Hi, Pastor John here, welcoming you to our service. As we look at Genesis 5, we all know that the genealogies in Scripture can be somewhat tedious at times to read through. But we're going to find out today from Elder Jimmy Carter that the genealogies present a lot more information than might first appear. So let's listen in as we go through Genesis 5 and we learn that it's time for all of us as Christians to play ball. Where were we? Baseball, right? Baseball been very good to me. Okay. So we're looking at chapter five, which is a genealogy where God is going to reestablish his promise to us that he is in control of everything that's going to happen. He's going to generate two teams here, team Cain and team Seth. And as we look through chapter five today, we're going to see that there's a very specific sequence, just like in chapter one, the creation sequence, day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, God grades himself. He says certain things to get us through that creation week here in chapter five, we're going to hear a sequence. We're going to hear a name, a son's name at birthday, and then other sons and daughters, and then a death date. And probably one of the saddest phrases in our species history. And then he died, had other sons and daughters, and then he died. But our God and King is working with us through time and through space that this horrible notion, and then he died is going to be erased eventually. That's part of God's promise to us. So if you'll open your Bibles then with me to the end of Genesis chapter 4, the beginning and all of Genesis chapter 5, turn to or turn on your scripture, and let's begin with the notion that God establishes a line of faithful people who precede the Messiah. Pray with me, would you? Mighty one, we seek your favor in your face today. We want you to inhabit our praise. I want you to remove me, Father, and speak through the voice you've given me that all these things heard by these brothers and sisters would encourage them in their path and their journey with you for the sake of Christ, who is our Savior. And we say all these in your name, saying together, amen. So here's the breakdown of our lesson today. Genesis chapter 4 will start with Genesis 4 25 through 26. This is God's promise line is restored We'll talk about why it had to be restored our second division today is going to be God's promise line is recorded from Aden to Lamech that's in chapter 5 verses 1 through 27 and our third division is God's promise line is recorded from Lamech to Noah and verses 28 through 32. And let's see what we can dig out of these boring and dusty genealogies and apply them to the life that we're living today, shall we? Now, let's go back to chapter four for just a moment. Technically, we've already seen a genealogy. Did you know that back in chapter four, verse 17? Let me read something for you. Cain lay with his wife. Oh, come on, Jimmy, where did Cain get a wife? It was one of his distant sisters, right? The prohibition against union between close relatives doesn't happen for centuries later. That's the Mosaic law. Obviously, it seems that the human DNA is robust enough that you can marry a sister and still not have any problems with the offspring. Well, anyway, Cain lays with his wife. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to Enoch. Mark that name Enoch. There's going to be a bad Enoch and there's going to be a good Enoch. And then Cain was building a city. Now, didn't God tell Cain, you're going to wander for the rest of your life? You see, God didn't curse Adam. God cursed the ground to make it hard for Adam to get the fruit of the ground. But God cursed Cain. He said, you won't even be able to work the ground. No matter how hard you work, nothing's going to come out of the ground. So remember we talked about in chapter four, Cain was whining about this. So Cain decides he's not going to be a wanderer. What's he decide to do? Build a city. Well, he's being disobedient right off the bat, isn't he? So the first man conceived by human sexuality is a murderer and a city builder. He has a son named Enoch. Enoch then has a son named Erod. Erod has a father. He fathers a son named Mahushael. Then there's Mahushael. And then there's Lamech. Lamech is the first sexual deviant. And the first deviation is not fornication. It's not adultery. It's more than one wife. He sings something called the Song of the Swords. He's a violent man. He's killed another man. Well, there's your descent from Cain in the first five or six generations. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? But you notice there's no ages. There's no phrase, had other sons and daughters. It's kind of a cursory, because God wants us to focus on what? He wants us to focus on the Abel-Seth line, doesn't he? That's why God is giving us all of these details when it comes to the genealogy in chapter five. So yes, Adam and Eve do conceive Seth. Why does Seth have to be conceived? Let's think about this for, it's looking pretty bad for people who wanna be with God. Remember the last verse in chapter four is, and men, human beings, men and women, were calling on the name of the Lord. This is probably the first corporate worship service. They're calling on the name of the Lord. Things aren't looking very good. Abel's dead, murdered by his brother Cain. Remember God made that promise in chapter three that Eve is going to have a descendant who crushes the head of our enemy? Things aren't looking good. Where's the descent line here? It's been destroyed. Here's the first obvious attempt of Satan's servant trying to erase the line of Messiah. Abel's dead. Now what do we do? Seth. And what does Eve say about Seth? Here's God working. Here's the replacement for Abel. And by the way, ladies, who names the boy? Eve does. Now, that's not patriarchal. Practice is it the dad using names of son, right? I think this is further powerful but subtle evidence that God created men and women to be co-heirs They are the creature king and queen of its creation. We've fallen we engaged in treason against him, but still The differentiation in the work he has us to do does not make us better or worse. It makes us different and together We bring that full reflection of God into his creation. I Well, suddenly, Seth is on the scene in chapter 5. And you'll see the first verse in chapter 5 is a toldeth. Remember we talked about this notion of a toldeth? is as if we had an authenticating signature at the bottom of certain narratives. Our first toledoth, and remember, I don't read or speak Hebrew. I have to rely on other people's research. But the first toledoth was at the beginning of chapter two. And it said, these are the generations of the creations of the heavens and the earth. We take that to mean that God took that narrative, authenticated it, and gave it to Adam. And that Genesis chapter two then, and three, and four, and the top of five, are Adam's memories. And it's a separate section. And Adam has signed it then in a sense by saying these are the lines of the generations of Adam. So we have two distinct sections in our study of the Genesis account so far. One we believe handed down to Adam from God himself, because there were no human witnesses to the creation week, am I correct? And this told us we've just studied is the line or that narrative that Adam has added to what God already has put. We put the rest in notion that chapter two was a competing creation story, remember that? It's not a competing creation story, it's an augmenting creation story. It's Adam in a sense looking from the bottom up as God had looked from the top down and you put them together, you get a beautiful symmetric view of the creation week. But here we are with our second told us in chapter five, When God created man, there's a reminder here, he made him, them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them man. This is a quick review and takes us back to Genesis chapter one. Now the writer would not want to do this because chapter five is a bridge. Again, it's a bridge between the beginning of all things and what's going to happen in this catastrophic event we call the flood. So suddenly, in the space of one verse, Seth grows up, gets married, has a boy. And his boy's name is Enosh. And this happens about the same time that people began calling on the name of the Lord in corporate worship. Now, Enosh, has a sense in it in the Hebrew. Again, I don't rewrite it. I have to look up other people's work. Enosh has a sense of frailty or mortality because I believe that now this line that God is creating, this messianic line through Seth, God has imprinted and put upon, he's put upon the descendants of Seth the idea that we really are temporary. And we're gonna see that reinforced with the phrase, and he had other sons and daughters, and then he died. So suddenly we see the Lord God repairing the line of Abel with his little brother, Seth. And there's one more important small detail here, I think, that you'll see that It seems as if God is no longer speaking directly to Adam and to Eve and to Cain or to Abel, but he is in a sense, he's pulling back slightly to a loud space for corporate worship. Men and women are calling upon the name of the Lord and the Lord has allowed that space in a sense so that we can practice praising the Lord corporately and serving one another and our Lord God as a community. I think we're seeing really what God wants in the church way, way, way, way, way, way, way back prior to the flood. So here is Seth, he's the repair. In chapters five, one through 27, we see that now, I'm sorry, we are seeing right now that God has stepped in intentionally and has repaired the line. So our first principle today is that God's promise of redemption restores damage done by wickedness. God has promised us in chapter three that there's gonna be a descendant from Eve. She is eventually going to be in that line of Messiah The line isn't broken if you study scripture you'll see down through the centuries there are several attempts to break that line From Adam to Abel Seth and From Seth to Lamech to Noah, from Noah's son to Shem, and then Shem's descendant Nahor, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, through Israel, through Judah, through David, through Solomon, on down to Jesus. That line is intact. And although there will be several attempts to get rid of that line, the Lord God protects it by his mighty right hand. So with the idea that God's promise of redemption is restoring things that have been broken in wickedness, how has the Lord fixed something in your life this past year when you thought one of his promises had been broken? That despairing moment when you thought God is not with me? I'm kind of all by myself here. Is it a health problem? Is it a financial problem? In the darkness of your heart, you said, Lord, where is your promise? I am aching and I am burdened by those things that are happening to me. Well, the promise here is that God is the ultimate fixer and that he will fix all that we have broken in his economy and his creation. So the second division, we've seen the line restored. God's promised line is recorded from Adam to Lamech. We've seen the line restored in the first division, and now we're looking at its descendancy in the pre-flood era from Adam to Lamech. So in five, as we work our way down through the notion of this sequence that we see continually, that Cain's Enoch was the name of the first city and a center of rebellion. Might have been the first idea for the Tower of Babel, who knows? But Seth's Enoch now, as we work our way down through Seth's son, he said that Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and his name was Seth. Seth was born, Adam lived another 800 years. You see the sequence there? He lived to 930 and then he died. Now Seth has a baby, When he's 105, he became the father of Enosh. We saw that Enosh might have meant frail or kind of temporary in that sense in verse seven. That Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters and together Seth lived 912 years and then he died. Now when Enoch had lived 90 years, he became the father of Canaan. And after he became the father of Canaan, Enosh lived 815 years and had other sons and daughters and together Enoch lived 905 years and then he died. What's going on here? We're seeing the details of the line of Messiah being described to us in writing in a language that we can understand today. Why? Because it assures us that God has been working in our past, is the king of our present, and the promise of our future. The one true God is the master and the captain of time and space and he's demonstrating that he is, in a sense, intruding in time and space to affect that which is always desired, which is to keep his promise to the descendants of Eve. So we work our way down through verse 12 in chapter 5, and we see again and again that offspring, a certain date of conception and birth, and then a certain years that they live to, and then there's death in the family. And by the way, when it comes to genealogy, especially this is kind of more poignant when we get to Noah. Was Noah really 500 years old before he had kids? Well, maybe. But the Lord God has picked certain names in the genealogies of other sons and daughters because they're important for us to know. Noah may have had other sons and daughters before, 500 years old, right? But Shem, Ham, and Japheth are the ones that God wants us to focus on. This is not an uncommon practice even today. As a matter of fact, my mother made a genealogy for our son when he graduated college. It went back about 14 generations. She didn't hit everybody. But enough that we would know that this is our line back to Plymouth, England. This is our line through Jamestown and Orange County and Albemarle and the Gap. This was our line without hitting every single generation, but the generations that would keep us linked to those who were our ancestors in England. So as we go through this cycle of God recording and preserving the official line of Messiah before the flood, We're going to see that this is a gift to us. So hopefully Genesis chapter five isn't so boring after all. It's something that you and I can grab onto in time and space just like a toledoth. It's as if God is authenticating his work pre-flood to make sure that there's a line which of course ends in Messiah himself. What a God we worship. We might also look at chapter five as a legal document. You, when Matthew went to the temple when he was writing his biography of Jesus, he went to the office of records and probably had to pay a couple shekels to get the official descendants genealogy of the royal line of David. And he put that official lineage into the first chapter of his biography of Jesus. An authenticating real line of people in real time, doing real things that God gave us to say, Hey, Jesus really is the king of the Jews. He descends from David through Solomon through his foster father, Joseph. And that sign, that placard they put over Jesus's cross, king of the Jews. was the truth. Some people have asked, well, gee, why did Jesus's foster father die so soon? Well, if Jesus's foster father had still been alive when Jesus was crucified, a sign couldn't have been put up, could it? Joseph would have been the king of the Jews. Jesus would have been the heir apparent. But since Joseph seemed to have died an untimely death, guess who the king is? Real life if there had been a king of Israel sitting on the throne of David in the first century, who would it have been? Yahshua bar Yosef king of the Jews So these real genealogies do something special for us when it comes to trusting God and his account the account that he has given us, right? So we see Seth and his son Enosh. We see Enosh and Kenan. We see Kenan and Mahalalel and Malala. And then Mahalalel has Jared and Jared with Enoch. Oh, there's that name Enoch again. Ah, but this is the good Enoch. Remember the bad Enoch was the city named when that Cain was building, he named it for his kid. But this is the good Enoch. Now what is so special about this good Enoch? He had other sons and daughters, and then he didn't die, did he? This Enoch didn't die, holy mackerel, as we might say in the vernacular. He is what? He walks with God, that phrase means a lifestyle, right? He walked with God, that was his lifestyle, and then for 360 some odd years he lives, and then he was what? No more. Because what did the Lord God do with Enoch? He took him out of this space and Enoch didn't die. Now this is a neat detail in the genealogy. Some scholars think, you know, there are two Old Testament personalities that don't die. Enoch is one and the super prophet Elijah is the other. And some scholars think that these two men who did not suffer physical death have an important part to play in the narrative and the drama of Revelation 11, the two witnesses in Jerusalem. But the neat thing is to know this might tell us again how integrated God's word is through time and through space. So Enoch has a special place in God's purpose, as do you and I. He glorifies God and enjoys Him in a lifestyle that is described as walking with God. As a matter of fact, in Jude, Jude has a little letter to this one of Jesus' brothers. In Jude 1, 14 through 15, we read about Enoch that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men, the line of Cain. See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of His holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in their ungodly way and all the harsh words that ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." That's in Jude about Enoch. Enoch is a prophet. He was one taken up by God. He did not die. So when you say thousands upon thousands returning with the Lord, a thousand times a thousands of millions, there's gonna be a lot of glory when Jesus returns. But finally, when we get down to verse 25 and 27 in chapter five, we see a man named Methuselah. Methuselah has the good Lamech. When he was 187, he lived another 782 years, had other sons and daughters, and then he died at 969. And what does that number mean to you for Bible trivia? It's the oldest human being, right, is Methuselah. And some scholars believe that Methuselah's name in ancient Hebrew means judgment. That's why some scholars believe that when Methuselah dies, we're on the precipice of the flood. That God is actually using this genealogy as a clock to warn the people in the pre-flood era and to us as a marker to say, see, God is in control of time and space. Our second principle then today reads, God's promise of redemption retards the effects of further wickedness. Not only does God restore the line of Abel Seth, in the restoration, he slows down that which is against his plan. Now you and I both know in the days of Noah, things were pretty bad. That our species had rushed to the bottom in moral depravity. But the flood, in a sense, is one of God's first works to slow the spread of evil. Have you heard this argument in our world today? If God is all powerful, and if God is really good, then why is there sin, suffering, sickness, and wickedness, and evil in his creation? I don't want to make try to this, but let's face it. Sin, and pain, and suffering, and wickedness are bad. But God taking pain and suffering and sin and weakness and doing something good with it is good. I think our God is demonstrating to us that no matter how bad things get, he's better. And that he will allow pain and suffering and sickness and disease into our lives. That he might glorify himself through us. We have friends and family who don't understand that. They don't hear the master's voice. They don't follow and know him. So to them, their pain and suffering can never have meaning. can never be integrated into God's great plan to his glory. You and I have that privilege, and it's tough. It's hard to bear untimely death and disease. It's hard to bear financial stress. But our God is demonstrating, even through the simplicity of a genealogy, that he is in control, and that his affection for us is ultimately demonstrated at the cross. And that is his ultimate work. to rid this planet, his biosphere of pain and suffering and wickedness and evil. Oh, what a God we worship. What progress is the Holy Spirit making in the life you live for him? What disciples, sons and daughters are you bearing for the kingdom of God before you die? Our last division today, God's promised line is recorded from Lamech to Noah. This is the last two verses in chapter five, verses 28 through 32. And again, we see that the promise remains. It's still here with us today. Lamech, this is the good Lamech, of course. He was 182 when he had Noah. And Noah is named for the idea that he will help his parents as they age and toil against the cursed earth. And then Lamech lives another 595 years, and then he dies at the age of 700. Did you know, as Mark told us, the name of Noah has in it the sense of rest, the sense of respite. It's as if Lamech is saying, you know, when we're retired, Noah can help us. It's as if Lamech was naming his son Pension or IRA. Ira. Hey, that's a Jewish name. The kid is going to be able to help us because it seems as time is progressing before the flood, it's getting harder and harder to generate the fruit of the earth. It's getting harder and harder. No matter how much work we put into the earth, we're getting less and less back. That might be another indication to us that we are in the times of Noah. With disease and with confusion and with chaos comes a sense of less and less efficiency when it comes even to the biosphere. So my goodness, what in the world is Noah doing at 500 years of age having his sons? Well, we talked about that before. He may have had sons and daughters before that. But God wants us to focus on Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In verse 29 of chapter five, We might see also that not only are things getting harder for human beings to do when it comes to getting food and staying alive, are we not taught in the New Testament that even creation groans under the weight of our treason against the Most High God? Here we might see some of the initial effects of the very creation groaning under the weight of our rebellion against God, our treason against Him. So our last principle today, God's promise of redemption reminds men of his expectations. Yes, God is restoring the line of Abel, Seth, and from that line will descend Messiah. And in that line are the expectations that God has put before us, curbs to our behavior to protect us, to defend us. And our God is motivated by his affection for us, right? Application might be how is God used the right expectations of parents or families or friends? To make you more like his son Jesus. Oh my goodness. Are you meaning to tell me Jimmy that God uses family members? To shape me more like Jesus Christ Husbands, how about that most important tool that God has put into your box and that's your wife. I Did you say wife? Yes. And why did you say husband? Yes. The perfect tool that God uses to bring us to a higher and holier relationship with him. And our model of course is Jesus Christ himself. Well, my goodness, how in the world can we trust this ancient record, this myth, this legend? You can't trust this stuff. It's been translated too many times. It's been passed down too many times. They probably didn't even know how to write back then. It was all oral. Who knew what you could memorize and what you didn't remember? on and on and on and on, but God doesn't care about keeping his word. God doesn't care about you and me not being confused. God doesn't care about you and me not being in wonderment or in, oh my gosh, you see, can I believe that or not? Yes, God loves us. He doesn't want us to be confused. He's put these things in us and in our way that we might read them and come to a trust that becomes, as Enoch was, a living lifestyle. You know, the Bible defines faith in Hebrews 11, one as, now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. There's hope and there's certain in that definition, isn't there? But my goodness, today in our world, everybody's hoping, aren't they? But this is the hope they have. There's a wishing hope. What kind of hope do you and I have as Christ followers? We have a waiting hope. And that's not waiting as in, hmm, where's the bus? Or, hmm, where's the train? That's a waiting hope as in waiting as in serving others. That's our hope. As sons and daughters of the Most High God, our hope is sure and we wait for its fruit, not like the world that has a wishing hope. Paul proclaims in Acts 26.6, and now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our fathers that I am on trial today. He was risking his very physical existence for the hope that the fathers, the pre-fled genealogy, demonstrated as they lived a life walking with the one true God. Paul also wrote in Romans 418, against all hope, wishing in the world, Abraham in hope, waiting on the Lord, believed and so became the father of many nations just as it had been said of him, so shall your offspring be. You see the difference in the hope that you and I practice as followers of the Most High God and the hope that is in the world? There's another phrase in that definition in Hebrews chapter 11. It's the notion of being certain in what you don't see. Holy cow, Jimmy, what do you see? We can't see it. How can you trust or hope in something you can't see? My friends, have you ever been given an ounce of loyalty? How about two square yards of courage? Oh, I don't, don't know what you're talking about, Jimmy. Can you quantify jealousy by giving me three pounds of it? No, but are those things real? Yes. So there's a realm to us that we cannot see in a sense, but we see its results. Don't we? We know that emotions are real. We know that our thoughts are real, but we don't actually see them. We see the. fruit of that reality. It's the same thing with the one true God. We see the fruit of that reality. And if that were not enough, then the king of the universe says, that I am going to give you the ability to see that which is unseen. 2 Corinthians 4, 18. We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary, wishing, but what is unseen is eternal, waiting. How are we able to do that? How can we see the unseeable? In John 16, 7, Messiah promises to send the Counselor to us, capital C. In first Corinthians two 16, we have the mind of Christ. That's how you and I see those things that are unseen. Our minds and imaginations are now unveiled. They are uncovered by the, by the, by the intervention of Jesus himself. So as Christ followers, we can see things that our unsaved neighbors don't see. We can understand these things like a genealogy in chapter five of Genesis for what it really is. Not some boring, dry, dusty legend or myth, but living, breathing, real. Grab hold of trust and faith to prove to us that our God and King is in complete control. Yeah, we practice a common faith in the horizontal. We drink milk trusting that it's not ruined. We step onto an elevator not knowing how it works. The center stripe on the road, I'm trusting the driver coming at me doesn't come across it and plow into me and kill me. But it's an alien, capital F faith that God has given to you and me in the restoration of the line from Seth to Messiah. It's in that promise that he made to Eve and he's going to fulfill it. And we have seen that in our lifetimes with Christ's beautiful sacrifice for us on the cross. We see now that the vertical portion of faith, that capital F faith, that capital T trust, because faith and trust are synonyms. We see that God has reestablished that which had been disintegrated in the fall. The vertical component of our faith and trust is now back, has been restored, even through the evidence of a genealogy in Genesis chapter five. It truly is an alien faith that God uses as a venue that we might then respond to his unmerited favor, which we call grace. And in that righteousness, we learn in Galatians 3, 23 through 25, Again, as Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 289, for it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourself. This is the gift of God, not by works that no one can boast. That means that faith itself is even a gift to us. In Romans 3, 2, Paul again says, this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, and receiving that gift, we now understand Genesis 5 for what it really is. And as we work our way through the Genesis narrative, hey man, we're at five out of 50 chapters already. How about that? As we work our way through this beautiful narrative, as Pastor John works his way through the Ecclesiastes, as we respond in Isaiah, as we read John again, we come to understand that the king of the universe indeed has not just reestablished the line of Messiah, he is working through the line of Messiah. So who's going to win the world series in 2024? We don't know who's going to win the Superbowl. Well, we might have an idea here then, but who wins the ultimate game? Who wins the ultimate competition team cane or team Seth team Messiah or team antichrist, you know, dump all your cane paraphernalia. Okay. It's worthless, the hats, the jackets, the cards. Rid yourself of them. Team Messiah, there's where the stuff that is priceless and eternal lives. You see, when I was watching the Cincinnati Reds at the old Crosley Field in Cincinnati, we would sing, ♪ O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. In a couple of seconds, someone would yell out what? Play ball! Play ball, brothers and sisters, and play well to the glory of God. Play well for the love of the commissioner. Play well for the joy of the game. Play for the benefits of the clouds of saints and the witnesses that surround us. Play ball. Let's pray, shall we? Mighty One, thank you for being the commissioner, and thank you for putting us in the game, and the promise that you're winning it for us, that you've won it for us, and that your promises are always kept. Glory and honor and power to you and you alone, oh Mighty One, that we might leave this place more like your son Jesus, bold and clear thinking, because you have unveiled our minds and imaginations, that our memories are now made complete by the work of your son Jesus on the cross, and that we can be in right relationship with you only by his magnificent work. Lord Jesus, we look to you in your name alone to live a life that is true and right and holy. And for your sake, we ask your fame among the nations this day in Little Warrenton, Virginia, that you would glorify yourself and inhabit our praise. And we do all these things in your name saying together, amen. Thank you for tuning in, those of you online, and for those of you in the big room, may God bless you this week until we see one another again soon. Amen. Pastor John back here again. If you are blessed by the service, let me ask you to do us a favor. Would you click on the like button below that little thumbs up? If you're listening on sermon audio, perhaps you can comment or even share the sermon with someone else. We'd love to hear from you. We're on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter at WBFVA. We're on the World Wide Web at WBFVA.org. Let us know if you'd like us to pray for you. If you'd like to support us financially, you can make donations through our website at WBFVA.org. Just click on giving. You'll receive a tax deductible receipt at the end of the year. Either way, we would love to hear from you or even have you visit us in person one Sunday. We meet at 46 Winchester Street in downtown Warrington, Virginia at 11 o'clock every Sunday morning. And now, may God bless you richly until we gather again.