Genesis 5:1-32

This is the book of the generations of Adam

Distinguished men

I. SOME MEN ARE RENDERED DISTINGUISHED BY THE PECULIARITY OF THE TIMES IN WHICH THEY LIVE. Adam; the first human being to

(1) inhabit the earth,

(2) hold communion with God,

(3) be led astray.

II. SOME MEN ARE RENDERED DISTINGUISHED BY THEIR MARVELLOUS LONGEVITY. Methuselah.

III. SOME MEN ARE RENDERED DISTINGUISHED BY THE VILLAINY OF THEIR MORAL CONDUCT.

IV. SOME MEN ARE RENDERED DISTINGUISHED BY THEIR ANCESTRAL LINE OF DESCENT. Feeble lights in a grand constellation.

V. SOME MEN ARE RENDERED DISTINGUISHED BY THEIR TRUE AND EXALTED PIETY. Enoch. This is a distinction of the very truest kind; it arises from the moral purity of the soul. Lessons:

1. That a good old age is often the heritage of man.

2. That noble lineage is the heritage of others.

3. That true piety may be the heritage of all.

4. That true piety has a substantial reward as well as a permanent record. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)

Thoughts

I. THE LONGEVITY OF THE ANTEDILUVIAN RACE.

1. Their longevity might be explained on natural principles.

2. Their longevity was for special ends.

3. Their longevity contributed to their depravity.

II. THE POVERTY OF HUMAN HISTORY. The record of a thousand is in these few verses.

III. THE MATERIALIZING TENDENCIES OF SIN. All that is recorded here of these great men, except Enoch, is that they begat sons and daughters. They thought only of material things.

IV. THE INEVITABLENESS OF MAN’S MORTALITY. It is said of each, “He died.” No money can bribe Death, no power avert his blow.

V. THE BLESSEDNESS OF PRACTICAL GODLINESS. “Enoch walked with God.” (Homilist.)

The genealogy

1. It is a very honourable one. The Son of God Himself descended from it.

2. Neither Cain nor Abel have any place in it. Abel was slain before he had any children, and could not; and Cain, by his sin, had covered his name with infamy, and should not. Adam’s posterity, therefore, after a lapse of one hundred and thirty years, must begin anew.

3. The honour done to Seth and his posterity was of grace; for he is said to have been born in Adam’s likeness, and after his image. Man was made after the image of God; but this being lost, they are born corrupt, the children of a corrupt father. What is true of all mankind is here noted of Seth, because he was reckoned as Adam’s firstborn. He, therefore, like all others, was by nature a child of wrath; and what he or any of his posterity were different from this, they were by grace.

4. Though many of the names in this genealogy are passed over without anything being said of their piety, yet we are not from hence to infer that they were impious. Many might be included among them who called upon the name of the Lord, and who are denominated the sons of God, though nothing is personally related of them. (A. Fuller.)

The original vitality of men

Whether we are to think that the original vitality of the human frame faded only by slow degrees, or whether there was something salubrious in the air of the ages after Eden, has often been asked, but can never be answered. Some have fancied that the immense lives ascribed to the antediluvians imply that each name represents a tribe, the lives of whose leading members are added together; others have understood the years to mean only months; while others have sought to prove that from Adam to Abraham the year had no more than three months, from Abraham to Joseph eight, and from Joseph’s time twelve months, as at present. But such explanations have no sufficient warrant, and it is perhaps best, on the whole, to keep in mind what Bishop Harold Browne has pointed out, that “numbers and dates are liable in the course of ages to become obscured and exaggerated.” It is quite possible that some of the early Rabbis, desirous of emulating the fabled age ascribed by heathen nations to their heroes and demigods, may have added to the Bible figures, so as to secure the patriarchs an equal honour. Our present bodies certainly could not live more than two hundred years, at the very most, from the decay of one part after another, and hence we must either take Bishop Browne’s solution of antediluvian longevity, or suppose that exceptional circumstances in the first ages produced exceptional results. (C. Geikie, D. D.)

The apostate and the godly seeds

I. IT IS ESPECIALLY IN THE LINE OF CAIN THAT WE FIND THE ARTS OF SOCIAL AND CIVILIZED LIFE CULTIVATED. They increased in power, in wealth, and in luxury. In almost all earthly advantages they attained to a superiority over the more simple and rural family of Seth. And they afford an instance of the high cultivation which a people may often possess who are altogether irreligious and ungodly, as well as of the progress which they may make in the arts and embellishments of life.

II. THE GODLY SEED WAS PERPETUATED IN THE FAMILY OF SETH, whose name signifies “appointed, placed, or firmly founded.” For on him now was to rest the hope of the promised Messiah. So God ordained, and so Eve devoutly believed. The posterity of Seth maintained the cause of religion in the midst of increasing degeneracy. It is true they did not always maintain it very successfully; perhaps they did not always maintain it very consistently. In the first place, in the days of Enos, the grandson of Adam, a signal revival took place among those who adhered to the true faith (Genesis 4:26). Again, secondly, several generations later, contemporary with Lamech in the house of Cain, lived Enoch in the family of Seth, the seventh from Adam. He was raised up as a remarkable prophet, and the burden of his prophetic strains is preserved to us by the Apostle Jude (verses 14, 15). Once more, in the third place, still later in this melancholy period, the Lord raised up Noah, or Nee, as his name is often written. That name signifies “comfort” or “consolation.” Thus, in three successive eras, the Lord remarkably interposed to arrest the progress of the sad apostasy.

1. It is interesting in this view to consider the longevity of the patriarchs. The length of their days well fitted them for being the depositories of the revealed will of God, preserving and transmitting it from age to age; and so many of them surviving together to so late a period must have formed a holy and reverend company of teachers and witnesses in the world. So, at least, it should have been; since, at all events, this longevity of the fathers was a boon and privilege to the Church. It served the purpose of the written Word. It transmitted, not a treacherous and variable tradition passing quickly through many hands, such as some would fondly prefer even to the Bible, but a sure record of the truth of God. Hence it was fitted to rally with no uncertain sound, and not by the artifice of any dead and nominal uniformity, but on a trustworthy principle of living unity, the Church of the living God. If the effect was otherwise--if the testimony of the long-lived fathers then, like the teaching of the abiding Word now, failed to keep the sons of God at one among themselves, and separate from the world, their sin was on that account all the greater. Nor was the agency wanting which alone can give a spiritual discernment of the truth. The Spirit, who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God, was, throughout these ages, continually striving with men, and by the Spirit Christ was ever preaching to the successive generations of that antediluvian world.

2. But it is not the length of their lives only that is to be taken into account when we would estimate the effect which the testimony of the godly patriarchs was fitted to have in stemming the torrent of ungodliness. Their deaths also must have been instructive and significant. That they all lived so long, witnessing for God, believing and showing forth His righteousness, was a standing reproof to the wicked. That, long as they might live, they all died at last, gave a warning more affecting still. The death of each, coming surely in the end, though long delayed, must have rung emphatically the knell of judgment. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)

Lessons

1. Providence hath made a sufficient register of the Church’s rise and growth and state, for faith, not for curiosity.

2. God’s will is made out, that His Church was to be propagated by generation, not creation.

3. The generations of the Church were ordered to be from Adam fallen, that grace might appear.

4. God’s blessing makes man only fruitful to propagate His Church. (G. Hughes, B. D.)

Nobodyism

You must have already noticed that this chapter is as true as any chapter in human history, especially as it shows so clearly, what we ourselves have found out, that the most of people are extremely uninteresting. They are names, and nothing more. They are producers and consumers, tenants and taxpayers, and that is all; they are without wit, music, piquancy, enterprise, or keenness of sympathy. Such people were Seth and Enos, Mahalaleel and Jared; respectable, quiet, plodding; said “good night” to one another regularly, and remarked briefly upon the weather, and died. Just what many nowadays seem to do. Now, I want to show you that such people are often unjustly estimated, and to remind you that if all stars were of the same size the sky would look very odd--much like a vast chessboard with circles instead of squares. I want to remind you also that really the best part of human history is never written at all. Family life, patient service, quiet endurance, the training of children, the resistance of temptation--these things are never mentioned by the historian. Because we admire brilliance we need not despise usefulness. When your little child is ill, he needs kindness more than genius, and it will be of small service to him if his mother is good at epigrams but bad at wringing out a wet cloth for his burning brow. I am, then, quite willing to admit that Seth and Enos, Mahalaleel and Jared, are not one-thousandth part so well known by name as the man in the moon, but I believe they did more real good than that famous character ever attempted. You should remember, too, that a long fiat road may be leading up to a great mountain. There are some very plain and uninteresting miles out of Geneva, but everyone of them brings you nearer Merit Blanc. Oh, so dull that long road from Seth to Jared, but round the corner you find Enoch, the Mont Blanc of his day! Many a child who never heard the name of Jared knows well the name of Enoch. So you do not know to what high hill your life may be quietly leading up. Even if you yourself are nobody, your son may be a man of renown, or his son may be a valiant and mighty man. Enoch reaches the point of renown in godliness; he walked with God three hundred years at least; his walk was on the high hills--so high that he simply stepped into the next world without troubling Death to go through his long, dark process. “He was not, for God took ” As if he had walked so near that God opened the window and took him in; and we, too, might pass in as easily if we walked on the same sunny heights. But we are in valleys and pits, and God must needs send Death to dig us out and send us to heaven by a longer road. After Enoch, we come to Methuselah. He, too, is well known, although for nothing but length of days apparently; yet as a matter of fact he ought to be known for something much more highly distinguished. He was the grandfather of Noah; that is his glory, not his mere age! You cannot tell what your boy may be, or his boy; so keep yourself up to the mark in all mental health and moral integrity, lest you transmit a plague to posterity. It may be that Nature is only resting in you; presently she will produce a man! Precisely the same thing we have in this chapter we find in the catalogue of the names of the early disciples of our Lord. We know Peter and James and John. But how little as compared with them do we know of Thomas and Bartholomew and Philip, of Lebbaeus, and Simon the Canaanite? Yet they were all members of one company, and servants of the same Lord. We speak of men of renown, forgetting that their renown is principally derived from men who have no renown themselves! Unknown people make other people known. The hills rest upon the plain ground. Besides, there is a bad repute as well as a fair fame: Judas Iscariot is known as widely as the Apostle John! Be not envious of those who have high place and name; could we know them better, perhaps we should find that they long for the quietness of home, and sigh for release from the noise and strain of popular applause. Happily, too, we should remember that a deed may be immortal, when the mere name of the doer may be lost in uncertainty. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The Divine image in man hidden

A researcher of art in Italy, who, reading in some book that there was a portrait of Dante painted by Giotto, was led to suspect where it had been placed. There was an apartment used as an outhouse for the storing of wood, hay, and the like. He besought and obtained permission to examine it. Clearing out the rubbish and experimenting upon the whitewashed wall, he soon detected the signs of the long-hidden portrait. Little by little, with loving skill, he opened up the sad, thoughtful, stern face of the old Tuscan poet. Sin has done for man what the whitewash did for the painting. It has covered over the likeness of God upon the soul; and it is only by the Spirit of God Himself that the long-hidden likeness can be manifested again.

Long life and death of the patriarchs

From the 4th verse to the 22nd two things chiefly are noted, the long life of these fathers and their assured death. Many years they continued, yea, many hundreds; but at last they died. Death was long ere it came, but at last it came.

1. And touching their long life, some questions are moved: First, why it was so long; secondly, whence or how it came to be so. Of the first, two causes are alleged, one for the propagation of mankind so much the faster and more speedily, the other for continuance of remembrance of matters, and deducing of them to posterity the better. The indifferent mixture, equal temperature, and good disposition of the chief and first qualities, heat, cold, moisture, dryness, is in nature the ground of life, and by all probability in that beginning this was so more than now; their diet better, and temperance more from surfeiting and fleshly pleasures than is now; their minds quieter from eating and gnawing cares, the shortness of man’s life, since, iniquity then being not so strong, many woes and vexations were unfound; and lastly, the fruits of the earth, in their purity, strength, and virtue, not corrupted, as after the flood, and ever since still more and more, might be to them a true cause, and a most forcible cause, of good health, greater strength, and longer life than ever since by nature could be.

2. Their certain death is noted, to show the truth of God’s Word, ever infallible and unmovable. The Lord said, if they did eat they should die: they did eat, then death must follow; for He will be true, do what we can, and we shall find it so. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, but he died; Sheth nine hundred and twelve, and he died; Methuselah nine hundred threescore and nine, and yet he died. Died, died, is the end of all, that God might be true, how long soever they lived. The same word of the Lord is no falser now than then, but the same forever. Would God this repetition of death, death, to all these fathers might make us as duly to remember it as we are sure truly to find it--to find it, I say; and God knoweth, not we, how soon. “Today I, tomorrow thou,” saith the wise man. His conceit was not unprofitable that imagined man’s life to be as a tree, at the root whereof two mice lay gnawing and nibbling without ceasing, a white mouse and a black. The white mouse he conceived to be the day, and the black mouse the night, by which day and night man’s life, as a tree, by continual gnawing, at last is ended. Who can now tell how far these two mice have eaten upon him? Haply the tree that seemeth yet strong ere night may shake, and ere day again fall flat down. Oh, let us think of this uncertainty! But you see the snow, how blind it makes a man by his great whiteness; so doth this world, by his manifold pleasures, baits, and allurements, dazzle our eyes, and blind us so, that we forget to die; we dream of life when there is no hope, and we cannot hear of it to go away. O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest in his possessions, unto the man that hath nothing to vex him, and that hath prosperity in all things, yea, unto him that is yet able to receive meat. (Bishop Babington.)

Lessons from the longevity of the antediluvians

1. Now, here is a lesson in human experience which one would think would silence forever the advocates of the theory of human perfectibility. The race of antediluvians were blessed with all possible capacities and facilities for indefinite improvement in knowledge and happiness. They were not called to die when they had just began to live, nor to quit their investigations forever when they had just learned how to study. Men’s minds might have been formed and disciplined in the revolution of nine hundred years under an accumulation of influences and circumstances in the highest degree powerful and favourable. A ladder was let down to them from heaven; but instead of rising thither, they employed every endowment of being, and every capability of life, for growth in unkindness, and corrupted themselves to such a height before God, that their sufferance on earth was no longer possible. So much for human perfectibility.

2. Only one event is recorded alike of them all, no matter what may have been their situation in life--whether princes of the earth or beggars in rags. Their life is reduced down to the bald, unvaried epitaph--“He died”! The only thing of absolute value is that which connects us with God. Crowns are playthings; dukedoms and dominions of no more importance than the grains of sand that go to make up an ant-hill.

3. The consideration of the great age of the antediluvians, and its effect upon their state on earth, might lead to some faint conception of what an apostle calls the “power of an endless life.”

(1) The power of such a life for the increase of holiness.

(2) In the progressive accumulation of depravity.

4. We are all naturally as wicked as the race of mankind destroyed by the deluge. And doubtless it will be less tolerable for us than the antediluvians in the Day of Judgment.

5. The mere duration of years does not constitute a long life, but the fulfilment of life’s purposes.

6. There was a time in the life of every ungodly antediluvian in which his wickedness had reached such a point, his long habits of sin had gained such strength, that all hope of his salvation departed. At such a moment, though long before the close of his mortal career, it might have been said with awful emphasis--“He died”! (Christian Age.)

God’s way of writing history

Bible history is written on the principle of abridgment and selection. God Himself is the abridger and selector. He has written the story of His own world in His own way, and according to His own plan, keeping such things as these in view--

1. What would most glorify Himself.

2. What would most benefit the Church upon the whole.

3. What would mark distinctly the stages leading on to the incarnation of His Son.

4. What would prove the true humanity of Messiah as the seed of the woman, and so the embodiment of the grace and truth wrapt up in the first promise to man.

The first verse carries us back to the earlier Chapter s, and repeats the statement already given as to man’s creation in the Divine image. It is plain from it that God desires us to look at and ponder such things as these--

1. Man’s creation by God.

2. His creation in the likeness of God.

3. His creation, male and female.

4. His being “blessed” by God, and that he enters this world as a blessed being, not under the curse at all.

5. His receiving the name of Adam, or man, from God Himself, as if God specially claimed the right of nomenclature to Himself.

How much importance must God attach to these things when He thus repeats them at so brief an interval! He does not repeat in vain. Every word of God is “pure,” and it is full of meaning, even though we may not now see it all. It is not a mere grain or atom; it is a seed, a root. (H. Bonar, D. D.)

Ten biographies in one chapter

A single chapter contains ten biographies. Such is God’s estimate of man, and man’s importance! How unlike man’s estimate of himself! How unlike are the biographies contained in this chapter to those volumes of biography over which are spread the story of a single life! Is not this man worship, hero worship? And was it not to prevent this that God has hid from us the details of primitive history--everything that would magnify man and man’s doings? Just as He has taken pains to prevent the grosser idolatries of sun worship and star worship by exhibiting these orbs in the first chapter as His own handiwork, so in this fifth chapter He has sought to anticipate and prevent the more refined idolatry, not only of past ages, when man openly and grossly deified man, but of these last days, when man is worshipping man in the most subtle of all ways, and multiplying the stories of man’s wisdom, or prowess, or goodness, so as to hide God from our eyes, and give to man an independent position and importance, from which God has been so careful to exclude him. We might say, too, that this chapter is God’s protest against that special development of hero worship which is to be exhibited in the last Antichrist, when God shall be set aside and man be set up as all. The importance attached to these recorded names is just this, that they belong to the line of the woman’s seed. It was this that made them worthy of memory. The chain to which some precious jewel is attached is chiefly noticeable because of the gem that it suspends. The steps which led up to the temple were mainly important because of the temple to which they led. So it was the connection of these ten worthies of the world’s first age with the great Coming One that gave them their importance. Standing where we now do, far down the ages, and looking back on the men of early days, we are like one tracing some great river back to its distant source amid the lonely hills. The varied beauties of its banks, however great, yet derive their chief attraction and interest from the mighty city reared upon its margin, at some turn of its far downward course, and from the mighty ones which that city has given birth to. It is Bethlehem that gives all its interest to the river whose beginnings this chapter traces; or rather, it is He who was there born of a woman--Jesus the son of Abraham, the son of Adam. Save in their bearing upon Him, how unmeaning do these names appear! (H. Bonar, D. D.)