Life Before the Flood | Genesis 5:18-32
Genesis 5:18-32
Genesis 5 continues to account for the generations of Adam who come through a redeemed and righteous lineage of Seth. We know that it is through Seth’s lineage that the fulfillment of Jesus Christ bruising the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15). In God’s wonderful grace He is already planning on saving His people while the rest of the world is falling into chaos.
This is a pre-flood world meaning the world looks and acts differently than the modern world.
The continents are closer together, the world hasn’t been destroyed with flood and changed it geography yet, there are also land bridges connecting regions where now we have water flowing over those land bridges creating new islands Island of Malta used to be connected to Sicily, in Italy, by a land bridge but now that bridge is covered by water creating an Island).
People lived way longer than modern people. This is the case because of the state of the world’s climate, it was warmer on average because of the water firmament surrounding the Earth (Genesis 1:6-7), diets were different since people had just started eating meat and ate plants and veggies often. Adam and Eve were created without sin. In this state of perfection, they were meant ot live forever in paradise on earth. After the fall of man, death began to exert its destructive influence on all humankind
“Therefore, just as though one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.” –Romans 5:12
“While the bible does not say, it makes sense that longevity at the outset of the race would allow humans the opportunity to accumulate knowledge and make other cultural advancements. At the same time, God commanded Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Longevity seems to have been God’s way of kick-starting the growth of civilization, as it would have taken centuries of procreation to fill the earth with people living mere decades.”
--GotQuestions.org
The Bible isn’t the only historical document which backs up this pre-flood long living fact for humanity. There has been one historical document that supports the idea that most people before the flood lived to be as old as or even older than Adam when he died. The Sumerian King List is a non-biblical text from southern Mesopotamia that lists the Sumerian kings and the length of their reigns before and after a great flood. Like the long-life spans of the pre-flood patriarchs, the most ancient of the kings enjoyed extraordinarily long reigns.
Adam dies when he is 930 years old (Genesis 5:5) and his children and grandchildren shared similarly long lifespans. Except for Enoch, the ten patriarchs who were born before the great flood lives an average of 900 years. Seth lived to be 912 years, Lamech (Noah’s father) died at the age of 777, Methuselah (Noah’s grandfather) died at the age of 969. If Adam lived 100 a century longer he would have been alive for the birth of Noah.
The Bible isn’t the only historical document which backs up this pre-flood long living fact for humanity. There has been one historical document that supports the idea that most people before the flood lived to be as old as or even older than Adam when he died. The Sumerian King List is a non-biblical text from southern Mesopotamia that lists the Sumerian kings and the length of their reigns before and after a great flood. Similar to the long-life spans of the pre-flood patriarchs, the most ancient of the kings enjoyed extraordinarily long reigns.
Remember: Sin brings Chaos; God brings order. Sin will distort God’s perfect and wonderful order which is why we currently live in this broken world where sinful deeds are praised, and righteous deeds are not. Righteousness reigned in the lineage of Seth and last week we asked the question: “What does it mean to be righteous? How do we live righteous lives?”.
We walk with God. We reorient our hearts, our minds and our lives around Him.
Genesis 5 is broken up into two parts: a) God repopulates the world with a righteous lineage and they become fruitful and multiply b) The result of walking with God is righteousness.
- God repopulates the world with a righteous lineage, and they become fruitful and multiply. (What is righteousness?)
“To Seth, to him also a son was born and he called his name Enosh. Then men began to call upon the name of the LORD…When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.”
--Genesis 5:1, 3
This is a clear call back and foreshadowing to what Christ will be in relationship to The Father God. Man is created in the likeness of Christ—we are a copy of Christ; we are to imitate Christ. Seth is a copy of Adam, and he is to imitate Adam. Jesus continually gives the glory to The Father even as a God/Man He consistently gives glory back to the father.
This is clear and evident when Jesus is praying to God the Father right before He raises Lazarus from the dead in the gospel of John,
“Father, I thank you that you have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that you sent Me.”
--John 11:41b-42.
God is charging Adam with a responsibility, to raise Seth in a godly light, so that Seth can walk like Adam. This is the first healthy father-son relationship in scripture. It is a model of how we ought to raise our children. This language of “imitating your father” is continued throughout scripture,
“Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgements which the LORD your God has commanded me to teach you…These words which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”
--Deuteronomy 6:1,6-7
“Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him—a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.”
--Colossians 3:9-11
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.”
--Ephesians 5:1-2
Throughout the entirety of scripture God is repopulating the lost world with His righteous people, he does it here and He does it through Noah after the flood
“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.’” –Genesis 9:1
God continues to pour His grace out onto the depraved sinful world as he gives new life to the world, He saves His righteous people and works through His righteous people.
When we look at the Genesis 5 text there are some stark differences between Gensis 4 + 5. Genesis 5 resets the narrative; we see where the lineage of Cain ends up in Genesis 4:24-26 where Lamech boasts about killing a boy and a man unjustly (talking to his multiple wives). Cain’s lineage are doing “amazing” things, they are building cities (the city of Enoch in Genesis 4:17), making music, doing some amazing, cultural and earthly things. Seth’s lineage in Gen. 5 ignores the earthly accomplishments of Seth’s family rather they focus on the godly accomplishments.
- The result of walking with God is righteousness (How do we become righteous?)
Genesis 5 begins with a reminding of Genesis 2 where Seth is made in the image of Adam and Adam is made in the image of God. We then see a repetition of lineage in Genesis 5:1-32). God’s people are flourishing, they are multiplying, they are being fruitful despite of the sinful world in which they are born into. Then we see a break in that repetition:
“Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters.” --Genesis 5:22
The Hebrew word for “Walk” is “Halak”
This word has two meanings, it’s first meaning literally means to move forward or to go, but there is a figurative side to this word which means to be conversant or to have a eased behavior. You could put both of these meanings together to say that walking in Hebrew means to walk forward at an eased behavior, to be conversant. Conversant means to “conserve” or to “preserve.”
Enoch is literally preserving his time with God, he is moving forward with God at an eased pace. Enoch’s countenance is high because of how he walks with God. Hebrews reminds us of the faithfulness of Enoch and where Enoch found his assurance with God.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks. By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God.”
--Hebrews 11:1-5
Hebrews 11 is giving us a clear interpretation of Genesis 5:22 and moreover an interpretation of Genesis 4-Genesis 13 highlighting the faith in which these early men of God had—their faith led to a strong, healthy relationship with God which then led to them being righteous in the eyes of God.
Remember from last week; some of these men made terrible mistakes, they fell into their sin, but ultimately they repented of that sin and withstood further testing from God. When a sinner walks with God they yield to God’s command, they run to God when they have made a mistake, they listen when God disciplines and they worship God with every breath they have.
“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
--1 John 1:5-9
Genesis 5 is a time of preparation for Noah. It is God preparing Noah for a lineage of men and women are living their best to glorify the true God of the Universe. While Cain’s lineage is doing amazing things in the world, building cities, making music and carving out a legacy for themselves Seth’s lineage is carving out a legacy that glorifies God, a legacy of walking with God. This prepares Noah for what is to come when God will call him to stand for righteousness in a corrupt, depraved world. When Noah will be the only one building an ark for rain that hasn’t come yet. Noah will look crazy, he will look bizarre and it will test his faith in God. Living for God is hard, it will make us unpopular, it is countercultural.
“Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, ‘I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.’”
--Genesis 8:20-21
The question we face is this: do we want to carve out a temporary legacy that glorifies ourselves? The world? The sin? Or do we want to carve out an eternal legacy that will last forever, that will glorify God, that will bring people into eternal relationship with God.
The Point: A righteous person walks with God. God is their king, God is their Lord, God is their focus, God is their everything—everything comes from God.