God brought Naomi from pleasantness to bitterness, from fullness to emptiness. Contrary to what she could see, God was not moving to destroy her. He was moving to save her and all mankind. God would give her a child through Ruth who would be the grandfather of King David, through whom the promised Christ would come. God didn’t reveal any of this to Naomi. She wanted sight, but she needed faith. The same is true for us.

Christians rejoice that God has called us out of our spiritual darkness into his marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9). We walk by faith in the Light of the world. Yet sometimes God calls us to walk at night, when his providence perplexes or pains us. Even then, God has given us his word to guide us, like “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns” (2 Pet. 1:19). One helpful guide is the story of Naomi, who was also called to walk through the spiritual dark of suffering. As we see God’s gracious work in Naomi’s life, we learn three lessons for enduring spiritual nights.
Lesson 1: Prepare for the Night
Naomi’s story starts with suffering. We find her widowed, bereaved, and hungry (Ruth 1:1–5).  It might surprise us to learn that this sort of hardship is not the exception, but the norm for the Christian. God may not call us to suffer as Naomi suffered, but even so, Peter tells Christians not to “be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Pet. 4:12). Jesus did not tell us to affirm ourselves and take up our comforts, but to deny ourselves and take up our crosses.
This should not make us pessimistic; it should make us prepared. Nighttime always comes. We are not surprised when the sun sets, and because we know it is coming, we are prepared. Night shouldn’t surprise us. Neither should suffering.
In Genesis 41, God warned Pharaoh in a dream that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of famine. He did this so Pharaoh would prepare for the days of famine by filling his storehouses with grain during the days of plenty. True, God has not told us when our spiritual nights and famines will come, or how long they will last, but he has told us they will come. So we mustn’t waste the days of plenty, but use them to prepare for whenever the night or famine arrives. We must soak up the rays of the gospel when it shines brightly in our hearts, and fill the storehouses of our souls with its grace. We must prepare for the night through the means of grace God has given us, because our faith won’t see as well when the sun sets.
To lack a biblical theology of suffering confuses and confounds. We may be tempted to doubt God’s promises. God may feel distant and silent. Our physical and spiritual strength may be diminished. This is when we need to be sustained by stored grace. Our preparation will not make suffering more enjoyable, but it will make it more endurable.
Lesson 2: Don’t Trust Your Sight
When we suffer, it’s not uncommon to feel like the darkness will never lift.
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The Bible doesn’t tell us to preach when the Word is in season and to try something different while it isn’t. We are to preach in season and out of season. In fact, we only know what season it is by preaching! We don’t put a finger in the air and check the weather, we preach the Word and the results tell us what season it might be. But whether it appears to be an in season or an out season, we preach the Word. And, yes, we keep doing it, even expecting different results as we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

They say madness is doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting a different result. Just doing the same old same old and hoping that something different might happen. And yet, as we read the Bible, that does seem to be what we are taught to do.
We are to preach the Word in season and out of season. What doesn’t change is the preaching of the Word. We are to continue preaching in the belief that this is God’s ordained means of reaching the lost, growing his people and building his church.
But it is also true that there are times the Word is in season and times when it is out of season. Sometimes, we will preach faithfully and consistently with little to no results at all. The Word seems totally out of season. It doesn’t seem to make an impact on anyone or in anything we’re doing. Popular wisdom suggests this is the time to stop, pack it in and try something else. Only a madman keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expects anything different.
But as we keep preaching the Word, we find that there are times it is in season. The same Word we preach in the same way suddenly starts to yield apparent results. People begin to respond to it. Some come to faith, others grow. The same preaching of the Word, in pretty much the same way, suddenly starts to produce fruit.
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The basic guidelines for interpreting Genesis 1–3 derive from Scripture itself. If we follow the guide of Scripture, we will read Genesis 1–3 with understanding. We will not have all our questions answered, because Genesis 1–3 does not say everything that could be said about the details of how God did things. Much remains mysterious.

ABSTRACT: The beginning of the book of Genesis is not, as some claim, a mythical or poetic account of creation. It is historical narrative, telling the same story that unfolds in the patriarchs, the exodus, and the establishment of Israel. And, being from God, it speaks truly. Modern readers may not learn everything they would like to know about creation from Genesis 1–3, but they will find everything they most need to know. They also will find an account of creation unlike anything outside the Bible. Compared to the creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, Genesis stands majestically alone.
How do we interpret Genesis 1–3 in a sound way? It is not so easy to find out just by listening to and reading modern interpreters. There are many voices, and they disagree with one another.
I have only one main piece of advice. We learn how to read Genesis 1–3 wisely in the same way that we learn to read the rest of the Bible wisely. And how is that? By taking to heart what the Bible itself says. Several aspects of biblical teaching need to be taken into account.
Let us begin with a foundational issue: the nature of God.
Who God Is

Does God exist? And what kind of God is he? Is he a God who can create the world, in the way that Genesis 1 describes? Is he the kind of God who could fashion the first woman from the rib of Adam, as Genesis 2:21–22 describes? Is he the kind of God who can speak in an audible voice from the top of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:9–20:22; Deuteronomy 5:2–22)? Is he the kind of God who can multiple five loaves and two fish, so that they feed five thousand men (John 6)?
Most of elite culture in the modern Western world does not believe in a God like that. Rather, the culture is deeply influenced by philosophical materialism, which says that matter is the ultimate constituent of the world. If some kind of a god exists, he is not involved in the world in the way that the Bible describes. He is not a God who speaks or who works miracles.
In addition, some people are influenced by New Age mysticism. They believe in various kinds of spiritual influence. But their “god,” if they call it that, is an aspect of nature.
The issue of God is monumentally important. If God is not a God such as the Bible describes, then either the Bible is a lie or it has to be radically reinterpreted. And that is what people do. Much of the academic study of the Bible at major universities of the world takes place under the assumption that the way we read the Bible must harmonize with modern ideas about the world. Hence, this academic study corrupts the Bible. And then this corruption travels out into general culture.
But in fact, God exists — the same God that the Bible describes. Therefore, the elite people in Western culture are walking in the dark about God. It is the culture, not the Bible, that has to be radically reinterpreted. Genesis 1–3 is one text — a crucial text — that shows the massive difference between the Bible’s view of God and common modern Western views.
The first point, then, is that when we read the Bible, we need to reckon with who God is.
The Divine Authorship of the Bible

A second issue concerns the nature of the Bible. It is the word of God. It is what God says.
One principal reason for the diversity of readings of Genesis 1–3 is an underlying diversity of opinion about what kind of text the Bible is. Much of the academic study of Genesis takes place with the assumption that God is not the author of Genesis. In effect, academics deny the divine inspiration of the Bible. This denial follows directly from the prior assumption that God does not speak. According to modern Western thinking, either God does not exist, or he was not involved in the writing of Genesis in a special way. Or, if he was involved somehow, he deferred pretty much to the human author or authors. One way or another, these people discount divine meaning and search only for human meaning.
Clearly, the issue of divine authorship makes a difference in what meanings come out at the end, because a misjudgment about who the author is leads to a misjudgment about what he means. Or, according to some postmodern interpretive approaches, verbal texts and the readers who interact with texts float in a sea of meanings, more or less independent of either God or human authors. But this kind of multiplication of meanings is a mistake, because it discounts the unique authority of God to say what he means and to do so with unique authority.
So it is worthwhile asking whether the Bible teaches divine authorship. It does, in any number of places. Second Peter 1:21 says, “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” This verse affirms a role for human authors: “men spoke . . .” But it emphasizes that the more ultimate and decisive author is God: “men spoke from God”; and “they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Jesus himself affirms the divine authority of the Old Testament in a number of places and a number of ways (Matthew 5:17–20; 19:4–5; 26:54; John 10:35). Interested readers can consult any number of books by evangelical authors, showing how the Bible affirms its own divine authorship and authority (2 Timothy 3:16).
Since God is a God of truth (John 3:33), his word is truth (John 17:17). He can be trusted. The Bible can be trusted, because it is his word. That must be our attitude as we read Genesis 1–3 — and every other passage in the Bible.
So here, in the fact of divine authorship, we have a second central principle in interpreting the Bible. We read and study it with respect and trust, rather than distrust. Just as we must reinterpret modern Western culture in its view of God, so, for the same reason, we must avoid imitating the distrust that the culture has toward the Bible. We avoid also the human temptation to pick and choose the meanings that please our prior preferences, or picking and choosing to believe only those parts of the Bible that line up with our preferences. That picking and choosing makes sense only for people who have already rejected God.
The Genre of Genesis

Next, let us ask what kind of a book Genesis is. In accord with the richness of who God is, what God says in the Bible includes a variety of forms or genres of literature. God chooses a variety of ways of communicating, in order that we may absorb what he says and grow in communion with him in a variety of complementary ways. The book of Psalms, for example, is a collection of poetic songs and prayers. In the Gospels, we find sermons of Jesus (such as the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7), parables, records of miracles, records of healings, and the record of the crucifixion. The Bible has prophetic books like Isaiah that contain exhortations, recollections of God’s past dealings, and predictions about the future. There are historical books, such as 1–2 Kings, that have a record of past events in the history of Israel.
Each literary section of the Bible was crafted by God, as well as by the human author (2 Peter 1:21). It is exactly what God designed to say, not only in its contents, but also in all its details, including the features of genre. If we respect God, then we should take into account how he chooses to communicate. It would be a mistake, for example, if an interpreter were to treat Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) as if it were a prosaic nonfictional account that is merely about one shepherd and one sheep. It is a fictional story with a spiritual point. The point is indicated at the end: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Jesus also indicates near the beginning of the parable that it is hypothetical, rather than an actual case in real life: “. . . if he [the shepherd] has lost one of them [the sheep], . . .” (Luke 15:4).
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