Genesis chapter 5 begins with the statement, this is the book of the generations of Adam. So it's clear that Moses, in writing this material, now wants to bridge between the reality of Cain and Abel and what happened with them and off to the flood. So chapter 5 represents a bridge between those two great events. The reality of Cain murdering his brother as a picture of the effect of sin that has now come into the world and then of course the flood which is the pinnacle of judgment and sin that we'll look at next week, Lord willing. So chapter five is a bridge in between. It's not a throwaway chapter, though. It's not one of those genealogical chapters that you have a tendency to sort of skip over. I've preached from the genealogies of Matthew and Luke a number of times to make the point that These men wrote these things for the purpose of demonstrating something. There's something important in these words and we see that here. This isn't just a list of people by name. This is a way of Moses instructing us as to what is going on in the world as a result of what Adam did. Cain and Abel is obvious. This is more subtle, but yet it's just as in your face as what Cain and Abel did. So it's a good chapter, I think, because it bridges that gulf. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female, he created them. Once again, notice that repetition of the creation of humanity being male and female. And he blessed them and named them man or translation really should be named them Adam. And when they were created, when Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. And once again, we're confronted with the question of how might Adam and his wife have perceived this new son? Now, this is not the third son of Adam and Eve. It is, according to this text, but it certainly can't be in terms of the human race. There's many more children. So Seth is being picked out as an individual who becomes the father, if you will, of a generation. And so, once again, we ponder what Adam and Eve might have considered. Remember I said in our study of Cain and Abel that Eve may have believed that Cain was the one who was promised to be the seed. She may have believed that. There's my first son. There's this man. The Lord has given me a son. I've gotten a son by the power of God. And it could very well be that she thought, hey, this Cain is going to be the one. Well, it's obvious he's not. since he has now killed his brother and been banished from even staying in one place. And so now Moses turns his attention to Seth and it's highly likely again that Eve would have believed that Seth was the promised child. And I think Moses is actually setting it up this way. He's drawing the picture in such a way as that your attention turns away from Cain as the possible seed to Seth, now being the possible seed. And in a way, you could almost say that Seth is that seed, because it's from his lineage that you will come to Noah, and then it's from Noah's lineage that you'll come to Abraham, and then it's from Abraham's lineage, of course, that you come to the Christ. So there's a sense in which Moses is making the connection for the Israelites, this is the man who was given by God through whom the seed would eventually come. Other sons and daughters of Adam, of course, would have not been included in this lineage, not excluded in the sense that they weren't part of God's plan in total, but excluded specifically from the purpose of redemption. So even though Abel's dead, Eve may have believed that God had replaced Abel with Seth. he was more righteous than his brother, because his brother killed him, so maybe now she's thinking Seth will be the one. And I think that's the picture that Moses is trying to paint here. Here is where you come from. This is where you come from as a people. Now you'll notice in 426, the end of the previous chapter, it says that at this particular time men began to call upon the name of the Lord. And it's important for us to understand what that phrase is about. The world at this point, try to think about this very primitive world. Try to picture in your mind this very primitive existence. Here you have, you're not too many generations at all from the very beginning of the creation itself. So the world is fresh and new. There's a sense in which the effects of sin have not yet accumulated upon the world, and there's an ability of human beings, we'll see in this chapter, to live 900 years or more. So there's this sense of life very much present in this place. But based on Adam's sin, what could have happened was that God could have said, okay, I've created this race and they've rebelled against me, Therefore, I'm not going to have anything to do with them. I'm going to leave them. I'm just going to let them go do their thing. And he could have distanced himself, or separated himself, if you will, from the race. He could have walked away and just, you know, as God, just sort of stepped back and watched while things happened. But that's not how God intended for this world to be. Remember, the fall of Adam was a part of his plan. in this creation. And so here you have God who although he has been rebelled against, and they're continuing to rebel against him, he is still present in the world. And there are people now who are beginning to desire, if you will, the relationship that Adam had with God. there they have this innate desire to still know their creator now I would argue you know several millennia later that that is definitely been waning over time so so you have to try to put yourself back into this world this is a world in which we're very close to the days in which the world was created so there's a a sense in which people would have had at least and those days a much closer sense of their creator than even now so Here you have a time in which people begin to call upon the name of the Lord in the sense that they do a number of things. To call upon the name of the Lord then, by definition, is to do three things. One, is to recognize the power of God. based on his name. Remember, it's always the name of God that's important. I pointed this out last week. When you think about the names in scripture, you think about the name of a person, and then you think about the name of God, you learn much about the character of the individual from the name. When we think about the name of God, although God's name has not yet been identified at this point in an official sense, his character is still very much present. He is the self-sufficient, self-determining, self-existent one. There's nothing in God by which he needs to survive. He needs nothing else in order to be God. There's no want in God, which is why we must absolutely deny that God created human beings because he needed some sort of relationship with a creature. That's utterly false. God was utterly self-sufficient without us. So it's to recognize who God is by his power, but it's also to recognize the distance from God by virtue of sin. The gap that has now come as a result of the fall of Adam has separated man from his creator. And so to call upon the name of the Lord is to recognize the power of God and also to recognize the extent of one's own distance and then to cry out to God for mercy. Fundamentally, what human beings need more than anything else from their creator is mercy. That wouldn't have been the case for Adam. Adam, in his unfallen state, his primary need was not for mercy. His primary need was for the presence of his Lord. But once sin came and the relationship was broken, now what human beings desperately need is mercy. And as I've been pondering Ephesians 2 this week, consider this reality that our primary need is not something in our circumstances. Our primary need is not something in our circumstances. Our primary need is in our broken relationship with our Creator and our desperate need for Him to be merciful to us. All other needs, no matter how great they might be, A body filled with cancer, for example, is trivial compared to the real need that we have, which is to be close to our God, to know him. Because the fact of the matter is, is everything in this world is terminal or temporary. It's not if, it's when. It's not if, it's when. That's right. We all have one thing in common. We're all going to die. So the fact is, is that we need mercy. There's a desperate sense in the human race of the need for contact with creator. And humanity begins to seek him, especially in the line of Seth. You see this in the line of Seth. There's a sense in which the line of Cain is a line of people who are being banished from God. Now we have a mirror in which Seth becomes the picture through which God comes close to his people. There's an opposing picture being painted between chapter four and chapter five. And so as people now begin to call upon the name of the Lord, they recognize that what they need is to call out for mercy. To call upon the name of the Lord is to invoke the character of God as a part of what it means to come into a relationship with him. Oh God, you are merciful. Oh God, you are the one full of forgiveness. You are the one of compassion. We are the sinners. As Luther said, the only thing we contribute to our salvation is our sin. So the fact is that what we need from God is everything. So we call upon the name of the Lord. And it's even a part of the idea, and I asked a question about this, about the concept of us calling upon the name of Jesus even in our prayers. we say in Jesus' name at the end. And of course, it's become just a ubiquitous little thing that we tack on the end. We don't even really think about it. But my hope would be that you, as you consider what is happening here as well as in Ephesians 1 and 2, that you would rethink that as you're praying and thinking about this calling upon the name of the Lord, even in your own personal prayers, that you would pause and ponder that. I'm not just calling out in my own authority because I don't have any. But I'm calling out in the authority of one who does to a God who is merciful. And so what I need is I need for some authority. I don't have any, but I have an authority in Christ because he has taken me to himself. I am in Christ, which means that I can cry out to the father through the son who possesses all of the authority in heaven and on earth. I mean, it's a, it's a beautiful picture that Paul paints there at the end of Ephesians one about the fact that it is this Jesus who has been given who has been raised from the dead, who has been seated at the right hand of the father, who has been given the name above all names, who has been given every ounce of authority in this world, and who has dominion over all things, and all things are put over his feet, and he's given as the leader of the institution that will become the power of God in the world, the church. He is the one. And so when we come before God, we're not coming in some, well, I'm coming on my own authority, God. No, we're coming without any authority, but because we know Him, we can appeal to the Father in the name of the Son. Which, by the way, nobody else on this earth praying can do. If you think about it. The Muslim can pray five times a day facing Mecca, but he has nothing to appeal to his God for accept his own authority. All he can do is hope that the God he worships will hear him. But that's not our worry. We don't have to worry about whether God will hear us, because God hears us in Christ. And we will learn, of course, in the New Testament that it's the Spirit of God who perfects the prayers of the saints, even to bring them in a package in which they're acceptable to the Father, and then the Son appeals. So it's a Trinitarian reality. So this is the picture of people calling on the name of the Lord. Here we have it at the very beginning of time. People turning to their God and coming before Him and being willing to call upon Him. Seth is implied, see, this because in verse 26 it says to Seth also a son was born and he called his name Enosh at that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord the connection that Moses is making is here we have a man who comes he has a son and it is at this time that men began to call on the Lord the implication being that Seth is the first of these to begin to call upon the name of the Lord to seek God and look for God now one of my A verse that I think is one of the most fascinating verses in the book of Genesis is chapter 5, verse 3. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image and named himself. Now, it's fascinating the way that he puts this, because that comes right after Moses writes, when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female. So Moses sort of repeats that Genesis 1 reality. Let us make man in our image. Male and female, he created him. And that makes us a distinct species in this male and female sense. But notice here, something changes. Now Seth, although he will be a good man and he will be a man after God's own heart in a sense, he will be a man calling after the name of the Lord and he will be the progeny of generations of people leading to Noah, but he's a man created in the likeness of Adam. And this to me is one of those sentences which confirms that doctrine of original sin. Here's the propagation of the corruption of Adam. Adam's likeness. What is Adam's likeness? Adam's likeness is one of sin now. It's one of a curse upon him that he will return to the dust of the ground. It's the propagation of the sinful nature of Adam where now because of his fall into sin he desires sin. He has a nature that is incapable of being holy and righteous in the presence of his creator, which is why he's been banished. He cannot be in the presence of a holy God anymore because his nature is such that he is unholy. And nothing unholy can come into the presence of a holy God. And so when he propagates himself, when he reproduces, guess what he reproduces? He reproduces that sinfulness. And I want you to connect that verse then back to the very beginning we were talking about this idea of reproduction. Be fruitful and multiply. But now that multiplication is a multiplication of the sinful nature of Adam rather than the holy nature of God that had been placed into Adam in the first place. Now Adam has no choice but to produce offspring that will be sinful. The QA stamp, he'll never pass QA because the parts were inferior. That's right. The parts are inferior. They'll always be inferior. In the first two verses before that, he reminds that God made man in his life. Correct. But, exactly. What was is no longer. There was a time when God was creating man. Now, does that mean that the Imago Dei no longer exists within humanity? Well, of course not. That's not what Moses is saying. We still possess the image of God. We still possess all of the various attributes that God gave to Adam that come out of his nature as God. We still have intelligence. We still have language. We still have all these other kinds of things. But all of them have been corrupted. because they're not coming out of god putting them directly into adam the coming out of a a man who is sinful and so there's a propagation of that in the world it's a blessing and a curse really the curse continues and yet the blessing is is that look man you still get to go out and set forth and multiply yeah well I'm still going to allow you to multiply the problem is your children are going to sin they're going to be like you know the person who said my sin is ever before yes In sin, I was conceived in my mother's womb, right? I mean, those kinds of verses, the idea of original guilt, original sin as very much being passed down from generation to generation. Now, I said this last week, but I want to repeat it again because it's worth repeating. In Baptist circles, the vast majority of Baptists today no longer accept the doctrine of original sin. They no longer believe that human beings are in fact born guilty. Okay, because there's two elements of original sin. When we talk about original sin, original sin is just the umbrella doctrine over the fact that human beings are propagating themselves in sin. There's two primary pillars holding that up. One is original pollution. which is the idea that everybody's been corrupted by what Adam did. We've been polluted. I like the word better even than total depravity because pollution is this idea that every part of us has been infected, polluted by sin. Maybe not as... total depravity would make you believe that you're as sinful as you can be. Yes, right. No, pollution is this idea that every aspect of yourself has this smog of sin that's overcome it. You can't rationally think right anymore because sin has corrupted your mind. Your emotions don't come out right because sin has corrupted your emotions. Your will doesn't act the way it's supposed to because it's been corrupted. Language doesn't work. Memory doesn't work and so on and so on and so on because you've been polluted in every sense. So sin has corrupted every part of you. But there's another pillar that goes with it and this is the one that's denied by most Baptists and that's the doctrine of original guilt. Not only are we polluted by what Adam did, but we also are guilty of what Adam did. And the reason, of course, why this is denied is that in our ruggedly individual Western culture, most people would say, well, I can't be held guilty for somebody else's sin. I can only be guilty for my own. And God says, well, no, not actually. You can be held guilty for the fact that you're human. You're born into this world with a guilt. That guilt upon you is a reality that you cannot overcome. What is the term in the Baptist that they use about... It's like rugged individualism, but it is that each man is sinful. It's a correct term, but I can see it's where you're at right here. Yeah. There's a term used in, the term you may be looking for is soul competency or soul liberty. Okay. That has nothing to do really with this doctrine because soul liberty, soul competency is the belief that Baptists, that we are individually capable of understanding the word of God. We do not need an ecclesiastical body above us telling us what scripture says. Okay. the Spirit of God is able to instruct you individually to understand. Now, I get where you're going with that because there could be, in the sense that individual Baptists may be saying, well, see, I am capable individually of understanding the Word of God, therefore I'm really not guilty individually. Where the corruption really comes in is the mistaken belief that you're born into this world morally neutral, quote-unquote innocent, and then you become guilty as you sin. Or when you cross over that fictitious boundary called the age of accountability, where somewhere before that you are not accountable and suddenly you become. Which, by the way, when I've talked to Baptists who believe this, I've asked them this question. So you believe then that there's two ways to be saved. one is to believe in christ and to accept his death the other is to be young enough that you don't know the difference so you're suggesting that god has two ways so what you're suggesting to me is i really should have killed my kids before they got to that age in order to guarantee that they were going to go to heaven oh no no no we shouldn't do that because then you've sinned a great sin well of course i've done but i've saved them did they invite you back? I mean, if I've had four kids and I kill all four of them, I've doubled the number of people that are going to be in heaven for me and my wife, so it sounds like I've done a pretty good job. I mean, just doing the math, right? Obviously, that's preposterous as an example, but fundamentally it drives, it shows the inconsistency of the view. And I've always argued, any theology that is inconsistent is wrong. Your theology must be consistent from end to end. If one part of your theology contradicts another part of your theology, you've got a problem. In this particular case, we believe, or we should believe, in the doctrine of original guilt. We have been imputed with a guilt just by virtue of being born. We are born in the likeness of our father, who is born in the likeness of his father, who is born in the likeness of his father, going all the way back to Adam, who has brought down to us sin. Yes. We only want to believe that Christ's imputation comes. We don't want to believe the sin side of the equation, which destroys the gospel. and I argued this in a paper I wrote at Bethel, you can find it on my website, that without the doctrine of original guilt, you've fundamentally destroyed the very nature of the gospel itself, because if you can't have an imputation of sin, then by definition you can't have an imputation of righteousness. Which is why, by the way, you find most Baptists trying to be consistent. And here's how they do it. They try to be consistent by saying, well, we don't believe in original guilt or the imputation of guilt. And we struggle with the idea of imputation of righteousness. So we embrace the idea of, well, part of this process is ours. OK? It's why they hate limited atonement. Well, it's why they hate limited atonement. It's more likely why they hate effectual calling. It's about the idea that they just believe that, well, God does his part, I do my part, and everything should be fine. We call this synergism, and as I said on Wednesday night, I'll define that on Sunday morning. The fact is that human beings are born in the image of their fathers, and they're born with a sinful image, and this likeness is passed down from generation to generation, and all humanity are under the curse as a result of it. And Paul, in Romans 5, proves it by showing the one thing that is common amongst every human being regardless of age or activity, and that is death. Death is the proof. Everybody dies, no matter how innocent they might be. There are many babies who never reach the age of accountability who perish. There are many who die in utero. Obviously, we've killed about 50 million of them, but And then there are many others of course that die from natural causes and from things outside of our ability to control. If they were in fact innocent, why do they die? They should not. But the fact is they do. Because, as Paul points out in Romans 5, we have been imputed with the guilt of our forefather. He was our federal representative. When he sinned, he cursed the entire race to be condemned. And so Here is the proof of it. Here is a statement making it clear. Seth was born in the likeness of his father. He was born with this reality. Now, and that's what I was, that's what we were talking about from Romans. Okay, now let's take a look at the people listed in this chapter then. When you go down this list of patriarchs, and this is a list of patriarchs, now this isn't a list of the patriarchs of Israel, this is a list of the patriarchs of the human race. So as you go down this list, there are four things that are given to us about each individual. Moses repeats the same four things all the way down with one exception, and only one exception along the way. We get four things. First, we get the name of the patriarch. Verse six, when Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh. Seth lived after he fathered Enosh 807 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. Okay, four facts come out of that verse. One, his name. Two, his age at the birth of his first son. You will notice that they're quite a ways up there when they have their first kids. uh... seth is a hundred and five inaugurations ninety canada's seventy mahalo hell is sixty five and he gets to medicare agent has his first kid right this is the first of that's what it says the implication is that's his first job i mean it doesn't matter to me i can see it fine either way because it could be like adam obviously i didn't force that it's it's it's the implication is that's his first son the name of his first son and the total length of his life, including the number of years he lived after the birth of his first son. So here we have Seth, 912 years and he died. Now there's one more piece of information, really a fifth thing, that's said of each one. I didn't include it in the list and that is there is a sad refrain, it's included at the end of each one, and he died. And of course the purpose of that is to show us again the consequences of what Adam did. Here is the likeness of Adam being propagated. Each of these individuals lived, each of these individuals reproduced, each of these individuals continued to live and reproduce more, and then each of these individuals died. So the curse is being pictured here. Adam was told, from the dust of the ground you were formed, to the dust you shall return. And here is a continuing line of that reality. So why does Moses include this genealogy in his work? What does it prove? Well, there's a number of things I think this chapter does, including this refrain of individual years, son's name, and death is this. It shows the Israelites who their ancient ancestors were through the line of Seth. Remember, this is a people coming out of Egypt, been there now 400 years. They don't know the name of their God. They haven't had any connection to him for the last 400 years. And frankly, their history is rather vague. They don't know really who they are. They know their patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but only in the barest sense. In fact, the point of this book is going to be to outline who is Abraham, who was Isaac, who was Jacob, who were Jacob's sons, why is Joseph as important as he is, and so on. And why is it that Joseph's sons are being given places of prominence over the other sons of Israel. This is backing it up even further. This is saying here is who you are from in terms of all the way back to the very beginning. Here's who you are as a people. You belong to a line coming out of a man who is pictured here as being a man of righteousness. A man who calls upon the name of the Lord. A man who has a connection to God. this is an official list then of the names of men who follow after one another for you so here's who you are here's who you are you're not just some random people you are specifically set aside in redemptive history secondly of course it accounts for the period between Seth and Noah and establishes the basis for the flood alright we have generation after generation after generation if you were to do the math coming out of this chapter, not just so much in terms of the length of time, but the number of people that would be potentially propagated out. You're looking at tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people coming out of this list. Each one has a son and then other sons and daughters and the result of multiplication over a very short period of time, you would have a massive number of people. The one thing that human beings can claim to have done well is to be fruitful and multiply. Even though we do have a tendency to go about killing each other and lowering that number dramatically, We still do have a tendency to multiply. We still do have a tendency to produce children. Even when those numbers are in the millions. Even when those numbers are in the millions. Per episode or event. Well, in the 20th century, more than 100 million people died as a direct or indirect result of war. And they're now reassessing how many people actually died as a direct result of the Nazi empire. It used to be around 20 million. Now they're rethinking that. I think it's even more. So there's a massive number of people that have been lost. Imagine how much more propagation would have happened if the 50 million children that haven't been aborted would have been here. I always like to remind people who embrace abortion that the reason why their taxes are going up is because they've killed off an entire generation of people that would be paying taxes. and all of their children that would also be in the game and who knows how much else has been destroyed in that process. So this genealogy shows who the Israelites are, it shows the period between Seth and the flood and of course it demonstrates the awful effect of sin upon the race. The awful effect of course is the fact that each one died. Death now reigns over human beings. It rules over human history. Although they continue to live to great ages, every one of them will die, with one exception. This is a visible testimony to the curse given to Adam. Everybody dies. Everybody dies. And these men prove it to be the case. Now, if you get out your calculator and look at all these numbers that are put in here, you can calculate that the average age of these men at their deaths was over 900 years. My calculation was 907. Our engineer friend who's off in North Carolina thinks it was 926. He's not here to defend himself, so 907 is the right answer. Yes, that's right. It's 912 if you include Noah. But I didn't include Noah because he's actually living past the flood, and his lifespan is being diminished by virtue of the fact he lives beyond it. Why did these men live to such tremendous ages and why do we not? There's a good amount of speculation. One of the things that you will hear unbelievers do is they'll point to a chapter like this and say, well look, this is preposterous that men would live 900 years, therefore It's, you know, you can't believe the Bible, it's preposterous, okay? But there are a number of reasons why we could believe this is the case. One of them, which we'll talk more about next week when we get into the flood, is the fact that there is a covering of water over the earth at this point. Remember at the early parts of Genesis 1, it says that God separated the waters below from the waters above. So he placed the waters above separate from the waters below and then he separated the waters below into water and land. So there was probably some sort of water canopy over the earth which came down in the flood and this canopy would produce this beautiful greenhouse effect. If you know anything about the planet Venus, you know that it has a methane covering over the surface, which produces a greenhouse effect in which the temperatures inside of that planet soar to unbelievable heights. Because of Venus being so much closer to the sun, it gets so much more heat from the sun. And there's this massive greenhouse effect inside. If you pull that planet out to about where we are and put a canopy of greenhouse gases over it, you get this beautiful environment. which looks a lot like Hawaii from pole to pole year around without any stop. This canopy, of course, would also be filtering out a tremendous amount of the damaging rays of the Sun. The UV and UVB rays that would be coming in are being filtered out or they're being, you know, reflected away by this canopy and so there would be this sense underneath of a world in which this damaging effect does not produce the aging that it does. I read an article the other day, I don't know if I mentioned this or not, but I read an article the other day in a magazine called Wired Magazine, it's a science magazine, it's grossly liberal and weird, but every once in a while it has a good article in it, and the article started with this sentence, scientists do not know why human beings age, period. They don't. There's absolutely no reason why our cells should not be able to reproduce themselves again and again and again. Why it is that every time a cell reproduces, it does not reproduce itself perfectly. The DNA structure within each cell seems to change, even though it's simply duplicating itself. You would think that duplication would be perfect, but it's not. Now, of course, secularists with no in a Christian worldview are struggling to try to figure that out. We know why. Because we know that the effect that's come upon us is what sin does, which is the second point. The reason these men live as long as they do is because the effects of sin have not accumulated in their DNA as much as they have in ours. It's why the children of Adam could intermarry and have children of their own without producing the dangerous side effects of incest. And you'll notice there's no prohibition of incest until you get to Moses, which is centuries after Adam and Eve, right? And so it's not until you get to the law that incest is prohibited because it becomes at that point where now it's beginning to be dangerous for brothers and sisters to marry and have children. And by the way, you'll notice, as I mentioned once before, that seems to be only true in the human species, not in other species of the planet. I don't know why. Could it be the effects of sin upon the human race and the curse? Well, I think so. So the accumulative effects of sin on the physical nature of man had not yet been established. Aging and disease and immorality, et cetera, were not yet fully formed. And human beings were able to live much longer because their DNA structures can survive much longer than they can in our days. And so the effect is cumulative over time. Thus, the effects of redemption must also be accumulative, which is why we look forward to a resurrection. We're not just going to be ourselves in this condition for all of eternity, because in this condition, I don't know what I would look like after 900 years. in this world. Can you imagine someone living to 900 years? I knew a woman that was a member of our church at Calvary. She was 106 when she died. She was 99, she turned 98 the day that I started at Calvary and she lived until she was 106. So I knew her for many years and she was this small little shriveled up little thing And it was obvious that she was a hundred years old. In fact, she donated her body to science. When she died, she was taken to the KU Medical Center and they studied her because she was one of these rare specimens of people who lived to that age and they want to investigate what was going on in her cell structures and her organs and so forth to get an idea of why she was living to that age. And it was obvious. Can you imagine living to 900 years old in these days? No. No. I mean, I can't imagine what we'd be racked with, right? I mean, I take a few pills each morning. I'd be taking a bag full at 900 every day. I wouldn't have to eat. I'd just take pills. I talked to a Catholic friend the other day, and she said, well, I don't think those years were like our years. Really? Yeah, it was years. Why not? I've heard that before. What leads you to believe these were shorter years and that the years have been getting longer? That's called rationalization. Yes, that's right. So the fact is that we have a cumulative effect of sin on the physical nature of man and the fact that you have a canopy. By the way, the proof of that canopy thing is when God says, I'm going to limit man in 6.3, I'm going to limit man to 120 years. Guess what would happen after that canopy is gone? life expectancies would drop dramatically. And that's precisely what took place. But we have one interesting character in the midst of this story by the name of Enoch. Verse 21, when Enoch had lived 65 years he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. The Septuagint translates as he was not found, for God took him. Now notice his lifespan is significantly less than all the rest. He's only 365 years old when he disappears. Now the implication, of course, is that he simply walked off the face of the earth, that God took him off the face of the earth. That's what it says in the text. So the implication being that this is a man who walks with God, he is a picture of a difference in all of this. So we have this refrain of here's a man, he lives X number of years, has a son, he lives X number of years more, and then he dies. Again and again and again and again, repeated down through the text. And then in the middle of it, just before you get to the end, Moses sticks in this other man. Now there was probably a great deal of oral tradition that Moses relied on to build this prompt that had been passed down from generation to generation. And as he's writing it down under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, he's inserting Enoch into this text. You can almost imagine him smiling while he writes this in because he's saying, there's a difference here. There's a positive in the midst of all of this. So Enoch is a picture of this not being just a story of history, but a story of redemptive history, which is all of what the Bible is, a story of redemptive history. There's a lot more history that's not included in the Bible, right? So this is a redemptive history, and this particular man is being included to tell us that the curse upon Adam is not absolute. there is the possibility that one might escape from the curse. That God is already signaling, if you will, today we call it virtue signaling, but he's signaling that he is going to, at some point in the future, reverse the effects of the curse and there will be some who will not experience the sad refrain and he dies. that death does not have to be the finality of a life, that there can be more. Now, again, let's not impose, be careful here, do not impose New Testament categories onto this text. Moses doesn't know those New Testament categories when he writes this. So he is not in any way making Enoch out to be some forerunner of christ for example or some of these kinds of things you hear preachers try to do with this text this is just a picture of a man who god accepts if you will be x c e p t accepts from the curse here's a man who walks away dot takes him as a picture of saying okay listen This curse, yes, it's real. Yes, men are dying. Yes, this is the sad reality of people being born in the image of Adam, but I have a plan and I'm going to do something. It's going to be centuries before it's going to be carried out in a literal sense in history, but I'm still going to do something. I am going to do something fantastic. I am going to take men away. I'm going to take them away from this curse. This man walked away and was not found. The curse did not find him because God took him away. Which is why I like the Septuagint translation better. And he was not found. Found by what? Found by the curse. God took him away from the curse. God took him away from that refrain. Is Enoch in some special way going to be something special in the future? I don't know. But what I do know is that God took him away because he was designed. And this is an essential element of Jesus' words that those who believe in him, John 11, 26, will never die. Because when we read that text, what do we assume? Do we assume that we're never going to face physical death? Of course not. Because we've seen people die who believe in Christ. No. What we know from that text is Jesus says, you will never finally die. You will never finally be under the curse. All of those in hell are spending an eternity under that curse. That curse will continue to rule over them. They will continue to be in rebellion against their God. They will continue to have hearts of stone that refuse to bend the knee to their God. They will not call out upon the name of the Lord. There will be no desire of it. They will sit in darkness and utter loneliness, because look, there will be no relationships in hell. There will be no relationships because that brings hope. There will be utter loneliness and utter darkness and they will sit in their rebellion and they will stew in their hatred of God and they will suffer in themselves under the curse forever. Too gruesome to even imagine. But that's what God is going to give them because that's what they want. That's what they want. But God has found a people and he has taken them to himself. So here we have an early picture of how God is going to carry out his promise of Genesis 3.15. There's going to come one who's going to crush the head of the serpent. And guess what? He's not going to be able to find those people that belong to me. I'm going to take them. They're going to be mine. They're going to live forever. Enoch is mentioned in a few other passages, of course. We see him in 1 Chronicles 1.3 as a descendant of Seth. Again, demonstrated the connection of the Israelites to Seth. He's seen in Luke 3, 37 in the genealogy of Jesus, again demonstrating that Jesus was descended from Adam through Seth's line. He's found in Hebrews 11, 5 as one who did not see death because he was pleasing to God and God took him. And of course in Jude 1, 14 as one who prophesied about the ungodly who have done much wickedness and deserve the judgment of God. Potentially, by the way, a reference to the flood. as Enoch is going around saying, hey, folks, repent. There's a day coming. By the way, if you do the math here, I think I mentioned this last week, if you do the math here, Methuselah died in the flood. His son died in the flood. Didn't get in the ark. Didn't get in the ark. Which leads us to the end of chapter five, and just, I think, really, if you did this right, you would put chapter six, the beginning of chapter six would really be earlier in this text, probably going back maybe to verse 32, but whatever. The last person that we have in this list is Noah, who's 500 years old. He has three sons. Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Notice three sons versus just one listed in the other men who are named. They had other sons and daughters, but this is the only one named with three. And I think, again, Moses is pointing to the reality that here's a man who is going to be different than all of the previous ones. He's going to have a much different kind of reality. The word Noah means relief. It means rest. Noah would be, according to the prophetic word about him, someone from the ground who would bring rest from the painful toil of the curse. He would be, they said, someone who would bring relief from the hard bondage of sin and death. Not the way he's going to bring it, of course. It's not the way most people would want it to come. Noah would, in fact, fulfill this prophecy by bringing the rest of death, the rest of death, upon most of the human race to the flood. Death brings an end to the painful toil, right? but it also brings an end to most of humanity. What's this chapter about? How do we plug this into the gospel of Jesus? Now, we could just look at Enoch and say, well, he's a picture of the Christ and so forth. And I said, we certainly could do that, but that's probably not why Moses is included in this text and how it really relates to the gospel. In fact, to me... Basically turning the volume up. Yeah, I think that chapter 5 to me reveals... No, chapter 5. The reality of chapter 5 is that it reveals the awful truth of the reality of death. This is a chapter about death, really. In every sense, every one of these men are listed as having died, except for Enoch that was taken, so he didn't die. So you get the juxtaposition designed to point you back to the fact that all these other men died. And the fact that it leads to Noah, who will be the one through whom the entire race, with the exception of his family, will die. So you have this great picture being painted here of death. Not great in the sense that it's a wonderful thing, but great in the sense that it's come upon all of humanity. and the fact that it's inescapable. Death is nothing we're going to be able to escape. Human beings all have the same tragic commonality, and that is that we will die. However, we're given a little picture, as I said a moment ago, we're given a little example here of God acting in time and space to turn the curse of death away, which he can do. which he actually desires to do, which is his goal. He imposed death upon the human race as the result of sin, but he imposed death upon the human race as the thing he could conquer, thus bringing glory to himself, thus glorifying himself within the creation he had made. If you think about it, death is the thing that is overcome by redemption. Redemption's goal is to overcome death. Death is the thing that's the real problem, right? What's our biggest problem? Is our biggest problem the fact that, well, the closing didn't happen today and I've got to wait until next week? Is that my biggest problem? No! It's trivial. Our real problem is death. In fact, yesterday as I was praying in the sanctuary, I said, Lord, would you be willing to exercise your power to move this process along? And then I stopped and I said, you know, Lord, that's one of those first world kind of things. And I apologize for that prayer. That's no big deal. Your power needs to be exercised in what really matters. The power of God is over death. It's over corruption. It's over the likeness of Adam being carried down from generation to generation which leads to death. That's the real problem of the race. And the fact of the matter is that most people do not view that as the real problem of the race. They worry about every other imaginable thing under the sun and sort of ignore death and ignore a broken relationship with the Creator They just kind of ignore that. And of course, in their reprobate nature, that's exactly what they want to do. This is a chapter which reminds us that God has a purpose in creation. That purpose is to glorify himself by conquering his own proclamation over this world. I have condemned you to death, but I have also conquered it. And I'm going to do it not just by sweeping it away, not just by speaking forth a word and death is done away with. No, I'm actually going to enter into my own world, take on the condition of the race itself in the likeness of sinful flesh, and die. I'm actually going to bear it myself, thus conquering it. And this is what makes the Christian religion so very unique. It's the only religion that says that the creator actually entered into his own world and took on the one thing that we all struggle with in order to overcome it and kill it, which makes Easter Sunday so much more valuable to us.