BEMA 7: The Preface (2025)

Transcription Status

17 Feb 25 — Initial public release

16 Feb 25 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteer: Sergey Bazylko

The Preface

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. In this episode, we look back over the first 11 chapters of Genesis and work to understand their significance to the greater narrative of Scripture.

Marty Solomon: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll have a nice, short, concise, but a really, really cool conversation today. Kind of one of my favorites. I’m going to say one of my favorites for so many episodes that they can’t all be my favorites, but darn it. This is a good one. I enjoy it.

Brent: This is really good. Yeah.

Marty: We’re going to, we’re going to basically talk about, there’s no new stories today. We’re not going to go over any new stories today, but we are going to look back over the group of stories that we’ve been looking at. We come now to the end of Genesis 1–11, and there’s something unique that I like to do for this section of the scripture. And we will, as we go through the journey, I will always talk about this section, Genesis 1–11, as the preface. And we have one of those presentations today, right, Brent?

Brent: We do.

Marty: So we got some slides, and if you’re in a place where you get a reference to those, they might be, well, especially today, they’re going to be super helpful. You won’t nearly appreciate the stuff we’re talking about today without the slides. So at some point, pull them up and appreciate them.

But this first slide here is going to basically give us the outline. I believe that God’s telling a story in the Bible. There’s a narrative that God has. And in Genesis 1–11, He’s working with what I like to call the preface.

We know how prefaces work. You might read, I don’t know, you might—I remember when I read Lord of the Rings, Tolkien with my family. And they had read Hobbit a few years earlier. But if you hadn’t read Hobbit, there’s a preface essentially.

In the first chapter, there’s what I would call a preface at the very beginning of the Lord of the Rings, the first book. And it basically goes over a whole bunch of the backstory about how you got there and what we’re dealing with. And it’s going to introduce you to Middle Earth, because Middle Earth’s a little different than the world we live in, Brent.

Brent: A little bit. Not so different when you boil it down, but yeah.

Marty: Yeah? Yeah, it’s a little bit different. Yeah, yeah, we got some orcs and some elves and some dwarves. And you need to kind of get used to the Shire and what hobbits are. And so there’s a preface. And it basically is helping you reframe. It’s helping you reshape. It’s helping you rethink the world that you’re looking at.

And then the Bible has what I would call the introduction. We’re about ready to start going through the introduction on the podcast. It’s gonna be Genesis 12–50. And it’s going to be the introduction. For me, it was the rest of that first chapter, maybe even first two or three chapters of that first book of Lord of the Rings, where you’re in the Shire.

It’s the setup, like you’re being told about, it’s not the preface where you’re given all the backstory, but it’s the setup to the story. I’m gonna get introduced to the ring and what has to happen on some level, the plot, all the setup that I need. I have the main characters, I know what the gist is. That’s your introduction.

So the preface of God’s story, Genesis 1–11. High level, high level backstory, stories of origin, big meta level conversations about what the world is like, who is God, who is mankind, how do all these things relate to one another.

And then in the introduction, I’m going to get introduced to Abraham, the family of God. I’m going to get introduced to the story. And then the rest of the narrative ends up being Exodus through Revelation is how we’ll talk about it for now.

And that’s going to be the story, a story of Exodus, a story of deliverance, a story of, I don’t know, people might want to use a lot of language, salvation, like whatever you want to call this. It’s the rest of God’s story, the rest of God’s narrative, Exodus through Revelation.

But what we want to do is we want to look, let’s step back and look at that preface. I want to look, I want to take a greater, closer look at the preface. The preface is made up of eight essential stories.

We’re going to go to the next slide there. And these eight stories make up Genesis 1–11. It’s essentially the stories that we’ve looked at with the exception of the genealogies, the stories we’ve looked at so far on the podcast, we’ve got creation. And then we’ve got the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Genesis 2–3. We have Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Then we have a genealogy in Genesis 5, give or take.

And then we have the flood, Genesis 6 through the beginning of 9. Then a few episodes ago, we talked about Noah’s curse, the vineyard and the curse—the rest of Genesis 9 and 10. And then you’re going to have the tower of Babel that we looked at in the last episode, the first part of Genesis 11. And the rest of Genesis 11 is going to be another genealogy.

And so you have these eight sections, these eight stories, creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, genealogy, the flood, Noah’s curse, Tower of Babel, and another genealogy.

We also talked about kind of if you were, like really, like in the groove and if you were paying attention and if you were feeling, if you were smelling what we were cooking, then you noticed us talk about the similar, like there were similar parts of these stories. Every story had problems. That’s how we got into the story. We’d noticed the problems. Every story ended up being a chiasm. We didn’t always talk about the chiasm, but every story, we talked about a lot of them and every story when you go back ends up being a chiasm.

So creation, there were problems with the story. There was a chiasm. The creation story was about the goodness of creation. It was about a God who knew when to stop, when to say enough. And there was an invitation to rest.

Adam and Eve also had problems. It was also a chiasm. But then the story changed. It was about tragedy. Instead of a good story, it was about tragedy. Instead of stopping, there was an obsession. They were obsessed with moving forward. Instead of rest, there was mistrust.

The Cain and Abel story, very similar. There were problems. We didn’t talk about the chiasm, but it’s there. In fact, I bet a lot of you have the tools enough that a lot of you could go back and find that chiasm. And it, too, was a tragedy. It, too, was a story of obsession. And it, too, was a story of mistrust. And then the genealogy.

And then we got to the flood. And we talked about how the flood mirrored, And it paralleled in a lot of ways the story of creation. It had problems. It was a chiasm. We talked about that chiasm. It’s actually one of my favorite chiasms because of how easy it is to see and to find. It’s still a challenge. I don’t want to say anybody should be able to do it, but because it’s the numbers, it’s a little bit more easy to grab. It too was a story about the goodness. It was God reaffirming the goodness of creation. It was a God who knew how to stop, stop destroying. The first story was about stop creating. This time he stopped destroying. It was a story of rest—rest.

And then we had the story of Noah’s curse and then we had problems and we had a chiasm. I bet you could find those things. And then we talked about the tragedy. We talked about the obsession. We talked about the mistrust.

We had a story of Tower of Babel that too had problems. We talked about the chiasm of the Tower of Babel. It was obviously a story of tragedy and obsession, and it was a story of mistrust followed by a genealogy. Now, if we’re really paying attention to this and looking at the slide, Brent, people have probably already noticed. Do you see anything going on here in the slide, Brent?

Brent: Yeah, it seems like there’s some parallels happening here.

Marty: These stories parallel each other, and that next slide shows you with the arrows how these stories relate. I can remember, I can remember, Brent, I didn’t even see this to begin with. I saw all the chiasms independently. And I can remember teaching this for the first time long before BEMA was a podcast.

I was just teaching to college students, and it was my very first group that I ever had on Washington State University’s campus. There’s only two, maybe three people in the class together. My very first student was a guy by the name of Paris Shewey. And we were learning about all this stuff and I was talking about how I basically drew this slide on the whiteboard.

Brent: [laughs]

Marty: And I said, “Look at the chiasm here, look at the chiasm here, look at the chiasm here, look at the chiasm.” And I remember Paris saying, “Oh, so all of them actually are a chiasm. All of them together are like a big chiasm.” And I remember sitting there going, “No, Paris, like pay attention. Listen to what I’m trying to tell you.”

And then right as I was like mid-sentence in my mind, as I was just kind of frustrated, it dawned on me what Paris was saying. I turned around and looked at the whiteboard and I went, “Oh my goodness. There is a chiasm of chiasms. It all relates to one another.”

And so if you go to that next slide that Brent has, you can see the ABCD-ABCD nature of this chiasm. So it’s not an inverted parallelism. It’s a parallelism. And a lot of times these ABCD-ABCDs don’t necessarily have a center. And I think on this you could actually argue that there’s really no center because the center exists on the other side as well.

But if I were to talk about the center as we have been talking about, the center of a chiasm. I remember that day as Paris Shewey said that, I remember sitting there going, “Well, what’s the center of this chiasm going to be?” So I started pulling it all apart, and I looked and sure enough, right in the middle, if you go to the next slide, here’s the passage, Genesis 5:28–29, that lies as I see it at the center of the chiasm. Go ahead and read that verse there, those two verses there, Brent.

Brent: When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.”

Marty: I think one could make the case that the center of the center is literally the name Noah. Noah means in the Hebrew “comfort,” noach, “comfort.” And this verse tells us how Noah is going to provide this comfort. How, Brent, when you look at that verse, how is Noah going to provide comfort to creation? What is he going to do for us? What does that sound like to you?

Brent: He will relieve us of the labor and painful toil.

Marty: Sounds like Sabbath, sounds like rest, sounds like trusting the story.

Brent: Sounds like rest.

Marty: It sounds like this massive chiasm is actually making the exact same point that our initial chiasm was making, that so many of these other chiasms were trying to talk to us about. This really is, the preface of God’s story really is, an invitation to what we’re going to say over and over again: Trust the Story.

When we say that, what are we saying? saying trust that the story is good, trust that creation, maybe more specifically, trust that creation is good, trust that there’s enough, trust that God loves creation, trust that God has the best interest in mind for creation. In Genesis 1–11, we see the brilliant design of the Scriptures, because this is crazy, Brent. to say, “Chiasm, chiasm, chiasm,” but then to have a chiasm of chiasms.

I had a teacher once that used to always use the joke, like, it’s almost like the writers of Scripture had help, which is always supposed to be a little funny, like this. Whatever is going on here, this is beyond what just a mere human being on his own, on her own, should be able to accomplish the way that these things are being pulled together.

Brent: Well, and I love the experience that you had of this because your student flipped the script and brought you to the point of discovery.

Marty: Absolutely. Which is, which, I mean, that’s it, too. I mean, that is just the absolute essence of what this experience should look like. When your students get it—no greater affirmation, no greater encouragement exists for a teacher than watching students actually go beyond you and excel in the things that they see and the things that they do, and the things that you find in the middle of that.

So what do we learn from this? We learn that the beginning of God’s story, the preface, is an invitation to reframe our understanding of the world. This preface is asking us to rethink, and you’re like, it was asking them to rethink. No, no, no, it’s asking us. Brent Billings and Marty Solomon and you and I, like it’s asking us to rethink and reframe what we understand about the world.

Who is God? Is God full of wrath? Is God full of anger? ‘Cause the God I’m finding in these stories, it seems like a God that might be angry on the surface, like the flood story. Here he is destroying the whole world. And yet by the time I’m done with the flood story, it’s a God saving the whole world. It’s a God that knows when to say enough.

It’s a God—this is not the God that I think I assume when I come to the opening pages of the Bible. I grew up in a Christian world that told me the Old Testament God, the Jewish God, was an angry God, a God full of wrath. But thank goodness that Jesus came, because then God became loving. But God has always been loving.

From the opening pages, this was a God that sat with Cain and pled with him, pleaded with him, and said, “Cain, you’ve got to believe. If you don’t just do the next right thing, sin is crouching at your door, but my position on you hasn’t changed. Why are you upset, Cain? I’m not upset. I didn’t like your sacrifice that much. I’m not upset.” You’re being invited to reframe what you think about yourself, like that Cain story.

You’re being invited to rethink what you understand about humanity. I think for us Christian readers, there’s a lot of theology that we presume when we bring into the story. The preface is inviting us to reframe some of our most central foundational assumptions when it comes to theology. We’re being invited to reframe what we understand about what God is doing in the world and how he relates to it. That is a beautiful preface.

Brent: Okay, Marty, well, I think that kind of does it for this episode, a little bit shorter than some of the stuff that’s come before, but we left a few things on the table. We’ve got some chiasms that maybe we brought forward but didn’t actually lay out.

And so, if you need something to do with your time, go back and revisit those stories and see what you can find in those chiasms, and maybe find some other details that you didn’t notice and just encourage people to keep digging into the Text because we want to make these discoveries. That’s the point. We want to make the discovery.

If we just tell you everything on the podcast, and spoiler alert, we’re going to start to speed up. We’re not going to cover every verse. We’re not going to cover every story because we want to give you tools. We don’t want to give you all the answers. We don’t have all the answers.

And this idea of discovery, like, how much more powerful was it for you to be in that classroom and turn around and look at that whiteboard and make that discovery that your student had just made. What a powerful moment. So we don’t want to rob you of that chance to make your own discoveries.

Marty: Absolutely. And I know that some people will be sitting there going, “But wait a minute, I want to know, tell me about those two or three chiasms you didn’t touch on.” But we want to leave some of that. We want to give you the tools, but we want to leave some of that.

How is the Tower of Babel, how does that mirror and parallel the story of Cain and Abel? And we could go through and we could talk about, well, Cain and Abel is a story about wandering. It’s the story of Tower of Babel. It’s about trying to settle, but they have to wander. Like there are all these parallels, but if we answer all those things for us, we rob and we rob us of the joy of what Brent just said. Which is sometimes you guys find even more.

Sometimes you all find even better than what I found or what I have in my notes. And I get to hear that from you and see that in you, and it’s beautiful. So we wanna leave some of the good stuff, leave some of the good stuff for you in your discussion group or whatever it might be for you to find and discover on your own.

Brent: And we do want to get through the whole Bible in a reasonable amount of time. If we went over every story, we would never get to the culmination of the Scriptures. So yeah, we have to move forward, but there’s plenty of things for you guys to do, plenty of time in between episodes.

So don’t necessarily slow down too much, but take some time as you’re studying to notice these literary structures and other things that you are maybe learning about for the first time. Probably. I was definitely learning about all this stuff for the first time. There’s this tendency to feel like, man, I wish I knew this stuff earlier. Well, yeah, me too.

I was only 26 when I got into BEMA. I’m like, man, I wish I would have known this earlier. It almost doesn’t matter how old you are. You’re probably going to wish you knew this stuff earlier, but the best thing you can do at this point is to just get started.

Marty: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brent: Okay. Well, that does it for this episode. You can go to bemadiscipleship.com. Check out the presentation if you didn’t have a chance to already. And we’ll be back next episode to start into the introduction of God’s narrative. And we’ll talk about Abraham and all of those fun things. So thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Annie Komarisky: Hi, I’m Annie Komarisky, a BEMA listener in Auburn, New York, and here is the prayer from Episode 7’s Companion.

God, as we wake up each morning in the face of our chaos or worries or fears, may we accept your invitation to stop creating, and rest. May we accept your invitation to stop destroying, and rest.

May we reject the cycle of vengeance, reject the need for empire and power, and may we accept your invitation to trust. Trust that creation is good. Trust that Your Word is enough. Trust the Story. Amen.