Enoch Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, we are going to look at the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis starting at chapter 5, verse 1. If you have been here for a while or you are new here, basically we are going through a fall series called “Extraordinary People of the Bible”. The focus is really on the lesser-known people of the Bible. Lesser-known pretty much ordinary people but people who God was willing to use in amazing and extraordinary ways simply because of their faith in God. Last week, we looked at the prostitute named Rahab. This week we are going to look at a little known figure called Enoch. How many of you know who Enoch was? Enoch was a guy who lived a long, long time ago. Last week I mentioned Rahab lived about 3500 years ago. We don’t know exactly when Enoch walked this early but somewhere between 4000 to 6000 B.C. He walked this world during what is known as the antediluvian period. How many of you know what that is? It is actually a new word for me. It basically means the period before the flood. Ante- being before and diluvian comes from the word deluge which means flood. So it is the period before the flood and that is when Enoch walked this earth. You have a new word for the week: antediluvian. Not only does it mean before the flood, but it also refers to something that is outdated or old fashioned. So he lived in the period before the flood that Noah was involved in and all that sort of thing. Not only did he live in that period, because he was an extraordinary person, he basically, like Rahab, got a lot of press coverage. He is in the Old and New Testament. When we first get a glimpse of Enoch is in today’s passage out of Genesis 5. We are going to look at the whole chapter. He doesn’t come in until a little bit later, but we are going to look at the whole chapter of Genesis 5 from verse 1 all the way down to I believe it is about 32, and then we are going to come back and note a few observations. Genesis 5:1. (Scripture read here.)

If you read along with that or you listened to it as I read it, probably a couple things came to mind. First and foremost is probably that those people back then lived a very long time. The average age was about 900+ years, which is a very long time. People wonder how did they live that long. The reality is we don’t know they did it. We just don’t know. There are a lot of theories out there. One theory is that back then, shortly after the dawn of creation after God created the heavens and the earth, at that particular point in time the earth was basically at an optimal time for man. It was basically a perfect environment for man and woman to live in. What happened over time is that the world slowly began to get polluted. Things that we experience now with chemicals and pesticides in our fruits and vegetables and the ozone layer is thinner so you have the possibility of dangerous sun rays coming down and harming our DNA. The theory is after time, the earth became not such a great place to live so the DNA became affected and people’s bodies and over time you have all these things incorporated into humanity such as disease and illness and untimely death all attributed to the fact that the climate had changed and how we treat our planet. That is a theory. Really to find out what happened, all we have to do is jump to chapter 6 where the Lord said my spirit will not contend with man forever for he is mortal. His days will be 120 years. Basically, we see that God was getting pretty tired of our man was behaving or he was getting tired of maybe the fact that he didn’t appreciate the land or appreciate life and he decided he was going to limit life to 120 years. That is what we see today. We don’t see many people living past the age of 120. So the pattern we see first in the passage is the pattern of longevity; people living a long age but really we see another pattern in there. If we were to go back and look at some of those items we would see this constant pattern where somebody is born and then somebody decides he is going to become a father of so and so and he is going to have more sons and daughters and then they die. We see that clearly. The formula we see here is so and so became the father of so and so; he had other sons and daughters; altogether he lived so many years; and then he died. That is the continual pattern we see in that chapter of Genesis. Really, it is not too much different than we see in a typical obituary today. The sad thing is you have people that live long lives, some of them well past 100, but they might only get a couple lines in an obituary. If you open up the newspaper today and you look at the obituary section, I suspect that most people just get a few lines. So and so was born here, had all those kids; those kids had grandkids; maybe the person had been involved in some form of civic organization or that sort of thing. All in all, most people get about three or four lines and that is it to sum up their whole life. As bad as it is for us, think about the people that lived 700, 800, 900 years. All they get is a line or two. Sometimes in the newspapers we see that some people get a lot more coverage. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they were a celebrity. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they were some sort of a civic leader or some sort of a big shot in the community and they get more coverage. I think that is what we are seeing here.