Genesis is the first book of the Bible.  Significant events of Genesis are creation of the world, creation of man and woman,  the entry of sin into the world, the great flood, origins of the nations, the covenant of God with Abram and his descendants, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph in Egypt.  

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Not only is the foundation of the world and of history laid in these chapters, but also the division between the believing and the modern (secular) mind.   Here are rooted the ideas of God as Creator, of history as a divine project, of the family as the fundamental God-appointed unit of society  -- all of which are rejected by the contemporary public-school graduate.  He has learned (and science has proved!) that the universe is the product of random molecular collisions, that underlying any appearance of order in the natural universe is the reality of ultimate Chaos and Chance, that humans have evolved over eons of time without any divine participation or plan, that human life and relationships are likewise temporary and random: that, in a word,  the whole human drama has no ultimate significance.  One day we shall all decay into the primordial protoplasm from which our one-celled ancestors so laboriously escaped.   For this person, the Bible is a foreign world.

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Yet have we, with all the advantages of modern education, managed to solve the international and inter-racial conflicts that beset humanity -- or have we perhaps only made them worse?   The Bible gives us a completely different perspective on our world and on its conflicts.  Can we set aside, for the moment, our sophistication, our training, and enter the thought-world of the Bible on its own terms?