September 4 - Adam to Noah to Abraham

September 4 - Adam to Noah
Genesis 5:1-32

Have you ever watched a movie or television episode where they have to move forward in time really quickly?  They show the sky, clouds flying across, sun coming up then going down; all of this happening in mere seconds. Or, they show a clock with its hands speeding around the dial.

The Bible took an entirely different approach. In one chapter, nearly 1000 years pass.  There were a lot of births that took place in those intervening years.  When we start reading Chapter 5, God created Adam – but the time we get to verse 32, Noah’s sons Shem, Ham and Japheth have entered the picture and the scene has been set for the great flood.

The wonderful thing is that there are some pretty amazing stories that get buried in all of those names and dates.  The purpose of this passage is to show the line from Adam to Noah.  We met Cain’s descendants in Genesis 4:17-24, then all of a sudden we discover in Genesis 4:25 that Adam and Eve had a third son to replace Abel named Seth.  It was this line that gets us to Noah and his sons.

It would be interesting to create a computerized (because there’d never be enough paper for the exercise) flowchart of the possibilities for population expansion in these first thousand years.  The Bible lists one person, their age when they had the son who was part of the line, the fact that they had other sons and daughter, then the age of their death.  So. Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born.  He lived 800 more years and had other sons and daughters.  Seth lived 105 years, then had Enosh, lived another 807 years and had other sons and daughters.  At the age of 90, Enosh had Kenan and lived 815 years longer … on and on until we get to Noah.  That man was 500 years old when his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth were born.

Two other interesting men in this account.  Enoch only lived 365 years, but the Bible tells us that he walked with God and then was no more because God took him away (Gen. 5:21-24).  There is no more explanation than that. Doesn’t it make you wonder what was different about his life?  His son, Methuselah, lived to be 969 years old and was the oldest man to be noted in scripture.

Because Genesis has to get from Adam to Abraham in order to tell the stories of the Patriarchs, we find one more lineage in Genesis 11:10-26, from Shem to Abraham. This only takes us through 290 years and the life spans are much shorter.

We say Happy Birthday to many men in these passages and with the coming of Abraham, we begin the story of God’s covenant with his people on earth.