I’ve been thinking about some things recently, the subject of a blog post that I’ll be writing tonight. But those things got me thinking in another direction, namely how important an entity’s beginnings truly are.
I like reading biographies because you begin to get an idea of how these people came to do everything they did by looking at what came before. Similarly, when you look at the historical record of any event, you come to see how it came to be by looking at its predecessors. Indeed, you really cannot fully understand anything – be it person, event, or organization – without understanding its history and in particular, its Genesis.
In the Genesis, we see the seeds of everything that the entity will come to be, from its grandest heights to its lowest lows, and eventually even its destruction. This is how we were Created.
Take a look back at the Biblical Genesis. God begins by creating everything we know, beginning first with the heavens and the earth, then moving on to the various plant and animal life, and even the angels. Finally, He creates His Greatest Creation, his very Image Bearers, humans.
And in that very creation, that Genesis, we see the seeds of everything that would later come. We were created much like the angels, but frailer and with one key distinction: We were given the gift of Free Will. No other being in all of Creation has it, and with it we see both the religious aspects of all that would come – the Fall, Christ, and the Judgement – and the more ‘human’ aspects of all that would come – with our intellects, we have been able to accomplish both astounding wonders and catastrophic evil.
We also see the importance of the Genesis in the very birth of the Palestinian nation, when Abram did not trust God and had a child by his servant, then sent both the servant and her child away. That child was Ishmael, the first Palestinian/Arab – and the half-brother of Abram’s later son, the one God had promised him all along, Isaac – the first Israeli. The entire Israeli/Palestinian/Arab and Jew/Muslim/Christian battles that have waged throughout history and wage on our own streets today can be traced back to that Genesis, and without it, how different would history have been!
The Bible is replete with other examples of the Genesis of various things, including marriage, the family, the church – and government.
But switching gears, we also see the importance of the Genesis of the United States of America – and here I count basically the entire 200 year or so period between the founding of the original colonies and the War of 1812 – the War that Forged a Nation. Everything that we as a country have been and will become, the seeds of it can be found there. Our eventual destruction can also be found there, in the very battles over limited government vs a strong national government.
But even at the individual level: To understand all the evil that Hitler would come to do, look at his Genesis. Not necessarily his childhood, but in the early adulthood that would shape his emotional and political beliefs for the rest of his life.
To understand the genius that was Thomas Edison, again look at his Genesis, specifically the early adult period.
The same can be said of ANY individual, be they great, vile, or just the normal, average, every day guy.
To understand the entity, look at its Genesis.
Tonight, I talk about my own Genesis. Definitely that ‘average, every day guy’ I just referenced, but the man that most people know now essentially began a decade ago, in the summer of 1999.