Genesis 4:18-5:32

All right, welcome back, friends.
Good to see you,
good to have you with us on a Monday,
beautiful Monday here in the Lakes area.
If you’re here,
get outside and enjoy that.
If not, thanks for joining us from wherever you are,
whenever you listen to this.
We are at the end of chapter four
and moving into chapter five of the book of Genesis,
really kind of transition chapters.
Not that these are unimportant,
but they are largely not particularly important to us
as people removed from this story.
These are the genealogies and they are interesting.
They come from different places
though they overlap some names.
The first genealogy at the end of chapter four
traces the lineage of people through
Cain.
And as we move into the fifth chapter,
that genealogy is traced through Seth.
Now,
they are different genealogies,
but they include either the same people
with a different account of the genealogy,
or they include people of the same name.
More likely,
this is just two different traditions
that trace back.
And as we move into the fifth chapter,
we have 10 generations,
which is a pretty significant number
in the book of Genesis.
There are actually 10 genealogies
spaced throughout the book of Genesis.
In this one, we have 10 generations.
And they are tracked differently.
What’s interesting in these genealogies,
we see some differences in the Hebrew text,
in the Aramaic,
in the Greek.
They have different longevity for some of the people.
So one of the realities we face
when we get into these early chapters of Genesis
is that they have a lot of looseness in them.
These are ancient texts.
They are handed down by generation for thousands of years.
There are at least,
we can see here
at least two different versions.
There are these varieties that are clearly connected,
kind of like we had in the first and second,
the two creation stories in the first and second chapter.
We have here these different accounts.
On one hand,
this is filling space.
The author wants to take us from where we are,
which is Cain and Seth,
to where we are going next in the story,
the next major highlight of the story,
which is Noah.
They both get there,
though they get there by different pathways.
And the more expanded and the more consistent genealogy of chapter five,
we see variations in that with other sources.
So it is very difficult.
There are people who have made a great deal
out of things like the numbers and how long people lived
and tried to analyze that.
And whether we take those literally or not,
certainly in the story as it originally arrived
to the people,
it would have clearly been understood
that those were literal numbers.
They would have genuinely believed
that that was the intention,
that people were living 900 years, 800 years.
As we have tried to explain that later,
we’ve
gotten pretty deep down that rabbit hole at times,
though I would argue,
as Michael and I have
in many points already in Genesis,
that when we dig into those peripheral details,
we’re really probably missing some of the main points
of the book and the story.
The purpose of this fifth chapter is really just
to be a vessel that delivers us to the starting point
of the new story.
And to make the point that the world has aged,
society has increased,
the population has expanded,
and yet that effect of sin continues.
It also introduces the idea that God’s story
is going to follow a particular set of people.
The idea that that’s Adam and Eve,
and then Cain or Seth,
and then their people, their descendants,
that it’s Jared and Enoch and Methuselah and Lamech, and finally Noah,
that there is this line
in the fifth chapter that happens for them
that they walked with God,
they were full of years,
that God takes them.
The days of Methuselah were 969 years,
which by the way makes him the oldest character.
And so we don’t have a variety of stories,
we don’t have a lot of information
about what’s happening in this period,
but God remains in the background.
God remains connected to the story
as these people fill the earth,
as they pursue that charge they were given,
be fruitful and multiply.
And as they do that,
God continues to be on the scene.
Now,
one of the things that we get to right away
in the sixth chapter,
which we’ll primarily start looking at tomorrow,
but
one of the things that it will tell us immediately
as we turn the curtain,
as we open the curtain
on the Noah story,
is that humanity is wicked,
that the fallenness of man has only gotten worse,
that deceit and murder and anger
and all of those things that we’ve seen
foreshadowed in the garden,
that they have continued to hamper
the development of people,
that they continue to be the root problem of people.
And there is this beautiful line we’ll look at tomorrow
where the text will tell us that God is in some sense,
grieved or the simple translation might be sad or sorry
that he’s created men,
that not only have we fallen,
but we’ve managed to decline even from there.
And so it’s fascinating the way in which this story
reconnects us
with the problem of sinfulness
and what this leads God to do,
how God responds to the brokenness of humanity.
And that will primarily be the focus of the Noah story.
I would argue that it would not take you long.
I would argue that it may be worth your time
to read through chapter five,
though my experience is that genealogies in scripture
are rarely of great interest to modern Christians
as we live in a different time and place,
and those names are not major characters in the story
and largely unfamiliar to us.
So we generally tend not to do a great deal with them.
I did hear a sermon once in which a pastor referred to them
as a kind of cemetery.
If you ever have been in small towns
or grew up in a small town
where there was kind of the old church cemetery,
or if you have in your family a section in a cemetery
or have ever seen that,
then you kind of get the idea
that this is essentially a brief stroll
through mankind’s family cemetery.
There’s Methuselah, the oldest man.
There’s Lamech, the father of Noah.
There’s that guy who had a couple of sons
and a couple of daughters.
And so there is that sense
of where we come from in the meta story,
not in a family way,
but in a human way.
And yet, as the earth fills with people,
it fills with wickedness.
And this really sets the stage
where we find ourselves tomorrow.
So that’s really it for today.
Today’s short, it’s a transition piece.
Tomorrow, as we begin to dig into the flood story,
I think we’ll have a lot more of interest.
There’ll be a lot more that is familiar to you.
There may also be some surprises.
My experience is that when we revisit the Bible version
of Bible stories we think we know well,
we are often surprised.
We often have inherited details from other places.
Probably the most
prolific example of this
is the Christmas story.
We all carry things around in our mind
that aren’t really part of the biblical Christmas story.
And the same might be true
for some of these other popular stories like the flood.
So as we move into the flood narrative tomorrow,
you may find that there are things
that you have either forgotten
or might realize you picked up from somewhere else.
But we’ll see how that goes.
We’ll begin working our way through that tomorrow.
Thank you for being with us.
Thanks for starting your week with us.
And please do continue to join with us
as we make our way through Genesis.
Take care, blessings everybody.
Stay safe and be healthy.