Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents
Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude
The Story-Teller God
[Bible references: Genesis 1-50; Matthew 1-28 or Matthew 13:1-23]
At one level, many, many scholars over the last two millennia have delved deeply into the details of this complex story and have tried in many ways to interpret this story. It can be frustrating to try to figure out the Creator of this universe and of this complex story. There is so much of the creation itself that we don’t understand that it “makes sense” that we would be unable to understand the one who created it. That said in what seems to be a deliberate pattern, the Creator doesn’t try to explain Himself, as much as He just does things and then tells us who He is and what He does, such as:
- The creation of the world and His response to it
- the first people He created and the messes they made and how He responded,
- the family he chose to give His laws to, the messes they made, and how He responded to them
But we have another level at which to understand this story. When God came to us in human flesh as Jesus, a man from Nazareth, a small town in the Galilee region of ancient Israel, speaking to us as one human to another, much of his basic teaching was in the form of little stories called parables. It’s within those stories and through those stories, the stories of God’s interactions with people and the stories told by Jesus, that even children as well as adults can intuitively grasp the very character of the Creator.
Reflections
If you have the time, skim through Genesis and/or Matthew. Notice that much of the Bible is narrative, stories about things that happened. Write down your impressions of this high-level skimming read of these books and of any questions you have then share them with others.
Observe
Read Genesis 1-3 and Matthew 1-3. Compare the first three chapters of Genesis with the first three chapters of Matthew. What do they show about how God works?
Dancing In The Kingdom 