《Nisbet’s Church Pulpit Commentary - Genesis》(James Nisbet)
Commentator
With nearly 5,000 pages and 20 megabytes of text, this 12 volume set contains concise comments and sermon outlines, perfect for preaching, teaching, or just another perspective on a passage for any lay person.
James Nisbet compiled and edited the Church Pulpit Commentary. Over 100 authors wrote short essays, sermon outlines, and sermon illustrations for selected verses of the Bible. The authors include Handley Carr Glyn (H.C.G) Moule, F.D. Maurice, and many other bishops and pastors.
As with many commentaries of this nature, the New Testament contains substantially more comments than the Old Testament. This is not the famouse Pulpit Commentary. This is a different commentary. Not every verse includes a comment.
00 Introduction
Genesis 1:1 The Sublime Introduction
Genesis 1:1 The Beginning
Genesis 1:3 ‘All the Blessings of the Light’
Genesis 1:5 ‘Day and Night’
Genesis 1:14 Sun and Moon
Genesis 1:26 The Divine Image in Man
Genesis 1:31 The Divine Verdict
Genesis 2:1 The Completed Work
Genesis 2:3 The Sacred Day
Genesis 2:7-8 The Garden of Eden
Genesis 2:9 The Tree of Destiny
Genesis 2:17 The One Forbidden Thing
Genesis 3:1 The Temptation of Man
Genesis 3:8 Concealment from God impossible
Genesis 3:10 Cowardice and Cant
Genesis 3:13 The Excuse of the Tempted
Genesis 3:15 The Earliest Gospel
Genesis 3:16-18 Sinners must Suffer
Genesis 3:19 ‘He remembereth that we are dust’
Genesis 3:24 Driven into Exile
Genesis 4:4-5 The ‘Disregarded and the Accepted Offering’
Genesis 4:9 The Unbrotherly Brother
Genesis 4:19-24 An Early Chauvinist
Genesis 4:26 The First True Worshippers
Genesis 5:24 The Witness of Enoch
Genesis 5:29 The First True Comforter
Genesis 6:5-7 An Awful Sight
Genesis 6:6 Human Sin and Divine Judgment
Genesis 6:8 A Lonely Man of Grace
Genesis 6:17 Doom and Deliverance
Genesis 7:5 Obedience to God
Genesis 8:4 The Ark of Safety
Genesis 8:20-22 The First Altar in the New World
Genesis 9:8-9 The Noahic Covenant
Genesis 9:12-15 ‘The Bow in the Cloud’
Genesis 9:14 The Bow of Hope
Genesis 11:1 ‘Of One Language’
Genesis 11:9 ‘What will these Babblers say?’
Genesis 12:1 The Pilgrim Father
Genesis 12:3 Blessing received and imparted
Genesis 12:4 The First Columbus
Genesis 12:4-5 ‘I do not ask to see the distant scene’
Genesis 12:10 A Fateful Journey
Genesis 13:10-11 The Worldly Choice
Genesis 13:18 Tent and Altar
Genesis 14:23 Some Elements of a Godly Life
Genesis 15:1 Abram’s Vision
Genesis 15:5-6 Righteousness by Faith
Genesis 16:13 ‘Thou God seest Me’
Genesis 17:2 The Promise Renewed
Genesis 18:2 The Divine Guest
Genesis 18:22 A Persevering Intercessor
Genesis 18:25 The Righteous Judge
Genesis 19:26 An Old-World Beacon
Genesis 20:11 A Godly Man’s Lapse
Genesis 21:17 The Listening God
Genesis 21:19 God’s Well and Man’s Bottle
Genesis 22:1-8 The Great Test
Genesis 22:1 (r.v.) The Trial of Faith
Genesis 23:19 ‘Till Death do them part’
Genesis 24:10 Fidelity
Genesis 24:58 ‘Forget thine own People!’
Genesis 25:8 ‘A Good Old Age’
Genesis 25:34 The Despised Birthright
Genesis 26:3; Genesis 26:5 Hereditary Blessing
Genesis 26:22 Isaac the Peaceable
Genesis 26:31 The Man of Peace
Genesis 27:5-6 A Game of Cross-purposes
Genesis 27:34 A Penitent’s Prayer
Genesis 28:16 The Pilgrim’s Vision
Genesis 28:17 ‘Hallowed Ground’
Genesis 28:19 Life’s Bethels
Genesis 29:20; Genesis 31:38 The Mid-passage of Life
Genesis 31:6-7 Lights and Shadows
Genesis 31:48 The Heap of Witness
Genesis 32:1 Angels on Life’s Pathway
Genesis 32:1 The Angels of God
Genesis 32:24 The Divine Antagonist
Genesis 32:26 ‘When I am weak, then am I strong’
Genesis 32:28 A New Name
Genesis 32:31 Life’s Sunrise
Genesis 33:3 A Happy Reunion
Genesis 35:3 Back to Bethel
Genesis 37:3 The Favourite Son
Genesis 37:18 Unbrotherly Brothers
Genesis 39:9 ‘Yield not to Temptation, for yielding is Sin’
Genesis 40:3 A Noble Prisoner
Genesis 41:14 Potentate and Prisoner
Genesis 41:41 Prison to Palace
Genesis 42:21-22 Conscience Awakened
Genesis 42:30 Rough Tongue and Tender Heart
Genesis 43:9 Surety for a Brother
Genesis 43:30-31 Tenderness and Self-control
Genesis 44:12 The Cup Discovered
Genesis 44:32 A Brother’s Heart
Genesis 45:5 ‘God is His own Interpreter, and He will make it plain’
Genesis 45:28 Alive from the Dead!
Genesis 46:4 Father and Son
Genesis 47:9 A Tired Pilgrim
Genesis 47:23 ‘Ye are bought with a price’
Genesis 48:15-16 An Old Man’s Blessing
Genesis 49:18 Waiting for God’s Salvation
Genesis 50:26 Joseph’s Death
01 Chapter 1
Verse 1
THE BEGINNING
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’
Genesis 1:1
I. What is meant by creation? The giving being to that which before was not. The expression, ‘the heavens and the earth,’ is the most exhaustive phrase the Hebrews could employ to name the universe, which is regarded as a twofold whole, consisting of unequal parts. Writing for men, Moses writes as a man. The moral importance of the earth, as the scene of man’s probation, is the reason for the form which the phrase assumes. The truth of the Creation governs the theology of the Old and New Testaments, and may have influenced the formation of heathen cosmogonies, such as the Etruscan and the Zendavesta. Creation is a mystery, satisfactory to the reason, but strictly beyond it. We can modify existing matter, but we cannot create one particle of it. That God summoned it into being is a truth which we believe on God’s authority, but which we can never verify.
II. Belief in the creation of the universe out of nothing is the only account of its origin which is compatible with belief in a personal and moral God.
Creation suggests Providence, and Providence leads the way to Redemption. If love or goodness were the true motive in creation, it implies God’s continuous interest in created life. By His love, which led Him to move out of Himself in creation at the first, He travels with the slow, onward movement of the world and of humanity, and His Incarnation in time, when demanded by the needs of the creatures of His hand, is in a line with that first of mysteries, His deigning to create at all. Belief in creation keeps man in his right place of humble dependence and thankful service. A moral God will not despise the work of His own hands, and Creation leads up to Redemption.
Canon Liddon.
Illustration
(1) ‘What sacredness the thought that God is the Creator should stamp on every object in nature!
I go forth amid all the glories and the beauties of the earth, which He has so marvellously framed. He is there; it is with Him I walk; in His works I see something of Himself. Thus there is a tongue in every breeze; there is a voice in the song of every bird; there is a silent eloquence in every green field and quiet wood. They speak to me about my God. In a measure they reveal and interpret Him. He made them; He made them what they are; He made them for me. Thus the sights and sounds around me should be means of grace.
And, if He is Creator, I must be careful how I use nature’s gifts and bounties. The wheat, the corn, the vine, this piece of money, this brother or sister, He formed them, and formed them for gracious and holy ends. My hand should be arrested, my mouth should be shut, my spirit should shrink back in awe, if ever I am tempted to abuse and wrong them. Let me tell myself: ‘They came from God, and they are meant to be employed for God; for His pleasure they are, and were created.’ I move through a world mystic, wonderful.’
(2) The keynote of the whole chapter is struck in its first verse: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ As Professor Elmslie well says, ‘The concern of the chapter is not creation, but the character, being and glory of the Almighty Maker. If we excerpt God’s speeches and the rubrical formulas, the chapter consists of one continuous chain of verbs, instinct with life and motion, linked or in swift succession, and, with hardly an exception, the subject of every one of them is God. It is one long adoring delineation of God loving, yearning, willing, working in creation. Its interest is not in the work, but the Worker. Its subject is not creation, but the Creator. What it gives is not a world, but a God. It is not geology; it is theology.’ It matters little to this writer whether the birds or fishes come first in the scale of creation; it matters everything that his readers see, behind and above all, God. ‘And God said’—let the intermediary stages be as many as they may, we come to that at last. Let science take all the æons of time it needs for the great creative processes it is slowly unravelling before our eyes; let it go on adding link after link to the mighty chain of created being; sooner or later the question must be asked, ‘On what shall we hang the last?’ And when that question is asked, the wise men and the little child will go back together to the Bible to read over again the old words past which no science ever takes us, so simple and yet so sublime—‘In the beginning, God.’
Verse 3
‘ALL THE BLESSINGS OF THE LIGHT’
“And God said, Let there be light.’
Genesis 1:3
I. We have reason every day that we live to thank God for life and health, for countless blessings. And not least among these may be reckoned the free gift of, and the many ‘blessings of the light.’
For in many ways that we can tell off, at once, upon our fingers, and in very many more ways that we neither dream of nor think of, does light minister to our health, wealth, and comfort.
The very birds sing at daybreak their glad welcome to the dawn, and the rising sun. And we all know and feel how cheering is the power of light. In the sunlight rivers flash, and nature rejoices, and our hearts are light, and we take a bright view of things.
So, too, light comes to revive and restore us. Darkness is oppressive. In it we are apt to lose heart. We grow anxious, and full of fears. With the first glimmer of light in the distance, hope awakens, and we feel a load lifted off our minds.
Again, we have often felt the reassuring power of light. In the darkness, objects that are perfectly harmless take threatening shapes; the imagination distorts them, and our fancy creates dangers. Light shows us that we have been alarmed at shadows; quiets, and reassures us.
Once again, the light comes to us, often, as nothing less than a deliverer. It reveals dangers hidden and unsuspected; the deadly reptile; the yawning precipice; the lurking foe.
And when, over and above all this, we remember that light is absolutely essential, not to health only, but to life in every form, animal and vegetable alike, we shall heartily echo the words of the wise king in Ecclesiastes—‘Truly the light is sweet; and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.’
II. All things are double one against another. The types in the natural world all have their antitypes in the moral and spiritual world. So we find it here. The natural light of which we have been speaking; the sun, which is the centre of our system—is a type of another light, of which we are now going to speak.
When God sends this light, of which we speak, into a soul that has long been dwelling in, and rejoicing in the darkness which the evil liver loves, a man’s first impulse generally is to shrink from it—to shut it out.
As you know very well, one of the chief characteristics of light is that it shows things, not as they might be, not as they are said to be, not as they ought to be, not as they are supposed to be, not as we would like them to be, but as they are!
In some way or another God sends a flood of pure light into your home; sometimes it is through sickness; sometimes through sorrow; now by means of an accident; now it is the innocent prattle of a little child. Your life is revealed to you just as it is! There hang the thick cobwebs—long indulged, confirmed evil habits; here lies the thick dust of a dulled conscience—there the dark stains of grievous sins. And the air is full of countless motes—these are what you call ‘little sins’—motes of ill-temper; motes of malice and unkindness; motes of forgetfulness of God, and many others.
It is from God, this light; stand in it; gaze at it; look through it, till you see His face who sends it—God, who in the beginning said, as He saw the earth ‘without form, and void,’ who says, as He looks at you, ‘Let there be light.’
—Rev. J. B. C. Murphy.
Verse 5
‘DAY AND NIGHT’
‘God called the light day, and the darkness He called night.’
Genesis 1:5
(I.) One of the first lessons which God intends us to learn from the night is a larger respect for wholesome renovation. Perhaps this may not show itself in any great lengthening of our bodily life, but rather in a more healthy spirit, less exposed to that prevailing unrest which fills the air and which troubles so many minds.
(II.) The night is the season of wonder. A new and strangely equipped population, another race of beings, another sequence of events, comes into and fills the world of the mind. Men who have left their seal upon the world, and largely helped in the formation of its deepest history,—men whose names stand up through the dim darkness of the past, great leaders and masters, have admitted that they learned much from the night. (III.) The next thought belonging to the night is that then another world comes out and, as it were, begins its day. There is a rank of creatures which moves out into activity as soon as the sun has set. This thought should teach us something of tolerance; senses, dispositions, and characters are very manifold and various among ourselves. Each should try to live up to the light he has, and allow a brother to do the same. (IV.) Such extreme contrasts as are involved in light and darkness may tell us that we have as yet no true measure of what life is, and it must be left to some other conditions of existence for us to realise in anything like fulness the stores, the processes, the ways of the Kingdom of the Lord which are provided for such as keep His law. (V.) Let us learn that, whether men wake or sleep, the universe is in a state of progress, ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.’ (VI.) Let us learn to use day rightly and righteously, to accept the grace and the forces of the Lord while it is called to-day, and then the night shall have no forbidding, no repulsive significance.