'Chapter 1-2'

In these chapters, the prophecy comes to be and an oppressive government comes into power and oppressed the weak and the destitute. This may be one of God's bigger pet peeves. His justice is horribly offended when a strong person or group oppresses a weak person or group. So, at this point the Amorites have become so wicked that God, in His righteousness, has deemed them irredeemable. If He really is God, he knows when people are not going to come back. He does not go willy nilly destroying people, as evidenced in Jonah, which we'll get to. So, the Israelites cry out to God to save them from oppression. God has a soft spot for the children of His followers. So Israel's children ask to be delivered from oppression and they are. God raises up Moses. God's way of doing things should become apparent soon. I'll make a post soon just on the concept of vocation, as Moses is a great example. So Moses is raised up by God to lead Israel and he ends up through some exquisitely planned moves by God living as a son of the princess of Egypt. Moses saw an Egyptian mistreating an Israelite and he killed the man. He takes on one of God's characteristics in hating oppression, but he reacts wrongly, on his own. Let this sink in as a sign of how important faith is. Faith allows us to approach the horribleness that is sometimes manifest in life with the greatest strategist and biggest strong arm on our side. If we kill the oppressor and bury him in the sand, then we can ruin our chance of God bringing us in to fix things with all the armies of Heaven behind us. So at this murder being revealed to Pharoah, he flees to a place called Midian and gets a local woman for a wife. His father-in-law exemplifies something that we will see again and again, but I'll come back to the righteous outsider later.

'Exodus'

The Exodus is an amazing event. In that time, God made a people for himself, pretty much from scratch. God predicted the whole thing in Genesis. He said, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here..." So, just as he said, God allowed his people to be slaves and then brought them out in great power.
I am not really sure why God allowed the Children of Israel, that is Jacob, the third patriarch I mentioned before, the grandson of Abraham, I'm not sure why his children became slaves in Egypt. Egypt has had a long history and has been and was at the time Exodus took place a powerful empire. I cannot say it was the Israelites fault, but I can and should mention an important reason why they were not in the land God promised them. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God makes it clear that Abraham cannot take possession of this land that God has given him yet. He says, "In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." So it seems that God is mercifully putting off His righteous judgment a little longer, but He knows that the Amorites, which is also intended to insinuate their neighbors, will only get more wicked and the day will come when the Israelites will be able to act as God's instrument of justice to destroy a wicked people.
But I get ahead of myself. So the Exodus both prefigures the future redemption of mankind from sin all together and is the next step towards God making a refuge and an instrument for His holy agenda on earth.
The Israelites were slaves in an oppressive, idolatrous regime in Egypt and they showed God's righteousness and power in Egypt and God showed His power to Israel that they may believe. So God is simultaneously making a statement to a world that has rejected and forgotten Him that He is not dead nor is he done with mankind.
The second half of the book details the adventures that the people have under Moses and the beginning of the Law that he is setting out for them.

The Law

We looked at Genesis as a study in faith and I mentioned that this is part of a process that God was using to 'set the world to rights.' The next part of the History of the Redemption is that of the Law. There are three steps to God's making us holy again. The first is embodied in the Law. The Law is the tool God used to teach his children to be obedient. This is the way we always learn and that's why God makes Scripture that way. The story of the world mirrors our lives. When children are born, they are selfish. One of the first words they learn is no and that is the essence of the disobedience that got us into trouble to begin with. So first parents just teach their children to be obedient. Obedience is the key to righteousness. The Law also begins to set them off as the people of God and to make them act differently from everyone else. So, the Law teaches us to be obedient. I'll focus in on Exodus next.

A Short Interlude on the Centrality of Faith

In recent days, it has become popular to say that Christianity is a way of life and that it is more important to be good than to believe in certain doctrines. It is very important to Christianity that we be good, but we must understand, above all, that faith is of the utmost importance. It is faith that saves us. No good works will save us and good works alone will not change the world. Our goodness is a weak, incapable goodness. Let me repeat, our being good or seeking justice will NOT change the world. We cannot do that. This does not mean that we should not try to change the lives of individuals by common and uncommon kindnesses. We should give to the poor and fight for the oppressed. All of that is good and when we believe all of those works must come or our faith is null and void. But we must believe in God, the God of historical Christianity, who sent his Son to die and be raised from the dead as the first-fruits of a New Creation. If we do not accept the gospel, then all our goodness and all our hope is worthless. Our love is human love. Our love is not Love, it is not He who is Love Incarnate. I hope this is a reasonable explanation of the problem I see.

'Chapters 12-50'

Now about Abram. Abram was, like his father, one who left his native land and followed God into the wilderness with no idea where he was going. The thing that separated him from his father was that while his father stopped, he went on and on. That is faith. I forgot to mention it before, but Noah prefigures Abram in his faith and will go on to prefigure the other steps in this process. This process is found in Israel's history, the Anointed One's life, and in the accorded path for each individual's life. The first step is faith. Before the LORD can do anything in us or even begin to fix this world that we've destroyed, we must relearn to trust him like Adam did once. This faith is essential to all other parts, because we cannot be related to someone we don't trust, we cannot obey blindly one we don't trust, and we cannot hope to be filled with Him if we do not trust him to do what is best for us. So it begins with faith. This begins with Abram, but it is important through the three patriarchs and even in the stories of Jacob's sons. Thus the book of Genesis comes to a close, considered by Jews to be part of the Law, but really more a prelude to what the law is trying to do. So next time I will try to begin tackling the meaning of the Law that God gave to Moses.

'Chapters 4-11'

To jump ahead so as to give some hope, this is the gospel, all the hope of paradise that we had before our nasty Fall is available to us right now. All the holes have been patched and the relationship stands at point zero, nay better, because Christ has done a great work. This, to differ with many who call themselves Christians and some who are, is not in some other dimension of Heaven or even in the future. All the hope of freedom is here now. Christ has broken the chains and the sinner walks free. This may seem poetic and grand, as opposed to realistic and analytical, but by nature it must be a little prosaic, because this is not a treatise, but a story. All knowledge of God and indeed everything is bound in a story, but that's another, very important point.
I'm going to try to escape this assumption that you understand this whole thing already. As soon as G-d saw what we had done, He made His first prophecy concerning His Redemption. 'I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.' In this, G-d promises that one day a son of man would rise up against evil and free us. So G-d begins by trying to patch up His relationship with man, before it gets too bad. But, the second man, the first man's son, killed his brother and thus the distance between G-d and man increased. Man became horrible and wretched, but eventually G-d decided that man had gone too far off track. He sought to correct this by starting over. But He found one righteous man who followed Him and thus G-d spared him to start over. This is Noah. God flooded the whole world and killed all but eight people. He did this to wipe the slate clean and give man another chance. There is a whole other theory and idea behind this that I'll discuss later.
So God began by making a deal with that one righteous man. He said that He wouldn't kill all of us and they would try to follow Him. This righteous man was not completely righteous and his family split drastically and man was again in trouble. It was not long before man was getting delusions of grandeur again and trying to make towers to Heaven, forgetting all about the deal they made.
So God began to look for the best man to use to start His rescue attempt. He must have tried dozens, but finally Terah of Ur agreed to leave all the corruption of his people and set out to start a godly people. Terah didn't make it far, but after Terah died, God used a principle that served him very well. He picked the son of one who loved him.
That man's story is for next time. He is the first step in this whole plan to make things right.

'Chapter 3'

This is where I begin to explain where it all went wrong. We all know that the world we live in is less than perfect. This is often referred to as the 'problem of evil' or 'problem of pain.' This was downplayed by Enlightenment thinkers as only a slight deviation. It's important to our philosophy to understand the world, from the first sin, was corrupted and rotten to its very core. How then did good Creation have such a bad Fall? Somehow the very nature of not only the human person, but nature and all created things have been corrupted by mankind's failure to be obedient. The story of this is in Genesis, chapter 3, hence the title of the post. The details are important but dealt with in other places better than here.
You may ask, those who know the story, how did one fruit getting taken from one tree and eaten do all this damage? Two important factors need to be considered to properly answer this question. The natural effects of man's dominion over the earth and the extent to which extraphysical forces exist and affect the world. From observation we can know that 'the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.' From these observations we should understand why G-d's plan might go equally awry. The fault of Gd's plan was that he had us carry it out. This fault was a necessary fault, as I'll try to show later.
Second an objection to the purely observational. Man was given dominion of the earth. This can be dismissed, if you insist on a materialist worldview, but if you meant to do that, you'd not be reading this. The world has many levels. The idea that magic is just an idea universal in man with no correspondent in reality is absurd and strange to a Romantic. If dragons or a universal flood are represented in the old myths of a huge number of cultures, then maybe they existed in real life, in history or prehistory rather. So magic must have a correspondent in the world. The earth is held together by the properties of physics and but also a magic that links all things. Magic is not some thing that we can command and cast spells. It is supernatural force, spirits, and probably ghosts. The spiritual world exists and we are affected by it. This includes the paranormal. (For more info read 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge.)
So, by some magical property of the fabric of all that is, man's Fall affected the whole of Creation. I'd like to insert some of the lingo, the jargon of New Romanticism with the word Ea. Ea simply refers to creation, but strips away links to a simply material understanding wound up with that language and imagines the world as two parts interwoven: material and spiritual. Ea is literally that which is. So, Ea is messed up as a result of the breach between men and God. That's enough for one day, but remember to read further to hear the good news.