the bookstore because they have a good bookstore, so I was looking and I saw what was called the Holy Land Satellite Atlas, Volume 2. And so I immediately looked through it. It was fascinating. I loved it. So I bought it, I took it home to our home in Knoxville, sat it on the coffee table, and I would look at it uh many times a week. So that was in 2007. 2009, I got a call from a man from Cyprus who was named Richard Cleve, and he was the author of the Holy Land Satellite Atlas, Volume 1 and Volume Two. Volume 2 is a priceless jewel, and I use it still today. But he called up, he had a British accent, he was British, he was an MD, medical doctor, he was the Bedouin's doctor at Petra, actually, for the British government, and uh they were, as you know, tied in with Jordan. While he was in the Middle East, he began to take with the 70 millimeter film pictures of North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, every part of the Middle East, all the way over into Persia, then throughout much of what is modern-day Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and all over Israel. He worked for Time Life magazine. It was just absolutely a phenomenal photographer. And what he would do is take pictures of all the sites that all of us wanted to see but could never see. But then he hooked up with the Technion in Haifa and uh worked with NASA and the French and developed a satellite photography and uh a way to get down to just uh within uh three meters of an object and he could grid it off, and so he put this atlas together, and the whole concept was he started at a 30,000, 40,000 foot level, and then he would go down to a helicopter because there were no drones in the 80s uh as such, and so then he would get on the ground with the pictures that he had made. So he had three levels. So he would have a space level, we would say, 30,000 feet level, then a helicopter shot, and then he would get down into the granular ground pictures, and then he would explain those. And so he called me up and he said, I've been reading some of your material, I have been listening to some of your messages and some of the things that you've recorded. You preach and teach as I take photography, and that is you get the big picture, and then you zero in, and he said, I think we need to team up, and so that's what we did. And so my wife and I made a couple of trips to Cyprus. We stayed over a couple of weeks each time, of course, went all over Cyprus, but I learned um great lessons from uh Richard Cleve and uh great photographer, had a great mind, just brilliant, absolutely, has some of the greatest photography and the largest collection of photography of anyone on the Middle East in the world. And he has left this life, he and his dear wife. I have many volumes of those and I use them to teach historical geography. And I use them at the seminary level, I use them at the college level, I use them at the church level. And if you would like a copy of those, I'll be happy to sell those to you. I'm not trying to sell something because I have the last volumes of those that have been published in mass, so they are great for seminary professors or anyone else. But I have a few hundred volumes left. I sell those at a ridiculously low price because my goal is not to make money. My goal is to get the teaching and this teaching tool into people's hands. If you'd like a copy, then I will invoice you, I'll send this out, and also we'll help you to learn how to use it. It's a tremendous tool for learning the geography of the Holy Land of the Middle East. And also, it has great articles and uh general information that's just good for anyone, but it is incredible. So if you'd like a copy, just email me at DRCrisp, dr c R I S P at TonyCrisp.org, and I'll get them to you. Now I'm telling you that story to say that there is something to this because here is an East Tennessee Appalachian guy who knows very little and then great, great scholars, and we have come from different worlds from different angles, but we ended up believing that God revealed truth the way they did, from a great, grandiose satellite view of the panorama of his revelation down to the granular, and that's the way you study, that's the way God made our minds to work. This is why when you do a dissertation, you do a thesis, you do a paper, you give the overview of what you're going to do. That's the great panorama of what you're going to try to accomplish. And then what do you do? Do you go down into the nitty-gritty? No, you start outlining in chapters, and then chapters go to the outline Roman numeral one, Roman numeral two, Roman numeral three, and then under that you have a capital A, a capital B, a capital C, and then you have uh an Arabic numeral one, two, three. You see what I'm saying? Everything goes from general to uh specific. And that's the way God wrote the scriptures. Genesis chapter one is a summary of creation. It's a summary, it's a panorama. And then chapter two is the more detailed account. Why? Because he deals with man and the creation of man and his responsibility. The reason for that is the apex of God's creation is man. It's not the Angelic host, it is man. He didn't redeem the Angelic host, he redeemed man. And so chapter two is not dealing with angels or dealing with uh the rest of creation, he's dealing with man that he placed in a beautiful garden that he prepared. Now I just want you to think about that, and then in chapter three, you have the fall of man and God's promise, the Proto-Evangelion, the first gospel, the gospel actually before the gospel, in Genesis three fifteen, and then you have in Genesis three twenty-one the story of God's redemptive act in providing a sacrifice which opens up the great fountain from which comes the crimson river that I talk about of redemption that does not end until the book of Revelation, the end of the book of Revelation. This is so critical that you understand this, because this is what I want to unfold in the coming weeks and months is this great story of creation, redemption, and recreation that is the story and the main theme of the Bible. And so I want you to just think about this. You look at Genesis chapter 1, Genesis chapter 2, and see if what I'm saying is not so. God in Genesis 1 gives the great panorama, and we'll go over this in more detail the next podcast. And then in chapter 2, and most of you know that Genesis chapter 2 actually would not start until Genesis 2.4. That's where the natural break is and the literary break is between one and two. It's not where the chapter heading was placed in the English Bibles in the 1500s, the sixteenth century. And so uh we'll deal with that the next uh time, but I want you to read those two because unlike the documentary hypothesis and the Bellhausen theory out of Germany from Neo Orthodoxy, this is not two accounts. This is not one account and then another account and how they were redacted together. I think that's a bunch of hooey. That is not the way that God reveals Himself through all of these documents that are redacted and the documentary hypothesis, which assumes an anti-supernatural bias and has a neoorthodox underpinning. I believe the Bible is the word of God from cover to cover, and I believe it is inerrant in the original manuscripts. I believe it is truth without any mixture of error whatsoever. So you call me old-fashioned, fundamentalist, whatever you want to, but that's what I believe, and that's what I'll die believing, because I have found it to be the truth as God reveals it in Scripture. Well, that's all the time we have for now. Hope you have a great, great weekend, and I'll see you on the next podcast of On the Way. This is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at Tony C R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.