We're starting our 20th session in the book of Genesis. We've been in chapter 4 of the book of Genesis and I'm going to review last week's message where we looked at what happened to Cain after he murdered his brother Abel. He was banished from God's presence And one can't get banished from God entirely because God is omnipresent. So he was banished from the Shekinah glory that was guarding the east gate at Eden to keep Adam and Eve from going back in. Eden, we believe, was what we know was in the Mesopotamian region, somewhere in southeast Iraq, near present-day Babylon. And Babylon is there today. It was the city that Nebuchadnezzar had raised and Saddam Hussein had restored most of it, including the Hanging Gardens, before he was killed. It's about 40 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Euphrates River right near the Persian Gulf. So Cain was banished from God's presence and he was banished from Eden and he was told that he had to be a wanderer, a nomad. We know that Cain had sisters because Adam and Eve had many children and It was entirely appropriate at that point in the human history development for a near relative to marry each other, or near relatives to marry each other, because the gene pool had not gotten corrupted at that time. And so there wasn't any prohibition. The prohibition would come around 1444-1443 BC in the Mosaic Law, and we see this in Leviticus 18 verses 6-18. And that fact is still in existence today. And we see the prohibitions in the New Testament, for example, in 1 Corinthians 5, 1, and other places. Now, unbelievers will try and say that Cain did not have a spouse because there weren't any people available for him, but they will always try and degrade the scripture any way they can. But the biblical text does not cite everybody that was born at that time. It cites a certain number of people that God wants us to know about. Cain is seen as wandering only so far. He went to the land of Nod and God told him you're gonna be a vagabond and his career at that time was agriculture and he was prevented from being able to exercise that career. He was told he was going to have an extremely difficult time with it. Adam, for example, was told that it was going to be a toilsome effort for him to produce things from the ground for his career. And Cain was told, you're not going to get anything out of the ground, basically. So he was told that he was going to be a nomad and a wanderer. And the first thing he does is he goes to a land that's close by, a land of Nod. and he settles there, has a son Enoch with his wife, and his son becomes the founder of the city by that name, Enoch. So the prohibition starts where Cain is defiant, Cain never ever admits his sin, Adam did admit his sin, but he was reluctant to when he was first confronted by God. Cain never does. And Cain produces a line of people that are sinful and worldly. It's a satanic world system that comes through Cain that exemplifies principles of greed, selfishness, ambition, force, and pleasure. We are commanded in the New Testament not to embrace this worldly system. You see that in 1 John 2, 15-17. And all of the New Testament focuses in on what God would have us do, not what the world would have us do. Now that city was destroyed with the flood, but the principles kept going on. There were many cultures that came out of that area. We're going to look at several of them this morning. And then after we get through the flood, we will start looking at, in a little more detail, the cultures and world empires that actually lived in the Mesopotamian region. Now, Cain had Enoch, and then four generations down from Enoch is Lamech. Lamech, as we saw last week, was the first individual to introduce polygamy or bigamy into the human family. He took two wives, Ada and Zilla, and he had a daughter that was mentioned, but her name, or excuse me, her career, if you will, was not really mentioned. So there's some significance there, but the Bible does not speak to that, so it's unclear exactly what she did. The three sons that he had with these two wives, two of them were progenitors of music and metallurgy and the third one embraced that nomadic lifestyle. We don't know what the daughter's contribution was. It'd be interesting if we could know that because there must be something of significance there and I'm sure that for several centuries the people that had the earliest text of these scriptures that Adam wrote knew what it was that she had done. Adam then records a song by Lamech and it's in a Hebrew Paralysm poetry and in Paralysm in the Hebrew poetry one line is repeated after another but in a slightly different form so it slightly changes the text to embrace a little deeper understanding of that text it says that Lamech slew a youthful warrior who wounded him But he demanded greater leniency than any vengeance that might come his way than that was afforded to Cain. So he's boasting about the murder. But he's not repentant at all about it. And it just shows you how the society was getting increasingly more selfish, seeking pleasure, self-indulgent. He was just bragging about the fact that he killed somebody else. He was so far away from God and he was resting on his own capabilities. Now there are seven generations down from Adam and Adam died in that last generation. Adam died in the year from creation of 930. So he lived 930 years. The line down Cain is the line where human sin was entrenched without any godly people. Humanism came in, murder, lying, self-pity, it became commonplace as well as the worldly security that people were looking for instead of God's offering. All false religions follow this. all false religions basically say you can work yourself to God, whereas what God really offers us is for us to draw near to Him, accept the salvation that He freely gives us by believing that the Lord Jesus did exactly what He did. Now I can make these statements and it sounds so easy, well you just believe in these facts of history, but people have such a hard time. There's a statement that I've made in the past that I think deserves re-repeating, that the greatest distance in the world is at 18 inches from the human mind to the human heart, of accepting what it is that God has done for us. moving our pride out of the way and take what God has done and accept it. And that puts us in a right relationship with God. The text changed last week from the line it came to the line of Seth. And we're going to look at this in chapter 5 that we'll go through today for today's message. Adam's wife Kava, which we translate as Eve, comments that God appointed, that's why she named Seth, which means appointed, a son to replace Abel. God centered Abel. Seth becomes the godly line through which the Messiah would come through. This is the seed line of the woman that was first introduced in Genesis 3.15. And Christ is going to come through here. Luke 3 verses 23 to 38 clearly described this. Eve did the naming of Seth, exerting her authority over the ability to state that this is where God is coming, through here. He's coming through here. Seth had a son, Enosh, and his name means frail man. And the important text for us in that section on the line of Seth is that, then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. And it's really important that we understand this because it's an expression, a Hebrew expression of public worship. We, you know, it's important for us to understand how many hundreds and hundreds or thousands of people that were on the planet at this time. There wasn't just the number that we see in the biblical text. There were a lot of people around and there basically came two groups of people. The godly people that were coming from Seth and the ungodly people that weren't going to respond to God from Cain. And for the people that came from Seth to stand up and start worshiping God, they were putting themselves into peril. It's like the missionaries today going out into unwholesome environments or us trying to witness to people that don't want to hear it. You make yourself a pariah. You make yourself a persona non grata because we become One of them. One of them. And they don't even know what that means, one of them. But they just know that it's not good. That we know God. And we want them to know what God is. To experience that redemption. But this just shows us the division between the people groups on the earth at that time that continues until today. People that know God, love God, are so thankful or redeemed and understand that blessed assurance and want the people that don't know God to have that same blessing. So these folks that stood up in the beginning to try and proclaim God had a tough time. The line from Seth was belief. The line from Cain was unbelief. This is why we need a Redeemer. We need a Redeemer. Now today I want to talk about the seed line, and we're going to go over the entire fifth chapter. And it's a genealogy, but it's got some very, very interesting characteristics in it. The genealogies are in the Bible for a specific reason. And I know that they can be boring if you don't understand why they're there or what the important characteristics of these genealogies are. This is one of the most important genealogies in the Bible because it establishes that seed line to Christ. The text reads, this is the book of the generations of Adam In the day that God created man in the likeness of God, made he him male and female, created he them and blessed them and called their name Adam. In the day when they were created. And Adam lived 130 years and begot a son in his own likeness after his image and called his name Seth. In the days of Adam, after he begot Seth, were 800 years, and he begot sons and daughters. And all the days that Adam lived were 930 years. And he died. And Seth lived 105 years and begot Enosh. And Seth lived after he begot Enosh 807 years and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Seth were 912 years. And he died. And Enosh lived 90 years and begot Kenan. And Enosh lived, after he begot Kenan, 815 years, and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. And Kenan lived 70 years, and begot Mahalalal. And Kenan lived, after he begot Mahalalal, 840 years, and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died. And Mahalalel lived 60 and 5 years and begot Jared. And Mahalalel lived, after he begot Jared, 830 years and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Mahalalel were 890 and 5 years and he died. And Jared lived 160 and 2 years and begot Enoch. And Jared lived after he begot Enoch 800 years and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Jared were 960 and 2 years and he died. And Enoch lived 60 and 5 years and begot Methuselah. And Enoch walked with God after he begot Methuselah three hundred years, and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Enoch were three hundred, sixty, and five years. And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. And Methuselah lived a hundred eighty and seven years and begot Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begot Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years and he died. And Lamech lived a hundred eighty and two years and begot a son. And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us in our work, and in the toil of our hands, which cometh because of the ground which Jehovah hath cursed. And Lamech lived, after he begot Noah, five hundred ninety and five years, and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years, and he died. And Noah was five hundred years old, and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now I was reading from the American Standard Version of 1901. I think the first thing that anybody sees reading this genealogy is the longevity of these people's lives. No one lives like that today. This is called in the Hebrew the Toldat of Adam, or the Generations of Adam, and it expresses the chronology from Adam to Noah. Now both of these guys have very significant roles in the development of a human family. Adam was the first man made by God, and Noah was the only man with his family that survived the flood. This is the seed line, if you will, that made it through the flood. The seed line made it through the flood. The line of Cain did not make it through the flood. Now, we know that Adam wrote portions of Genesis and that even though Moses wrote the other four books of the Pentateuch, Moses was the compiler of Genesis. And we've looked at what, in the past, what Josephus had to say about the writings of Adam existing on a stone in Egypt in the first century A.D. So we know that Adam wrote these things and we believe that this book that he had written was probably a scroll back then or a clay tablet or something of that nature. was in existence at that time to record the earliest events of the godly line and the ungodly line of Cain. The Hebrew word for book is a sefer, And because Adam died about 120 years before Noah was born, we believe that Noah finished the book and wrote of his exploits regarding the flood and shortly thereafter. Remember, Moses was the compiler of this book. Now, I placed a chart in your notes that lay out the exact dates from the biblical text that show the longevity of these folks, who was born when, and ultimately when the flood came. The flood came in the year from creation of 1656. The text, the original text of the Old Testament that we use is the Hebrew Masoretic text. The Masoretes were a Jewish group that carefully preserved the Old Testament. They lived sometime between the 7th and the 10th century AD. And we don't know a lot about them other than that text of what they call the Tanakh was preserved by them and it's that Masoretic text that all of our English translations are based on now that being said when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Qumran in the late 1940s they validated almost all of the Masoretic text So that was one of the most significant aspects of that find that it quieted for a short time the Bible critics that said we had old texts that were unreliable and you can't believe this came from God, you can't believe any of that stuff. Well, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and they were compared to the Masoretic Texts, they matched almost perfectly. So we do have God's Word. We do know what God has told us. The Masoretic Text gave these dates that we have here. Now I'm going to take you back a few centuries before then, maybe more like 7, 9 to 11 or 12 centuries before then. Around 200 BC, one of Alexander's major accomplishments was setting up a library in Alexandria, Egypt. And it was an incredible library. It's since perished and was burned, but it was the largest, most complete library in the world at that time. And there was a group of people at Alexandria, the 70, if you will, scholars, that came together because of Alexander's desire to have the whole world speaking Greek. They translated the Old Testament from the documents they had at that time out of Hebrew into Greek. And we call it the Septuagint. They have different dates. The same relative dates But they have different dates in the Septuagint. The Septuagint is not the most authoritative translation of the Old Testament. Most people, including the Jews, don't use the Septuagint. They use the Masoretic text. So if you study Hebrew from Jews, Orthodox Jews, that are teaching you the Hebrew Scripture, you're studying the Masoretic Text. That's what they view as most authoritative, and that's what the Bible translators view as the most authoritative. But looking at this chart though, you can see the lives of these people, and you can see, man, it's incredible they lived so long. After the fall, entropy, or decay, came in. But it didn't take full force and full effect immediately. Yes, everything started to decay, but it didn't all of a sudden get to be a full decay or a full degradation. And man's life was just a long, long time back then. God had originally planned, and he knew what we were going to do, but he had originally planned that mankind would live forever. To live forever. Now this chronology is repeated again in 1 Chronicles 1 verses 1 to 14 and then as we saw in Luke 3 verses 3 to 38. There are no gaps in this account. One person gives birth to another. One generation, I should say, gives birth to another. There are no gaps here. There are no grandfathers and grandsons in this account. The Hebrew text does not accommodate that in this particular genealogy. These are normal years. These are not exaggerated years as our critics would have us believe. The Hebrew text does not accommodate that. It's a normal year. These are the lifespans that were here at that time. And we even have two examples that I'm going to bring out this morning in the secular text that validate the fact that there was a genealogy and validate that the lifespans were long at that time, although these are greatly exaggerated accounts and I'll explain that in a couple minutes. One of them is called the Sumerian king list and it was written sometime between 2000 and 3000 B.C. Now I put 3000 B.C. in your notes and that should say 2000 to 3000. We just know that it's sometime in the third millennium B.C. I don't think it's anywhere near 3000 B.C. but sometime in there. The second was the Babylonian history by a man named Berossus around 300 B.C. and that was written in Greek. The Sumerian king list, it records in succession the kings of Sumer. Sumer was the name of one of the people groups, the Sumerians that lived in Mesopotamia, lived in that area around Eden. This is not the biblical line of Seth. This is the unbiblical line, if you will, of Cain. Cain's worldly group. And look at the map that I placed in there, and you can see the orange area around the Tigris and the Euphrates is Sumer. Now, they were a post-flood empire. and they succeeded the empire that was created by Nimrod. Nimrod, the founder of that Babylonian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian empire, whatever you want to call it, because these were all individual people groups that one conquered the other in that Mesopotamian region. The Hebrews today date from the creation. They don't have an exact date any better than we do because going back into antiquity it's so very very hard to get the exact dates because some of the accounts like the Gilgamesh epic and the Sumerian king states that the kings lived for 250,000 years which is absolutely untrue, but the unbiblical accounts of the flood and others are very, very fanciful. What we have to validate the biblical text is the fact that God himself, in Christ, validated the authority of Genesis. If we didn't have Christ himself validating this, we would be arguing the biblical text against the secular accounts of these things happening, which are very fanciful. But what we do get out of these secular accounts is validation that these things happened. They're just fanciful, they put different names on them, but it's the same region, It's the same concept and when we get closer to studying the flood, we'll look at like the Gilgamesh epic and a few of these others and you can see how the stories got fanciful after the sons of Noah migrated away from Ararat and away from the ark. But we have the authentic text validated by God himself. Sumer was succeeded by the Akkadians, which became the Assyrians. They were conquered by Babylon, and so on. And we will look at this in a lot greater detail when we get to the flood, because it's important to see, after the flood, how these people groups start migrating away from Ararat, becoming the various people groups that we have on the planet today. Now this document, the Sumerian Kings List, again it's fanciful, but it talks about the time when the first king descended from heaven and goes up to the reign of who they call Sin-Magir, and that was towards the end of the Sumerian Isin Dynasty. And it's just characterized by these extremely long lifespans. And again, it's very fanciful, but it does validate that there is a succession of individuals and the events that we're talking about, even though they're recounted here in a very fanciful form, did actually take place. Especially the flood that we'll look at in a few chapters. I want to talk for a few minutes about Enoch and his translation. One of the real obvious factors of this chart that I put down, the blue chart with the different ages, is that Enoch's life is so short. God took him. He took him away. He only lived for 365 years and that was relatively short given the life span of the other individuals at that time. What God did is he gave immortality to Enoch. In the Hebrew word there is Lakak. It means that God captured him. God took him. And it's not a bad word like a capture of an enemy. It's I want you. I'm taking you to be with me. This is a model, or a type, of the rapture that's going to come to the Christian church, the believing church, at some point in the future. It's clearly explained in 1 Thessalonians 4. But it's interesting, you know, that Jesus told us that we would not know the day or the hour. And he said this in Matthew 24-36. The believing Christian community should pay attention to what Christ said. Sometime in the past couple weeks there was an individual from California, Harold Camping, coming up with a prediction that the world is going to end and the rapture is going to take place and so on. You know, the fact that Christ told us we're not going to know these things should be enough to keep us from trying to second guess and engage in the mental gymnastics that people come up with to try and predict when Christ is coming back. All that happens by this is it reduces the Bible's credibility And it drives people away. You know, Mr. Camping, God bless him, I think he's a fool for trying to do something like this. He should have never, ever done this. And when we were living in California, he did it then too. He wrote a book, 1994, that the Lord was coming back someday in 1994. Well, he didn't come back then either. And there's been a lot of groups that do this. The Millerites in the early 1900s. I mean, you know, people sold all their belongings and and knew that the Lord was coming back on some particular day, and they sold everything, they gave everything away, and then they went up to some hill in Massachusetts, and they waited for Him to come back. And He didn't come back. That doesn't mean He's not coming back. He is coming back, but He made it real clear. We're not to know the day or the hour. We're not to do this. And again, all that happens when somebody does these things is it produces a lack of credibility on Bible prophecy, and it drives even the professing churches away from teaching it. Because they get really ashamed of what people do, like just making these predictions. And they throw these things out of the Bible. They say, well, it's not important. Well, it is important, but all the words of Scripture are important. And the doctrine of the rapture is an important doctrine. Now, the earliest indication that we have of this, that was very first introduced with Enoch, is in Luke 21 verses 34 to 37. The Lord himself said, and I want you to carefully listen to what his words are, and take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, meaning excessiveness, and drunkenness and cares of this life, so that day come upon you unawares. for as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things, that ye shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man." And in the daytime he was teaching in the temple, and at night he went out and abode in the mount that is called the Mount of Olives. So after the Lord Jesus described all the terrible events of the Great Tribulation that are coming on the planet, He says, in this, he says, no earth dwellers can escape the calamities. Nobody that's here, because it's coming on the entire world. And there's only one way, and that's by not remaining on the earth. In order to escape these things, you've got to be a believer. And you will stand for the judgment of the believers, the Bema Seat of Christ, after the rapture. And standing is a place off of the earth. So we will not be here. There's no escape for the calamities that are taking place on the earth. But if we're off the earth, as he says, then we will escape them. One of the reasons for the tribulation is to make an end of sin. Christ has taken the punishment for believers And if we believe, we do not suffer any punishment. Just like Romans 8.1 says, therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And He's going to take us to be with Him when He punishes the world to make an end of sin, just like Enoch. We're going to please God by believing that Jesus is exactly who he said he is and believe that gospel. We please God by responding to the call that he's given us. So the result of that rapture is we will stand in front of God. Methuselah is the longest living person that has ever lived on this planet he lived for nine hundred and sixty nine years when he died the name his name means his death shall bring Methuselah's father Enoch was functioning as a prophet and we see this in Jude 14 and 15 he named him to signify the timing of the flood Because he knew that the flood was coming. Adam knew that the flood was coming. Remember that stone monument that Josephus in the very first century AD talked about said that Adam described in detail The flood coming on the earth and a fire coming on the earth to destroy the earth. And that's yet future to us. Adam knew these things were going to happen. These people knew these other things were going to happen. They knew this was going to happen. The longevity of Methuselah's life is a real testimony that God has patience with mankind. He's waiting for all those who would respond to that message of salvation. So he withheld the flood for 120 years. Just like today, 2 Peter 3, verses 8 to 9, talks about how patient God is, waiting and waiting and waiting. Now, He knows who's going to respond, but He's giving mankind the ability to come to him. The genealogy of Adam ends with Noah, and his name means comfort or rest, and it's a direct contradiction to what Adam was given was toilsome labor, hard labor. Noah gets rest, the comfort of God and the rest. Noah was the only person in his family to make it through the flood that came on the entire world. None of the individuals in that godly seed line died in the flood. They were either dead before the flood and went to be with God, raptured before the flood, or passed through the flood. The death account, the fact that there is death, and that death came from the sin, is personified in Romans 5. We're in the 12th verse. The text says, Wherefore, as by one man's sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. And Romans 5.14 says, Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who was a figure of him that was to come." Amen?