Abraham, savior of the world

Genesis 12-25

It seems you can't do any justice to the book of Genesis without focusing on Abraham as its key character. The first eleven chapters have told a story of how God created the world and us humans to cultivate it, and how we chose death over life and deteriorated into depravity. God purified the world with a flood to wipe out all living creatures, except for faithful Noah and the creatures he was able to preserve on the ark. Now that this "baptism" has taken place, there are new life and new possibilities for the world; yet humans are by no means perfect. There is a strange ambiguity in this introductory story: was Noah really worth saving? Is not the human race even from Noah just the same sinful race of Adam which the flood was meant to wipe out? Genesis makes no attempt to settle that question. Instead, it goes on to God's new plans. The Bible may bring up more questions than it answers, but its agenda is always forward-looking. The unanswered (and possibly unanswerable) questions must be allowed to remain, while God does a new thing to bring new life to his world.