Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Choosing to Walk With God? | Torah | Genesis 5

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here to grow in your faith this year. Every day, we choose to either submit to God or go our own way. Which will you choose? In today's episode, Keith uses the life of Enoch in Genesis 5 to help us make the choice in our own life. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others so that others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Passages: Genesis 5 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. I'm Jensen Holmick-Nair. And I'm Patrick Miller. We're digging into the stories found in the first books of the Bible. They're not just some of the best stories in the Bible. They're some of the best stories in all of human history.

Right now we're in the Book of Genesis. Are you as much of a sucker for a good email newsletter as I am? I have to admit I love them because they keep me informed. Unfortunately, they don't really help me grow in my faith. What if you gave Jesus access to your inbox? 10-minute Bible Talks is starting a weekly email newsletter. It will have a variety of things inside of it. Each week will be different.

Sometimes it'll have cultural background about the topics that we're talking about. Sometimes it will have insights into what it means to practice the spiritual disciplines. I think you're going to like the variety. All you have to do is go to the show notes and hit the link there. and you can sign up for the new 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. A friend told me she was going to be making a ton of food for Thanksgiving. Now, did she mean that literally? Like, did she get out all her food and put it on a scale and it weighed exactly 2,000 pounds?

Well, of course not. What if a friend said, man, I got a million emails to answer this week? Or a friend said, my grandpa is a thousand years old. These are obviously examples of exaggeration, hyperbole. They're symbolic uses of numbers to make a rhetorical point. All they're saying is, look, I've got a lot of food for Thanksgiving. I've got a lot of emails. I got to return.

And my grandpa is really old. How do we know their exaggerations? How do we know they're not lying? Well, we know they're exaggerating intentionally to make a point because these numbers are ridiculous. Nobody has a ton of food for Thanksgiving. Now, when you read through Genesis 5, by the way, that's where we are today, Genesis Chapter 5, you see a list of people.

called the genealogy, and they lived for a really long time. I mean really long, like 700, 800, 900 years. So is this a symbolic use of numbers, or did people really live to be that old? Well, their ages seem preposterous to us, right? They would have even been more preposterous to ancient Israelites, because they only had a life expectancy of 40 years. So maybe these numbers are not talking about how long someone really lived. Maybe these numbers are being used symbolically. We find another clue in the brief story of Enoch. He's the only person in this genealogy that gets much attention. We read this in Genesis chapter 5 starting in verse 21. When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. And after he became the father of Methuselah,

Enoch walked faithfully with God 300 years and at other sons and daughters. All together, Enoch lived a total of 365 years. Enoch walked faithfully with God. Then he was no more, because God took him away. Now, does the number 365 sound familiar to you? Of course it does. It's the number of days in a year. And it turns out that the number of years that other characters in this genealogy lived, well, those numbers are also symbolically related to astrological events in the ancient world that ancient people were aware of. So it appears for lots of reasons that, these ages that people lived in the genealogy in Genesis 5 are symbolic ages. Now, when we read ancient genealogies, they seem like boring history to us, but they weren't originally

written for historical purposes. They were written for social or judicial, or as in this case, in Genesis 5, theological purposes. In history, numerical exactness may be a value, but it's not really the same value in a theological argument. So it's possible that just like we could say, my grandpa's a thousand years old, and you know what we mean, that he's just really old, that an ancient author could say, well, Enok lived 365 years, and an ancient person knew what they meant. So the question in Genesis 5 is not how did these people live so long? How do they live to be so old? That's not really the main question. The question is the question. The question is, how do they live? And it's not really the The question is, what theological point was the author trying to make by saying these people lived for such a long period of time?

I'm sure you've been to an art gallery before, and as you walk through different sections of the gallery, you see different painters from different eras. And one thing you notice is that they represent their subjects differently. So, for example, let's take a fruit bowl. A fruit bowl painted by Rembrandt will look different than a fruit bowl painted by. Van Gogh or one painted by Picasso. They all represent reality. They're just saying something about reality through the way they express their painting. So the fun part of art is asking, what are these artists trying to communicate by the way they represented their fruit bowl? Now back to Genesis chapter 5. The author is giving us a true representation of reality,

but he's doing it in an artistic manner, a symbolic manner, and we've got to to ask, what point is the author trying to communicate? And the more you read through Genesis Chapter 5, the more you see that there are two lines, two sets of descendants that come from Adam and Eve. One is the line of Cain, and the other is the line of Seth. Both Seth and Cain come from Eve. They're brothers. And yet, Cain is the spiritual son of the serpent, and Seth is the spiritual son of the promise. So Cain proudly names a city after himself, after his line, whereas Seth calls upon the name of the Lord. The seventh person in Seth's line is a man we just met Enoch. He walked with God. But the seventh person in Cain's line is Lamek, who is the world's

first bigamist, and he sings about murderous rampages and puts curses on all those who would defy him. Cain's line begins with murder. murder, and it goes worse from there. It becomes more and more violent. Cain's line starts with the city builder, and it ends with sons who make culture, music, metalworks, hurting, domestication. It's the story of human mastery. Seth's line starts with those who call upon God and ends with one who tries to please God by praying that God would bring an end to the curse. It's the story of human beings being mastered by God. The line of Cain brings death. The line of Seth brings life. The line of Cain is characterized by violent chaos. The line of Seth is characterized

by life-giving order. The line of Cain is about human mastery. The line of Seth is being mastered by God. The line of Cain is the city of man. The line of Seth is the city of God. And all of us have to choose, don't we? All of us have to make the choice that Enoch made, and that is to walk with God, to live a life before God in which you can say, God, you are my Lord, you are my God. You are my king, I want to walk faithfully with you for my entire life. But that's a tough choice, because we are always faced with the same choices that Kane and Seth were faced with. Will we submit to God, or will we rebel against Him? Genesis 5 is simply a retelling of the story of Genesis 3. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve faced a choice. And now in Genesis 5, every human being must make that same choice. Will

we submit to God or will we go our own way? Will we live according to the line of Seth or will we live according to the line of Cain? Will we walk with God and trust him with our future? Or will we try to build a reality in which God is pushed to the margins of our life? It's interesting to see Seth's genealogy develop. It leads to Noah and then to Abraham, to David and ultimately to Jesus. Jesus is the resurrected king who gives such a full and abundant life that living 900 years sounds like nothing. He came to give life to its fullest. Jesus came announcing the good news that through his death and resurrection, God's city is breaking in right now into the very present. God's city is breaking into Cain City.

God's city will one day be established here on earth and Cain City will be eradicated. This is a claim that has been forgotten in our daily lives. We've made salvation only about us getting to heaven, about our personal walk. We've forgotten the far larger claims that we should be swept up into. See, the cosmos has gone through a cosmic reordering. Jesus has died and destroyed the power of sin and idolatry. He has risen victorious over the powers of Cain and is right now sitting on the throne of heaven, holding out his authority and his powers.

We are citizens of Seth's line, of Jesus' kingdom, and therefore we should give our lives to justice and love and mercy. We should be the hands of justice, the hands of love to the poor and the needy, the one who step into the ruins of modern society and begin God's rebuilding project. Not rebuilding America, but rebuilding Eden, rebuilding God's kingdom by the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this starts with us in our daily life, with how we treat the people around us. It starts with how we spend our time, our money, how we act on social media, what choices

do we make about worshiping together in our church? Who are we serving, both in our church and in our community? Genesis chapter 5 should take us back to a choice that we've been. face every day. Really, we face it every moment of every day. And that is, who will be my king? Will I kneel in devotion to King Jesus? Well, I say to him, Jesus, you get to define what's right and wrong. You get to define who I am, because in you, I have life. In you, you have given me new life. You've given me salvation. And that same salvation you are bringing to this world. God, I want to see your kingdom come on earth, that your will would be done here just as it is in heaven.

God, I want to be a part of you establishing your kingdom of love, justice, and mercy. I pray, God, that the curse of sin would be removed, that you would heal this world. Let it start with me, Jesus. Hey, before you forget, make sure you sign up for the new 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. Just hit the link in the show notes.