930, 912, 905, 910, 895, 962…what do these numbers have in common? They were the number of years the first few generations of humans lived!! Geez Mahalalel, you’re a young whipper snapper dad…only 65 years old when you had your Jared? Brown Chicken Brown Cow!! :-) Jared musta thought his pops was a little young because he waited til he was 162! I wonder if Jared and his son Enoch threw ball in the backyard. Wow, almost a millennium for each of them!
OK, then here comes the really weird part…. Genesis 5:21 “Enoch lived sixty-five years, and became the father of Methuselah. 22 Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters. 23 So all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. 24 Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.” POOF! Enoch’s gone! Like 500 years early! That’s such a unique situation and probably a very dramatic situation for that day. He wasn’t even middle age yet and besides Abel, it sounds like he was one of the first to die “young.” Well actually he didn't die...he just disappeared. Talk about modern day CSI case right there. I really really wonder what the Lord was thinking. Since the verse said “Enoch walked with God” it sounds like Enoch was a righteous man and a true companion to Christ, so guessing the Lord was jealous for Him and brought him home. Sure wish God had given us more details on that one!
Now check this one out!!! In Genesis 6: “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, 2 that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
There is lots of crazy stuff in those verses that I don’t know much about but I’ve never read them quite that closely before. So either God was claiming boy babies but not girl babies as His own (not likely), or there was some kind of supernatural being (the Nephilim)…which if you research seems to be a Biblical possibility, that there was some kind of intermingling of human and supernatural in that time period. The result was “the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.” Another seemingly research possibility is that the Nephilim were of Seth’s descendants and were a giant people, which is possible, but I find it odd that God would use the verbage “sons of God” and “daughters of men.” After further research it seems that indeed there was a mixture of the demonic and human which resulted in evil which is one reason God chose to destroy almost everything on earth…to wipe out that unnatural state of life.
Interesting one to think through on that one!
So its interesting to me that by Chapter 7 in the Bible, the earth has already multiplied several generations and there were LOTS of people…enough to have corrupted the earth so severely, that God couldn’t take it any more. This goes back to my last post about how dramatic Adam & Eve’s choice really was in the spiritual world. Its obvious that by them doing what they did, some form of legality was broken that released Satan to wreak havoc on the earth….literally all Hell broke loose. I’m sure it was Satan’s goal (as it is today) to destroy humankind and to totally corrupt the concept of creation that Jesus meant for glory. So mankind exuded evil and the Lord, in His holiness, had to start over. However, He found one man and his family who were righteous and who had stood up to the sin and chosen companionship with the Lord. So, God provided an escape route for Noah & his family and gave them directions on how to avoid the devastating flood to come. Noah of course built the Ark to God’s specs out of sheer blind faith (they’d never had rain before so what the heck was a ginormous boat out in the middle of a field for??) So Genesis 7 comes around and God “blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.” From my quick interpretation/calculations, it seems as though Noah was on the Ark somewhere around 12-14 months before there was dry ground to walk out on…12-14 months!! I’ve been in a season of life that I haven’t enjoyed for that long before and even been in times of uncertainty for longer, but I ain’t go NOTHIN’ on Noah! Can you imagine stepping off that life perserver?? Everything desolate, destroyed, drowned, dead…except him, his family, and a bunch of (probably by then) ANNOYING & stinky animals...Can you even consider how lonely he felt? How much uncertainty arose before him? How much he questioned his future? So Challenging Question for the day…was Noah lonelier before the flood when there were lots of people around who he had nothing in common with or after the flood when the world was barren and dead and he just had his family and God? So question to you - Would you rather be with lots of people who you have nothing in common with or by yourself with God? Seems like a duh question, but I bet we don’t truly live the “right” answer. Most of the time, I don’t think that I truly wrap my head around the concept that God is all I need. That if everyone else fails me, He is enough. He saved Noah from the biggest catastrophic event in human history. He gave him a new life and allowed him to be the ancestor of every human being left on the planet….HE is all I need.
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