Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 35 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Dr. Schreiner sets the course's one big idea, the kingdom of God, then walks the story's opening scenes: creation by the triune God, man made to rule as God's image bearer, Eden as the first sanctuary, the fall, and the first promise of the gospel. Listen for how often the beginning of the story already points to its end.
Dr. Schreiner opens with Graeme Goldsworthy's observation that people mostly learn how to use their Bibles from their teachers at church, so no one has a better opportunity to model sound handling of Scripture than the preacher. The greatest theologians in the church's history have been pastors: Augustine, Luther, Calvin. Pastors walk with people through birth, life, and death, constantly applying Scripture.
Putting the whole Bible together is hard, and honest differences show up precisely here: the major systems, dispensationalism, covenant theology, and new covenant theology, all grow out of biblical theology. The aim of this course is to trace the Bible's storyline.
Scripture has no single center, Schreiner argues, but its most helpful central theme is the kingdom of God: God's rule over God's people through God's covenants. The covenants are the backbone of the story, a reading he shares substantially with Kingdom through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum. The kingdom also involves place, moving from the garden to the land of Canaan to the new creation.
Whatever one's view of the millennium, a question he deliberately sets aside for now, the millennium is temporary and the new creation is forever. It is off center, he presses, to be more excited about the millennium than the new creation, just as it is off center to care more about rewards than eternal life itself.
The story opens with God creating all things. Psalm 33:6, the heavens made by the word of the LORD and the stars by the breath of his mouth, read in light of the whole canon, shows the Father creating through the Word, who is the Son (John 1 is meditating on Genesis 1), and the Spirit, the breath of God hovering over the waters. Schreiner is candid that the psalmist himself was not thinking of Jesus; reading canonically, we see the fullness of what was there. He reads the "let us" of Genesis 1:26 the same way, while granting that good men differ, his colleague Peter Gentry among them.
The gods of the nations are worthless idols; the LORD made the heavens (Psalm 96:5). Satan is truly in conflict with God, but the dualism is historical, never ontological: Satan is a creature, no equal to God. Creation exists to display God's glory and does so every day (Psalm 19:1); unbelief before that display reflects sin's blindness, not a lack of evidence.
Genesis calls the day God rested the seventh day, not the Sabbath: a day signifying God's reign, a day of refreshment and joy, and a day that keeps going. It points forward to the Sabbath rest that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4), found finally in the new creation, where the dead who die in the Lord rest from their labors (Revelation 14:13).
Human beings are the crown of creation, made in God's image to rule the world for God as his vice regents, the way a vice president governs for the sake of the president. Ancient kings set up images to mark the reach of their rule; God set his image bearers in the world.
Adam rules for God, a king, and mediates blessing, a priest. His charge to work and keep the garden (Genesis 2:15) uses the same pair of verbs given to the priests who serve and guard the tabernacle (Numbers 3). The garden is presented as a sanctuary where God dwells with man, a reading Schreiner shares with Greg Beale: God walks in the garden as he dwells in the temple; both are entered from the east; cherubim guard both, from Genesis 3 to the ark to the living creatures around the throne in Revelation 4; the lampstand may recall the tree of life; the river from Eden anticipates the impossible growing river that flows from the temple in Ezekiel 47; and rivers flow downhill, suggesting Eden was a mountain sanctuary as the temple would one day sit on a mountain. Adam and Eve's task was to spread God's blessing and presence over the whole world.
Adam was to rule under God's lordship, and he collapsed. When the serpent entered, he should have driven it out; instead he stood passively by while Eve was tempted, then joined the rebellion. The heart of sin is the displacement of God, wanting to be like God (Genesis 3:5); every unbeliever is finally worshiping self. The fall broke the world too: thorns and thistles, a groaning creation awaiting redemption (Romans 8). Adam and Eve were exiled from God's presence, a picture of hell as eternal exile. And so the story's great question is set: who may ascend the hill of the LORD, who may dwell with God (Psalm 15, Psalm 24)? Only, in the end, those forgiven through Christ's death and resurrection.
Genesis 5 tolls "and he died" over generation after generation, a roll call of death showing Adam's sin reaching the whole race, with Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 still ahead in the story. Doubting the historical Adam is, in Schreiner's word, disastrous; he commends the Crossway volume Theistic Evolution, edited by Wayne Grudem, Stephen Meyer, and others, for a serious treatment.
God puts hostility between the serpent and the woman, between his offspring and hers; her offspring will crush the serpent's head. Revelation identifies the serpent as Satan (Revelation 12), so this is the Bible's first gospel promise, and the rest of the story will trace it. Schreiner commends Jim Hamilton's article following Genesis 3:15 through Scripture.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Where do most people learn how to use their Bibles?
2. What does Dr. Schreiner propose as the Bible's most helpful central theme?
3. In this course's definition, the kingdom of God is God's rule over his people through his what?
4. Which does the lecture insist lasts forever?
5. Read canonically, the word by which the heavens were made (Psalm 33) points finally to whom?
6. The image of God in this lecture centers on humanity's role as what?
7. Adam's charge to work and keep the garden matches the duties of whom?
8. Which is NOT a garden and temple parallel given in the lecture?
9. When the serpent entered the garden, Adam should have done what?
10. What is the heart of sin, as this lecture puts it?
11. Genesis calls the day God rested what?
12. Why is Genesis 3:15 programmatic?
All twelve correct. Lecture 1 is complete.
Schreiner says some Christians are more excited about the millennium than the new creation, and more about rewards than eternal life itself. Where does that pull show up in your own thinking, and what re-centers you?
Adam was a king who would not rule and a priest who would not guard his charge. Where are we tempted to the same passivity in our own households and callings?
Psalm 15 and Psalm 24 ask who may dwell with God. How would you answer that question for a child at your table this week, using this lecture?
Genesis 3:15, the Bible's first promise: the offspring of the woman will crush the serpent's head.
The lecture's own recommendations: The King in His Beauty by Thomas Schreiner, the book behind this course. Kingdom through Covenant by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum. Theistic Evolution, the Crossway volume on the historical Adam. And Jim Hamilton's article tracing Genesis 3:15 through Scripture.