Reading Plan
Genesis in a Month
The whole of Genesis, read together, a chapter or two a day. Everyone is on the same passage on the same morning — so if you fall behind, you are not behind on your own, and the day you missed is still here waiting. Fifty chapters, thirty-one days, from the first light to a coffin in Egypt and a promise that outlives it.
The whole plan
- 1
Genesis 1-2
God speaks, and there is something
Everything begins with God talking. Light, sky, sea, land, animals, and then a man made of dust with God's own breath in him. Read how often it says good. The world was not an accident and it was not a mistake, and neither were you.
- 2
Genesis 3
The fall, and the first promise
The serpent does not start with a lie. He starts with a question: Yea, hath God said? Everything that has gone wrong since began with a doubt about whether God could be trusted. But read to the end of the chapter, because the first promise of a Saviour is already there in verse 15, spoken to a snake in a ruined garden.
- 3
Genesis 4-5
Two brothers, and a long list of graves
Chapter 4 is the first murder. Chapter 5 is a list of men who lived hundreds of years, and after every one of them come the same three words: and he died. Sin arrived in chapter 3 and death is already keeping the books. Watch for Enoch. One man in the list does not die.
- 4
Genesis 6-7
The earth was filled with violence
God looks at the world He called good and grieves. This is not a temper; it is heartbreak. Notice that Noah is not saved because he was flawless, but because he found grace in the eyes of the LORD. That is the first time grace appears in the Bible, and it is on a man in a doomed world.
- 5
Genesis 8-9
A covenant with every living thing
The water goes down, the door opens, and the first thing Noah builds is an altar. Then God hangs His weapon in the sky. A bow points away from the earth, and God says He will look at it and remember. He did not promise there would be no more evil. He promised He would not drown it again.
- 6
Genesis 10-11
A tower, and a scattering
Let us make us a name. That is the whole project at Babel, and it is the same project still. God scatters them, and the chapter closes on one family from Ur with a barren wife and no future. Read the last verses slowly. That is where He is going to start.
- 7
Genesis 12
Get thee out of thy country
God asks a seventy-five-year-old man to leave everything he knows for a land He will not even name yet. Abram goes. Then read the second half of the chapter, where he panics in Egypt and lies about his wife. The father of the faithful is a real man, and God does not drop him for it.
- 8
Genesis 13-14
Lot chooses, and a priest appears
Lot lifts up his eyes and picks the well-watered plain. It looks like the better deal. It is pitched toward Sodom. Then out of nowhere comes Melchizedek with bread and wine, a king of Salem who is also a priest of the most high God, and Abram gives him a tenth. Remember him. Hebrews will come back for him.
- 9
Genesis 15
He counted it to him for righteousness
God takes an old man outside and tells him to count the stars. Abram believes Him, and that believing is counted to him as righteousness. Then God cuts a covenant, and only God walks between the pieces. Abram is asleep. The whole weight of keeping it is on the one who made it.
- 10
Genesis 16-17
Hagar, and the God who sees
Sarai gets tired of waiting and arranges a shortcut, and it costs a servant girl everything. But God finds Hagar in the wilderness and speaks to her by name. She is the first person in Scripture to give God a name of her own: Thou God seest me. He saw a used, pregnant, runaway slave. He sees you.
- 11
Genesis 18
Sarah laughs
Sarah laughs behind the tent door, and God hears it. He does not scold her for long. He simply asks the question the whole book turns on: Is any thing too hard for the LORD? Then Abraham stands in front of God and argues for Sodom, and God lets him.
- 12
Genesis 19
Sodom
This is a hard chapter and it is meant to be. Judgment is real, it is deserved, and it falls. But do not miss the mercy in the middle of it: the angels take hold of Lot's hand while he lingers. He is dragged out of a burning city because the LORD was merciful unto him. Not because he was ready.
- 13
Genesis 20-21
The child of promise
Abraham tells the same lie he told in Egypt, twenty-five years later. Then Isaac is born, and Sarah says God has made her laugh, and this time the laughing is joy. The promise took a quarter of a century. It was not late. It was never going to be a thing Abraham could produce himself.
- 14
Genesis 22
The mountain and the ram
A father takes his only son up a mountain, and the son carries the wood on his own back. Isaac asks where the lamb is. Abraham says God will provide Himself a lamb, and he says more than he knows. There is a ram in the thicket that day. Two thousand years later, on a hill in the same country, there is no substitute for the Son.
- 15
Genesis 23-24
A grave, and a bride
Abraham buys a field to bury Sarah in, the only piece of the promised land he ever owns. Then a servant goes hundreds of miles to find Isaac a wife and prays a small, specific prayer at a well, and God answers it before he has finished speaking. Rebekah is asked if she will go. Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go.
- 16
Genesis 25
Two nations in the womb
Rebekah is barren for twenty years, and Isaac prays. The boys fight before they are born. Then Esau comes in hungry and sells his birthright for a bowl of stew, because he wanted something now more than he wanted something later. That is what he despised it for. A meal.
- 17
Genesis 26
Isaac digs the wells again
Isaac is the quiet one between two loud men. He repeats his father's lie, and he also repeats his father's work, digging out wells the Philistines had filled in and calling them by the old names. Some faithfulness is not dramatic. It is clearing out what was stopped up and getting the water running again.
- 18
Genesis 27
The stolen blessing
Nobody in this chapter behaves well. A mother schemes, a son lies to his blind father four times over, a brother plans a murder. God's purpose stands anyway, and every one of them pays for how they went about it. Jacob leaves with the blessing and does not see his mother again.
- 19
Genesis 28
A ladder set up on the earth
Jacob is running for his life with a stone for a pillow, and it is there, not in the tent he cheated in, that heaven opens. God does not lecture him. He makes him promises. Surely the LORD is in this place, Jacob says, and I knew it not.
- 20
Genesis 29-30
Leah, Rachel, and twelve sons
The deceiver is deceived, in the dark, by a father-in-law with a better trick. Then read the names Leah gives her sons, because you can hear a woman begging to be loved in them. And the fourth one is Judah, this time I will praise the LORD. The line of the Messiah comes through the wife nobody wanted.
- 21
Genesis 31
Leaving Laban
Twenty years of changed wages and shifting terms, and Jacob finally goes. He has learned to be shrewd and he still has not learned to be honest. But God speaks to Laban in a dream and puts a fence around him, and the two men part at a heap of stones. Watch it: God has been protecting Jacob the entire time he was scheming to protect himself.
- 22
Genesis 32-33
I will not let thee go
Jacob is about to meet the brother he robbed, and the night before, a man wrestles with him until daybreak. He will not stop until he is blessed, and he walks away with a new name and a limp he keeps for life. Then Esau runs to him and falls on his neck. The thing he had dreaded for twenty years took about a minute.
- 23
Genesis 34-35
Back to Bethel
Chapter 34 is what happens when a family drifts. Then God says, Arise, go up to Bethel, back to the place where it started, and Jacob buries the foreign gods under an oak before he goes. Repentance is usually that plain. Get rid of what you have been carrying, and go back to where you last heard from God.
- 24
Genesis 36-37
The coat, and the pit
A father with a favourite, a boy who cannot keep his dreams to himself, and ten brothers who have had enough. They throw him in a pit and then sit down to eat. Twenty pieces of silver, a torn coat, and a lie their father believes for twenty-two years. This is where God is starting to save them all.
- 25
Genesis 38-39
Judah, Tamar, and a man who ran
Chapter 38 is ugly and Scripture does not clean it up. Chapter 39 puts Joseph in the same kind of moment, and he runs, and it costs him his freedom. Doing right is not always rewarded on the day. But read the last line: the LORD was with him. That is said over the prison as easily as over the palace.
- 26
Genesis 40-41
Dreams in a prison, dreams in a palace
Joseph interprets two dreams and asks one man to remember him. The man forgets, and Joseph waits two more full years. Then in one morning he goes from a dungeon to second in Egypt. Do not read past the two years too quickly. Most of the story is the waiting.
- 27
Genesis 42-43
Ten brothers come for bread
They bow to him, exactly as the dream said, and they do not know who he is. Joseph is not playing with them; he is finding out whether they are still the men who sold him. And he turns away to weep, more than once. Power did not make him hard.
- 28
Genesis 44-45
I am Joseph your brother
Judah, the one who suggested selling him, offers to take Benjamin's place as a slave. That is the moment Joseph breaks. He clears the room and tells them who he is, and their first response is terror, not joy. Come near to me, he says. Be not grieved. God did send me before you to preserve life.
- 29
Genesis 46-47
Israel goes down into Egypt
God tells an old man not to be afraid to go down to Egypt, and promises to bring him up again. Seventy people go in. Read Jacob standing in front of Pharaoh and blessing him, a shepherd blessing an emperor. He calls his own years few and evil, and he is right, and God has kept him through every one of them.
- 30
Genesis 48-49
The blessing of the twelve
Jacob crosses his hands on purpose and puts the blessing on the younger boy, the way it has gone all his life. Then he tells his sons what they are, honestly, including the ones who shamed him. And in the middle of it, over Judah, comes a sceptre that will not depart until Shiloh come. He is looking at Jesus.
- 31
Genesis 50
Meant unto good
Their father dies and the brothers assume the reckoning is finally coming. Joseph weeps again and gives them the sentence that holds the whole book together: ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good. Genesis ends with a coffin in Egypt and a promise about a land. God is not finished, and He does not forget where He said He was going.
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