Old Testament Snapshots
From Creation to the Cross
Ron Fast
[email protected] Copyright 2007 by Ron Fast
Intro
Imagine that you are very artistic and like to create stuff. Every chance you would get, you’d sit down and do your art stuff. Let’s say that you like to create sculptures out of garbage, not like leftover casseroles and corn cobs and watermelon rinds, but like the kind of garbage or junk you find at a junk yard. To you, a junk yard is a sculptor's paradise. You could spend hours and hours just walking around the piles and piles of junk. As you walked, you would look for the things that you could use in your latest creation. You had the unique ability to recognize beauty in junk.
You had just started a new sculpture and were looking for parts for it. You were crafting a huge radar that would allow you to catch alien signals and they (the aliens) would communicate with each other. You just knew (Why does the word “knew” have a “k” on the front of it? Or even more confusing why does “who” have a “w” attached to the front of it? It should start with an “h”. It should be “hoo”. I get so confused sometimes. Sometimes when I’m typing really fast, I type “ov” for “of” because it sounds like “ov” or “uv”. AHHHHHHHHHHHH. I’m so confused sometimes I think my forehead is going to cave in. OOPS—Sorry, the circuits in my poor witto bwain misfired. I hate it when that happens.)… Uh . . . Where was I . . . Can anyone tell me? . . . Oh. . . Yeah. . . That’s right. The reason that you knew there were aliens is because you had been abducted by this really slimy bunch of aliens from the planet Foofoohead (no, we aren’t going to talk about Zits anymore). One night while you were trying to sleep, they beamed you into one of their spaceships. It wasn’t a very smooth beaming up. They had just trained this new dude (I’m not sure you can call an alien a “dude”), Foofoofreak, as a beamer-upper-type dude. And he wasn’t very good at beaming earthlings up. The first time he tried it on me I materialized in the bathroom on the alien spacecraft. VERY, VERY SCARY. The second time he tried I materialized in the bulkhead of their ship. My feet were hanging out of the spaceship and my head was in the spaceship. My body, however, was inside the metal bulkheads. Foofoofreak tried one more time to beam me aboard. He finally succeeded.
After I was on board, they started doing all of these weird experiments on me. They made me eat cockroaches and slugs and some purple slimy stuff that was supposed to make my head sprout antennas, but it just made my ears glow in the dark. After a couple of days experimenting on me, they finally beamed me back to my bedroom.
My ears still glow when it’s dark but that’s okay. It makes a cool night light and I’m able to find the bathroom really easily. It’s also great to scare the bahooies out of my little sis. She still hasn’t recovered from the last time I scared her. I think she is going to need some serious counseling later in life. She always calls me a freak for some odd reason.
Anyway, back to the point of this another one of my really, really bizarre stories. You were in the junk yard searching for just the right stuff to make this alien radar so you will be able to listen to the aliens and find out when they are coming to earth the next time so you can hide out until they take your sister and do experiments on her.
Finally after 3 weeks of searching for just the right stuff, you had all of the right parts for the radar. You headed home with your junk and proceeded to build the radar. You had to get it done by the next new moon because that’s when you figured they would come back and take you again. You finally got it done. It looked really cool. You were soooo proud of your sculpture/radar. What an accomplishment.
The next day you headed to school feeling pretty good about yourself. You felt much safer now that you had finished your radar. You couldn’t wait until school was done so that you could go home and hook up your radar to your computer.
After your last period was over, you headed home as fast as you could. When you finally got home you couldn’t believe what you saw. There were at least 12 small kids, including your sister, climbing all over your radar. They had broken some of the parts off and others were mangled beyond recognition.
You yelled at your sis, “What are you doing? You are ruining my alien radar.”
Your sis told you that she thought it was monkey bars and she invited her friends over to play on it.
You told her that it wasn’t something to climb on. It was a highly sophisticated, extremely sensitive listening device.
You just couldn’t believe that someone could use it for something other than what it was created for.
Imagine that you were God and that you created man for one reason only, so you could have fellowship with them. Since you were the creator you could choose any reason for man’s existence. But after you created them, they screwed up big time and went their own way, breaking their relationship with you. How would you feel?
Adam and Eve did just that. God had created them perfect and to fellowship with Him. They walked the garden alongside of God. Since God created them sinless, they could stand in the presence of God anytime they wanted. They didn’t have to cover their bodies. They didn’t have to sacrifice anything. They didn’t have to ask for forgiveness. They just walked and talked just like you would do with your Ma or Pops.
But Satan and then, eventually Adam and Eve, had a different agenda. Actually it was Satan’s agenda but he convinced Adam and Eve to change their agenda.
Man was not doing what he was created to do. God created man with a very specific purpose and man chose to disobey and walk away from their Creator.
I imagine that hurt God in a huge way.
There are so many cool stories about God and His chosen people in the Old Testament. Each story has a lesson for each of us. In the New Testament, God reveals Himself through His Son Jesus Christ. When we studied about Jesus, we found out that He is God in the flesh. And because He is God in the flesh, we can know who God the Father is by learning about His Son because Jesus possesses all of the attributes of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. But throughout the O.T., God gives us glimpses of who He is in many different ways. All of the Children of Israel knew who God was because He was very real to them as a group. It’s really cool to see how God reveals Himself to His people in unique and different ways.
We are going to start off in the book of Genesis (Duh!!) since that is the beginning. So let’s get going and see what God has to reveal to us through the book of Genesis.
Monday
Creation
Read Gen. 1 (the whole thing)
Let’s determine what kind of raw materials God had to work with when He began creation.
For each of the following Raw Materials answer true or false
Time:
Space:
A Lump of Clay:
Parts to make a body:
Let’s go quickly through the creation process just so we all are reminded of what happened when. Put the following list in order by when they were created
1.Adam and Eve
2.Elephants
3.Bears
4.Iguanas
5.Saturn's Moons
6.Sun
7.Mediterranean Sea
8.Crows
9.Shrimp
10.Australia
Why do you suppose God created stuff in the order that He did? Could He have done it in a different order? Why or Why not?
Tuesday
At the end of each day of creation, how did God feel about what He had just created? Find the words below Word search puzzle and then with the letters that
are left write the answer below.
Wednesday
Creation of Man
Read Gen 2:1-7.
Let’s spend a little time on verse 7 since there is so much that we can learn from this tiny verse.
He Formed Us
The first part of verse 7 says that God “formed us from the dust of the ground”.
What kind of image does this give you of how God created us?
Should this affect the way we view ourselves? How?
We are made from mud. That doesn’t sound very cool. How can you feel good about yourself if you know that you are made from dirt?
Gave us Life
The second part of verse 7 says that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”.
How is this different from how God gave life to the animals?
What should that say to you about your value to God?
A Living Being
The last part of verse 7 says “And man became a living being”. What does this mean to you? Is this just repeating the second part of verse 7 or does this mean something entirely different?
Was Adam created perfect? Why or why not?
At the end of each day of creation, how did God feel about what He had just created?
Thursday
Eden—Paradise or not?
Read Gen 2:8-14.
We each have a picture of what the Garden of Eden was like. It probably was paradise. I imagine that it was like a tropical forest with lots of color and full of cool animal-types. God made a lot of trees that Adam and Eve could eat from. He gave them lots-o freedom in the garden. He gave them dominion (rule or control) over everything that He had created. But God also created two very special trees in the garden. What were they?
1.
2.
Why did He create these two trees and give specific instructions for each of them?
The question that you will probably be asked sometime in your life is “Did God create evil?” Did He create evil by giving Adam and Eve a choice?
Friday
Man’s Major Faceplant
God created man and put him in paradise (Eden). Adam and Eve had everything going for them. They couldn’t have had it any better. God had given them a perfect world to live in. He had created the hugely beautiful world to live in but that wasn’t enough for them. Let’s look at Adam and Eve when they crashed and burned (Man’s Major Faceplant).
Read Gen 3:1-10
What was the first question that Satan asked Eve?
Look at verses 2 & 3 to figure out the answer for this question. Did Eve understand God’s rules when He said “Do not eat from . . . “ or did she sin because she didn’t understand the choice she had been given by God?
Question to think about. How many times do we know the truth but yet choose to sin? Why do we do that?
So Eve ate the apple. It’s sort of like when Snow White ate the poisoned apple from the witch. The apple looked normal and there was no reason for Ms. White to suspect anything else, so she ate it and it put her to sleep for a long time.
Do you think that God somehow put sin into the apple (like a caramel coating of sin) and that’s how Eve got sin into herself?
How did eating the apple bring sin into her life?
What was Adam’s reaction (verse 6) when Eve handed her the apple? Did he question her or say “No thanks. That turkey dinner you cooked earlier today was enough”?
Why did God say this about His creation?
What does this tell us about His creation?
Moses wrote the book of Genesis. How did he know the details of creation?
Saturday
God’s Reaction to the Faceplant
God created Adam and Eve with the ability to choose. God didn’t want robots that would automagically follow him. It’s sort of like this. Think of your bestest friend-type in the whole wide world. Now he or she is your friend because they choose to be your friend. Now imagine that someone paid your friend 1000 bucks to be your friend for a year. How much would that friendship mean to you if you knew that they had been paid to be your friend?
God wanted creatures to have fellowship with Him and He wanted them to choose that fellowship because having someone choose you because they like/love you is soooooooooo much sweeter than someone who is forced. God wanted to have a relationship with Adam and Eve but He didn’t want it to be a forced relationship.
After Adam and Eve sinned, what was their first reaction to “having their eyes opened”?
Can you imagine walking down the middle of a big shopping mall and all of a sudden realizing that you are buck naked? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! You’d grab pretty much anything to cover up. How scary would that be? Adam and Eve, for the first time, were ashamed of the way God had created them. They went down to the nearest Bon and bought the latest fig leaf fashions. They both now needed to start building a wardrobe. I mean, how creative can you get with fig leaves? They are uh. . . How do I say this. . . Uh. . . . GREEN. They didn’t have spray paint back then so they couldn’t color them.
Anyway, back to the story. What was Adam’s reaction when he got busted for the sin? (Does this remind you of how you react when you get nailed for a no-no??)
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Ron Fast is the author of G-TRAX Devo's, Biblical devotionals for youth. G-TRAX Devo’s are now available online at www.youthministrydevotionals.com in an interactive form with word puzzles, word search, and drop down lists answer formats. He has over 9 years of experience working with Junior High and Middle School students. His personal mission is “to make the Bible relevant to today’s youth”.