Jan 2 - A Great Beginning

January 2

A Great Beginning

Ge 2:8 ¶ And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

What better way to start than to be in the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had everything they needed because God had planted the garden. They also had a great beginning because they had none of today’s worries.  They had a job, (tending the garden) they had no monthly bills, were not in debt, had no health problems, no taxes, no disagreeable neighbors or relatives, no problem children (yet) and no worries.  They did not have any of your problems or the things that are burdensome to you.  I cannot think of a better way for the book of Genesis to start.  

The year ahead of us holds great possibilities.  There is just something about starting a new year that makes us want to make New Years resolutions.  We want the coming year to be better than the last one. The anticipation of accomplishing a long desired goal fills us with determination that this year we will do better. 

Adam and Eve did not need to make any such resolutions. Things for them were already perfect.  What a fantastic beginning for them. Their story should have ended “And they lived happily ever after”  But we know what happened to them. They sinned, got evicted, one son murdered his brother, and it was downhill from there.

The book of Genesis is a book of beginnings, but how does it end. We can learn more by seeing how things end than how they began.  We all know stories of people or groups that started with great promise and ended as failures. We understand where they went wrong. If only they had done or not done something, how much better it would have been for them.  The Book of Genesis offers us the same lesson. It started in the Garden of Eden and ended “…in a coffin in Egypt!”   

Ge 50:26 So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. 

What!!   How did it go from the Garden of Eden to a coffin in Egypt?  Well, first Adam and Eve disobeyed God (sin) their son murdered his brother, and every major person in the book of Genesis was flawed. They were sometimes faithful but they all chose to sin. 

None of these people went from faithful to faithless, from great promise to utter disaster in a single day. It took some of them years of daily making small bad decisions.

How will this year end for you? The year starts off with a clean slate. Every time you excuse yourself from following your resolution you are voting to fail.  Sometimes people talk to me about big problems they are having and ask for advice. I tell them how to eat an elephant; One spoonful at a time. Your year will end as the sum total of all the “spoonfuls” you fill it with. 

Let us be mindful of the Blessings of God in our lives and live according to his will for us so our year does not end “In a coffin in Egypt.”