GOD’S WORD FOR MARCH 25
GOD’S WORD FOR MARCH 25 ~ ~ Revelation 15:3
“And they sang the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are Your works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Your ways, King of saints.”
There are some interesting and instructive events in the history before and after the flood.
After the fall of man, when Cain brought evil into the family line, and continued it in his progeny, God was working in the Godly line of Seth. Enoch was the 6th generation from Seth, who was the son of Adam and Eve.
Enoch was one of only two people in the Bible who did not die. Elijah was the other one. It says that “All the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty five years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” That was generally, only a third to half the length of the lives of other patriarchs of that time.
We need to look at Enoch’s life, what made him different. We need to ask the Lord how it applies to our lives.
Matthew Henry says this of Enoch:
He quotes Amos 3:3 “For two cannot walk together except they be agreed.”
“To walk with God is to set God always before us, and to act as those that are always under His eye…. It is to make God’s Word our rule and His glory our end in all our actions. It is to comply with His will……”
He summed up Enoch’s life like this: “He was entirely dead to this world, and did not only walk AFTER GOD, as all good men do, but he walked WITH GOD, as if he were in heaven already.”(e.m.)
Enoch’s son in the line was named by him, “Methuselah”.
The meaning of the name leads us in this direction: Methuselah means “his death will bring,” and the year of Methuselah’s death was also the year the flood came upon the earth. He was the longest living man in history, at 969 years, Being that the length of his life represented God’s timing in judgment is witness to God’s desire for grace to abound to sinful man as long as possible, encouraging repentance.
As we read in 2 Peter 3:9 ~ ~
“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
Methuselah, the son of Enoch, was the father of Lamech, who was the father of Noah. Thus Enoch, whom God took without death, was Noah’s great grandfather. That must have impressed him to know that a man’s walk with God was that important.
Noah’s father, Lamech, said this when he named him Noah, (a name meaning “rest”) “This one will give us comfort from our work and from the hard labor of our hands caused by the ground which the Lord has cursed.” He was referring to the curse on the land and the wild animals from Adam’s sin. Life was very difficult in those days. The animals were vicious toward each other, but equally so to mankind. Just walking out of their homes/fortresses they could be killed and eaten. The soil too was cursed, so producing food was backbreaking work constantly. The soil was weak and crusty, and weeds took over the crops. He felt that somehow, God was going to give them relief from this curse in Noah’s lifetime. He was right. God made the animals fear man after the flood. (Gen. 9:2) Maybe because of the effects of the flood stirring up the land, the soil was better, and, logically, all the decaying plants and animals all over the world would make a fertile topsoil. We aren’t told this in the Word.
Both Lamech and his father, Methuselah died shortly before the flood. Again, God’s timing, and His mercy to His own, should be apparent to us in this, and applicable in our own lives, that He will take care of us in the judgments that are to come into the world in the future.
Noah was called by God, a righteous man, and perfect, as God said of Job also. As Matthew Henry put it: “Not with a sinless perfection, but a perfection of sincerity”,
With their long lives (because of the canopy still being above them, screening out the damaging ultraviolet rays of the sun, and making the climate temperate), sometimes 8-10 generations could easily be alive at the same time. Thus, the story of the fall of man, translation of Enoch, and the prophesies of a savior defeating satan, were easily and accurately passed down, both written or vocal.
Adam was alive yet when Lamech was alive, thus only a few years before Noah was born. That’s nine generations!
The people of Noah’s days became very corrupt. The righteous descendants of Seth intermarried with the cursed descendants of Cain,(Adam’s first son who killed his brother Able) and gave a highway to the evils of demonic deception, and God “repented that He made man” in Gen. 6:5-6. The obvious question is, “Can God repent??”
Again, looking at the inspired wisdom of Matthew Henry, “It does not imply any change of God’s MIND but it expresses a change of His WAY. Now that man had apostatized, he could not do otherwise than show Himself displeased: So, the change was in man, not God.” (e.m.)
And thus began the 100 year building project called today the ark of Noah, which is really another of the preliminary steps in the salvation of mankind. The ark, was not only a cleansing vehicle, but the symbol of our salvation from the evil within ourselves, and in the world system around us, in and through embracing Christ’s substitution for our sins on the cross. This was the message that was passed on down the generations after Noah as they lived and worked with their grandfathers. Although the lifespan of mankind gradually got shorter after the flood, because of the loss of the protective canopy, they did live much longer than we do for a while, so generations overlapped more than now, for the continuation of recording history.
Abram (Abraham’s original name) was 58 years old when Noah died! Abram was the 10th generation from Noah’s son Shem!! This, of course, was after the flood. So Abram heard about the flood first hand from Noah, and thus, he heard about what it represented, namely, the sacrifice of the Messiah, and our salvation IN Him, as they were saved IN the ark.
They passed on the fact that the Messiah who would be the sacrifice, would be in their family line.
Of course, Abraham passed that on to Isaac, so when God told him to sacrifice Isaac, they both had to know that He couldn’t let Isaac die permanently and still fulfill the promise. This was in their minds constantly, so the ram in the bushes was an affirmation of the coming salvation for them, as it is for us.
Thus Abraham said, in Genesis 22:8
“… My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together”
Abraham didn’t just mean the ram in the bushes—that wasn’t a lamb, and it wasn’t THE LAMB, but in that statement, he also prophesied about the Lamb of God.
And so God certainly did provide the sacrifice. That sacrifice was HIMSELF, in the form of the Son on Calvary. “God will provide HIMSELF a lamb.”
“The next day John sees Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”
John 3:16
“ For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
Live in the Light of Our Lord 