The Book of Genesis: Long List of Sins.

The Book of Genesis is a Long List of Sins.

I think that statement will shock some; it would have shocked me up until a few weeks ago.

But then we started doing our final pre-printing read through of our translation work, obviously starting at Genesis, and as I read it to the translation helpers, it was clear that Genesis was a long list of the sins committed by both God’s people and others. The sins were so glaring I was ashamed, and had to tell the people listening, “Yes they were God’s people, but he sinned; yes she sinned, but we do not want to do what she did.” I wanted to somehow minimize their actions, but I could not!

Frankly I have never looked at the book of Genesis like this before, but it came out clear as day, as in chapter after chapter, we read about people sinning, and many of the sins quite heinous; we would be excommunicated from our churches if we did what they did!

Here is an outline of Genesis, chapter by chapter, listing most of the sins.

Gen 3: Adam and Eve blatantly disobey God, hid from him, Adam blames God, and turns on Eve.

Gen 4: Cain kills his brother, is insolent to God, disregards God’s warning about sin, and simply will not submit to God, but aliens himself with his father the devil (1Jn 3:12).

Gen 4: Lamech starts the practice of polygamy (½ of the Angave men have 2 wives !), and out of pride (a great sin) follows Cain’s example, and murders someone who insulted him, and then brags about it!

Gen 6: The condition of the world was such that only a clean sweep would satisfy God, but being the merciful God that he is (he delights in mercy!), he gave them 120 years to repent (the time it took Noah to build the ship, being clearly seen by everybody around him), and yet still nobody would listen to him, Noah who is called a preacher of righteousness (2Pe 2:5).

Gen 9: Ham’s sin against Noah is not that he just happened to see Noah naked, but the Hebrew word carries with it the idea of “gaze on with delight;” he saw and then gazed with homosexual delight and desire!

Gen 10: Nimrod instigates mass organized rebellion against God with the Tower of Babel. He is called a “mighty hunter before the Lord.” The word “before” has a negative concept, he was an aggressive adversary in God’s face; this has nothing to do with hunting animals. Read Keil and Delitzsch of this.

https://worthy.bible/commentaries/keil-delitzsch-commentary/commentary-on-genesis-10

Gen 12: Abraham sins by lying to the Egyptians about Sarah not being his wife, and he causes Sarah to sin. He lied because he did not believe God could or would protect him. It is so obviously wrong, the heathens rebuke him.

Gen 13: The herdsmen fight. Lot leaves Abraham. Family divides, and with full knowledge of what goes on in Sodom, Lot prefers to go there, rather than to be with Abraham, the one to who God gave the promise, and with whom he could inherit the promise.

Gen 14: Is a list of fighting and pillage and plunder and murder.

Gen 16: Sarah now causes Abraham to sin, by telling him to sleep with Hagar her servant girl. Hagar turns on Sarah, Sarah turns on Abraham, Hagar is sent out into the desert to die; the entire event is a total mess-up, with one sin upon another.

Gen 19: Lot offers his 2 daughters to the men of the city, to rape and abuse. Lot’s wife disobeys the angels and is turned into salt. Lot’s daughters get him drunk and then each one commits incest with him.

Gen 20: Abraham sins again in the exact same way, lying to Abimelech saying that Sarah is his sister, and exposing her again to being taken by another man. His motive clearly being fear that God could not or would not keep him safe, and this is after he had done the same thing in chapter 12, after being given the promises of chapters 15 and 17, and after God’s rescue of Lot in chapter 19!

Gen 21: In an attempt to retain his place as the first born, Ismael mocks Isaac. We see this all the time here in PNG, for in a polygamous society, there is great conflict between the children of the first wife and the children of the second wife: all is not equal, all is not loving and kind. We call it “the pecking order;” that is mild, it is a matter of survival; the drive to be top dog is brutal!

Gen 25: Abraham had concubines. Esau sins by despising his birthright and selling it to Jacob for a bowl of soup; Jacob displays his bent to trickery by negotiating the deal.

Gen 26: Isaac lies to Abimelech saying that Rebekah is his sister. He did just what his father twice did, even though he would have known the facts of both events, and the resultant rebuke and shame that got Abraham. Ismael takes a wife from the heathen.

Gen 27: This whole chapter is again one with so many sins! Rebekah does not trust God to bring to pass his promise that Jacob will be the leading son, so she sets about to deceive Isaac her husband. Jacob is a willing participant to lie and deceive his father, no just once, but several times. Esau than vows to kill Jacob.

Gen 28: Esau marries another heathen, clearly out of spite.

Gen 29: Laban deceives Jacob and gives him Leah instead of Rachel. Then he gives him Rachel, polygamy.

Gen 30: The competition between the 2 sisters is something most Westerns would not understand, because polygamy is un-known, and people now-a-days do not want children anyway; BUT in a polygamous culture, where the number of children a woman bears is a huge status symbol, and also shows that her husband loves her, because he is sleeping with her, shown by the fact that she keeps getting pregnant, this competition is so common place, it is a culturally defining item. Also, something that most people would miss, the women would often be pregnant at the same time, so babies were being born at basically the same time. This is a total mess! The polygamy is sinful. The competition is sinful. The giving of the servant girls Zilpah and Bilhah to Jacob is sinful. Remember, I had to make sure the language helpers knew this was all sinful!

Gen 31: What ever was going on with the sheep, it certainly sounds like basic Animistic thinking: if they mate in front of white sticks, they will have stripped lambs! And Rachel stealing her father’s idol, and then lying about it!

Gen 34: The rape of Dinah, and the deception of Simeon and Levi (I wonder who they learned that from!?); then the murder of all the men, all of whom were innocent, and even Shechem, who though he raped Dinah, was called “honorable” (v 19). And after having killed all the men, they pillaged the city of its goods, and took the children to be slaves, and the women to be slaves and concubines. How can such behavior be condoned?

Gen 37: Joseph’s brothers wanting to kill him, but settling for selling him into slavery in Egypt. Then to cover up the whole affair, they plan out an elaborate deception (again, who did they learn that from!?) and then they lie to their father. They lived with that lie for years, and it ate like a canker in their conscious.

Gen 38: First Er and Onan; Er is so wicked, the Lord slays him! Then Onan refuses to fulfill his role as the brother (in Leverite marriage, which was part of the Jewish Law, and is not un-common in tribal cultures), so the Lord slays him too!

Now Judah and Tamar. Judah breaks his promise to Tamar to marry her to Shechem; think Ps 15:4: "who swears to his own hurt and changeth not." That was sin. Then, instead of getting married again, Judah figures he will just avail himself of a prostitute. Then, and while we cannot justify Tamar’s deception, yet she was the wronged party (2 wrongs don’t make a right), she prostitutes herself to her father-in-law. And then consider the hypocrisy of Judah: "Kill her!" But he at least confesses his sin, a bright spot in a chapter full of sin.

Gen 39: Starts the story of Joseph. Because we look at the end of the story, where Joseph says to his brothers, “You meant it for evil, but God for good,” we kind of look at everything in between as good, and gloss over the sin.

While Joseph does give God credit for showing him the meaning of the dreams, and the scriptures clearly say God was with Joseph, the fact that Joseph married the daughter of a pagan priest, who would her self have been a pagan, was a clear violation of God’s will. Great grandpa Abraham told his servant to not marry grandpa Isaac to a pagan girl; Joseph knew that, and he also knew that his grandmother Rebekah sent his dad Jacob back to Paran to get a wife of her own people, because she was loath that Jacob marry a local girl as Esau had done: "And Rebekah said to Isaac, I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth: if Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these which are of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?" Joseph knew all of that! He should have risked execution as Daniel had (the fiery furnace and lion’s den), by refusing to marry her, and telling Pharaoh his God only wanted him to marry a Hebrew girl; they all knew he was a Hebrew. He should have been obedient, but he was not.

Gen 42 – 43 – 44: We tend to look at Joseph’s behavior toward his brothers, his testing them, his bringing their sin to their minds, etc, in a positive light, BUT he lied to them, he set them up with deception, manipulated the situation, etc. If someone did this to us, even to show us our sin, we would say they did us wrong; it is akin to en-entrapment, which is illegal.

Before we noted that Joseph had married the daughter of a pagan priest; she too was a pagan, a practitioner of occult magic!, and her practices rubbed off on Joseph. He refers to his cup, as a cup for divination, and himself as one who certainly divines (Gen 44:15); this is the word for enchantment, witch craft, sorcery. Should a Christian ever say, even joking, they used occult practices?

This is why the scriptures say: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?  And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” 2Co 6:14-16

Joseph fell far short of being a Daniel!

So ends the long list of sins we find recorded in Genesis. I might have missed some, or included things you might take exception to, but the point is clear. We tend to read Genesis and see only the positive: the gospel promise of Gen 3, Abel and Noah being righteous, the calling of Abraham, the covenant, etc. but we fail to see the sins, a long litany of sins, grievous sins against light and love and knowledge (as the Puritans would say), revealing at a minimum, weak faith in those who were God’s people.

What do we learn from this? For we always want to learn from what others do, whether good or bad.

1) The Christian life is lived in the real world, with real people, by real people, with real temptations, in real and complex situations. In point of fact ONLY Christians live in the real world, because even though we sin, only we see what is really going on. We see the real story, which is going on behind the scenes. If you are un-saved, you are blind to the real world around you, which is a world order under the sway of the devil, whose only desire is that you spend eternity with him in hell! When Christians sin, we confess it, repent of it, fix it, and purpose to not do it again, for we know we are sinning against God our Father.

2) God’s people still sin. No one is perfect this side of heaven.

3) There are consequences to sin, both practical, in the cause and effect of life, and from directly from God’s hand in discipline and/or judgment, in a supernatural way.

Consider:

- Cain becomes a vagabond

- God kills every man, women, child, and animal in the Flood

- Ham is cursed

- Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed

- Lot’s daughter’s decedents become the enemies of Israel

- Abraham is rebuked by 2 heathen kings, to his great shame

- Isaac suffers the same rebuke and shame as his father

- after Simeon and Livi kill all the men of Shechem, Jacob has to flee, and live in great fear of retaliation from the people around him

I could list more, but the point is made: sin has consequences.

4) Thankfully God does not hold the sins of his people against us, but washes us daily in the blood of Christ, as we confess our sins, acknowledging them as sin, and ask for forgiveness. God did not abandon Abraham, or Lot, or Isaac, or Jacob, or Sarah, etc; thankfully he does not abandon us!

5) But that statement cannot be used as an excuse to sin: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” Rom 6:1-2

6) While God is not the author of any of those sins, rather each person was fully responsible for their personal sins, yet the plan of God goes ahead, incorporating those sins, and as Joseph did said, “You meant it for evil, God meant it for good.” Understanding this is definetly above our pay grade!

7) Their is a group of people called "God’s people," who as Heb 11 says, could have gone back to the land of their fathers, to their pagan ways, but they chose not to, they chose to be pilgrims in a strange land, seeking a better country, a heavenly country, whose builder and maker is God. Abraham could have gone back; Isaac could have gone back; Jacob could have gone back; Joseph could have been buried in Egypt, but they were looking for a better land, not a piece of ground called Canaan, but for heaven.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. 

But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.” Heb 11:13-16

Wounded and weary, bandaged up, limping and hobbling, yet are you one of “God’s people? Are you walking the narrow road, seeking a heavenly country?

3 March 2025