Genesis 5

God created mankind. He had His purposes in doing this. All of us fit into God's plan. We are not independent of Him, and our ease and immediate sense of well-being are not His highest goals. To have a realistic view of life, we must begin to look at the world from the standpoint of what God has revealed, and not merely from the view of our greatest curiosities and troubles.

According to what God has revealed, Adam and Eve had three prominent children. They did have other sons and daughters, but Cain, Abel, and Seth were the three that he has chosen to tell us about. Abel was murdered by his brother Cain, whose line of descendants would all perish in the flood. That line reached a point of great arrogance and evil in Lamech.

We are told that it is in the line of Seth that people began to call upon the name of the Lord. It is in the seventh from Adam in that line of Seth that a very unusual thing is noted for our consideration. Enoch, the seventh, walked with God. No explanation is given as to the meaning of this phrase, yet we understand that this is a good thing, true of Enoch, and later true of Noah, a blameless man in his generation, and true of the New Testament believers who have the Spirit of Christ at work within them. To walk in the Spirit is to live as child of God, loving Him, hearing His Word and obeying His commandments. This Enoch lived 365 years, one year for every day that the earth rotates around the sun. Then God took him home.

The words of God's original creation of mankind are repeated in connection with the line of Seth. Seth is a new beginning after the grief of one brother murdering another. In between Adam and Enoch we read of Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, and Jared. We know very little about them, only how long they lived before fathering the key figure who would be next in their line, how long they lived after that moment, and then the words that show us that God's warning to Adam was right: “And he died.” Death is now a sad fact in a broken world, even in a line of people that are being blessed by God. To ask that there be no death right now is to insist that there be no Fall of mankind. The Fall is a settled fact, but it is a fact that can be reversed, not through the erasure of the past, but through the giving of one perfect life as an offering to the Father.

God has done this for us in Christ. Early on in the story of our lives, we may suppose that we know how everything will turn out. We do not know whether we will marry. We do not know if we will have children. We do not know if there will be future generations that will come from the children that we are granted. We do not know how long our line will continue. Nor do we know how long we personally will live. These facts of our existence are in the hands of the Almighty.

We do know that we are living in a world where death and loss are real. But we also know that death has been overturned forever in the great Son of God, descended from Adam's son Seth. Jesus lives, and so shall you. How then are we to live in the world that now is?

We will be greatly blessed in this world of death if we live by faith in the Son of God, the Man of Life. Long before Jesus came, the Lord God Almighty was blessing people with consecrated lives in the midst of a broken world. They lived out their days for as long as God gave them breath. They had sons and daughters according to the Lord's sovereign will. They may have enjoyed certain things about their lives, and hated other things that they needed to accept as facts that they could not change. Through it all, they learned to call upon the Name of the Lord. They walked with God.

Enoch was among their number. He walked with God. His son Methuselah would live a very long life. Enoch had his 365 years, unusually brief for the list recorded in this chapter. But Enoch walked with God, and He did not die. One day he was, and the next day he was not. God took him. Years later God would take the prophet Elijah. This kind of end is very extraordinary. These men were translated for a new life in the house of the Lord above.

Methuselah, Enoch's son, would live on, and then another Lamech (not the same as the one in the line of Cain) would come. This Lamech would be the father of Noah, another man who walked with God. Lamech would teach us a second lesson of how we are to live in an age of loss and death. When he fathered Noah, he looked forward. He believed in a future day of “relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” God did grant a powerful new beginning in the days of Noah. But even this great descendant of Adam and Seth would not be the one who would crush the head of the serpent.

Another man would come who would walk with God as perfectly as any man could. Jesus, the second Adam, has brought us a new age and a new life and has secured for us the kingdom of heaven. Through Him we have relief from all the pain that has come to us in this world where it is still said, “And he died.” Through His death and resurrection, the purposes of God are being accomplished. Through faith in Him, though we live in the age of death, we can still walk with God. And with our confidence in Him, we wait in joyful hope for the fuller coming of a day of perfect relief for the faithful in the age of resurrection.