Genesis Twice

Dee has started at the beginning twice and stopped in the same place twice.

She came to faith at forty-one, which is late enough that everybody around her assumes a great deal.

That is the whole difficulty and it is nobody's fault. In that church she is a grown woman with a job and opinions, and people talk to her the way you talk to a grown woman, and so nobody has ever said any of the things they would say to a fourteen-year-old.

She has bought two Bibles. The first one she chose because it was on the shelf and it looked serious, and the print is small and the English is four hundred years old and she loves the sound of it and cannot follow a paragraph. The second one she bought because somebody mentioned a translation in passing and she wrote it on her hand in the car park.

And twice, in two years, she has decided to do this properly and started at page one.

Genesis is fine. Genesis is, in fact, extraordinary, and she got through it both times at speed. Exodus held up. And then both times, at almost exactly the same point, somewhere in the endless careful specification of a tent, she stopped.

She did not decide to stop. She simply put it down one evening and did not pick it up, and by the time she noticed it had been five weeks.

And what she concluded, both times, is the thing this article exists for.

She concluded that she is not a reader. That other people have something she does not. That there is a kind of person who can do this and she is, at forty-one, evidently not one.

She said it out loud exactly once, to a woman called Pen who runs the coffee on a Sunday, and she said it as a joke, the way people do.

She said, "I have started Genesis twice."

And Pen said, "Oh, love. Nobody told you, did they?"

And Dee said, "Told me what?"

And Pen said, "Start with a Gospel. Start with Luke or with John and read it like a book. Nobody sensible starts at the front."

And Dee said, and she is not proud of how it came out, "Then why is it at the front?"

They both laughed. And then Dee said, quieter, "Why did nobody tell me that?"

Now let me ask you where you stopped.

Because if you came to this late, or came back to it after a long time away, you have a place where you stopped. And you probably drew a conclusion about yourself there, and I would guess you have never said it out loud.

It will not come back empty

Isaiah says something about God's word that is not about the reader at all, and that is exactly why it helps.

So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

It will not return to Me empty. The subject of that sentence is the word, not the person reading it. Its effectiveness is described as a property of the thing itself, like rain, which is the image two verses earlier: it comes down, it waters, and it does its work.

Without accomplishing what I desire. And notice whose desire is doing the accomplishing. Not the reader's diligence. His.

So hear this said over you, with two abandoned attempts behind you. What you have read has done something in you and you are not the one who has to make it work, and the five weeks you stopped did not cancel the Genesis you read. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a page live in a person, and He is not withholding that from a woman who put it down in a tent.

Now let me say the ordinary thing that nobody said to you, plainly, without making an occasion of it.

Start with a Gospel.

Luke, if you like an account with everything in order and a great many women in it. John, if you want the one that goes slowly and deeply and is written in the simplest vocabulary in the New Testament. Mark, if you want it fast.

Read it like a book. Left to right, a chapter or two at a time, not stopping to look anything up.

Then Acts, because it carries straight on from Luke and is the best story in the collection. Then a short letter. Then, when you are ready and not before, go back and do the front.

That is not a secret and it is not clever. It is what almost everybody does and nobody ever says out loud, because the people who know it learned it so long ago that it has stopped being information.

Now let me guard something, because this article is not a complaint about your church.

Nobody withheld this from you. Pen was not being lazy for two years. There is a particular blindness that comes with knowing a thing well: you stop being able to see which parts are obvious, and a room full of people who all learned this at nine has no way of noticing that a woman who came at thirty-nine did not.

That is why they built schools. Not because anybody was hiding anything, but because a thing everybody assumes is a thing nobody teaches, and the people it fails are always the ones who arrived last.

And here is what to do with the conclusion you drew.

You are not a person who cannot read this. You are a person who was handed the hardest possible entry point by an accident of binding order, and got further into it than most people manage, twice.

You are able to read this book, and the Word says it does not come back empty, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it land, and neither of those depends on where in the volume you happen to be standing.