40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 10

Episode Date: March 24, 2015

Genealogies and Resurrection 

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Well, thank you guys for joining us for another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. We are rolling out episode number 10. Are we on 10 here, guys? I think we are. And I am joined by the guys, Brandon Hanson. Hey, everybody.

And resident theologian, Chad Bird. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening. All right. So, Chad, where are we at in the book of Genesis right now? Well, we are going to start with chapter 5 tonight. Last week we talked about chapter 4, Cain and Abel. I think we talked about that actually for a couple of weeks.

And that covers the first half of chapter 4. But we're going to skip a few verses and pick up here at chapter 5 and spend probably all 40 minutes talking about the genealogy that's here and some of the significant folks who are included in that genealogy and what we can glean from it about the promise of the Messiah and lots of good stuff. So that's the plan for the night. Sweet.

Well, go Ancestry.com all over me, man. Let's do it. All right, let's do it. And this is one of those chapters that, honestly, most people skip over. People sometimes will get this idea that they're going to read through the Bible in one year. So they're all gung-ho, and they start out. And, of course, the first two, three, four chapters is good stuff, real interesting stories. And they get to chapter five, and all of a sudden you start having these genealogies pop up, and they skim it.

And then they get to chapter 6 and start reading about the story of the flood. Same thing happens, really, when you get to later chapters in the Pentateuch. You'll get to the book of Numbers, and you've got more genealogies. And you've got genealogies scattered throughout the Old Testament. And you get to these, and I think for most people, and it was really like this for me as well, you're wondering, you know, this is almost like wasted space. Why is this included here? because what could we possibly glean from just this list of fathers and sons

and how long they lived and when they died and things of that nature. So what I want to do is, first of all, talk about why genealogies are important and actually something that's probably going to surprise you, Why Genealogies Preach the Gospel. So that's one of the things that I want to get to. Why genealogies are important is because they preach the gospel. And then I want to talk about a couple of big names that are in the genealogy. One of those is Enoch, and one of those is Noah, as well as his father Lamech.

So that's kind of the plan for the next 40 minutes. We're going to talk about genealogies first, and then we're going to talk about two or three of the fellows that are included in this particular genealogy. And what we're going to see, at least what I hope to bring out, what I hope you're going to hear, is both law and gospel going on in chapter 5. we're going to hear a clear message of the law as we hear about all these fellas dying we're going to talk about that

as an illustration a vivid, clear illustration of the effects of sin but then we're also going to talk about how in this genealogy in chapter 5 there is a preaching of the gospel there is the firm and almost excited belief in the coming of the Messiah.

And there's also the promise of eternal life. So we've got lots of good stuff that we're going to talk about. But first of all, let's talk about these genealogies. And I'm going to say this as kind of a blanket statement, and then I'm going to explain why I said it. any time that you see a genealogy in the Bible, think, this genealogy is here because of Jesus. It's really that simple.

Any time you see a genealogy in the Bible, think that this is here because of Jesus. In fact, it's quite amazing to me that if you were to turn to the opening page of the New Testament, Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, it begins with a genealogy. In fact, that's the exact words. The book, Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, and so forth. Now, that in and of itself ought to be this huge red flag to us, telling us to stop and pay attention.

The genealogies are significant because they relate to who Christ is. Now, the reason that Old Testament genealogies are so important is because what we see in these genealogies is the Spirit is tracing this promise of the seed who is to come. You'll recall that when we talked about chapter 3, when Adam and Eve fell into sin, that at verse 15 of chapter 3, God promised that he was going to send the seed of the woman who was going to crush the head of the serpent, and at the same time, he was going to be struck by the fangs of that serpent and we also talked about how eve when she gave birth to cain thought that she had actually already given birth to the messiah she said i have i have gotten a man

namely the lord so eve believed the promise that god's book to her in 3 15 and she in fact believed that her first child cain was going to be this this promise to seed so the the promise was there, the faith in the promise was alive and well. Of course, Cain wasn't the Messiah, but the belief in the Messiah was there. It was strong. People were firmly believing that this was going to happen. God was going to send this seed who would crush the head of the serpent. And so, as the Messiah didn't come, you began to see that there was this keeping track of the seeds of people, if you will. So fathers and sons and grandsons and great-grandsons. And the reason this is important is because you see this growth that takes place in the

genealogy, beginning of Genesis, going all the way through the rest of the Old Testament, as the genealogies actually begin to take on more and more significance as the promise becomes more and more specific. So at first you have this kind of very general promise that the seed of the woman is going to come. But then as you move along in the narrative of the Scriptures, you come to Abraham, and it's narrowed down even more. And God said it's going to be of the seed of Abraham. And then the narrative continues, and Abraham has Isaac,

and Isaac has Jacob, and Jacob has all these sons. But we find out that it's going to be from the tribe of Judah. that the seed is going to come. And then you go farther along, and anyway, it finally ends up being it's going to be of the family of David. So there's this narrowing down of the seed as you go through the rest of the Old Testament. And these genealogies, the reason they're there

is that they bear witness to this growth. They bear witness to the growth of the genealogy and the narrowing of the genealogy until it finally comes to fulfillment when the seed is born of Mary. And that's why you have two genealogies in the New Testament. Matthew chapter 1, the one we already looked at, as well as Luke's genealogy. Both of these genealogies, in Matthew as well as in Luke, are instructive to us. They teach us how to interpret the Old Testament genealogies.

These New Testament genealogy are basically saying to us, hey, when you read the Old Testament and you read like Genesis 5 or Chronicles or something in Numbers, anything that has a genealogy, look for Jesus because that's why it's there. It's there to point you ahead to the promised seed to come. And that's why I said, anytime that you see a genealogy in the Bible, think, this is here because of Christ. Another way to think of it is that genealogies are more than a family tree. They preach the tree of the cross by leading us, through the generations, up to the promised seed and to his death and to his resurrection. and that's why when you get to Genesis chapter 5 you shouldn't just say hey I'm going to skim this I'm going to skip through this and get to chapter 6

because this is actually significant it is if you have Old Testament eyes and if you have Old Testament ears you can hear the good news of salvation in the promised Messiah already being whispered if you will in the verses of chapter 5.

You know, so much, I talk about this when I teach Bible class at my church. So often, we're accustomed to hearing the gospel preached to us in New Testament language. You know, we're used to hearing the gospel preached as Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and he lived a perfect life, and he died on the cross, and he rose from the dead, and he ascended into heaven, and he did all of this for us so that we might have forgiveness and life and salvation.

And that's the gospel. And all of that, of course, is true. But all of that is the New Testament's way of preaching the gospel. There's also Old Testament ways of preaching the gospel. And it's almost like hearing it, it's almost like learning a different language. It's almost like you have to be bilingual, if you will. Because when the Old Testament preaches the gospel, it does it in a different sort of way. It says things like, in this genealogy, we see the promised seed gradually emerging who will crush the head of the serpent.

Or it says things like, in the exodus out of Egypt, we see God's grace manifested beforehand of how he will bring us out of the Egypt of slavery and drown all our foes in the Red Sea of our baptism and bring us safely through the wilderness of sin to the promised land of heaven. or we hear the gospel preached in leviticus with christ coming as our high priest in the order of melchizedek as also the sacrifice the lamb of god who's slain from the foundation of the world who enters behind the veil to offer himself as the sacrifice in the father's presence in the holy of holies all these are old testament ways of preaching the gospel and the good thing is you're listening to this program you're you're you're in the old testament and you're hearing more and more about it and so it's like together we're learning the language we're learning the language of the old testament we're we're we're letting our ears grow accustomed to hearing a different way of

preaching it's preaching the same gospel but it's just preaching it in an old testament sort of way And that's why this, for me anyway, this is why these discussions are so exciting is because it's a chance for us to unearth these treasures that are buried. They're buried because we're just not accustomed to really seeing the gospel here when it is here. It's right there in black and white, but we're just not used to seeing it in that way. And the reason we're not used to singing that way is because so many of us, including me, so many of us once were schooled in the art of, or the false art, I should say, of reading the scriptures as if it's all about what we should do. So you read any story, you read any narrative, and you're supposed to ask yourself, supposedly, well, what is this teaching me that I should do? Instead of what is this teaching me about God, what God is doing for me. So we have to unlearn a law-centered way of reading these stories

so that we can learn a grace-centered, Christ-centered, gospel-centered way of reading these narratives. If we're reading these genealogies as looking to them to say, what do I need to do here, it really kind of sucks the life right out of you. You're going, okay, I'm going to live, and then I'm going to die. I'm going to live, and then I'm going to die. I'm going to live, and then I'm going to die. It's a horrible way to look at the scriptures and have to read these genealogies, because it's simply reminding you over and over and over, death is coming.

It came for this guy and that guy and the guy after him, and it hasn't stopped right up until my great-grandfather is dead. And, you know, my father soon will follow him, and then I will follow my father, just like in the genealogies. There's nothing to look there in them for hope if you're reading them in a narcissistic or self-centered or law-centered way. Yeah, if you don't read them with a gospel perspective, reading the genealogy, it's kind of like just walking through a cemetery. Oh, look, this guy, he was born this year, and he died this year, and he's dead. And look, this grave, he was born this year, and he died this year, and now he's dead. Yeah, so it's, I mean, certainly there is law here.

There's a reminder of the fruits of sin. This is what sin does. It kills. But there's a whole lot more to it than simply that. This is more than just a litany of death. Because it's interrupted by this bold proclamation of life, which we see in Enoch, which we'll get to in a few minutes. But yeah, if you don't have this grace, this non-narcissistic way of reading these, then it's just depressing. Because all it is is about death and punishment and the result of sin.

Would you mind taking just a couple moments to talk about the compare and contrast in verses 1, 2, and then compared with 3, when Adam fathered in his own likeness and his image? Yeah, that's a great question. If you're looking at these first two verses, if you're just listening, or if you're actually looking at your scriptures, I'll summarize what it says here. It says that in the day God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female. He blessed them and named them man in the day when he created them.

So this is basically a summary of what God did when he made Adam and Eve. He made them in his image and in his likeness. And then we have this contrast in verse 3. It says, when Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. That's always struck me because when I read that, what I'm hearing is that something has changed. so god the father creates adam from the dust of the ground and he breathes into him life so that adam becomes one who bears the image and the likeness of god but then you have the fall

into sin you have all of the ill effects of that fall and so that when adam in a sort of creative act, if you will. Father's a son. This son is in his own image and is according to his likeness. So even in the particular language that's used there, you can see that something has radically changed. Seth is no longer in the image and likeness of God as his father Adam was. He now bears the image and likeness of a fallen man who is his father. And that's the same situation that we're in. We bear the image of our fallen father and our fallen mother. And because of that, we also bear the image that's messed up, that's scarred, that's full of sin, and are in need of being recreated, which is what Christ does,

recreate us so that we are in his image and remade according to his likeness again. Is that your question, Brandon? Is that what you were thinking? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thanks. I knew you could say it a whole lot better than I could, so I preferred that question to you. Well, and as you—actually, that was a great question to lead into this, because what you see then following that is what it means to be in the image and likeness of Adam. Because, as we were just talking a minute ago, you have this recurrence of death. Verse 5, so Adam lived 930 years, and he died.

Verse 8, Seth lived 912 years, and he died. And on and on it goes. So-and-so lived so long, and he died, and he died, and he died. So there is this sense of a litany of death here, because everybody who's included in this chapter is bearing the image and the likeness of Adam. And because of that, they meet the same end that Adam himself did, all except for one, which we'll get to in just a minute. I want to say a couple more things about just kind of the structure of this genealogy that I think are of interest. There's ten generations that are recorded here. So ten generations from Adam until Noah. And this seems to be the structure that Moses likes to use because you also have ten generations from Noah to Abraham.

So this is Moses' way of highlighting the tenth one. And this is significant for a number of reasons, which we'll have to unpack in a later episode. But just to kind of give you a hint as to where I'm going with this, Noah is the tenth one from Adam. Everything in this genealogy is leading up to him. And Noah is in many ways like a second Adam. Because the flood is sort of a reversal of creation. You're going back to the beginning where everything is tohu v'vohu, as it says in the Hebrew.

You have this formlessness and void. It's like everything that was made is reduced back to water. And then when the water dissipates and you have Noah and his family coming forth from the ark, It's like they're in a new creation, and they're to be fruitful and multiply. And God speaks words that are very similar to the words he uses in Genesis 2 to talk to Adam and Eve. So it's like Adam now has a second Adam when Noah comes along. Except even though you have this seemingly new creation with this seemingly new Adam, things go terribly awry very soon. because just as Adam sinned, so Noah does as well.

We'll get to that at a later episode, but it's worth mentioning now just to kind of whet your appetite for what we have coming up. So ten generations from Adam to Noah, and then ten generations from Noah to Abraham. It's when we get to Enoch that I really get excited. And I guess I get excited because for the same reason that if you read Luther's commentary on Genesis chapter 5, he gets excited. Because here's what Luther says about Enoch. He says, this text should be written in letters of gold. I love that quote.

Genesis 5, of all passages, and especially these verses that talk about Enoch, should be written in letters of gold. Why? Because Enoch preached a better life than this one, a life that is to come, and a life that is centered around the promised seed. In fact, Luther goes on to say that Moses wants this story of Enoch to stand out as by far the most noteworthy story of the first world. Now, why is that? What's so significant about Enoch, and what can we learn from him? Well, there's not a whole lot said about Enoch. In verse 23, or actually verse 22, it says,

Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were 365 years, and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. And that's the last thing that we hear of Enoch in Genesis chapter 5. Now, why is this so important? Well, it's so important because, for a number of reasons, especially as we learn from later parts of the Scripture. What happened to Enoch is that God took him out of this world without him experiencing death. And he's one of only two people in the Old Testament that this happened to. You have him here in Genesis chapter 5, and then you have Elijah in 2 Kings chapter 2.

So both of these men were taken out of this world without experiencing death. They were taken bodily, bodily into heaven. Now the reason this is important, and Luther goes on and on about this in his commentary for good reason, is because what we see already in Genesis chapter 5 is a foreshadowing of what we're going to hear all about later, especially in the Gospels and in the book of Revelation, and that is the resurrection of the body. So I don't know if people have ever thought about this,

but already in Genesis chapter 5, you have testimony. You have evidence. You have this great proclamation of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. So Enoch bears witness to faith, and he bears witness to resurrection. It's like you have three different worlds. You've got this pre-flood world, and in that pre-flood world, God gives us a witness to the resurrection in Enoch. And then you have a post-flood, pre-New Testament world in which God gives us testimony of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting in Elijah. And then you have the New Testament world in which you have this preeminent example of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting in Christ Jesus and his resurrection on the third day. So God gives us all these testimonies of the resurrection of the body, that he intends for us to have a life that is beyond this life, a life that is beyond death itself.

So we might ask ourselves, going back to Enoch, what was it about him that was so significant? where we're given this expression that he walked with God and God took him. He was not because God took him. Now what does it mean to walk with God? And this is where, we were just talking about this a few minutes ago, this is where I think people typically go very wrong. So if you were to listen in, I think it would be a fly on the wall, and listen in on how Enoch was taught in your typical Sunday school room or even in a lot of adult Bible studies, Enoch is held up as this great moral example, right? So he walked with God. That is to say, he lived a life of obedience, and God rewarded him for that life of obedience by saving him from the experience of death.

And I suppose some example from this, some moral example would be drawn from this, something along the lines of, and you too, if you're like Enoch, should walk with God. That is to say, you should live a life of obedience to God the Father, and He too will reward you with life everlasting, or something along those lines. well the only problem with that is that it's completely wrong which is a big problem that's the only problem

the only problem is it's completely wrong that's the only problem besides that we're okay the only problem is it's completely wrong the problem is that walking with God according to the

scheme that I just laid out there It's completely defined self-righteously, legalistically, according to the works of the law. So it's kind of this natural disposition that we all have, this inborn thought process that we inherit, that we have to get right with God by our own doing, by our own works. We insert all of that into that phrase, walking with God. And so we think, well, of course that's what it means. To walk with God means to live this life of obedience, to live an upright life of morality. That's evidently what it means.

But there's absolutely no evidence that that's what it means. In fact, to walk with God means nothing more and nothing less than to live by faith in a good and gracious God who is good and gracious toward us in justifying us through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Now, I'm sure there's got to be somebody out there who says, yeah, but where do you get that from? How can you say that walking with God is just living by faith in the good and gracious God who justifies us for the sake of Christ Jesus? Well, I get it from the scriptures themselves, because that's the way that they describe Enoch. If you turn to Hebrews chapter 11, verse 5. This chapter that talks about what God did for people by faith. It says this, by faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death.

And he was not found because God took him up. For he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God. Can we pause there for a second? So by faith, Enoch was taken up. By faith he was. And before he was taken up, he obtained the testimony that he was pleasing to God. Okay, well, you might ask yourself, well, how is he pleasing to God? Well, it goes on in verse 6 to tell us,

And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. Now, to take what Hebrews says and then to look also at what the book of Genesis says about Enoch. What does it mean to walk with God? It's real simple. It means to live by faith. To live by faith in the God who is good toward us,

who is gracious toward us, who justifies us through and because of the promised seed. And what does it mean that these other people in genealogy didn't live by faith? No, it doesn't mean that. But for whatever reason, God decided that he would bless Enoch in this way. He lived by faith, and he exited this life bodily by faith as a testimony that this life is not all that God has in store for us. In fact, he has so much more in store for us.

And he gives this to us. It's not as if Enoch earned the right to skip death. It's not as if he walked with God obediently so that God rewarded him because of his obedience by letting him skip over death. Enoch simply lived by faith by faith in the God who declared him righteous on account of what the seed would do and that's a beautiful message

because it's a promise to us who also live by faith that God has so much more in store for us that this life is not the end In fact, there's not some sort of expiration mark on our bodies. As if, oh, okay, once you get to this point, it's over. The body's thrown away. It ceases to exist. What happens at a funeral, for instance,

should proclaim the message that God is not done with this body. God is going to raise this body. He's going to reconstruct it. He's going to glorify it. He's going to perfect it on the last day so that we bodily enjoy a life of resurrection and joy and bliss in the presence of God, just like Enoch does. I think this is missed by a lot of people for the same reason that, for instance, the Pharisees missed this, or the Sadducees, when they were talking with Jesus in the Gospels. Do you remember how Jesus proved the resurrection of the body when he was talking with his adversaries? He quoted this recurring phrase from the Torah where God says, I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

I am not the God of the dead, but of the living. now that's always struck me because really before jesus said that who looked at that passage i am the god of abraham the god of isaac and the god of jacob and said to themselves that is testimony the resurrection nobody did but it takes christ to open up our eyes to see that and it's the same here he opens up our eyes to see that enoch is a testimony of the of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting as well. I think we may have a, within American cultural Christianity, we kind of have this Gnostic tendency slip in,

and we think, well, we're going to get new bodies. We're going to, you know, or they're going to be ethereal bodies. We'll be like spirits floating around in heaven. And this is very important for us to understand, that the testimony of the resurrection of our body, that God is going to actually, in a crude sense, reconstruct and reinvigorate and enliven the body that he originally gave us can't come through strongly enough in the face of this Gnostic kind of tendency that we have to think of heaven as a spiritual realm where we're going to float around and play harps and maybe eat chocolates, although spirits don't eat.

But we see in Job chapter 19 a further testimony of this idea that Enoch is taken in his flesh to be with God. And this testimony to the resurrection we see in verse 25 of chapter 19 in Job. For I know that my Redeemer lives, says Job, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. and after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes

shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me. His very eyes, that he is seeing things with at that moment, are going to with those very eyes he's going to gaze upon his Redeemer, who he believes

lives. Yeah, That's great testimony and great testimony in Job in the Old Testament of this sure and certain hope of the resurrection. I'm glad that you pointed that out and that you quoted Job saying it because very often, I've heard this, you've probably heard it too, people talk about, oh, the belief in the resurrection was a later development because of the Israelites' influence through Zoroastrianism or something like that. No. The belief in the resurrection is firmly embedded within the Torah itself. This was not some sort of innovation that the Israelites picked up from some false religion.

This was part of their fundamental confession, their fundamental belief that this life is not the end. Our bodies that die in this life will be resurrected. And we're not going to simply, as you say, float around in heaven and sit in the clouds playing harps. Our heaven is for resurrected people. So who we are right now as soul and body joined together, that's the way that God desires us to be for all eternity. The temporary separation that occurs at physical death is temporary. We await the resurrection when God will raise and enliven and glorify our bodies.

That is the Christian hope. The Christian hope is not simply to go to heaven. The Christian hope is the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. That's why Easter is so significant. That's why the resurrection of our Lord is so significant. Because he was bodily resurrected, we too will await that bodily resurrection. So that just as the head was raised, so the body will be raised along with him. Jesus possesses a body forever.

Jesus is flesh and blood forever. And so are we. I mean, the resurrection is you, and it's me, and it's everyone else, just as we are minus braces, glasses, and hearing aids. But it's flesh and blood. It's flesh and blood, just as you said, just as Christ is flesh and blood. And unfortunately, people's belief in kind of the spiritual existence after death also then misinforms their belief about Christ.

They believe that Christ has somehow sloughed off his body in his ascension, and so that he no longer has flesh and blood. No, Christ right now and for all eternity has a body just like we have a body. Yes, it's perfected, it's glorified, but we have a God with skin. We have a God with bones. We have a God with flesh and blood and muscle and hair. We have a God who is fully and completely human, while also being fully and completely divine. If you want to take it down to a real human level, we have a God with scars.

Amen. We have a God with scars, the ones that he showed to Thomas. They remain there as testimony of his sacrifice for us. so in other words if you're going to get scars or brands or tattoos better make sure they're ones you want to keep forever amen no no don't don't take that as done that's why i that's why i have the christ old fast tattoo i want to make sure christ old fast is in heaven good plan good plan well i i've been watching my uh my my clock here and unfortunately i don't know where the time went, but I think that we're actually at the

end of our 40 minutes. We are. That flew by. I really plan to get to Noah and to his father's belief in who he is, but I'll give a little teaser here to wrap things up. Just like we saw

with Eve's belief in Cain being the Messiah, so we're also going to see that Noah's father, Lamech, also believed that Noah was the Messiah so we'll unpack that a little bit more when we come back next week

alright that sounds exciting to everyone I'm sure are you excited and everyone said ahhh alright well thanks for joining us again and please tell your friends about 40 minutes in the Old Testament

and Christ Hold Fast and we will see you guys next week © transcript Emily Beynon