January 4-Genesis 5:1-6:22

Could people really live so long as chapter 5 of Genesis records?  Methuselah lived 969 years and became a father at age 187.  Today, men in their 50′s do not want to become fathers.  So what was going on before the flood?

There is a notable difference in the material in Genesis before chapter 11:10 and following it.  After Genesis 11:10 the story is focused on the family of Abraham.  This is the family through whom the Hebrew people come, and through whom Jesus Christ comes.  The chapters before are not legends, but they are more of a distant recollection.

Chapter 6 is pivotal the material before chapter 11.  In chapter 6 God is grieved with what humankind has become.  First he says in verse 3 that he will limit the length of their lives.  This explains the long lives before, recorded in chapter 5.  They lived so long because God allowed it.  In verse  3 he says, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for his is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.”  Note in Psalm 90:10 Moses laments, “The length of our days is seventy years–or eighty, if we have strength;…”  Now that is sounding more like what we see in our age.

God is so grieved in Gen. 6:7 that he says, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth–men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air–for I am grieved that I have made them” (NIV).  How bad had things become?  How sinful had they become?  Gen. 6:5 tells us, “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”  This is a great degeneration from God looking upon His creation, Gen. 1:31, and the narration reporting, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”  Gen. 6:11 says the earth was “full of violence.”

But there was one man, Noah, who pleased God.  And with Noah God would preserve humankind and all created life.  God would start over.  Gen. 6:8-9 describes Noah twice.  First, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”  And second, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.”  God let Noah know about His plan to destroy the earth.  And he gave him directions to build the Ark.  Pay attention to the details for they tell us how mammoth a project Noah was asked to do.  But most of all meditate prayerfully on verse 22, “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.”  It is one of those Biblical statements like Mary saying to the angel Gabriel in Luke 1:38, “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”  These are statements of incredible faith.  God calls on Noah, He calls on Mary, for a ginormous task.  And in faith they lean upon God to do what He has asked of them.

So it is to be for you and me.  We are to rise to the calling God gives us, whether great or small.  And who is to say one calling is great and another is small?  God is the one who weighs these things in the balance.  What we can know is what Noah, and what Mary knew.  God is dependable.  If He asks, He will provide.

What is God asking you to do?

Pastor Don