Genesis 5
Notes
Transcript
Today we’re going to consider the power of a family tree.
I have an uncle who is the family historian.
He has a big book full of info all about our family.
He was the one who figured out that we were distantly related to a US President.
He used to be a long haul trucker and so he used his extensive traveling as an opportunity to connect with distant cousins and hear their stories.
I’ve got to be honest, when I was young I wasn’t particularly interested in his genealogical work.
For some reason it bored me.
But it’s been interesting,
as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed a growing interest in myself to know more about my family history.
It’s just one of those things that you start to care a lot more about once you’ve lived a little bit of life.
Why am I the way that I am?
Why is my dad the way he was?
Does it matter that my mother’s father grew up in Iowa,
How does Swedish heritage play into my families story.
At the end of the day we are storied people, who like stories.
And we all know that families have stories.
In a sense, the first several chapters of Genesis are the story of the first family.
A family that started in unimaginable heights.
And quickly descended into astonishing lows.
Last week we worked through chapter 4.
and it ended in a verse that we didn’t talk about.
26 A son was born to Seth also, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of Yahweh.
This last verse before chapter 5 tells us that there is going to be a turn in the story.
Ever since the end of chapter 2, the story has been in a tailspin.
Fall of mankind,
ground cursed,
banishment from garden,
sin communicated to their children,
But now there’s a turn in that story.
And so the question is,
What’s the kerygma?
That’s the question I’m going to keep on asking until it’s burned in your brain and I don’t have to define it anymore.
What is the text trying to DO?
What is the text proclaiming.
The text is proclaiming loud and clear that in the face of human sin gone rampant, there IS a way to walk with God and be at peace.
We have been reading Genesis in light of what it would have meant to a people who are on exodus out of slavery to false gods.
The people of God coming out of Egypt are learning how to trace faith and it’s effects through the biblical story.
Where previously faith seemed to keep a small candle alive in single families and individuals,
through the work of God, faith will one day be for every family.
It will start with one family, and then be a global family.
So because of that, Genesis 5 has much to say to us as well.
We are connected through the same family of faith to the people who walked out of Egypt and across the Red Sea on dry land.
We too are on exodus.
Jesus is leading our church on a New Exodus out of the bondage of sin and death.
We too need to be able to trace how faith works in our families, for our sake, for the sake of our children, and the sake of the world.
Last week we spent time in the family story of Cain.
Cain laid a foundation for his family.
It was a foundation of embracing sin and
ignoring and lying to God.
We saw the generational fruits of that as we moved down the line of his genealogy culminating in a man named Lamech.
And in the life of Lamech we see Cain all over again but by now sin has become even more severe.
Lamech is more wicked than Cain ever was.
By the end of our time today we will see that this is a pattern that holds true in human lives when sin goes unchecked.
When people turn from God and worship idols,
which at the end of the day is always a way of worshipping yourself,
then we see people sink farther and farther into depravity.
If you are familiar with the concept of entropy it’s like that.
Life without God is a system that always breaks down into chaos.
But the interesting thing that we see as we scan these stories, and our own lives,
is that God has never once abandoned His world to decay.
He’s been working against sin, and for those who love him, since the beginning of time.
And I use that word chaos deliberately.
At the creation God dispels chaos and builds order.
After the fall of man, we don’t see a complete unraveling of order,
but there’s a potential for it.
The family line of Cain, started descending back into chaos as they rejected God’s order.
What this tells me is that
You can turn your life into chaos if you want.
If you refuse to listen to God when he speaks to you in His word,
and when you try to do things your own way, you are choosing to live in chaos mode,
and your life will become more and more chaotic until you die.
We’re tempted not to believe this.
Because we live in a culture where you can reject God and be massively prosperous,
wear a smile on your face,
and chock your problems up to your horoscope
But what the story of Cain’s family tells us is that even when you are making an appearance of being ok, chaos waters are churning just below the surface.
And chaos waters will always drown you.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Today we look at the story of Cain’s younger brother.
Not Abel, who he killed,
but Seth.
Think about what it may have been like growing up as Seth.
Seth was born after this whole fiasco with the murder of Abel.
Cain was this mythological character of sorts.
The first man to kill another.
He bore some sort of crazy mark from God on his body.
He was raising an evil family.
I wonder if Seth had this fear that Cain would show up someday and kill him.
Seth’s faith.
The story doesn’t shed much light on Seth’s life.
But reading between the lines we can infer some things.
Whereas Cain had laid a family foundation of sin and death,
Seth lays a family foundation of faith.
He never knew his older brother Abel because Abel was gone before Seth was even born.
How does that form him?
He could follow the path of Cain and repay evil with evil, making it his life mission to eradicate Cain and his descendants from the earth,
Or he could follow the path of his brother Abel and live a life that is pleasing to God.
It appears he chose the latter.
And what is the result?
Similarity between the genealogies.
ADD SLIDE
One thing about Genesis is that if you aren’t looking for parallelism, you will miss big key points.
It’s not an accident that these names were selected.
These genealogies are meant to be compared to one another.
What’s the big thing that we notice about the family of Seth.
People were walking with God.
Enosh- Calling on the name of the Lord
Enoch - Walked with God
Noah - Walked with God
And it is by walking with God that they escape the sting of death.
Enoch
What’s the deal with Enoch?
This man who never died.
He was the first man to be able to utter the words
55 Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?
I want to pause here and ask the question,
“What does it mean to walk with God?”
As you reflect on your own walk with God,
I imagine that there are things that make you feel like your walk is weak, or non existent.
Your walk with God is a lot less like a sunset walk on the beach, and more like a never ending hamster wheel.
The idea of progress is out the window because you aren’t noticing any fruit in your own life.
And what are the ways that you usually gauge your own spiritual health?
I would hazard a guess that for many of you as I have often done myself, you self assess your own spiritual health based off how often or how much you are reading your Bible.
And you live in a crazy cycle of intermittent bouts of what you perceive to be faithfulness, followed by long periods of dryness.
I would like to propose that this is nothing like what walking with God looks like.
If it was, then Enoch, this almost mythical man from the past, could never have walked with God.
He didn’t even have a Bible!
So the question is,
what did he have?
He had the story.
It was a relatively short story up to that point, but it was a story all the same.
And what were the key points of the story?
God created everything good, and people made in God’s image were able to walk with God.
Sin had greatly hindered this relationship but it was still there because God had not abandoned His world.
He knew his great great great grand uncle Abel had pleased God by making offerings that were a reflection of Abel’s heart devotion to God.
He knew that his great great great grand uncle Cain had been told by God that sin could be mastered.
He knew that his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather had all called on the name of Yahweh and were blessed by it.
So Enoch walked with God.
No Bible reading.
But you better believe that he fed every day on the word of the Lord.
The word of the Lord IS the grand story.
We see these great heroes in the Bible that are mentioned as blameless and that walked with God.
Two things we need to remember about these people.
They were sinners just like you and me.
The common denominator between all these people is faith.
And it is there faith that leads them to repentance.
Job is heralded as this incredible man of faith in the Bible.
He lived at a time before any official sacrificial system existed
And we know Job was a sinner.
But what do we see him doing.
Living a life of radical repentance.
It says that Job made sacrifices for his kids sometimes just in CASE they may have sinned.
Another excellent example is David.
That dude was in many ways a heinous sinner.
When he sinned he did it up big time.
But what do we see in response?
Nathan call 911!
So how does this translate to us?
People who feel stuck on the hamster wheel.
We could almost answer the question with a definition of faith.
Faith is believing so firmly that God is good that we regularly come to him with our sorrows, our sins, and our worship.
This is different every day.
We live in an age of unprecedented access to the written word of God.
We should avail ourselves of that.
But even Bible reading can become dead works if you have divorced it from the reality of what it is for,
which is to draw you into life.
To teach us repentance.
To form us back into what God intends people to be.
Royal Priests in a garden.
Sons of God and the Daughters of Man
1 When mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took any they chose as wives for themselves. 3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind, who bore children to them. They were the powerful men of old, the famous men.
Why did I include these verses from chapter 6 in this week’s sermon?
Because I believe that these verses are actually the culmination of the prior two weeks.
Different views:
Demon spawn
Intermarriage of these two genealogies.
At the end of the day it is syncretism.
So returning to our question of kerygma:
What is this text trying to do?
Why do the people of God need to know this?
This text is showing that family faith is possible, but the danger of syncretism is very real and it can wreck an entire family of faith.
As we read the rest of Israel’s story we will find that this is a ever present and devastating problem for them.
The temptation to be more formed by the nations around them than by Yhwh and His word will never leave them.
And this is precisely our greatest threat as well.
To be more formed by the cultures around us than by the word of God.
And this isn’t anti-cultural
The word of God fully alive in the person of Jesus Christ elevates the good the true and the beautiful things about a culture,
and puts to death the idolatrous things in that same culture.
That’s what Jesus does in our lives as well.
There is a dual promise in this passage.
That through our adoption into the family of faith, we can look death in the face, and say “Where is your victory?”
The story of Enoch is a teaser of what is to come.
We can infuse our own family tree with this faith.
4 One generation will declare Your works to the next and will proclaim Your mighty acts.
38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all those who are far away, as many as the Lord our God calls to himself.”
Faith, when it is fully grown, is designed to be generational.
And generational faith is attractive.
Question:
What is seeker friendly?
Is it building a consumeristic church experience that is nearly indistinguishable from a concert?
Our purpose as a church is to be the New Humanity.
And our gathering on Sundays is the place where we together draw near to the throne of grace to find help in our time of need.
If you want to be seeker friendly,
teach your children that they belong to God.
And then when they grow up and have children,
take your grandkids on your lap and tell them,
“King Jesus is ruling our world and you and I belong to Him.”
Model repentance for your family and teach them that what God really wants is not your works but your heart.
Show your children what it looks like to run away from sin into the arms of Jesus.
and when you inevitably fail at that,
show them what it looks like to confess your sin and then
revel in the magnitude of God’s mercy with them.
Teach your children that talking and walking with God is at the core of who God made them to be.
And that on the days when they feel like they can’t,
they have a mediator named the Lord Jesus Christ who is advocating for them even when they don’t have the words to pray.
If we live our lives in that way,
where the grace and mercy of God is woven into our interactions with each other daily.
Then THAT is seeker friendly.
I have a neighbor named Will who is pagan and who I love dearly.
He is seeking spiritual fulfillment and he does not care how cool our worship is or what kind of building we meet in.
He cares whether Jesus is who He says He is.
Because Jesus is the only one who can rescue him from the sting of death.
The people of God have the power of the resurrection at their backs.
If we ever