Our church is reading through the Bible in a year, all following the same plan by Tyndale House Publishers called the One Year Bible. I only got the list from church today (1 day late!) but then I found the plan is available for free on the You Version Android Bible app called Bible - lifechurch.tv
As I go through the year, if anything jumps out at me, I will record it on my blog.
Today, we had Genesis 1 and 2 and I have spent a lot of time in the past reading these chapters as I feel they are foundational to the rest of the Bible and certainly in our understanding of the human condition. The choice that was interesting to me as I read this today was between the two trees. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One represents life and the other death and God did specifically warn Adam in 2:17 that he would surely die if he ate from the second of them. This is not a surprise because the Tree of Life by definition relates to the Source of all life, that is God. It was God's breath that gave us all life in the first place and is the reason why we don't instantly die as sinners - that life is so powerful that sin takes a while to finally kill it off! Anyway, the second tree represents a choice that we all make to put us at the centre of our lives. It means that virtually every decision we ever make is based on our persepective, our judgment, our value system. This would probably be OK if we knew everything in the world but of course we don't. We have a very limited and differing set of experiences from each other so that my view of right and wrong is not your view. Sometimes we might agree on something but often we do not.
The only solution is through Jesus to figuratively start eating from the Tree of Life and to go back to God. He, having a full knowledge in all things, is uniquely qualified to judge all matters and that we through the Holy Spirit, likewise can make sound judgments on things. The fact that we disagree on so many matters really just proves how far off many of us are from listening to God's opinions over our own.
Interestingly the other passage today is Matthew 1-2 which says that it is Jesus who will save his people from their sins. Take Jesus away from the picture and you have humanism. We know that doesn't work because that's exactly what Adam introduced on the day he chose death rather than life. On that day that Adam decided that he wanted to be in charge, the earth started dying and we cannot recover without Christ.
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