Bible Project: Without God We Fall on our Face

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting in the main tabernacle at my church camp in Brown City, bored out of my mind. It was probably a missions service, which everyone knew were the all-time most boring. In that moment, I decided I would do what any ambitious 12-year-old kid would do: I would read the Bible from cover to cover.

To do that, you have to start from the beginning with “in the beginning…”

There was one major hiccup, however: I couldn’t make it through the first three chapters of Genesis. I wasn’t able to make it to Abel (he appears in chapter 4). If I had made it to chapter five, I would have found the first reference to my namesake — the second oldest dude in the Bible.

The stuff that I could understand was pretty heavy, especially for someone who, to that point, had been reading books by Judy Blume and Roald Dahl.

Of course I knew the story of Adam and Eve, but there was a lot of other stuff in there that went way over my head. There were names I couldn’t pronounce, cultural references that made no sense to me.

There was a flaming sword, however. That was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, the Bible Project didn’t exist back then to walk me through this process in a way that I could understand. Fortunately, we have this incredible resource which can bring the themes of the entire Bible to life in a way that everyone can understand.

Watch the video linked above. This is the first in a series devoted to understanding the Torah — the first five books of the Old Testament. Through these stories, you will get a better understanding of who God is through unified themes found throughout the scriptures.

In this first part of Genesis, you will learn about how human beings are really bad at recognizing good and evil in the absence of God. Through all the stories, you find one overriding theme: When we try to go it alone, without God, we always fall on our face.

God created the world and then created all of us to live in it and take care of it.

The lesson here is simple: No matter how good we are, we are not good enough without God.

See you next Sunday!