When I needed to pin down what I could believe and defend about God and Jesus, I began searching for answers. My questions kept leading me back to the Old Testament. I needed to know what led up to Jesus coming. I needed to understand the Old before I could really understand the New.
Chapter 1 of Genesis tells us that God made the heavens and the earth, and every living thing in it, beginning with nothing at all. Chapter 2 expands on his creation of Adam and Eve, and describes the garden he planted for them to live in. Everything humanity needed to live and thrive was there, with just one caution. God told Adam and Eve they could eat from every tree in the garden except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first two chapters of Genesis tell us that mankind was made in God’s image, with the freedom to choose the good, or reject it. Fourteen verses later, they both ate the forbidden fruit.
After that rebellion, God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden. The word exile means you are living in a place that isn’t your home, and that forms the implicit background setting for the entire Bible. This fallen world isn’t the one God created us for. Yet on the same day that God exiled mankind from the Garden of Eden, he also began the rescue operation that would bring us back. And that rescue is the story in the rest of the Bible.
So now we’re all living outside the protection of God’s garden, in a broken world that’s been corrupted by sin, evil, and death. But God promises over and over to redeem his people, end our exile, and bring us back home. God’s will and purpose for us is expressed in one of the most repeated phrases in the Old Testament:
“I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
We catch glimpses of facets of God’s plan for our redemption in a series of Old Testament stories that are the carriers of deeper meaning. When we realize they are actually about redemption, they come to life. The puzzle pieces begin to fall into place.