For any who followed the release of GOD QUESTIONS HIS CREATION: A LOOK AT GENESIS 4-11 through the blogs of the last several months, I also made the blogs for each chapter of Genesis available as a PDF. If you would like to see the entire manuscript as one PDF document, it can be found at the link above.
Just a note, as I was releasing the reflections as a series of blogs, I did edit a very things in the texts – a very few additions and also corrections of typing and grammatical errors. The text in the PDF documents do not have these edits/corrections. The PDF is the document as originally produced in a series of emails to the members of St. Paul Church, Dayton, OH, and to anyone who asked to be included on that email list.
I thank everyone who noted edits which needed to be done, especially Brad M from St. Paul Church.
The reflections began with the blog God Questions His Creation. You can find links to the PDFs of each Genesis chapter at https://frted.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/god-questions-his-creation-genesis-11-as-one-pdf-document/
Your comments, corrections and reflections are always welcomed.
Genesis opens with words of grandeur and mystery: “In the beginning, God…” God creating the heavens and earth is the beginning of space and time which are necessary for our own existence. Genesis does not begin offering insights into this God apart from His creating and His creation; despite God’s revelation of Himself, He remains a mystery to us, with His essence beyond our capability of knowing. (Fifth Century Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus postulates that Genesis does not begin with dogmatics because the ancient Israelites were not yet ready to understand the depths of such revelation and rather needed to learn about the Creator to refute the false worship of creation the Jews were coming to accept from the Egyptians at the time of Moses who is credited with writing the story). 
While we logically read the Genesis story as the beginning of our story as human guests on God’s earth starting with verse 1:1, experientially the story of Genesis begins for us in its last line: “So Joseph died, being a hundred and ten years old; and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt” (Genesis 50:26). This last line of Genesis causes us to stop and ask, “Why do we die? How did we humans created to live in Paradise, ever get to this point of lying dead in a coffin in Egypt?” We started with God creating the heavens and the earth. We started with God breathing His breathe into dust and forming a living being. How did humans created in God’s image and likeness, placed in a perfect garden whose landscape architect and maker is of God, created by God to have dominion over the entire world, chosen by God to be His people and doers of His will, ever end up subject to mortality and lying dead in a coffin in the foreign land of Egypt? Why aren’t we living in a perfect world, in which God clearly reigns over all, and in which humans are clearly regents over every other form of life on earth? Why aren’t we living in paradise or at least the Promised Land? The answer to that question is exactly what the Book of Genesis is about. 
We read Genesis to understand our human condition, our human nature, our human plight, and our common human experience. We read Genesis to experience God’s role in the world in order for this to be the foundation for our faith in God and our hope in the future. We read Genesis to understand Jesus Christ. We read the first book of the Bible to learn how to live in this world with faith and hope, and to prepare ourselves for life in the world to come. Genesis is thus much more about our present and our hoped for future than it is about the past. “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). We read Genesis not so much to discover the past, which we cannot change, but to prepare for the future – for the eschaton which we change by our choices now.
“Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ‘For God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’ But when it says, ‘All things are put in subjection under him,’ it is plain that he is excepted who put all things under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to every one” (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).
This section of Genesis brings us to the birth of Abram, whom many consider to be the father of the great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Genesis offers that overarching 
Each life is important, not random, and not meaningless. Even the use of 
Genesis 11:10 These are the descendants of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old, he became the father of Arpach’shad two years after the flood; 11 and Shem lived after the birth of Arpach’shad five hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. 12 When Arpach’shad had lived thirty-five years, he became the father of Shelah; 13 and Arpach’shad lived after the birth of Shelah four hundred and three years, and had other sons and daughters. 14 When Shelah had lived thirty years, he became the father of Eber; 15 and Shelah lived after the birth of Eber four hundred and three years, and had other sons and daughters. 16 When Eber had lived thirty-four years, he became the father of Peleg; 17 and Eber lived after the birth of Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and had other sons and daughters. 18 When Peleg had lived thirty years, he became the father of Re’u; 19 and Peleg lived after the birth of Re’u two hundred and nine years, and had other sons and daughters. 20 When Re’u had lived thirty-two years, he became the father of Serug; 21 and Re’u lived after the birth of Serug two hundred and seven years, and had other sons and daughters. 22 When Serug had lived thirty years, he became the father of Nahor; 23 and Serug lived after the birth of Nahor two hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. 24 When Nahor had lived twenty-nine years, he became the father of Terah; 25 and Nahor lived after the birth of Terah a hundred and nineteen years, and had other sons and daughters. 26 When Terah had lived seventy years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. 27 Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. 28 Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chalde’ans. 29 And Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sar’ai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. 30 Now Sar’ai was barren; she had no child. 31 Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sar’ai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chalde’ans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.
A genealogy is just a list of names. That would probably be a common summation of what many modern readers get out of the various family trees listed in Genesis. But in the ancient world, a name is not just a word. The name of any being reveals the very nature of the being. Every name is thus a revelation; every name is a thing, not merely pointing out the object to which it refers. The name reveals the meaning; it is the meaning itself, not just that which gets us to the meaning. Each name thus reveals and represents its reality. This is why the naming of the animals in Genesis 2 was such a significant story. It is why the genealogies are so important thousands of years after they were originally remembered; it also explains why the naming of the children in Genesis is of such importance. We, who are shaped by the mass industry of interchangeable parts, read the list of names and think anyone of those people could have been replaced by someone else. In the Scriptures however each name is a reality which had to have been present for the coming of the Messiah. This also explains why the Name of Jesus is so significant to the authors of the New Testament. “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). In the Gospel, it is not merely His being the Messiah, which makes Him so important, but it is also his very Name which makes Jesus essential to us, to our relationship with God, and thus to our salvation. As Matthew reports the Gospel, the angel reveals of Mary that “…she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
If humans aspired to build a tower to reach the heavens, they have not reached their goal, for the Lord still has to “come down” to see the city and tower which humans are building. The puny efforts of humankind to reach the heavens by human technology and engineering “miss the mark” which is what the word “sin” actually means. The leaden literalism of the humans causes them to think of heaven as a location which they can reach by their own physical labors. A hard lesson is about to be learned – there is more to the cosmos than the physical. Heaven is not a physical place, nor is it located “somewhere” in the universe. The concrete thinking of humans has got to be changed so that they can come to understand the reality of the spiritual. Have the humans totally forgotten that they are spiritual beings, created in God’s image and having a soul where the Spirit of God abides? In the Genesis account, their theology is completely wrong. They have forgotten about their own spiritual nature and their anthropomorphic descriptions of God have caused them to think about God completely in human and physical terms. God comes down to see their city, but they apparently are incapable of seeing God. God is not communicating directly to any of the humans. The Lord’s thoughts recorded in this passage of Scripture are His inner thoughts. He is saying nothing to the men of the city. Is it possible that not only can they not see God, but they can not hear Him as well? In Isaiah 44, Isaiah warns the
Fraternized 