Genesis 021 – Why The Monotony? (Part 1)

Genesis #021-

‘Why the Monotony?’

Genesis 5:3-5

We’re moving through the book of Genesis verse-by-verse.  Today, Genesis 5:3-5, [we’re] looking at it more in depth.  And then we’re going to start moving very fast, time permitting, through Genesis 5:20. The title of our message this morning is ‘Why the Monotony?’ It’s a question as to why the monotony?  The reason I decided to entitle our message in that vein is because when most people get to Genesis 5, it’s just too boring:  a bunch of names and dates of people who are long gone; it just seems repetitive.  And because we want some excitement, we have a tendency to just sort of skip over this chapter and miss what the Holy Spirit has for us.  There are some real nuggets of truth to be gained from these chapters.

But first, just by way of review, Genesis  4 and 5 go together in the sense that they are a record of Satan’s attempt to destroy a promise, and how God continued that promise through a new line.  As you remember from our studies of Genesis 1-11, it is really a record of the beginning of the human race; Genesis 12-50 are a record of the Hebrew race.  So Genesis 1-11 are part one and Genesis 12-50 are part two.  We have started part one, and it has four parts.  We’ve looked at the doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 and 2—creation as God originally designed and intended it.

But we saw what happened and what went wrong in Genesis 3-5:  the fall of man.  We worked our way through Genesis 3, the fall of man, and there was a lot of commotion and confusion going on today, even this last week in the United States of America.  It’s just so obvious that we’re living in a world very different than what God originally intended.  The reason for that is related to the fall of man in Genesis 3.  But Genesis 3, interestingly, ends with this note of optimism.  Where in Genesis 3:15, you have this tremendous prediction that there’s coming One from the Seed of the woman who would be Eve, who will take the serpent’s head and crush it.  That is, I believe, your first reference to a coming Messiah; the first reference, really, to the gospel in the entirety of Scripture.  And it’s announced really at a point when it’s needed.  Man has fallen.  Now we see God’s solution in terms of how things are going to be remedied and rectified one day in the person of Jesus Christ.

From there you move into Genesis 4 where Satan has Cain murder Abel.  And as we’ve tried to explain, that was Satan’s attempt to destroy that promise.  Satan, then in 4:16-24, through the Canite line, a wicked line, sought to establish his new world order.  The New World Order is a one world system of economics, politics and religion that excludes the vantage point of the Creator, God Himself.  Satan felt that he had won.  The Messianic line was destroyed, at least in Satan’s mind.  Satan then built the world the way he wanted it through the ungodly Canite line.  And we’re very fortunate that the chapter didn’t end there because whenever it looks like Satan is winning, God has a solution.  Even in the United States of America today, as you look at the events of this last week, it looks like Satan is winning.  But that would be contrary to God’s nature.  Satan is not winning.  God always has a solution, and God’s solution to this problem is the godly line of Seth.  Seth was born, and to Seth was born Enosh, and a new line continues which will be the fulfillment, or actually bring into existence, the promise of Genesis 3:15.

And so as we come to Genesis 5, which we started looking at last time, we discovered a messianic line through which the promise of Genesis 3:15 will be fulfilled.

The Canite wicked line was described in Genesis 4.  Now we’re getting a description of this godly line. And the line will start with Adam, per Genesis 5:1, and it will go all the way to Noah in Genesis 5:32.  So it’s a genealogy.

And then there’s going to be an additional genealogy post-Tower of Babel, beginning in Genesis 11:10 through the end of that particular chapter of Genesis 11.  That line will continue through Noah’s son, Shem, which will go from Shem all the way to Terah.   Terah is Abraham’s father.

And then once you get to Genesis 12, the spotlight will turn onto Abraham because it will be through Abraham that God will begin this new race, the Hebrew race through which the Messiah will be born, and Genesis 3:15 will be fulfilled.

So that’s where we are in our study of the book of Genesis.  We are in chapter 5, which gives us a monotonous perspective on this godly line.  In fact, it’s so monotonous that most people skip right over it.  But you can’t skip right over it because there’s some material here that’s critical to understand.  So there’s an introduction in Genesis 5:1,2, then you have the godly line of Adam, then Seth, then Enosh, then Kenan, then Mahalalel, and then Jared.  Some interesting things start to happen after the genealogy of Jared.  It gets very interesting with Enoch in 5:21-24; Methuselah in 5:25-27 and Lamech in 5:28-31, ultimately leading to Noah [5:32].

So the last time I was with you, we took a look at the Introduction, and now we’re moving into the genealogy, first of Adam, where we’re going to find a six-fold pattern.   I want you to see this pattern for what it is.  I’ll try to explain the pattern to you, why it is here and why it keeps getting repeated.  But once you get the pattern down, then the rest of these names go by very, very quickly.

So if you have a copy of your Bible, notice Genesis 5:3-5.  It says, “When Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.  Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters.  So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.”  Now, this is very, very interesting because it gives you six things.  And these six things are repeated for every pre-flood patriarch.  We call these the antediluvian people that lived prior to the great deluge of Noah’s day that’s going to be described for us in Genesis 7 and 8.  So these are the antediluvian patriarchs.  And for every patriarch, what you’re going to see are six things mentioned over and over and over again.  And that’s the monotony that I’m speaking of:  a monotony with a purpose, as I’ll try to explain. [See slide on Six-Fold Pattern — Genesis 5:3-5].

The first thing you’ll see is the name and the meaning of the patriarch. So I’ll be giving you the name of each of these patriarchs and what their name actually means in the original language. You’ll notice here that Adam is named, and his name means Man.

The second thing is the age of the patriarch at the time of his firstborn, so when Adam became the father of Seth, the next in the line, he was 130 years.

The third thing is the additional years that the patriarch lived following the birth of the seed-son.  So Adam became the father of Seth at the ripe old age of 130, and Adam, according to these verses, lived an additional 800 years.

And then the fourth thing is that Adam had other sons and daughters during that 800-year time period.

The fifth thing is the total number of years that Adam lived.  So you have to add up number 2 and number 3, and the total years that Adam lived were 930.  So at age 130, he becomes the father of Seth. Then an additional 800 years passed: 130+800 = 930, and that’s the total length of Adam’s life.

[Sixth], with each of these patriarchs, except for one, as we’ll explain, there’s a record of their death.  It says over and over again, ‘and he died, and he died, and he died,’ etc..

So let me slow down just for a minute and show you why this pattern is repeated—virtually ten times in Genesis 5.  Let me show you the reason for the repetition of this pattern.  In fact, I want to make six observations (see Slide on Six-fold Repetition: Significance (Gen 5).  There are observations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 about this pattern, because once you get it and see why it’s here, then the rest of the names will fit into the pattern very nicely and the rest of the antediluvian patriarchs will go by very, very quickly.

But what is this information doing here in our Bible?  First of all, with each patriarch, you see a name.  And we’re going to give the Hebrew meaning to each of those names.  Why do we have to know all of these names?  Why do I have to know the names Seth and Adam and Jared and Kenan and Mahalalel, etc?  The reason that information is so important is because the Bible wants us to understand that these are actual historical figures.  These people are so accurate historically in terms of when they lived as is or was George Washington or Napoleon or Alexander the Great or any other historical figure that you might study in history.  In fact, you might want to jot down 1 Chronicles 1:1-4, which is another genealogy.  In that genealogy, you’ll see the exact same names:  Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan Mahalalel, etc..  In fact, these names, many of them are mentioned in the genealogy leading to Jesus Christ.  Did you know that?  In Luke 3:36-38, which is part of a genealogy linking Jesus back to Adam, you’ll see these exact same names.  And did you know that these same names are mentioned in the book of Hebrews 11:4-7, our Great Hall of Faith chapter?  You’ll see the names Abel and Cain and Enoch and Noah.  And so I think that’s why the history here is given— God wants us to understand that this is not some sort of figment of someone’s imagination.  This is not some sort of fairy tale.  This is not Jack and the Beanstalk or Veggie Tales or Star Wars or whatever comes out of people’s minds in terms of imagination.  This is actual history.  And if you start playing games with the historicity of these characters, and if they’re in an unbroken genealogy, Luke 3, leading ultimately to Jesus Christ, and you dehistoricize some of these pre-flood patriarchs, then it’s just a matter of time before you start dehistoricizing Jesus because Jesus is in the same exact genealogy.

The second observation I want to make here about this pattern is there’s some very interesting information given here that you don’t find anywhere else in any other genealogy in the entire Bible.  The Genesis 11 and Genesis 5 genealogies are unique in the sense that they give the age of the patriarch at the time of birth of the seed-son.  In other words, it doesn’t just tell you how many years Adam lived and what year or age he was when he died.  It goes far more in depth than that, and it gives you the age of Adam at the time Seth was born.  This is true with all of these patriarchs.

Now, this becomes very significant because what is being demonstrated here is that there are no gaps, despite the fact that what many people will tell you, there are no gaps in these genealogies.  And I’m speaking specifically about the gaps allegedly in the Genesis 5 genealogy and the Genesis 11 genealogy.  There are no gaps.  There are no missing generations in those genealogies.

And the reason that is a battleground concept is because people have used these genealogies to calculate the age of the earth.  The age of the earth is not, contrary to what evolution says, 4.5 billion years old.  The age of the earth is quite young.  It’s in the thousands rather than the millions or the billions.  And you can reach that conclusion by simply not inserting massive gaps of time into these genealogies.

James Barr said this, and keep in mind, James Barr was not a conservative evangelical scholar at all.  He was very liberal in his views.  He did not have a high view of the inerrancy or the authority of the Scripture, but he simply admitted that the Scripture, when rightly understood and interpreted, leads to a conclusion of the earth being thousands of years old rather than millions and billions of years old.  It is almost the unpardonable sin to say something like that to an evolutionist because the evolutionist has a holy trinity that they adhere to.  A trinity are 3 beliefs that they adhere to by way of faith, and that holy trinity is time plus randomness plus matter.  They need vast ages of time for evolution to work.  James Barr says the Bible doesn’t yield those vast ages of time.  He says, “Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writers of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience. (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies… [That’s where we are in our study] … provided by simple addition, a chronology from the beginning of the world up until up to later stages in the biblical story (c) Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish…human and animal life except for those in the ark.  Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the ‘days’ of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be merely a local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.”

So what he is saying is if you just take the Bible for what it says, the creation days were 24-hour days.  The flood, which we haven’t studied yet, but we will be studying in our study of Genesis, covered the whole world, and there are no missing gaps of deep time in these generations in Genesis 5 or Genesis 11, because it gives you specific information, not just how many years Adam lived, but the age of Adam and all of these ten patriarchs at the time the seed-son, or the first-born was born.

So the Bible, if just taken at face value, reveals information that this world that we’re living in hasn’t been here for billions of years or trillions of years or gazillions of years, but rather thousands of years.

Now, I’ve given you this slide before from Dave Breese.  [See slide on AUTHORSHIP]. He’s talking here about seven men who rule the world from the grave, and he’s talking about how these men, although long gone, their ideas continue on.  And he’s got here Karl Marx, Julius Wellhausen, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Soren Kierkegaard.  And you’ll notice that the number one person he’s got on this list is a man named Charles Darwin.  It was Charles Darwin that formally articulated evolution in his book, The Origin of the Species, going back to 1859, and the moment that that idea became popular, the Christian Church, God’s people, found themselves in a quandary because the scientists, so-called, were saying that the age of the earth is very, very old because you need deep time for evolution to occur.  And yet the Bible, through simple addition, was saying something completely different.  And so what do you do when you’re in that conflict?  And we’re not the first generation that’s dealt with this conflict.  This conflict goes back to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species 1859.  Well, what the Christian Church started to do at that time was to adopt what I like to call the backward Christian soldier mentality.  Instead of ‘onward Christian soldier,’ it’s backward Christian soldier.

They began to rewrite or reinterpret the book of Genesis to make it harmonious with Darwin.  One of the tools that they used, and you can track this down to a Princeton scholar named W.H. Green about 1890, who started to say, ‘Well, there’s missing generations in these genealogies.  And if we can find enough missing generations in the genealogy of Genesis 5 and the genealogy of Genesis 11, then we’re going to have the deep time we need to make the Bible harmonious with the evolutionary view of the origin of the human race.  And so we can make the Bible fit science or scientific philosophy.’

The problem with that strategy is now, today, they’re not saying that the earth is hundreds of thousands of years old.  They’re saying it’s billions of years old.  Some argue it’s 4.5 billion years old.  And you can stretch these genealogies all you want.  But the fact of the matter is you’re not going to find a missing billion years.  So consequently, what people have gone to is beyond genealogy stretching. They’ve gone to the day-age theory that each of the creation days represents an age, and we’ve dealt with that in-depth in our study in the book of Genesis 1.  They’ve also gone into the idea that there is some sort of missing time or gap of however many years you need between Genesis 1:1,2 which is called the the gap theory, and that theory originated as a result of trying to make Scripture harmonious with what evolutionists were telling us about the age of the earth.  We’ve explained in prior studies, you can go back to our very early lessons in Genesis, why we at Sugar Land Bible Church, are not adherents of the gap theory, nor are we adherents of the so-called day-age theory.  But one of the other tools that’s been used is, ‘Well, there must be a bunch of missing persons in between each of these patriarchs.’  And what I’m trying to explain here is the details of the numbers, not just giving you how old Adam was when he died, but how old he was at the time his seed-son, in this case, Seth, was born.  That amount of detail allows you to find no missing ages whatsoever.

Arnold Fruchtenbaum puts it this way.  He says, ”A third observation is that there are no gaps in the genealogy.” [He’s speaking here of Genesis 5]. “Some try to put gaps into the genealogy in order to accommodate the scientific long age of man, but the wording does not allow for that.  If the text only said begat, then that would be permissible, since the word ‘begat’ does not always require direct father/son relationship.  It could mean grandfather, great grandfather, or ancestors and so on.  Nevertheless, the wording in this section does not allow for that interpretation.  The text does not simply say begat.  It gives the years before and after the birth of the seed-son.  So this type of language simply does not allow gaps to occur.”

So if the gap theory of Genesis 1:1,2 is invalid, if the day-age theory that each of the creation days represents some kind of vast age is invalid, and if there are no missing generations in this genealogy of Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, then the only thing that’s left to accept is the fact that the earth that we’re living in today is not 4.5 billions of years old.  It’s more in the direction of maybe thousands of years.  Some say 10,000, some say 6,000, and that’s the perspective that we adhere to at Sugar Land Bible Church, not the old earth creationist perspective, but the young earth creationist model.

Now, one of the things people are doing today is they’re trying to say, ’Well, you know, Genesis 1-11, that’s just poetry.  It’s just symbolic.’  And there was an actual study done on this by Stephen Boyd at the Master’s University.  You can look up his work online, and he gets into the specifics of the verb structure of Genesis 1-11, and he demonstrates that, yes, there are poetic sections here.  For example, I think the first reference to poetry or words composed in poetry is in Genesis 2:23, where it says, The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.”  That’s poetry.  And then over in Genesis 4:23-24, it says, Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, Listen to my voice, You wives of Lamech, give heed to my speech, For I have killed a man for wounding me; And a boy for striking me; If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In other words, that’s poetic.

So there are poetic statements in Genesis 1-11.  But the whole kit and caboodle is not poetic. It’s narrative history, and Stephen Boyd demonstrates this by simply doing an in-depth study, if you will, of the verb structures and how Genesis 1-11 doesn’t fit poetry.  It fits narrative history, although it has poetic statements interspersed inside of it.

So here’s my point:  If Genesis 1-11 is historical narrative, if the so-called gap theory between verses one and two of Genesis 1 is invalid, if the day-age theory is invalid, and if there are no missing generations in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, then the Bible is not teaching that this world has been here for 4.5 billion years, and that puts us into a collision course with evolutionary thought, which needs vast, deep time for evolution to occur.

And so the reason I’m going into this detail is [because] you have to decide which side of the ledger you’re going to stand on here.  You’re either going to stand on the authority of the Word of God or you’re going to try to rewrite the Bible as W.H. Green was doing in 1890, to try to somehow make Genesis 1-11 more accommodating to evolutionary thought. That’s why understanding the detail in these genealogies is significant.  Because the more you understand it and grasp it, the more it leads you away from the old earth creationist point of view.

When you think about this, there really can’t be missing generations in these genealogies. For example, when you go back to Genesis  4:25, you’ll see that Adam named Seth.  Because Adam and Eve begat Seth, and Adam and Eve named Seth, there can’t be a missing genealogy between Adam and Seth because it is parents who name kids. Grandparents or great grandparents typically don’t name their grandkids, but parents do the naming.  And so because Adam and Eve are begetting Seth and naming Seth, you can’t have a billion years between Adam and Seth, it just wouldn’t make any sense.  And then you go to Genesis 4:26, and you’ll see that Seth named Enosh.  Well, if Seth named Enosh, there can’t be a missing generation between Seth and Enosh.

And then you go to Genesis 5:29, and you’ll see that Lamech named Noah.  You can’t therefore have missing generations between Lamech and Noah since it’s parents who name their children.

And then when you go to the book of Jude, the Lord’s half- brother in Jude 14, it talks about how Enoch was the seventh from Adam.   Now look at the genealogy and just do the work.  Start at Enoch, and backup seven, and you get to Adam.  Adam to Seth to Enosh to Kenan to Mahalalel to Jared to Enoch.  Enoch is the seventh from Adam.  Therefore, according to Jude himself, who was the Lord’s half-brother, who wrote the little epistle of Jude under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, there can’t be any missing generations between Adam and Seth, Seth and Enosh, Enosh and Kenan, Kenan and Mahalalel, Jared and Enoch because Enoch is the seventh from Adam.

And so all of this mindset of trying to find these missing generations so we can get the Bible to somehow catch up with what Charles Darwin said was the age of the earth, becomes an impossibility.

So I have a choice I’ve got to make as a Christian.  What am I more impressed by?  Am I more impressed by what the Bible says, or am I more impressed by Darwinian evolutionists masquerading as scientists?   And this is why the work of Henry Morris, who I will quote a little bit later, is so significant because Henry Morris in 1960, roughly, with his book The Genesis Flood, reversed the evangelical strategy for dealing with this issue.  Prior to this point in time as I mentioned before, the issue was ‘backward Christian soldier.’ Let’s keep rewriting and accommodating the Bible to keep up with what Charles Darwin said was an appropriate age of the earth; Charles Darwin needing that deep time because the holy trinity of evolution is time, randomness, and matter.  So the only thing the Christian church knew to do was to just rewrite the Bible over and over again, to get it to keep up with Darwinism.

Well, Henry Morris came along as a scientist, fully credentialed, and he co-authored a book with John Whitcomb, a Hebrew scholar, and the two of them reversed the evangelical strategy on this issue and said, ‘You know what, we’re not going to do backward Christian soldier anymore.  What we’re going to do is we’re going to go out and challenge what evolutionists are saying concerning the age of the earth.’  So they went out and they challenged Carbon-14 dating.  They went out and challenged the fact that there this is this alleged missing link or links between apes and man.  And they went out and reversed the strategy, and challenged what the scientists masquerading as philosophers or philosophers masquerading as scientists were saying.  And they said, ‘We’re going to stand on the authority and the integrity of the biblical text.’  And so they reversed the strategy.

Today, evangelicals have to choose what strategy they’re going to adopt here.  You’re either going to keep rewriting the Bible to keep up with so-called humanistic philosophy, or you’re going to go out like Morris and Whitcomb did and challenge humanistic philosophy and stand on the biblical text.  As for me and my house, we’re going to adopt the Whitcomb and Morris strategy.  We’re going to leave the genealogy stretching and all of these other things behind with W.H. Green in 1890, because quite frankly, that’s where they belong.  They’re part of the past.

So that’s why I’m going into some detail here about alleged missing generations in these genealogies.  Now, one of the things people do is to go to the genealogy of Jesus Christ that you find in Matthew 1.  [See slide on Jesus Genaology According to Matt]   Matthew 1 deals with a genealogy of Jesus, linking Jesus back to David and then ultimately back to Abraham.  And what they like to say is, ‘Look, there’s missing generations in that genealogy.  And if there’s missing generations in that genealogy, then there must be missing generations in the Genesis 5 genealogy and in the Genesis 11 genealogy.’ And you know what?  They’re right in the sense that there are missing generations in the Matthew 1 genealogy.  In fact, if you were to read Matthew 1:8,9 and compare it to the genealogy in 1 Chronicles 3:10-12, you would see that Matthew omitted some names.

So the thought process is, ‘Well, if Matthew omitted some names, then obviously Genesis 5 omits names as well.  And maybe there’s enough missing names here that we can make the age of the earth not thousands, but maybe millions.  And we can finally get the Bible to catch up with Darwinianism.’  Well, I would just say this:  If that’s your mindset, that is what I would call an apples and oranges comparison.  There are things happening in this genealogy of Genesis 5 that are not happening in the Matthew 1 genealogy.”

First of all, the Matthew genealogy is summing up a vast portion of human history.  Think of all of the time that would have taken place before the New Testament came into existence.  That’s what Matthew is trying to sum up.  That’s not what’s happening in Genesis 5.  In Genesis 5, it’s a summation of a very short time that has elapsed thus far in human history.  Genesis 5 tells you the age of the patriarch at the time the son was born.  That never happens in Matthew 1.   So obviously you can’t compare the genealogy of Matthew 1 and Genesis 5 because they’re trying to accomplish two different things.

Matthew 1:17 is very interesting.  This is what it says, “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.”

Matthew wants you to focus on 3 groups of fourteen.  That’s not at all what’s happening here in Genesis 5.  Why is Matthew trying to get us to focus on three groups of fourteen?  Well, as you probably know by now that Matthew was the very first gospel that was written, and it was written to Hebrew Christians.  And one of the purposes of Matthew’s gospel, written to Hebrew Christians, was to explain to them that the Messiah that they had believed in is in fact the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ, sometimes called Yeshua.  And one of the things which is common in ancient languages is something called Gematria.  [See slide on Table of Alphabetic Notation of Numericals]  It’s a practice that’s foreign to us in the West.  But if you went back into biblical times, Gematria was very well practiced, and it’s the idea that each letter in an ancient alphabet—whether you’re dealing with Hebrew in the Old Testament or Greek in the New Testament, had a number associated with it.  In other words, you could take any person’s name, spell it out into either Hebrew or into Greek, attach the right number to the right letter, add up the digits and everybody’s name could be converted to a specific number. And you could do this in Greek and in Hebrew.  I think that’s part of the meaning of the Antichrist having a name: 666.  In the events of the tribulation period, everybody will know who the Antichrist is because they will be able to take his name and spell it out in Greek, and attach the right number to the right letter, and he will be the only man in history whose name spells out to [the number] 666.  Everybody living on the earth at that time will know exactly who the Antichrist is.  Therefore, taking the mark of the beast as given in Revelation 13:16-18 will be a sin that damns someone eternally.  But this is all based on this practice of Gematria.

[Something else] that’s very interesting is if you take David’s name and look at it in Hebrew, attach the right number to the right letter and add up the digits, David’s name in Gematria using Hebrew Gematria is 14.  Oh, well, that’s why Matthew is focused on 3 groups of 14.  The reason Matthew is focused on 3 groups of 14 is [because] he is using another tool at his fingertips to identify to his Hebrew Christian audience that in fact, Jesus is the son of David, the heir to David’s throne.  That’s why Matthew selectively picks 3 groups of 14.  He’s deliberately skipping generations because he is using Gematria very skillfully to show that there are 3 groups of 14 here.  One group from Abraham to David.  He skips a lot of generations and just picks 14; another group from David to the deportation.  He selectively skips many generations, but picks a second group of 14.  And then the last group from the deportation to the coming of Jesus Christ, he does a lot of selective skipping and just picks a third group of 14.  Why is this number 14 so important to Matthew?  Because of Hebrew Gematria.  The name David adds up to 14, and Matthew is just showing that Jesus, in fact, is the heir to David’s throne.

So that is a reality that’s happening in the Matthew 1 genealogy, but that’s not happening at all in Genesis 5.  There’s no Gematria here.  There’s no deliberate skipping of generations to find this number 14.  And so when people say, ‘Well, gee whiz, Pastor, there’s gaps in the genealogy of Matthew 1, so there must be gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and Genesis 11,’ they’re mixing apples and oranges.  I mean, those two genealogies are written to accomplish two completely and totally different things.  And I bring this to your attention because these are the things that people use and employ because they’re trying to always find gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5, because they’re still walking by the backward Christian soldier mindset as adopted by W.H. Green.

So what are we talking about here?   I realize that this is a lot of information to be dialing into on a Sunday morning.  I’m simply trying to show you that there’s a pattern here.  To each patriarch in the genealogy, six things are going to be repeated about ten times.  The first reason this is so significant, finding the names of these people and what their Hebrew name means is to show:

Number one, these are actual historical characters.

Number two, there’s information here about the age of the patriarch at the time of the birth of the seed-son.  That information is given, I believe, largely by the Holy Spirit, to reject old earth creationism, and to show you that there are no genealogical gaps here.  There may be genealogical gaps in Matthew 1, for reasons I’ve explained, but that’s not what’s happening here in Genesis 5.

The third thing that takes place here is it reveals that each of these patriarchs after the seed-son is born, had other sons and daughters.  Adam and Eve, for example, had other sons and daughters.  Now, that becomes very significant because it helps you understand the population explosion happening on the earth at this time.  That becomes very critical because Genesis 4:14 says, and Cain is speaking, “…whoever finds me will kill me.”  Genesis 4:17 says concerning Cain, “Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch;…”

And people say, ‘Well, oh my goodness, where did all of these other people come from?  How did Cain get his wife?’  Genesis 4.  How did Cain work himself up into such a frenzy or such a fear that he thought other people were going to come and kill him?  So until you get from Genesis 4 into Genesis 5 and start to understand that these patriarchs had other sons and daughters, can you make any sense of those statements in Genesis 4.  But those statements start to make a lot of sense when you understand that there was a population explosion happening on the earth at this time prior to the flood.

Adam and Eve, living into their nine hundreds, continue to have sons and daughters, as did all of these other patriarchs.  And therefore, Genesis 4, where did Cain get his wife”? Genesis 4, what about this vigilante army that Cain was afraid of?  Suddenly, Genesis 4 statements start to make a lot of sense.  That’s why Moses keeps saying, ‘After the birth of the seed-son, other sons and daughters were born unto Adam and Eve’ and all of these other antediluvian patriarchs.

Henry Morris says it very well in his book The Genesis Record.  He says, “It is further assumed that, on the average, these children grew to maturity, married, and began to have children of their own by the time their parents were eighty years old, and that the parents lived through an average of five such ‘generations’ or four hundred years, then it can easily be calculated that the earth had acquired within its first eight hundred years, (presumably approximately the lifetime of Cain, as a minimum), a population of at least one hundred and twenty thousand.” [That’s the vigilante army that Cain is afraid of.  He says, ‘They’re going to kill me.  They’re going to take it out on me because I murdered Abel.’

Where did all of these people come from?  It’s explained in Genesis 5.  Henry Morris says,] “It is probable that the figure was much more than this, since people lived to greater ages than assumed and probably had many more children than assumed.”

Genesis 6:1, when we get there eventually, will give you indications of a population explosion that was happening just prior to the flood.  Genesis 6:1 will and does tell us, “Now it came about when men began to multiply on the face of the land,…”  Why does it say that?  It says that because in each of these genealogies, the patriarchs, after the birth of the firstborn, had other sons and daughters.

Henry Morris says, “The ancient quibble about ‘Cain’s wife’ is thus seen to be quite trivial.  Long before Cain died, there was a large population in the earth.  By the time of the Deluge, 1656 years after Creation by the Ussher chronology,...” [By the way, Ussher is someone that is completely demonized. If you do any work on Ussher, you’ll see that he is completely demonized because he is the one that was teaching basically what I’m teaching here.  There are no missing gaps of generations in these genealogies, leading to the conclusion that the earth is not billions of years old, it’s thousands of years old.  And the reason Ussher’s chronology is demonized is Ussher just took away from the evolutionist one of the things that the evolutionist needs for his system to work, which is time.  The evolutionist has to have time.  They have to have randomness and they have to have matter.  Ussher, in his chronology, took that away. Consequently, Ussher is hated by the evolutionary world.  But anyway, the quote goes on by Morris, and it says]…, “By the time of the Deluge, 1656 years after creation, by Ussher’s chronology, even using the above conservative assumptions, the world population would have have been at least at least 7 billion people!”

So when Genesis 6:1 says, “Now it came about when man began to multiply on the face of the land,…” You can envision a population of about 7 billion people. So once you start to understand that, then all of a sudden the problems with where did Cain get his wife?  And why is Cain worried about a vigilante army?  I mean, those problems disappeared.

It’s kind of interesting what our Lord said.  Didn’t our Lord say, “As it was in the days of Noah, So shall it be again.”  There are an awful lot of similarities between our culture and our society and the days of Noah, not the least of which is the population count.  It’s interesting to me that the population count of the world is basically where it was, if Henry Morris is accurate here, at about seven billion people.  And if that’s true, you start to wonder, how much longer is the Lord going to tarry?  Certainly the end time events seem to be coming upon us very, very quickly and very, very rapidly.

So, gosh, we certainly didn’t get very far, did we, today, in our study of the book of Genesis 5?   I thought we’d get a lot further.  But my only point is to explain the pattern that’s given in 5:3-5, the six elements that are mentioned, and why understanding those six elements is actually a big deal.

Number 1, it shows us that these are actual historical people.

Number 2, the pattern demonstrates, by giving us details that you find in no other biblical genealogy concerning the age of the patriarch at the time the seed-son is born, that there cannot be genealogical gaps here.

And then number 3, through the repetition of ‘they begat other sons and daughters’ helps us explain, actually, it helps cause to disappear the ancient quibbles about where did Cain get his wife and where did this vigilante army come from?

Now, the next time I am with you, on our next Lord’s Day, we’re going to be finishing up this list of six, and I’ll give you some other reasons why this pattern is so significant.  Why were people living into their eight hundreds and nine hundreds prior to the flood?  And why does he keep saying, ‘And he died and he died and he died?’  What’s the significance of that?  And beyond that, why is this so monotonous, which was the title of my sermon indicating I thought we were going to get much further than we got.  We’ll have to do ‘Why is this so monotonous? Part2’ next week.

There’s a reason for the monotony.  The monotony is there, as we will explain, to show a pattern.  And then when you get to the names Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech, you’ll see something outside of the pattern.  You can’t see something outside of the pattern until you first are exposed to the monotonous pattern.  You see the monotonous pattern recycled, recycled, recycled, and then something happens outside of the monotonous pattern, and immediately your attention is drawn to it.  So something very abnormal to the pattern is going to happen with Enoch, with Methuselah, and with Lamech, the father of Noah, and the Holy Spirit has inserted those nuggets for us to further us in the faith; to further edify us.  And so we’ll be taking a look at that next time.

If you’re watching today, and you don’t know Christ personally, our exhortation to you is really what our church is all about: the proclamation of the Gospel.  The Gospel is revealed as early as Genesis 3:15.  It was always God’s intention to bring forth someone into the world to fix our problem.  Our problem is described in Genesis 3, and what we’re reading about is God’s gradual solution to the problem:  a genealogy leading to Jesus Christ who would fulfill Genesis 3:15, Jesus crushed Satan’s head.  He crushed the head of the serpent by stepping out of eternity into time.  And bearing in His body a sin debt that we could never bear or never pay back.  Christ’s final words on the cross were, which is a translation of the Greek term tetelestai, which means “paid in full”—Christ’s final words on the cross, John 19:30 is “It is finished.”

The seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent conflict that we see spelled out in Genesis 3:15 has now been brought to an end as Satan’s head has been crushed.  He is a convicted criminal.  The only thing remaining for him is his sentencing, which is yet future.  But as I speak today, he is a convicted criminal, and his power over the human race has been broken.

God has made things so simple for us because He’s asked us to simply trust, which is another way of saying believe, simply trust or believe what Jesus did for you 2,000 years ago.  Jesus authenticated this transaction through His bodily resurrection from the grave, and the only thing God asks us to do is to fulfill a single condition.  You’ll see that condition in many passages:  John 3:16, Acts 16:31, Ephesians 2:8,9.  You’ll find it everywhere in the Bible—Romans 4:4,5.  The single condition is simply to believe, which is another way of saying trust, or rely upon or depend upon what Jesus accomplished for you and me on the cross 2,000 years ago.

And the moment you’re trusting in what Christ has done rather than what you do for yourself is the moment that you can receive a pardon which has your name on it, which ushers you into a right relationship with the Lord.  The Holy Spirit per John 16:7-11, has come into the world to convict the world of their need to respond to this message.  And no doubt that convicting ministry of the Spirit is at work now in the lives and the hearts of many people listening, even as I am speaking.  And so our exhortation to you is to respond to that convicting work of the Holy Spirit by placing your trust for your eternity and your future in Christ alone.

And if it’s something that you need more information on, I would encourage you to notify us here at the church, send us an email that we can help you with this.  But it’s really a matter between you and the Lord, or the Lord convicts you, and you respond to it by trusting in the provision of Jesus Christ.  That provision which starts getting outlined as we’ve been trying to explain today, very early on in the book of Genesis.

So with that in mind, I want to thank you for watching, and I pray that you’ll share this message with your friends. You can do some very simple things by letting others know about our ministry here so that they, too, can sit under the teaching of God’s Word, and if they’re a Christian, they can be edified or fortified in that.  Or if they’re an unbeliever, they can receive Christ as their personal Savior and be saved.

Let me close this in a word of prayer.  Father, we’re grateful for today, grateful for the work of the Holy Spirit, grateful for your truth in your Word, grateful for the details.  But it all points to one thing Jesus, and help us to be faithful to that message in these final days of the age of the Church.  We’ll be careful to give you all the praise and the glory.  We ask these things in Jesus’ name, and God’s people said, Amen!

Thank you for watching.  God bless you.