Genesis 5

0:00 Well, good morning everybody. It's good to be here with you. Back again, I have been traveling, not quite all the way around the world, but to a good extent, about halfway around the world anyway. Spent the last couple of weeks until, I guess I got back on Tuesday evening, visiting missionaries from 3rd Avenue in a couple of different places. The UK, so Guildford, got to see the South Combs and the Persies and some other friends that have been here before, and then went on to Turkey. to see the team in Izmir that we just prayed for a little bit earlier in the service.

0:34 One of the things that I was doing in Turkey is that Kyler Henry, who many of you will know, has started a tour company based in Izmir, Turkey, wherein he pulls together people and sends them by bus to various biblically famous cities in Turkey. So, for example, the seven churches that Jesus speaks to at the beginning of Revelation are all in Turkey, like Western Turkey. And so within a two-hour drive of Izmir, where they live, you can make it to all seven of those cities where those churches were located and see what's left of them.

1:12 And let me tell you, it is an incredible thing to go to places like Smyrna, that actually is Izmir, or Ephesus, or Pergamum, and see the ruins that are left of those cities. And as you look at it, a couple of different things happen, right? First of all, there are certain cities that have been sort of reconstructed and rebuilt to an enormous degree. So when you go, for example, to Ephesus, you can see the city in enough kind of reconstructed order that you can sort of make out what the city would have been like.

1:45 So when Acts, for instance, says that the Apostle Paul was dragged into the theater, you know, they just kind of say, yep, and that's the theater right over there where Paul would have been dragged in. 22,000 seats of a theater carved into a mountain, and Paul would have been dragged in there and have to listen to 22,000 people yelling, great is Artemis of the Ephesians at him, right? So it's an incredible thing to see. There are other places, though, where it's not so reconstructed and not so built up. So you walk into Pergamum, for instance, and most of what you're going to see there are just, it's excavated, right? But nothing has been rebuilt. Like, there aren't any buildings. It's just sort of pieces of carved marble that are laying around.

2:27 Or you go to a place like Colossae, where they haven't even, you know, the city that Colossians was sent to, you go to Colossae, and they haven't done any excavation at all. Like, they've done nothing. And so all you've got in Colossae is just this gigantic, weirdly shaped hill of dirt. That's it. And a couple of things happen as you're walking around these places and looking at them, Whether you're looking at, you know, the ruins of these marble temples and houses and stores and all the rest of it. Or you're just looking at a hill of dirt in Colossae.

3:00 The first thing that goes through your mind is that something catastrophic happened here. Something catastrophic happened to take what was obviously a glorious city made out of marble and reduce it to rubble. The other thing that you start to notice, though, especially as you look at some of the reconstructed cities, is that there is still, even in the ruins, there is still a kind of broken grandeur in the places.

3:31 And if it could be reconstructed, if all of those pieces of marble could be lifted back up, and the columns could be put back together and set in their places, on their pedestals, if it could be rebuilt, you can tell even in the midst of the ruins that this thing would be breathtaking, glorious. Well today, as we look at Genesis 5, that's kind of in a literary way what we're going to be doing. Walking through some ruins that even yet show a kind of broken grandeur. We've been studying for the last few weeks through the book of Genesis. We've made our way through chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, and now we're going to be looking at chapter 5. The plan for this series is to run it really right up until Christmas, and we ought to be able to make it through chapter 11, so right up until the birth of Abraham. Last time we were together in Genesis, that was three Sundays ago, we looked at chapter 4, which starts to tell the story of how sin's influence and effect, after Adam and Eve's fall, sin's influence and effect began to work its way deep into human life. So we

4:37 saw in chapter 4 the first murder, how Cain killed his brother Abel out of jealousy, and then we traced through several generations of Cain's descendants who surprisingly in a lot of ways made progress in several categories. They build cities and they have technology, technological improvements, and they even come up with ways to play instruments, to make music. They make progress and yet even so they remained captive to sin and that becomes clear at the end of chapter four. The whole thing of course ended with a note of hope and a note of glory and optimism.

5:12 when Eve gives birth to another son, Seth, to stand in the place of Abel. And that's where we're going to pick it up today in chapter 5. Chapter 5 quickly runs through the descendants of this new kid, Seth, right? Eve has Seth, and chapter 5 runs very quickly through the descendants of Seth and takes us all the way up to the birth of the next major character in the book of Genesis. That's Noah, and the flood is coming, right, starting in chapter 6. Technically, if you look down at chapter 5, this thing is called a genealogy.

5:46 In other words, it's a list of generations. These things show up all over the Bible, and they have a kind of form to them. You know, this person was the father of this person, and this person then is the father of that person, and that person is the father of that person. Sometimes they can go on for a really, really long time. They're extremely common in the Bible. In fact, chapters 5 through 11 of Genesis are really, if you look at their structure, they're one gigantic genealogy that runs from Adam all the way down through Abraham. It's just that in various places inside that genealogy, the action of the generations stops and we get a story.

6:22 So that happens several different times, the longest of which, of course, is the flood, which takes up like two chapters, right? But it's an interruption into the stream of the generations. As common as these things are, though, they show up in Numbers. They show up in Kings and Chronicles. In fact, believe it or not, the very first chapter of the whole New Testament starts out with Matthew giving us a genealogy that runs from Adam all the way back to, or from Abraham in that case, all the way up to Jesus himself. So they're really important. But as common as they are, these genealogies, I'm afraid, have a terrible reputation of being boring.

7:00 And people look at them, and they're like, why are we going to spend an entire sermon looking at a list of names? Because that's all it is, right? It's just a list of names and some numbers. Okay, well, two things to say about that. A, I know many of you, and I know many of you can spend an entire afternoon poring over sports statistics, which is a list of names and numbers.

7:32 And you don't find those boring at all. So have a seat, please. Second, I hope what you're going to see today is that the charge that genealogies are boring. It really couldn't be further from the truth. Anytime you see, this is kind of what I want to convince you of today. Anytime you see a genealogy in the Bible, you should not skip it. You should not read it faster than you read the rest of the Bible. You should read it more slowly. Because these genealogies have treasures in them that you will miss if you read them too quickly.

8:11 And I hope you'll see that today. All right, let's look at chapter 5 of the book of Genesis. Here we go. Starting in verse 1. This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them. and he blessed them and named them man 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 the days of adam after he fathered seth were 800 years and he had other sons and daughters thus all the days that adam lived were 930 years and he died 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. When Enosh had lived 90 years, he fathered Kenan. Enosh lived after he fathered Kenan 815 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. When Kenan had lived 70 years, he fathered Mahalalel. Kenan lived after he fathered

9:11 Mahalalel 840 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died. When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he fathered Jared. Mahalalel lived after he fathered Jared 830 years and had other sons and daughters, and thus all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years, and he died. When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. Jared lived after he fathered Enoch 800 years and had other sons and daughters, and thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died. 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 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered Lamech. Methuselah lived after he fathered Lamech 782 years and had other sons and daughters and thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years and he died. When Lamech

10:17 had lived 182 years he fathered a son and called his name Noah saying out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years and had other sons and daughters thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died. After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Okay, so now we've read it, but what did you notice as we read through this genealogy? What details popped out to you? What kinds of questions came up? What do you think this genealogy is doing? I mean, why not just take chapter 5, condense it down into one sentence, and say a whole bunch of people were born and died, and then we get Noah.

11:06 Why do we get this long list of names and numbers? What is it doing? What is it trying to teach us? Well, the genealogy is full of interesting details, and we're going to talk about a lot of them. But first, I want to just talk about the main structure of this chapter, because it's that structure that's going to tell us what we ought to focus in on. So it's obviously a list of fathers and sons, right, tracing through the generations, it runs from Adam all the way down through through to anyway Noah or you might say from the creation all the way down to the Great Flood if you count the names in it you'll see that it traces ten generations that's important to notice it's important that it's not nine or eleven it's this round number 10 because ancient genealogies like this not just in Israel but well other places in the Bible for sure but even in other civilizations they're often stylized by by leaving people out to make them hit a certain number of generations.

12:05 So sometimes fathered can actually mean grandfathered or even great-grandfathered or even great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathered. They'll skip generations in order to sort of make it a 10 or a 7 or a 14. Matthew did this kind of thing in Matthew 1 to make his genealogy, you remember, have three sets of 14. He didn't want it to be, you know, 17, 13, and 14. He wanted it to be 14, 14, 14, and there's a theological reason for that that I'm not going to tell you now, but it'll make you curious. Moses may have done it here to make this genealogy have ten generations.

12:41 Maybe that's because it's a round number. Lists of genealogies of kings often have ten, and so given the fact that we know the promise of Genesis 3.15 is organizing this whole story, and it's the promise of a coming king who will be better than Adam, this may be a royal genealogy. Anyway, you've got 10 of them from Adam to Noah, and what you're going to realize, what you probably picked up on as I read it, is that for most of those generations, this genealogy follows a very, very specific pattern. When X had lived so many years, he fathered Y.

13:15 X lived this many years more and had other sons and daughters, and thus all the days of X were this many years, and he died. So you see that, right? And like seven out of the ten, that's the pattern. But the pattern gets broken in three places. Did you notice that? In three places, something different happens. And that's where the Bible is telling us to focus our attention. That's where the good stuff is. It's like X marks the spot, right? When you see the flat dirt broken up by a little mound and something different happens, that's where you dig.

13:51 You see where the pattern breaks? It breaks with Adam in 1 through 5. There's extra stuff in there that doesn't meet the pattern. You can just compare it to 6 through 8. Compare 1 through 5 to 6 through 8, and the pattern's broken. There's extra stuff in 1 through 5. It breaks again with Enoch down in 21 to 24. There's just fascinatingly different stuff there, right? And it breaks at the end with the birth of Noah in 28 to 32. Because Lamech, he's the only guy in the genealogy that speaks.

14:24 He gets to talk, right? And so the pattern breaks. So I want this morning to talk about the meaning of this chapter and its function in the story of Genesis, in the story of the Bible. And I want to do it in three points that focus in on those three places where the pattern breaks. And what this text is doing is starting to unfold for us what are going to become some of the most important themes in the entire story of the Bible. They're all kind of starting right here. So here are the three points, and I'll give you the main idea. Point number one, looking at the entry for Adam, mostly, man's purpose.

14:56 What God created human beings to be in the first place. Number two, looking at Enoch, man's destiny. And number three, looking at Lamech and Noah, man's only hope. So here's the main idea, the three points, man's purpose, man's destiny, man's only hope. The main idea that I think this text is teaching us, that it's trying to insert into the stream of the Bible's storyline, is this idea. Death reigns with an iron fist because of sin, but even so, there's hope.

15:28 Death reigns with an iron fist because of sin, but even so, there's hope. All right, let's look at it. Number one, man's purpose in this world. You can see in verse 1, if you look down at chapter 5, verse 1, the chapter opens with a kind of title. It's, this is the book of the generations of Adam. That's an important sentence because when you see something like that in Genesis, it's basically flagging you to the fact that we're starting a new big section, right? So we've already seen it a couple of times. This is the, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth. These are the generations of Adam.

16:00 These are the generations now of Seth, or these are Adam. Later you're going to see the generations of Abraham, et cetera. And it's telling you this is a new section in the book. But here in the first few verses, the text, even though it's moving very quickly at this point, it's trying to get to know it very quickly. But even here, the text pauses to remind us of some important truths about who we are, who you are as human beings before God. So if you look at verses 1 and 2, you can see pretty quickly there that you've got an extremely fast retelling of the story of the creation of man, right? It's already been told in chapter 1, then it was told again in more detail in chapter 2. Well, here in chapter 5, it moves really quickly. God creates male and female in or as his own likeness, his own image. He blesses them, right? And then he names them man. We've talked quite a bit over the last few weeks about what it meant for human beings to be made in the image of God, or you can also

17:03 translate that made as the image of God. We've talked about that, but there are a few details here that I think push that whole concept of being created in the image of God even further. So in other words, these verses, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, they're painting a picture of what God intended for human beings in the first place. So let me show you some of those details. First of all, notice in verse 2 that this is the first time in the Bible storyline so far, this is the first time that it is said that God named the humans.

17:39 Male and female, he named them, and what he named them was man. Now that word man is just, it's just Adam. That's all it is, Adam in the Hebrew. It's not a different word from that. It's just Adam, but it's applied to both Adam and Eve, male and female. And what's that doing? Well, it's pointing to the headship that Adam holds in their marriage relationship. And it's probably even the root of why wives traditionally take the husband's name in marriage. It's also why we sometimes refer to the whole human race, male and female, as man or mankind or men.

18:18 There's nothing sexist about that. It's just recognizing the structures of authority that God put into creation in the first place. But think a little bit more about it. Think about the action itself of God naming the humans. What did we say back in chapter 3 is the significance of naming something? Remember, Adam names the animals as they come to him. He names Eve twice.

18:51 They name their sons. What's the significance of naming something? Well, it's an act of authority, right? It's an act of authority. It's a kind of kingly act of giving something a name and saying, this thing is now under my authority. So here, for the first time, God carries out that act of authority over Adam. It's not that there's been any doubt that God is over Adam in authority, that Adam is under God's authority. It's just that here we're reminded of that reality again. And it's one of the most fundamental realities of human existence.

19:23 That we, as human beings, are created by God, and therefore we are under his authority, and therefore we are accountable to him. You realize that, right? You fundamentally are accountable for the way you live, for the way you live out these years of your life. You are accountable, ultimately, to God. Now, I think that's a truth, as fundamental as it is, that is lost on most people in our society. My guess is if you were to go take a walk around town and stop people in the street and say, hey, to whom are you accountable?

19:58 Are you accountable to anybody? Very, very few people are going to say, I am accountable to God. They're going to think about it for a minute, and they're going to come up with all kinds of other people and things that they're accountable to. Some might say, well, I'm a student, so I guess I'm accountable to my teachers or my professors. Some of them will say, well, I guess I'm accountable to my boss, right? Or I'm accountable to the laws of the city of Louisville or to the laws of the United States of America. We all can think of things we're accountable to. Here's the kicker, though, about that. In every one of those things that we might mention as something that we are accountable to, it's a voluntary accountability, isn't it?

20:36 I mean, think about it. If you're a student and you don't want to be under the authority of your professor anymore, what do you do? You drop out. Even if you're, you know, if you're a, you know, young person and you don't want to be under the authority of your parents anymore, you should not, but you could just run away and get your own job, right? If you don't want to be accountable to the laws of the city of Louisville, you can move to Lexington if that's your thing. If you don't want to be accountable to the laws of the United States of America, you can move to the UK and be accountable to their laws, or if you're rich enough, buy your own island and make up your own laws.

21:07 But basically, we are convinced that ultimately, all of those accountabilities are voluntary and the only person to whom we are ultimately accountable is ourselves. And the Bible stands four square against that understanding. You are not the ultimate accountability in your life. You do not get to say what is right for you and wrong for you. You don't get to construct your own reality. You are accountable to God. You are under his authority because he created you.

21:43 And that's fundamental to understanding what human existence is all about. Not to mention fundamental to understanding the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if you get that wrong, if you don't understand that you're ultimately accountable to God, you're going to miss the whole gospel entirely. Because you won't see any need for Jesus to die for you. That's one thing to notice. He names the humans. Notice another thing. Look in verse 3. This is the only time this is said, but right there in verse 3, Adam fathers a son in his own likeness, in his own image.

22:16 It's the same words as God creating man in his image and likeness. So what's that doing? Is that making some case or making some statement that Seth and maybe the rest of us are not made in the image of God? There are religions that say that, that only Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, and the rest of us after Seth are made in the image of Adam. No, it's not saying that. There are several places in the Bible that make it as clear as day that all humans are made in the image of God, just like Adam and Eve were made in the image of God.

22:46 So here it's doing something different. Here it seems like this is said to create in our minds a new layer of meaning to God's relationship with us. It's trying to teach you something else about who God is to you as a human being. So, so far, up until this point in the story, God's relationship to the human beings has been one almost exclusively of king to subject, judge to judged, right, creator to creature, maybe friend to friend, but it would be a kind of royal friendship and patronage. You don't have anything quite like this. But here, this concept of one person being made in another's likeness is tying that idea specifically to fatherhood.

23:39 Seth is said to be Adam's image because Adam is his father and therefore we are God's image because God stands with us because he created us in a relationship of father to children, father to son. You see what it's doing? It's adding another layer of meaning to what it means to be made in or as the image of God. It means that God is our father. That's another fundamental truth of human existence, another fundamental truth of the gospel, because what it's doing is laying a theological foundation to explain to us why God deals with us as he does.

24:22 This right here, the fact that God is our Father is why he doesn't just act immediately to destroy us when we sin against him. It's why he pursues us as a human race for thousands upon thousands of years. It's why he's so determined to save us. It's why he doesn't hold back even his only begotten son when his life was the price of our salvation. It's because he does all of that because he loves us. as a father loves his children.

24:56 And even when we shattered that, even when we took the relationship of being the image of God and shattered it by our rebellion against him, it still wasn't destroyed completely. And even now, as a father, God calls all of us to come back to him. Look, if you're listening to this, you're a human being. And if you're a human being, then you are created in the image of God. Yes, you've messed that up. You've shattered it. You're part of a shattered human race. And yet God loves you and calls you to put your faith in his son Jesus so that you might be saved and restored to the father-son, father-daughter relationship that you were supposed to have from the very beginning.

25:39 He did all of that, up to and including crushing his own son in the place of rebels because he loved us. There's something else here that I want you to see closely related to it. You notice there in verse 2, God blessed Adam and Eve after he created them. And that's just repeating what was said in chapter 1. It's already been said a couple of times that God blessed the humans. But now it's sort of this idea of blessing is sort of injected into the stream of this genealogy.

26:12 And so it goes downhill through the storyline of the Bible and ultimately becomes one of the most glorious themes of the entire Bible. Because every new generation that comes, God blesses them and blesses them and blesses them. Again and again and again, he blesses. And you know where it all comes to a head? It all comes to a head, even though they break the promises, even though they reject the blessings. You know where it all comes to a head? In Revelation 5, then I looked.

26:44 And I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders, the voice of many angels numbering thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb who was slain, Jesus, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. It all came to him. It all came to him. And you know what happens? When you put your faith in him and you're united to him by embracing him and saying, yep, Jesus, you're my king. You've got to stand in my place, and anything I get in eternity has got to come from you.

27:16 You know what happens? The blessing that Jesus earned flows down to you. Revelation 20, blessed and holy, is the one who shares with Jesus in the first resurrection. Friends, the story of the Bible is the story of God acting to bless human beings, to do them more good than they can possibly imagine. And yet humans repeatedly push that blessing away.

27:48 So what did God do with it? He put it in the hands of Jesus, who now offers it to you. Don't go away from this place. Don't go away from this place without the blessing that God intended to give you. Not just little stuff. Not just money or a faster car or a bigger house. That's not what blessing is. Blessing is eternity. And Jesus alone can give it to you. That's man's purpose. Number two, man's destiny. Man's destiny.

28:18 There's something about this genealogy here in chapter 5 that's different from every other genealogy in the Bible. There's a little treasure in it that is different from every other genealogy in the Bible. You see what it is? In other genealogies, if you look at them, we'll say how many years a guy lived. So it's not that. It's not the numbers. They'll say who his children were. It's not that, but this genealogy in chapter 5 includes a detail that no other genealogy has. See it?

28:50 At the end of every entry, it is said, and he died. You heard it when I was reading it. I mean, the phrase just runs like a drumbeat through the genealogy. And he died. And he died. And he died. Over and over and over and over. You know what that's doing, right? It's showing you just how deep sin and the curse have gotten its claws into the human race.

29:22 Sin's grip is tight. And so generation after generation dies. Now, there's an important theological truth to see here. Because the point of all of that is that death has taken hold not just of Adam when he sinned by eating the fruit of the tree. But death and sin and the curse have taken hold of all of Adam's descendants as well.

29:55 Right? I mean, the Bible doesn't tell you that each one of these people, you know, Enosh lived so many years and then he sinned and brought the curse on him. When Kenan had lived a certain number of years, he sinned of his own accord and brought the curse on him. and Mahalalal did it and then everybody. It doesn't tell you that. It doesn't tell you that they individually sinned. It just wants you to understand that Adam sinned and now the whole human race, all his descendants are guilty of it. The whole human race is affected by Adam's sin. Now, why is that? Why is that?

30:27 Well, Genesis doesn't really tell us a whole lot about it. But the rest of the Bible does and it's come to be known as the Christian doctrine of original sin. Which is talking about the fact that Adam stood as the representative of the whole human race when he acted. So when you hear the phrase, the original sin, it's not talking about the original sin of eating the apple. That's not what it means. What it's saying is that sin's got its origin there, and then it flows all throughout the entire human race.

30:57 Because Adam stood as the representative of the whole human race. What he did, for good or evil, counted for all of us. So when he sinned, when he rebelled against God, the guilt of that sin, the punishment of death, was counted to all of us. It means that every single one of us, as human beings, every single one of us is conceived, as David said it in Psalm 53, conceived in sin. We're born under the sentence of death and in need of being saved.

31:30 The baby is born, right? And the grandparents want to hold the little baby. And they say, oh, what a sweet little dear this is, right? Sweet, dear little baby. I remember telling my mother when my first son was born, because I was all over this original sin thing at the time. I was like, yeah, he may be a sweet little baby, but he's a sweet little bundle of iniquity. And we all need to be prepared for that as he grows up. That's all of us. Now, some people object. Well, that's just not right. It's not right for God to say that Adam is going to be the representative of all of us.

32:03 Representation like that is wrong. It's arbitrary and it's cruel for God to treat us this way. I should be able to stand on my own. But I think if you give it a little bit of thought, it turns out that it's not at all arbitrary or cruel. In fact, there's some good reasons for why God chose to do it like this. So let me give you a few thoughts that might at least help you to see why appointing Adam to be the representative of everyone, even though he failed, why doing that was not unreasonable or arbitrary or cruel.

32:40 So here are a few thoughts. First of all, there's just a natural unity among human beings that makes it reasonable for God to treat us as one. We all came from Adam. We're all, every single human being who's ever lived, We're all organically, biologically connected. We do not stand as siloed individuals. God has created us to be one human family, organically connected. That's not true of angels. Think about it. Angels are not biologically connected.

33:12 They're created all at once, like all thousands upon thousands of them. They're created as individuals. There's no family connection. There's no racial connection. Nothing. They're not created through procreation or organic processes. So the fact that God appointed the first human, the father of all humanity, to stand for the whole of us is at least fitting. It works. Second, this idea and reality of representation is pretty common among us as humans.

33:43 And usually, we don't have any problem with it. Normally, we don't have any problem with representation. So we're in the midst of an election here in the United States, right? And we are about to elect a whole bunch of representatives and senators to go. They're literally called representatives to stand and represent us in the Congress of the United States or in the Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. We do that. And those people that are elected are going to represent you whether you voted for them or not or whether you voted at all.

34:16 And we're usually perfectly happy with that. We may not like the representative, but nobody objects that all 350 million Americans ought to get to vote on every spending bill that comes through Congress. We're fine with representation, at least in theory. Here's another example. We generally as human beings think it is perfectly fitting and reasonable that inheritance should pass down from parents to children. And we don't object to that unity between us and our parents. In fact, the only time we object to it is when there's something negative that comes down to us from our parents.

34:50 But we have a problem with the result of representation and organic unity. We have no objection to it in theory because we're fine with it when it works out for good. Here's another idea. This representative arrangement, I think, if you think about it just a little bit, not only is it fitting, not only is it not arbitrary, But it actually, I think, shows God's goodness and love better than making each of us go it alone. By appointing Adam to represent all of us so that what he does counts for all of us, he's letting us off easy.

35:29 I mean, think about it. Adam was literally our best chance at winning our own glorification. Because that's what would have happened. Had Adam done it right, had Adam looked at the serpent, you know, and been like, no, no, no, buddy, and stepped on his head and thrown him out of the garden, had he done his job as king, the whole human race would have moved on into glorification. If he'd remained faithful, he would have won the blessings of eternity for all of us weaker people.

36:01 Let me give you an example. Let's say you go down to the Yom Center at some point in the UofL basketball season. You're watching a game, and at halftime, they call your name, and they're going to let you participate in a contest. And the announcer says, look, here's the deal. You're going to shoot the basketball from the three-point line one time. You can choose anywhere you want to shoot it, but you shoot it. If you make it, the prize for making this one three-point shot is $20 billion. But if you miss it, you go to prison for the rest of your life, and then we execute you.

36:38 now you try to get out of it but you can't like you're stuck you you took it and here we are and you got to shoot this basketball you're starting to get scared and your knees are knocking because you know even on a good day what you make 30 percent of of three-pointers something like that you're just like you're scared to death about taking this shot because it either means like eternal glory or it means you know lifelong suffering right it's a big deal but then the announcer comes on he says wait wait wait there's more So, you can choose to take the shot yourself, or you can let Steph Curry take the shot for you.

37:20 Now, I can't say for certain what all of you would do, and I know some of you, and you're just going to do it yourself no matter what. But my guess is most of us would say Steph Curry's three-point percentage is much, much higher than mine. His chance of making this shot is way bigger than mine. So if I'm stuck in this thing, I'm giving it to him. He's going to shoot the ball for me. See, that's the reality. When it comes to Adam, too, the reality is for all of us, the only chance of winning, I'm not talking about the game anymore, I'm talking about eternity, The only chance of winning is for somebody else to do it for us.

37:59 So even though Adam missed the shot, it's really wonderful for us, actually, that God was establishing the principle that someone could shoot the ball for us and stand as our representative. That's the last thing I want you to think about, actually. If you object to the logic of Adam standing as your representative before God in the beginning, You are destroying the logic of the gospel that says that Jesus can stand in your place. God was loving you by establishing the principle that you don't have to do it alone.

38:38 That someone can stand in your place and do it for you. So that refrain, that idea of original sin, that death takes hold of all of us because of what Adam did. That refrain, when he died, reminds us of sin's grip on us. Doesn't it? But look down at 21 to 24. When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah.

39:10 Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. And what you're expecting right there is just for that drumbeat to continue, right? He died. And he died. And he died. But then you get to Enoch, and all of a sudden, he was not. Because God took him. Friend, what's that teaching you?

39:41 It's teaching you that no matter how deep sin and death and the curse have its claws in us as human beings, God can break that grip anytime he wants. And the drumbeat continued. Continued on even after Enoch, but it's in your head. It's in your head, right? God can break it anytime he wants. And a couple of times through the story, he does. He breaks it more times. But then on that Sunday, on the third day after Jesus was crucified. Death's grip wasn't just weakened. It was broken forever. And for you and me, if you're a Christian, like me, if your faith is in Jesus Christ, the drumbeat for you has stopped. Yeah, you're going to die. You're going to die one day. If Jesus doesn't come back and interrupt the whole thing, you are going to die. But friend, that reality should hold no fear at all for you.

40:47 Because in Genesis chapter 5, death is a fearsome enemy. A rabid dog that takes down everyone who comes against it. It's a fearsome enemy. But let me tell you something better. When Jesus rose from the grave on that third day, he kicked death in the teeth for you. And now all death can do, all it can do, the only authority that the king has given to that once rabid dog is just to pick you up and deliver you into the hands of your Savior.

41:19 That's all it can do. For you, for me, if we're united to Christ, death is nothing to fear. That's all because of what Jesus has done for us in his death and resurrection. Here's the third thing. Man's only hope. We've looked at man's purpose. In the verses about Adam, we looked at man's destiny, not to be carried away by death, but to be delivered by death into the arms of our resurrected Savior.

41:54 That's man's destiny. And third, man's only hope. Well, the third time this major pattern of the genealogy is broken is at the birth of Noah in verses 28 to 32. Several things happen in those verses, and we're going to look at them in just a minute. but actually, if the pattern is broken, there's at least a little bit of an alarm clock that starts going off, even in verses 25 to 27. It's faint, right? You can barely hear it because that, you know, the drumbeat is so loud, and you are so far asleep that you can barely hear this alarm going off. You know what that's like, right? The alarm goes off first thing in the morning, you just kind of barely hear it, and sometimes you even work it into whatever dream you're having, right? But eventually it gets louder and louder, and you get more and more awake, and ultimately it's blaring in your in your ear well there's a faint alarm that starts in verses 25 to 27 let's read those when methuselah had lived 187 years he fathered lamech methuselah lived after he fathered lamech 782 years and had other sons and daughters thus all the days of methuselah were 969 years

42:56 and he died okay that's the pattern like what what is the what's the alarm clock that we're supposed to be thinking about here well it's partly that he lives so long 969 years the longest living guy in the entire history of the human race. I remember when I was in college, I was taking an economics class, I think, and for some reason I was thinking about chapter five, and I realized, you know, if you had a piece of graph paper, you could actually interlock all of these different years of these people's lifespans, and you could like see how long they lived, and who they would have been contemporary with, and you know, you can put it all together, and you can graph it out and see it. So I started to do that, not paying attention to economics anymore, but doing a little, you know, biblical study, and I started tracing out. There's Adam's 905 years or whatever. There's, you know, this one. There's this one. I started tracing it down, and I had a line down at the bottom of when the flood was supposed to have happened, which was supposed to kill everybody except Noah and his family, right? And I started to realize as I was graphing this out

43:59 that Methuselah's line is stinking long. And my faith in the truth of the Bible, which says that nobody survived the flood except Noah and his sons, my faith in the Bible is going to be shook if Methuselah's line goes past the flood. So I kept going, kept graphing, kept getting more and more scared, more and more scared, because we're getting closer and closer to it. And I drew Methuselah's 969 years, And it ends the year of the flood.

44:32 Like exact. It ends in the year of the flood. Okay, now that's interesting. So the question is, well, did he die in the flood? He seems like he's in this line of righteous Seth, not evil Cain. So does he die in the flood? What's going on here? And so you think about it a little bit more. And you realize that sometimes in this genealogy, these names can be translated as certain things. You know, like great hunter or, you know, morning dawn. There's all kinds of things. A man, that's Adam, right? Seth is appointed.

45:03 Most of the time, they don't mean anything. They're just names that are given to somebody. But do you know what Methuselah translates to? Methuselah translates to, when he is dead, it shall come. When he is dead, it shall come. He's a timekeeper. He's a living countdown clock to the destruction of humanity in the flood.

45:34 When he is dead, it shall come. And so as Methuselah gets to the end of his life, as he gets weaker and weaker and weaker, as Noah is building this boat out in the field and Methuselah is getting weaker and weaker and weaker, the drama and the fear start to ratchet up because something big is about to happen. Which throws a little bit of light, doesn't it, on the fact that he lived so long.

46:05 It's not like an order of magnitude, but it probably is significant. If he's a timekeeper, if his life is sort of holding back the flood, and once he's gone, the flood will come, if that's what's going on, it's significant anyway that he's the longest living guy in the history of humanity. God is patient with you. Not wanting anybody to be destroyed, but all to come to repentance. He's patient. There's more. Look at verse 28.

46:41 28 through 32. When Noah is born, the usual pattern, as we've said, is broken again because Lamech, his father, speaks. Look what he says. 28. When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered his son and called his name Noah, saying, Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. Now, what is that reminiscent of as you think about it? He'll bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.

47:14 What is that referring to? What's it reminiscing about? Well, it has all the themes that we saw back in chapter 3, doesn't it? When God cursed the ground because of Adam's sin. So for whatever reason, Lamech looks at this little baby Noah and thinks he's going to be the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15. He thinks Noah is going to be this new king that will crush the head of the serpent and put an end to the curse. This is incredible.

47:45 Through all these generations, ten generations, hundreds of years long, the descendants of Seth have held on to that promise. They know Genesis 3. It's just an oral tradition at that point. Moses hadn't written it down. But through oral tradition, through generation after generation, they know that promise, and they're holding on to it. And wondering, who's it going to be? Who's it going to be that's going to set things right? And Lamech thinks it's Noah, which makes the story of the flood fascinating, right? Because when you read that, you're kind of thinking, well, maybe it's Noah too, right?

48:17 Maybe it is Noah. If you don't know the rest of the story, you're thinking, maybe this is a short book. Maybe Noah's going to be the guy. Lamech certainly thinks so. And then you watch his career take off, and he obeys God. He's said to be righteous. He's the only righteous person in the world. And God puts him in this boat and saves him through a worldwide flood that destroys everything. And he comes out, and there's a rainbow, and everything's looking great. Maybe Noah's going to set it right. But then you get to chapter 11 and you see, oh, no.

48:48 No, even if you take the most righteous person on the planet and wipe everybody else out, sin is still there. It's deep. Nobody's getting out of this. So was Lamech right? No. No, he wasn't. No, it's not the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15, but even here, it was clear to these people, it was clear to Lamech that humanity's only hope, humanity's only way of breaking free from the curse of his own rebellion against God was going to have to be for God to keep the promise he made in that verse back in Genesis 3.

49:34 Friend, if God has done you the blessing of making you aware of your sin, and it's consequences, the next thing you need to know is that you have no hope of breaking free of it, no hope of avoiding the punishment for it, unless God keeps the promise that he made in Genesis 3.15, to send another king to stand in your place and do what Adam should have done. And you're here, so you know who that is. It's Jesus. He's the one that Paul says is the second Adam, the one who came to do what Adam should have done in the first place. And through his life and death and resurrection, he exhausts the curse. He breaks death's grip once and for all. He wins eternal blessing. And then he invites us back into that father-son, father-daughter relationship with God that God intended from the very beginning. Why on earth, why on earth would you

50:41 Why would you, a member of this shattered, fallen human race that is hell-bound with everything it's got, why on earth would you look at Jesus' hand outstretched to you and hear his voice saying, I'm the fulfillment of everything you need and turn away? Friend, don't do that. Don't do that. Humanity is headed down a fast, chaotic river to hell.

51:14 But the king offers salvation. Take his hand and be saved. Let's pray. Our Lord Jesus, we praise you today as the king of kings and the Lord of lords. The fulfillment of that promise in Genesis 3.15 that another was coming who would crush the head of the serpent and save his people. Lord Jesus, we pray that you would cause these thoughts of your majesty, of your glory, of what you have done for us.

51:46 We pray that you would cause those thoughts to be huge in our minds and thoughts this week. Help us to remember you and remember what you've done and praise you and honor you and worship you because of it. We pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.