Most modern readers do not view Genesis as a carefully composed work of literature. We have become accustomed to reading it piecemeal. The public and private reading habits of Christians mitigate against the idea that Genesis should be understood as a single, coherent book. As a result, important aspects are missed. Let me mention three significant features of Genesis that need to be observed.
1. Genesis was composed to trace the history of a unique family line.
First, Genesis was composed to trace the history of a unique family line that highlights one male member in each generation (a “patriline”). The Greek term genesis means “genealogy.” This patriline begins with Adam and runs via his third son, Seth, to Noah (see Gen. 5:1–32). From Noah, the patriline is traced via Shem to Abraham (Gen. 11:10–26). Thereafter, the pace of the story slows, but interest in the unique family line continues. The childlessness of Sarah is a major barrier to its continuation, but God enables Sarah to have a son, Isaac. Beyond Isaac, the patriline is traced to Jacob (later renamed Israel), the younger twin brother of Esau. Esau should have been next in the patriline, but he despises his birthright and sells it to his younger brother, Jacob—who desires to be part of the patriline—for a bowl of stew (Gen. 25:29–34). Beyond Jacob, the patriline is associated with Joseph (see 1 Chron. 5:1–2) and his younger son, Ephraim, whom Jacob places ahead of his older brother, Manasseh (Gen. 48:13–20). Interestingly, Genesis often gives clues as to why firstborn sons are passed over in the patriline (e.g., Ruben’s inappropriate liaison with Bilhah; see Gen. 35:22).
While Joseph enjoys priority over his older brothers, Genesis introduces an important twist in the history of the patriline. In Genesis 38, a passage that is often dismissed as interrupting the story of Joseph’s life, attention is drawn to Judah. Read with an eye to the patriline, Genesis 38 is about tracing the line of Judah, which appears in danger when his eldest sons are struck dead by God. Tamar’s unusual intervention brings about a radical transformation in Judah’s life and results in the birth of twins. At this birth, once more the principle of primogeniture (the eldest son’s right of inheritance) is reversed as Perez breaks out in front of Zerah. Later, Jacob will pronounce a blessing on Judah that suggests kingship will be associated with his descendants (Gen. 49:8–12). This blessing is seen centuries later in the time of Samuel (see Ps. 78:67–72).

My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.

You’re getting to know some new Christian friends at a small group you just started attending. People are trading testimonies of how they came to faith. The next guy’s up, and he starts with, “I was raised in a Christian home.” Well, now you know it’s gonna get good. The false starts, the flimsy profession in adolescence, the hypocritical teen years filled with make-out sessions and secular music, the slide into the organized crime underworld by age 22, repentance and true faith at 27 to the tearful strains of Love Comes True—it’s all going to be there.
Well, that’s not me. Growing up, my mother was a believer—I think she was converted when I was a preschooler—and my dad took some years of his early adulthood to come to terms with the reality that the faithful Lutheranism of his upbringing was not his own. My family occasionally attended a local Nazarene church, and it was at their Vacation Bible School in 1980 that I first responded to the Gospel and committed my young heart to Jesus. But our participation in the life of the church was uneven, and I did not grow up in the conventionally Christian home that my own children would come to know decades later.
That little boy responded to his new faith by wanting to read his Bible, which was regrettably a verse-per-paragraph King James edition. Mom encouraged me in my faith, discipling me into the moderately fundamentalist Dispensationalism that, in the early 80s, had not yet begun its eventual decline. I recall enthusiastically reading Hal Lindsey and Salem Kirban and unironically consuming Chick Tracts. But tell me when God has ever been pleased not to allow his church to be, in some parts, a gloriously redeemed tire fire.
My family didn’t hold together. Substance abuse, mental illness, and a crumbling marriage culminated in my parents getting divorced in 1990—and me getting married that same year. My new wife and I promptly left our homes in Colorado and moved to Central Florida for college and a new life together away from our difficult families of origin. Church had not been a meaningful part of our lives in our teen years, and was also absent from the first year of our marriage. On a random August day in 1991, my wife pointed out a Nazarene church right next to the university, and said, “Wasn’t that the kind of church your family used to go to? We should visit there.”
We did. She was converted several weeks later, and my faith, which had been asleep, slowly woke back up over the coming months. We were loved and discipled by the healthy, caring brothers and sisters there—some of whom remain friends 30 years later. I discovered I had a mind for theology, and tried to understand what everyone meant by “Wesleyan Arminianism” and why this “Calvinism” thing I heard about was so bad. “Calvinism” was a system affirmed by “Baptists,” whose primary tenet was the pernicious “Once Saved, Always Saved” doctrine that could never possibly lead to holy living.
We attended the “College and Career” Sunday School class taught by a member of the church board who was around my father’s age. He and his wife took an interest in us and invested in us, as committed middle-aged folks tend to do with young couples in the church.
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Written by David S. Steele |
Monday, June 19, 2023
God finds happiness in the Son because the Son reflects the glory of the Father (Heb. 1:3). God finds happiness in people, not only because he created them but because, like his creation and like his Son, his people are a reflection of his glory!

Jonathan Edwards helps us comprehend the reality of God’s happiness: “It is of infinite importance … to know what kind of being God is. For he is … the only fountain of our true happiness …”1 Notice, then, several reasons for God’s happiness.
The Reasons for God’s Happiness
God finds happiness in himself
The primary reason for God’s happiness is this: he is God. We find a God in Scripture whose greatest delight is in – himself! So we begin with the doctrine of the Trinity which helps us understand the supreme happiness among the members of the godhead. C.S. Lewis argues, “The words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person then before the world was made, he was not love.”2 Daniel Fuller adds, “God’s love is primarily to Himself … and his infinite delight is in Himself, in the Father and the Son (and the Spirit) delighting in each other … The happiness of the Deity, as all other true happiness, consists in love and society.”3 God has from all eternity been happy in the marvelous fellowship of the Trinity!
God finds happiness in creation
May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in his works (Ps. 104:31, ESV).
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