Morning, everybody. How you doing? Good morning.

Well, you may recall if you were here last week that we're gonna interrupt our series on the life of David so I can show you a new app that just came out that I think might be helpful to you. So you may have downloaded it last week, and if so, whip it out. I want you to see it. If you didn't download it, then you might wanna do that right now. It's called the Bible Project app. So if you have it, it's on Android and iPhone. If you have one of those, go ahead and grab your phone. Or if you have an iPad, if you prefer, you can do it on that.

I can't download anything because I don't have. That's gonna make it hard, but you can watch and enjoy and be envious of everyone else, and that'll be okay too. It's a limited occasion for envy.

About the Bible Project

So what we're gonna do, this is a thing put out by a group of people, the Bible Project. They basically produce a whole bunch of different teaching resources. Generally, what they got started on and what they've done for a long time is these short five, six minute videos that combine fantastic biblical content with really terrific creative visual presentation. The magic of those two things—the solid doctrine and the very creative visuals—have produced like a juggernaut. These videos get gazillions of views and they're just fantastic teachers.

But they recently came out with an app. It just was released like a week or two ago. And the app gives you a number of different resources. I wanna walk you through the app. I wanna show you how it works because I think it could really be helpful to you.

The Key to Bible Study

I've said a hundred times, maybe two hundred times, that the key of this whole gig is that you become a self-feeder. Right? Coming and showing up someplace once a week and sitting in a group isn't nearly as profitable as all by yourself alone in your dining room or alone in your den or alone in your bedroom or some park you like to go to and getting into God's word.

Quigg's fond of saying, if you really wanna succeed at this game, you need to have—do you remember what are the three things that Quigg says you need to have if you're gonna be consistently in the scriptures?

A place.

A place. A method. Very good. A time, a place, and a method. Do you know? Maybe. Every morning at 7 AM or every evening at 9 PM, some time. Right? A place. I'm gonna go to the den. I'm gonna go to the sunroom. I'm gonna sit someplace. And what am I gonna do? Instead of just like randomly opening your Bible, I'm just suggesting—this is one of a gazillion methods, but it might be a helpful method to you.

The Pentateuch Plan

What these guys are doing is they're offering a through-the-Pentateuch-in-a-year. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. If you were to walk through these first five books of the Old Testament, you would get an absolutely extraordinary foundation for your faith. The Pentateuch, the Torah, the Books of Moses—they're all the same thing. These first five books, they have a plan to walk you through those in a year, which is not very much of the Bible in a whole long year. So it's a pretty modest amount. But in addition to the actual scripture reading, they're suggesting, "Hey, if you watch our videos here and here and here, then that's gonna help you mine those things for their value." And it's just an enormous gift.

Now, what they're doing with this app—I'll tell you the truth. Some of it is new. Some of it is a new organization of things. Some of it is a way to structure things that'll be helpful to you. But some of it is also recycling old material that they have. And to that extent, there's a little bit of "mileage varies" on this because some of their videos—as I've walked through this, what they call the journey, this first section of it—there's a fair bit of redundancy. So just be aware of that. I'll try to warn you where I think there are greater redundancies.

Redundancy can be fantastic because we learn through repetition. Redundancy can also be boring because you're like, "My goodness, how many times are you gonna say this?" And so you can adjust to that. But I wanna show you how this thing works. If you have the phone, you can follow along. I got Kelly and Sadie up in the booth. So I have the app right here, and they got the app up there. So they're gonna be controlling this. And I'm just gonna walk you through it and let you try to help you see how this thing works just to orient you to it.

Because I really think that if you decide to use this as a guide, as a structure for this individual time in the scriptures that you might spend every day, then it's gonna add a lot of value to you.

The Bible Project app. That's the name again.

Understanding the Bible Project App

The Bible Project's logo is kind of like a blue shape—I'm not sure what you'd call it. Is it supposed to be a book? It looks kind of like this, but it's all blue. It's like a text box in comics, you know, with a spoken kind of thing.

Here's how it works. If you get to it and find your way, across the bottom you're gonna see journey, skills, bible, videos, podcasts. I want you to go to bible first. Go to the bible tab.

This is simply a digital bible. If you go to the very top, mine opens up to Genesis one, NIV. Yours might open to something else. If you touch on the NIV, then you can choose your translation. They've got a handful of options for you right there, and you can choose whatever you like. Then Genesis one becomes the verse picker. You can pick Genesis and scroll through and go to, you know, whatever we're doing—First Samuel chapter 23—and you can jump right along. If you set the translation here to whatever you want—NIV or NIR, whatever you like—then that'll carry through in other parts of the app that use a bible reader. So that's helpful if you just want to straight read your Bible here. You might decide to do that, or you might read your own print bible. The bible shows up at another part of the app during the journey, which I'll show you in a second.

The Journey Tab

Now go over to the bottom—you've got journey, skills, bible, videos, podcast. I want you to go to the journey tab. You're gonna get this thing with movements and links. What you're gonna find is movement one, movement two is coming, and then it's gonna scroll on down to the other movements.

They use the term "movement" to describe a logical chunk of the Bible—generally a pretty big chunk. The first movement's 11 chapters long. It's bigger than a chapter, smaller than a book. It's like the logical main movement of a text. They're gonna organize all of the Pentateuch through these ideas of movements, and then they're gonna give you a week or two to work through a movement. It's not a daily reading plan like "on Monday do this, on Tuesday do that." Rather, it's "in the next couple weeks, spend time in these 11 chapters, watch these videos, maybe even listen to these podcasts." And as you do, here's some of the things that I want you to watch for. So it's more than merely reading the first five books of the Old Testament. It's gonna give you the first five books of the Old Testament, yes, but with some really fantastic explanations about what you're looking for and how it all works.

The first thing they're gonna do is explain what they mean by two key terms: movements and links. Movements are big chunks. Links are like thematic threads that run through it. They have a video about movements and a video about links. We're gonna watch both of those to get you oriented to the way this thing is gonna organize.

When you open into it, you get the video for movements and the video for links. Let's start with movements:

It's a nice compilation of ancient Jewish scrolls organized into two large collections. The first, called the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, was originally designed with three sections: Torah, the prophets, and the writings. And the second collection, the New Testament, has two main sections—the narrative accounts about Jesus and then his followers, and then a large collection of letters. Altogether, these scrolls tell one unified story about God's purpose to oversee the world through humans, about how we fail, then about God's relentless pursuit to restore us to our true purpose through Jesus.

Now, when you open up and read any one of these scrolls, you'll notice that in our modern bibles, it's been divided up into chapters and then into verses. These were all added much later in the history of the Bible to help people not get lost. But unfortunately, these divisions don't always match the literary design given to each scroll by the original authors. It's important to remember that biblical scrolls were written to be read aloud and memorized and then meditated upon. And so to help with this, the biblical authors used repeated words and patterns that would organize each scroll into larger movements.

A movement is a group of stories or poems that have been arranged together into a meaningful whole. For example, the Genesis scroll has four literary movements. Each one begins with God giving blessing and life to someone who then fails and brings about curse and death, and so God moves forward by offering the blessing to the next generation.

In Genesis, the first movement begins with God blessing Adam and Eve. But then they fail and things get really bad, and so God rescues and blesses Noah, and then he fails too and things get worse. So in the next movement, God promises to bless Abraham and all nations through him. And even though he too fails, Abraham trusts in God's commitment to bless the world through his descendants.

Then in the third movement, we get to Abraham's grandson, Jacob. And God wants to bless him, but Jacob keeps deceiving the people around him trying to manipulate God's blessing for himself. And it all leads to the final movement. God blesses Jacob with many sons, but they lie and almost kill each other. And so God has to somehow transform their violent rivalry into blessing and life for the nations.

Each biblical scroll has been organized in this kind of careful and intentional way. And reading biblical scrolls according to their literary movements, that's a great first step towards hearing the Bible on its own terms. Now, as you read through a movement, you can track key patterns and themes by paying attention to important words and ideas that repeat and develop throughout the movement. This is when you begin to see how each movement contributes to the overall biblical story.

Can you see how this can be helpful to you? The key here, the secret of the whole thing, the secret sauce is that you take full ownership of your own spiritual development, your own growth in Christ. You're not having a quiet time because anybody's telling you to. You're just like, this is what I wanna do. This is who I wanna become, and so I'm gonna do this. But these guys, and we hopefully as a church, can really help you be successful. So it doesn't just feel like you're roaming around in the middle of the desert. You're getting guidelines and a clear kind of path to follow to make what may have been previously opaque start to become translucent, even transparent, that you can see it and it makes sense to you.

Links and Themes

This is what he means by movements. The second key organizing principle are these links. Links are thematic ideas, these terms that weave through. And we've got a video about links.

Our goals at Bible Project have been to show that the biblical authors had a message they wanted to communicate. So like any good story, those ideas are not presented in formulas or lists; rather they're explored through patterns that we call themes.

In the Bible, a theme usually begins in the beginning and it continues all the way through the whole story to the end. There are lots of themes that link together and unify the biblical story and one of our goals at Bible Project has been to introduce you to them so that you can see how they all lead to Jesus. Now we wanna take a step further and help you learn how to discover and trace a theme for yourself while you read the Bible.

Themes in the Bible are activated by words that get repeated throughout different parts of a biblical scroll. Think of them as links that fit together into a larger developing idea. For example, the theme of God's blessing. This word is used hundreds of times throughout the whole biblical story. If you want to trace this theme for yourself, just turn to the first movement of the Genesis scroll.

In the first story, the word blessing appears three times. The first link is when God creates the birds and the fish and he blesses them saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters. So God's blessing has to do with abundance and multiplying life. Then the theme develops through the next link. God next blesses the humans giving them the honor of ruling over the creatures as God's partners. So now ruling is a part of God's blessing. Then on the seventh day, God rests and he blesses his beautiful and abundant creation.

So we've traced the word "blessing" and noticed how it connects to other ideas like being fruitful, ruling, or resting in life. When you see those words and ideas, know that the theme of blessing is being activated and developed. That's how it works.

Now you should try. We're going to practice by taking one theme and tracing its key words, images, and synonyms throughout one movement. Let's start in the first movement of Genesis and trace the theme of God's spirit—or in Hebrew, God's ruach. First, watch the overview video on God's spirit, then jump into the first movement of Genesis where you can find the links for that pattern.

Understanding Movements in Scripture

The whole Bible is divided into books, or what we call scrolls. Genesis would be a scroll. Within any given book, there are different movements—different chunks, about 10 or 15 chapters long. These are the main organizing principles, and they're not artificially imposed on the text. Your chapter breaks are. Chapter breaks weren't there when Moses wrote Genesis. Those were added centuries later. They're helpful for dividing things up, but they're not inherent to the author's organization.

These movements are what Tim Mackie points out as inherent to the story itself. If you read it and pay attention, you'll see: "Oh, yeah, that is a chunk. And then something changes and there's a new chunk." Throughout those chunks, there are themes and ideas.

What you're about to do—if you decide to follow on this journey—is not to identify every single theme and every single link and every single chapter. That would be absolutely overwhelming. Instead, we're organizing things through Genesis using a single theme: ruach. That's the spirit.

The word ruach is translated as spirit, wind, or breeze. It's the Holy Spirit, but there's a lot more here. We're picking that one as a sample because you just can't do everything all at once.

Using the Bible Project App

If you look at your app, you can go to the journey section and navigate to movement one. If you touch on that circle for movement one, you'll see things you can look at. Genesis 1 to 11 is a Torah series. They had previously made a video about this opening section of Genesis, which gives us a great overview.

You might not watch every introductory video for every movement, but when you get to the next movement, you're going to see what resources they have. In addition to the main videos, if you scroll down, there are all these little things they provide. You can click where it says "Primary Pattern: Holy Spirit" and open a submenu where you can watch a video about the theme of Holy Spirit and what we mean by ruach. There are also quizzes and all kinds of resources under each topic.

You've got a couple of weeks to read Genesis 1 to 11. You could read it in half an hour or something. But you've got two more weeks. What are you going to do? Maybe you're going to watch some of these videos, process the information, read it, and look for these patterns. You're giving yourself a fantastic foundational education that's going to serve you very well.

The Significance of Genesis

I'll tell you this: everything in the Bible is also in Genesis. It is the great acorn from which the oak of scripture comes. It's astonishing. In fact, it's nearly everything in the first three chapters of Genesis. The amount that's embedded and compact into the opening chapters of Genesis will just explode and flourish throughout all of Scripture.

So if you take the time to understand this book, it's going to matter for everything else that you study for the rest of your days.

Let's watch a couple more videos. Kelly, let's do the Holy Spirit page—Holy Spirit theme—and then we'll watch the Genesis video.

The Holy Spirit Theme

Go down a little bit more. Yep. And click on Holy Spirit, then go to theme, Holy Spirit.

Where do you start? Well, you have to start on page one of the Bible where the uncreated world is depicted as this dark, chaotic place. But then above the chaos, God's spirit is there hovering, ready to bring about life and order and beauty.

What is God's spirit? The spirit is the way the biblical authors talk about God's personal presence. The Hebrew word is ruach.

What is it? Well, ruach can refer to a number of different things, but what they all have in common is energy. There's an invisible energy that makes the clouds move or the tree branches sway. In Hebrew, that's ruach—wind. Now take a big breath. You feel that inside you? The air? Well, specifically, the energy. The vitality in your body that you get from breathing deeply—that too is ruach.

This is the same word used in the Bible to describe God's personal presence. Just like wind and breath are invisible, God's spirit is invisible. Wind is powerful, and so God's spirit is powerful. And just as breath keeps us alive, so God's spirit sustains all of life.

As we continue on in the story of the Bible, we see God's ruach giving special empowerment to people for specific tasks. The first person in the Bible this happens to is Joseph. God's spirit enables him to understand and interpret dreams. And then it happens to this guy named Bezalel, an artist. God's spirit empowers him with wisdom and skills. He's given creative genius to make beautiful things in the tabernacle. We also see God's ruach empower a group of people called the prophets. They're able to see what's happening in history from God's point of view.

Here's the problem as the prophets saw it: While God's ruach had created a really good world, humans have given in to evil. They've unleashed chaos into it through their injustice—a new type of disorder. The prophets said the spirit would come just like in Genesis one, but now to transform the human heart, to empower people to truly love God and others.

How will this new act of God's spirit happen? Centuries pass and we are introduced to Jesus. At the beginning of his mission, there's this beautiful scene where Jesus is being baptized in the waters of the Jordan River. The sky opens up and God's spirit comes and rests on him like a bird. The story is saying that God's spirit is empowering Jesus to begin the new creation. We see this happening when he heals people or forgives their sins. He's creating life where there once was death.

Israel's religious leaders oppose Jesus and they eventually have him killed. But even here, God's spirit is at work. The earliest disciples of Jesus who saw him alive from the dead said it was God's energizing spirit that raised Jesus. This is the beginning of new creation. And it's still going.

When Jesus appeared to his closest followers, he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." And soon after that, the spirit powerfully comes on all of his disciples so that they can become a part of this new creation and share the good news and learn how to live by the energy and influence of God's spirit.

And so today, the spirit is still hovering in dark places, pointing people to Jesus, transforming and empowering them so they can love God and others. The Christian hope is that the spirit is going to finish the job. The story of the Bible ends with a vision of a new humanity living in a new world that's permeated with God's love and life-giving spirit.

Isn't that good? You learn anything in the last twenty minutes? There's so much wisdom in this stuff, and it's such a creative presentation. Their doctrine is rock solid. They're trustworthy. If you trust me, you can trust them. They're trustworthy. But they bring to it such a creative presentation that just makes this stuff stick. Does art matter? It does. It affects the way that we can learn.

So I want to suggest to you a protocol that you might choose to follow. But let me just stop and give you a chance to ask questions about this app, how things are organized, what you might do with it. How's this landing?

Seth, do you want to share the quiz?

Yes, I do, but I want to pause and just give some feedback, and then we'll absolutely do that. I think those are helpful and valuable. So yes, please, thank you. Kat?

I don't know about this question, but I'm already reading the Bible in a year. Yes, I'm actually doing it on the Bible app that YouVersion. Yeah, it's Nicky Gumbel. Yes, that's great. The Alpha guy. Yeah.

So Kat, you're already in about through a Bible through the year kind of program. Should you stop doing that to do this? I'd vote no, right? If you have something that is working for you, the last thing I want to do is discourage you from reading through your Bible in a year. So if you're in a pattern, if you're in a habit and it's working for you, game on. Just do that. But do this next year, or do that if you find somehow in June that that thing has petered out and you got lost in the sea of Leviticus or something, then perhaps here's just another tool. You're already outside of that. You're killing it, right? So it's great. Whatever you—if you've already got something that's working for you, by all means. But if not, and I would guess that—how many of you already have a time and method and a place and you're locked in and I'm screwing that up right now? Okay. So I don't know what that was—40, 40% or something? Awesome. Do it. Carry on. It's great. But there is—there will be—hopefully you're gonna live for many, many years, right? And there'll be lots of opportunities to jump into stuff. Cool?

So, Bianca, I just want to encourage you—if you are already in a study, some of the videos and podcasts that they put together can be really good supplements if you're already into something to dig it. Okay. That's great. So Bianca is saying that if you're already doing something, that's great. You can do that, but there's content here that could supplement that.

Finding Supplemental Content

So let me show you how you would find that. So Kelly, go down—so if you're at the bottom, we're doing everything in this bottom corner: Journey, Skills—don't worry about that. Bible is just straight Bible. But under Videos and Podcasts, this is gonna be content not related to the journey per se. It's just all their stuff, right? And it's organized by book and by topic. So click on Videos, Kelly.

And if you go here, you wanted—you can just do this. So you're doing through your Bible, Kat, but you also just want to read—or these videos about how to read the Bible. And there's a bunch of these different themes: Royal Priests, Spiritual Beings. And if you click on any one of these, there's not just four. Like, click Kelly—under View All for, say, Themes—or that one's fine, it's great. You scroll down, there's just tons of content. These are all gonna be like five or six minute videos on something, and you could just scroll through and pick what's useful to you, right?

Back that up a step and you'll see they've got Books. They've got—go way down—want to find like Books of the Bible, Book Collection. So Torah, Luke, Acts, the Wisdom Books. If you go View All under that one, you've got just tons. If you happen to be reading Leviticus and you're like, what's that about? You're reading Job, here's a video on Job. Just great content that could supplement whatever else you're doing, alright?

Videos versus Podcasts

Those are all the videos. Now, and maybe while we're here, I'll also mention this. If you go to the Podcasts link on the bottom—a video is five or six minutes long, highly visual, easy graspable, really, really beautiful. Podcasts are very different, okay? Podcasts are more like their advanced content. They're hour-long conversations. There is no visual element to them. It's a podcast. It's a radio show. And they're full of great insight, but they're an hour instead of five minutes. So you're gonna experience those things differently. By all means, check out the podcast—lots and lots of different content—but they're much longer form and they're gonna appeal perhaps to a different audience. Try one, see what you think.

Maybe if you're in the car—podcasts are great when you're in the car and you're burning time, you're cutting the grass or you're mowing the lawn or sweeping the house. I love to have content going on. It's just kind of learning, kind of redeem dead time. But they're long and there's no pretty pictures to look at, okay?

Bob, the thing that's neat about the podcast is that they're actually the discussion between Sam and John as they're trying to visualize how they're gonna do the video. So it's really a back and forth. John always plays kind of the questioner, like you and I would go, "Why are you doing it this way? Or what is that all about?" And then Tim will explain that to him. But the podcast really fits in nice with all the videos because it is a more elaborate discussion about it. I listen to the call.

They're kind of the rough draft of them sitting around and batting ideas around. So they're less efficient. Their videos are so tight—not a second is wasted. The conversations are more leisurely as they roam through it.

Now, what's different about watching a podcast here is they do give you a visual component, but it's not pictures, it's just words. Go ahead and pick any podcast—say, episode one, "How do you read the Bible?" What you'll find if you do this is on the bottom, see up on the top, it's like "intro skip." They're giving you the table of contents. And if they quote scripture, they're going to have the scripture listed there. So it's nothing pretty. It's just a transcript.

So you can follow along with their section headings. There is a little bit of guidance there.

The Bible Project as a Discipleship Tool

Other questions about how this thing works? Lily, I wanted to put forth, especially since it's Alpha Sunday, that this could actually be a really valuable discipleship tool. Whether it's a live group or someone you're meeting one on one with in a small group—one of the beauties of the Bible Project is that my elementary school kids love it and those of us who are 50 years old love it. So if you're wondering for ways to engage with family members, like if I can do this with my third grader, you can do it with any of your kids.

Lily is saying this right now during Alpha Sunday—we're particularly thoughtful about how we help people who aren't walking with Jesus discover how great he is. The Bible Project is a great tool for that. For folks who have questions or are curious, you can watch a video. People are accustomed to watching video. You might say, "Hey, this is a great video," and you can share it, send them a link. This has a share function. You can push content out, or maybe you sit down with somebody over lunch and watch a video together and talk about it. They're all bite-sized—they're all like six minutes long. They're tight, and you can make good stuff happen.

So you can jump in and share things out.

Another thought about using this: the gospel came to us on the way to somebody else. Yes, but first it comes to us. The more that you are taking ownership for your own internal spiritual development—I'm going to read this, I'm going to know this, I'm going to understand the Ruach and what the theme here is—the spirit of God is alive and what he's doing. That has huge value.

Pacing and Using the Resource

Jim asked, are we going to all go at the same pace as a plan? Great question. It is not my intention to continue to do this here. Next week is going to be an alpha week, but when we resume we're going to resume Dan David's life story studying first Samuel. So I will not be guiding you through this at any kind of pace.

My suggestion is that all by yourself, when you're home and spending time with Jesus, this is a particular paradigm you could follow. There will be a pace because they're laying the tracks as the train is barreling down them right now. Only the first movement is done—I think it's January 17—so in a week they'll have the second movement ready. There is a pacing because the content will come delivered, but we are not doing this per se. I'm just suggesting this is one more tool in your tool bag.

Kat had two quick questions. First, you spelled a bunch of Hebrew letters—the English transliteration, what is that? It's Ruach—R-U-A-C-H.

And second, do you do this on your own pace at your own pace? Yes. They'll give you a couple of weeks to do a chunk.

And if you fall behind, you fall behind. That's the problem with the Bible reading plan. As soon as you fall behind, you're like, "Well, it's over." But it's not over. Just get back on. It's fine. Say it takes you a year and a half to get through the Pentateuch. Nobody's going to jail for that. It's okay. So just do it at your pace.

Alright. Let's do this now. Kelly Sue, can you navigate back to the journey? You mentioned this Holy Spirit quiz. Let's do this now. So we just watched a video about the Ruach. We're gonna take a quiz. You ready?

So punch that. What is the Hebrew word for the spirit of God? Is it Yahweh, Ruach, Elohim, or whatever that last one is?

Ruach. That's right. It is Ruach. Next. What was the spirit of God moving over? The mountains, the skies, the waters, the garden?

The water. Right? Very good. That was easy. So that was a two-question survey. That was not hard.

Okay, now here's the thing. After that, they're gonna suggest you check out these podcasts. You'll see these are 57-minute long commitments. I listened to every one of those podcasts last week when I hiked McAfee's. And if you wanna know the truth, by the time I got through the third one, I was like, "My goodness, you've said the same thing 500 times." It was drudgery. But the first couple were great. It just got a little redundant. But there's some good stuff. If you're doing something, just throw on your earbuds. If you're on a hike, you're cutting the grass, just let it play. Let's redeem the time.

So, here's a protocol that I might suggest. When you get home, or tomorrow morning, or whenever you're doing this, watch the movement video again. We learn better through repetition. Watch the link video. Now you know where we're going and what we're gonna do. Maybe watch the Holy Spirit video because that's the first link we wanna get. And then maybe you wanna start reading through Genesis one to 11, or maybe you're gonna want to watch the video about Genesis one to 11. I don't really care. Do them both. Do them whatever order you want.

Genesis One to Eleven

What we will do is watch the video on Genesis one to 11 right now. That'll give you a deeper sense, and then I'll show you the text. There are some little Easter eggs in the text.

The first book in the Bible is called Genesis. Genesis comes from a Hebrew word and it just means "beginning." Now there are a lot of stories from the book of Genesis, and it's easy to pull out a specific story and try to tell you what it might mean. But we think the best way to understand this book is to look at the book as a whole and show you how the whole thing is designed.

The book is designed to fall into two main parts. You have chapters one through 11, which tells the story of God and the whole world. And then you have the second part, which is about God and Abraham's family—that's chapters 12 through 50. And how those two parts relate, that's where you find the message of the book.

So let's start back at the beginning. The first part of Genesis begins with a creation story where God creates everything. And how exactly that happens, of course, that's where all the debates come. But he takes a dark watery chaos and he turns it into a beautiful garden where humans can flourish. That sounds nice. In fact, seven different times God says of all that he's made that it's good.

And this is where we meet the first human characters in the Bible: Adam and Eve. They're individual characters, but they're also representative. Adam is the Hebrew word for humanity, and Eve is the Hebrew word for life. And God creates them in his image. In other words, humanity reflects—or is meant to reflect—the creativity, the goodness, and character of the creator out into the world that he's made.

And they're supposed to reproduce and make cultures and neighborhoods, art and gardens and everything else. But he gives them a moral choice about how they're going to build this world. And this is what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is all about. He tells them, "Don't eat of the fruit of this tree or you will die."

What's that all about? So up till now, God has been the one defining and providing what is good. So God is the one with the knowledge of good and evil.

This tree represents a choice: Will the humans trust God's definition of good and evil, or are they going to seize the opportunity and define good and evil for themselves? Adam and Eve eat the fruit. This is the core biblical explanation for that concept of sin—that desire to call the shots myself. It's the inward turn of the human heart to do what's good for me and my tribe, even if it's at the expense of you and your tribe.

The problem is humans are horrible at defining good and evil without God. So now that humanity's made this choice, things get really bad. Genesis 3 through 11 traces this downward spiral of all humanity. Adam and Eve can't trust each other anymore. There's a story about how they were naked and felt fine about it beforehand, but now they feel shameful because all of a sudden Adam's definition of good and evil might be different than Eve's, and so they hide from each other.

Then there's another story of temptation. Cain is jealous of his brother Abel, and he gives in and kills him. There's a story right after Cain about a guy named Lamech, and all we know about Lamech is that he accumulates wives like property and he sings songs about how he's a more violent, vengeful person than Cain ever was, and he's proud of it.

Things get so bad with the human race that God decides to just wipe us out. We typically think of the flood story as about God being angry, but it actually begins with God's sadness and grief about the state of his world. Out of his passion to preserve the goodness of his world, he washes it clean with the flood. But there's a glimmer of hope. He chooses Noah and his whole family and saves them on this boat—and the animals too.

Noah and his family are going to reboot all of humanity. He must be a pretty great guy. But here's the story most people don't know because it's kind of weird: Noah gets off the boat and he plants a vineyard and he gets totally plastered, and then something sketchy happens in his tent with his son. It's a tragic story.

From here, humanity grows again, but things are as bad as before. The last story is the famous story of the Tower of Babel. In this story, all the nations unite together to use this new technology they have—the brick. They want to make a name for themselves and build this big city with a huge tower that will reach up to the gods. But God knows that this city will be a nightmare, and so in his mercy, he scatters them.

All of these stories underline the same basic idea: When humans seize autonomy from God, when they define good and evil for themselves, it results in a world of tragedy and death. This leaves you wondering—is there any hope for humanity? Yes, there is. It's the very next story that answers that question. It's the beginning of God's mission to rescue and restore his world.

Growing as a Self-Feeder

One of my most ardent desires is that you would grow in your ability to be a self-feeder. Some of you are like, "Man, I've been doing this for years." Praise the name. Deeper still. Others of you are like, "Well, I've never really done that."

I remember it was my junior year. I'd been involved with crew my freshman year, my sophomore year, and people were all spending time alone reading their Bibles, and I was like, whatever. I didn't want to do that. But finally, my junior year, I began to actually read my Bible just all by myself. I went from being fed to beginning to be a self-feeder. And that was the moment my life began to change because I began to decide, all by myself, I'm going to know this book.

For the last thirty years, that habit, that commitment has continued. And catalyzing that moment is really my great passion—that moment when it just becomes like, "I'm going to know this. I'm committed to this." I really think this is just a tool, but I think it's a tool that could really be helpful to you.

Here's the last thing I want you to see. Stay within the journey. Scroll down where it's finally time to read the book. Here's a little summary introduction. This is just Bible content. Keep going. You want to get to the text of the Scripture.

I think if you touch the word "done," does it take you to "hit continue"? I'm wrong. So hang on. This is live TV, folks.

Okay, so go all the way to the top. I want you to see they have these things scrolled a little bit down. Let's see where it is. The spirit of God—you can't really see it. I don't see it. You can barely tell.

Do you see where it says:

"In the beginning, I created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth is formless and empty, darkness over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

It is imperceptible on the screen, but that's highlighted. If you look in your app, that's highlighted. If you touch on "spirit of God," Kelly, yeah, it brings stuff up.

So anytime that the theme of Ruach shows up here in this first eleven chapters, if you touch it, there's a little double-click thing that'll give you a little bit more insight into what's going on here and what does the Ruach mean here. I don't know why it's so unimaginably faint there, but you can see it on your actual app, right?

So those are just—as you read through that first movement, there's little touch points. You're like, "Oh, Ruach. I see. Oh, who would have known that the spirit and the word breeze and the word wind are all the same?" And sometimes it gets translated in even more obscure ways, but they just capture them for you and remind you what's going on. And if you click on those little purple tags, then they bring you into a little bit more insight, and sometimes there's quizzes and stuff behind those as well.

The Plan

The goal is you go home, you get the app, you watch some of the introductory videos, and then every couple of weeks, you just check in. What's the new movement? What are the themes? What are we looking for? And over the next twelve months, you walk yourself through the Pentateuch and get a rock solid foundation for all the rest of what the scripture says. I think that would be amazing.

Just the Pentateuch in a year? That's all they're doing. Just those first five books for twelve months.

So we're done here. I hope you get it. And if you're like, "Blah blah blah," then you're really the one that I'm talking to. Because how amazing would it be if you had a habit of every day—what is it? Ten minutes a day? Twenty minutes a day? Go for a half hour? What do you got?—that you're just laying it down bit by bit for the next forty years and you're just gonna hide God's word in your heart laying it down. That would be extraordinary.

Next week, we're gonna be talking about Alpha again because we think it's so fantastic. So we'll do that for here next week. Week after that, we'll be back to continue the study of the life of David.

I think that's it. Thanks for coming. We'll see you.