Remsen Bible Fellowship; 01/14/2024
Introduction
We started into a study of Genesis back in October, but have been on hiatus from that study since the start of December as we examined the “implications of the image” of God for questions of current controversy.
As we jump back into Genesis, let’s refresh on where we are. In Genesis 1:1-2:3 we have an introduction to the book, and to the Bible as a whole, with the account of the first seven days - six days of God’s labor in forming and filling the earth, and then a seventh day of God’s rest. Obviously, God did not need to take six days to create the earth, much less did he need a rest on the seventh day. However, in this seven day sequence, the Lord is setting a pattern for those made in his image - human beings - to follow.
The rest of Genesis two zooms back in on that original creation, especially on day six with the creation of the man and the woman, and the first marriage ceremony. At the end of two chapters, this book is looking pretty happy. The world is very good, governed by the man and the woman who are able to live in the presence of God and of one another completely without shame.
But that changes very quickly in chapter three, as a serpent enters the scene and tempts the woman. She succumbs to the temptation, believing the lie that true happiness and joy could be found outside of God’s revealed will. She believed disobedience could bring life, but as she and Adam soon find out, disobedience brings about death.
This becomes exceedingly clear in chapter four as the eldest son of Adam and Eve, Cain, kills his younger brother, Abel. And then as you follow out the family line of Cain, you come to realize that disobedience to God compounds. Though humanity is still made in the image of God - and thus is capable of building great civilizations, developing musical instruments, and the like - evil increases, as Lamech becomes history's first recorded polygamist, and exerts his will over others through violent threats and violent action.
But in the midst of the pain and suffering which result from sin, there is echoing God’s curse upon the serpent: one would come, a Seed of the woman, who would crush Satan’s head. He would restore Sabbath rest to the people of God.
Genesis 5:1 marks a transition. It begins, “this is the book of the generations of Adam.” This phrase is used 10 times in Genesis, and each time it marks off a new section of the book. The first time it was used was back in 2:4, and the indication is that 2:4-4:26 tells us how the world got to the awful place it was by the time chapter six rolls around. But now in chapter five the focus shifts to Adam’s line. And whereas the first couple of chapters in Genesis covered days, now we’ll be moving at the pace of centuries.
Text
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. 2 Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. 3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. 4 The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters. 5 Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.
6 When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh. 7 Seth lived after he fathered Enosh 807 years and had other sons and daughters. 8 Thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died.
9 When Enosh had lived 90 years, he fathered Kenan. 10 Enosh lived after he fathered Kenan 815 years and had other sons and daughters. 11 Thus all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died.
12 When Kenan had lived 70 years, he fathered Mahalalel. 13 Kenan lived after he fathered Mahalalel 840 years and had other sons and daughters. 14 Thus all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died.
15 When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he fathered Jared. 16 Mahalalel lived after he fathered Jared 830 years and had other sons and daughters. 17 Thus all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years, and he died.
18 When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. 19 Jared lived after he fathered Enoch 800 years and had other sons and daughters. 20 Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died.
21 When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. 22 Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. 23 Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. 24 Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.
25 When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered Lamech. 26 Methuselah lived after he fathered Lamech 782 years and had other sons and daughters. 27 Thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died.
28 When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son 29 and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” 30 Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years and had other sons and daughters. 31 Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.
32 After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
What’s going on here?
The first question many of us have when we look at this - or any genealogy - is “what the heck is going on here?” Most of us have no real category for a list of names of sons and fathers, it just seems totally foreign to us and our eyes glaze over and we struggle to stay awake.
The first thing a genealogy does is establish that we’re dealing with history. This isn’t fiction. By tracing back - or in this case, forward - through the father’s line, the author is wanting us to see he’s writing about the real flesh and blood people who are descended from Adam.
The second thing that’s happening, as I mentioned earlier, is that the narrator is moving this story forward - in the space of chapter five the story advances by at least 1,500 years. To do this, we obviously aren’t getting full family histories - imagine trying to tell your family history starting back in AD 500, up to the present, and you have a 450 word limit. You’re going to have to be pretty sparse with your words. Frequently we’re reading references to “other sons and daughters” - who were they, what were their names, what did they do? We don’t know, and - apparently - it doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things.
The main point of this particular genealogy is to tell us that Adam’s line continued. And in continuing, they continued on bearing God’s image and likeness. V1 tells us that God created Adam in the likeness of God. Then down in verse 3, that same language is used to refer to Adam, who at 130 years old, was given a son - Seth - who was in his own likeness, after his image.
We live in a day that wants to separate children from their families, say your family doesn’t matter, but the fact of the matter is this: your family does matter. You are, in a real sense, in the image of your parents. The connection to fathers and mothers is not only biological - it is also a connection of duty, and a connection of likeness. From the beginning of the Old Testament, “honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12), to the end “he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6), the connection of children to their parents - especially theirs fathers - is of central importance to how we understand the Old Testament.
It’s also central to how we are supposed to understand our lives. The book of Proverbs makes clear the connection between a children and their parents, even in the sense that wise or foolish children bring either honor or shame to their parents: Proverbs 10:1 says, “A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother.”
Being in the image of our fathers means ultimately that each of us are in the image of Adam - an image connected to God’s image (only humans, those of Adam’s race, are made in God’s image). But there is also a negative connotation: in the image of Adam, we are each born in sin. And this sin, as the flow of Genesis five will show us, leads to death.
We can be struck as we read this passage by the extraordinary long lives each of these men lived. Adam’s 930 seems unbearably long - until we get to Methusaleh, and realize that he was 969!
What accounts for this long life? There are a couple of possibilities that have been floated, regarding the climate of a pre-flood world. Maybe the climate was more conducive to human life before the flood, before the ice age, etc. That’s all speculative, though. What I think is clear in the narrative of Genesis is that the further we get from the fall of Genesis 3, the deeper the effects of sin take root in humanity. Adam and Eve, in the garden, had access to the Tree of Life. But after their rebellion against God, they were cast east of Eden and blocked from access to that tree. And so their bodies began the long, slow, process of decay.
It was long, and it was slow: these people are fathering children hundreds of years into their lives. And perhaps there was some difference for women, but at least Eve would have been having children well past 100 years old as well. This is hard for us to grasp. But I don’t think we need to work up elaborate explanations, we can simply take the text at face value, and realize sin changes things: not just spiritually, but physically, as well. Romans 8 tells us that all of creation groans under the weight of our curse, and one imagines that such groaning has not gotten quieter in the intervening years. Sin’s presence in the world has a multitude of effects, and they’re all bad.
What’s the refrain?
And that leads us to the concluding refrain we hear over and over in this passage. It is spoken over each life, and there are two parts. It begins “thus all the days of,” now, fill in the blank, “and he died.” Each man’s days are numbered - it may be a quite large number at this early point in the story, but by Moses’ day he was wrote (Psalm 90:10),
10 The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Everyone’s days are numbered. And at some point, your number is up. As the Lord told Adam back in 3:19, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Enoch
But, if you were listening closely, you heard two expectations to this pattern. The first interruption comes with Enoch in verses 21-24.
“21 When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. 22 Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. 23 Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. 24 Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”
Verse 21 begins with the normal pattern: “When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah.” Normal enough. We’re getting deep enough into the passage where, though it would seem strange, it’s certainly not inconceivable for a man to be a father at 65, even today. But then in v22 we get a new phrase. We’re waiting to read “Enoch lived after he had fathered Methuselah”, but instead what we read is that “Enoch walked with God after he had fathered Methuselah.” That’s a different way to describe life.
If you remember chapter three, after Adam and Eve had sinned, they hid from God as he came to walk with them in the cool of the day. The implication seems to be that prior to the fall, the normal experience of humanity was to walk with God. To spend time with God. To know God in a personal, rather than a distant, way. That seems to fairly quickly disappear from human experience after the entrance of sin - but is this not what every form of religion or spirituality we’ve devised since that time sought to accomplish? To provide access to the divine, to have assurance of not only a supernatural presence, but a care and love that reaches down to us. To have an experience of something or someone that transcends this world. We ache for that, because we were created to experience life walking with the Triune God.
Enoch did. He apparently lived his life in such a way that a better description than simply “living” was to walk with God. And then - here is the true wonder - we are not told that he died. Rather, verse 24 says, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” He walked with God, and was not. He no longer was present on earth. God removed him. What would it look like to be translated directly into the presence of the Lord? We’ll come back to this shortly.
Noah
But first, we need to look at the other exception: The Lamech/Noah section, in verses 28-32:
28 When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son 29 and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” 30 Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years and had other sons and daughters. 31 Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.
32 After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
In verse 29 we have the reasoning for Noah’s name, an explanation not given for any of the other names in this chapter. It’s apparently important. The name “Noah” in Hebrew sounds like the Hebrew word for “rest”, and Lamech says in v30, “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.”
This was true enough, in its own way - but I doubt Lamech foresaw how this was going to happen. As we’ll pick the story back up in the weeks to come, by this point the earth is absolutely ravaged by human sin and the consequences of human sin. The painful toil of human hands had led not to flourishing, but to an earth which God would almost completely wipe out in the waters of the flood. Noah provided rest in the sense of salvation. The works of human hands had brought God’s judgment upon the earth. The works of Noah’s hands - obediently building the ark as God had instructed - provided rescue from that judgment.
Conclusion
How does this relate to Enoch, and how does it relate to us today? It’s very relevant to us today, particularly on a Sunday where we are celebrating baptism. The apostle Peter, in 1 Peter 3:20-22 speaks of baptism as analogous to the flood. As Noah and his family were brought safely through the flood of God’s judgment to the new earth of the post-flood world, so we now too are brought in baptism out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son. This takes place spiritually the moment we place our faith in Jesus Christ. But it becomes visible, it goes public, when we follow Jesus obediently in the waters of baptism. He is a greater bringer of rest than Noah.
The author to the Hebrews writes, in Hebrews 4:9-10, “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, 10 for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” How do we enter that rest? Through faith in Christ and identification with him. How is that identification made visible? Through the waters of baptism.
To identify with Christ in baptism is to say, “I can do nothing of my own to earn salvation. I rest in Christ’s finished work for me. His death is my death, his resurrection is my resurrection, his life is my life.”
And that life, life in Christ, how does the New Testament characterize it? As walking with God. As Enoch walked with God, so let us keep in step with his Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:16-26 says,
16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21 envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
As we gather to celebrate Loralai’s baptism, we as a church are affirming that we have seen evidence of the Spirit’s fruit in her life, and we are committing to helping that fruit grow. We are committing to help her keep in step with the Spirit. And Loralai, you are affirming, publicly, that you have rested in Christ alone for salvation, and that you are committing to walk with him for all the days of your life.
What’s in a list of names? More than meets the eye. Even here, in Genesis five, we see the core components of the Christian life: rest in Christ, and walk with him.
Trust God, Walk with Him