As we open our Bibles today, Genesis 5 is the first chapter before us. The chapter is a genealogy of people from Adam through Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. To me, it is not exciting reading. To you, it may well be. Genealogies have never been overly exciting to me. To others they offer a door of understanding. When I come to them in the Bible, I typically skim through to see whether there are details about a particular person or family line that offers insight. Other than that I move quickly through the lists of names in search of the next section of narrative.
That next section in Genesis starts in chapter six and continues through Genesis nine, with us being told humanity had degenerated in not too many generations from fallen to reprobate. what an incredibly rapid descent. God “repented” (in the old King James Version) of having made humanity. While God knew where humanity would go once sin entered the world, He created us anyway. Why? We can’t answer that question with absolute certainty, but it seems God’s love for us, and God’s desire for our love for Him to be genuine and without coercion, had to allow for our rejection of God. That rejection has been absolute in so many cases, and without skipping over the amazing account of that rejection leading to God’s destruction of all but eight human beings, let’s turn to our own rejection of Him.
You and I are descendants of Adam. If we could reconstruct the genealogy of our family trees all the way back to Adam we would find them connecting somewhere with the list in Genesis 5. We inherit Adam’s sin nature at birth. As the old saying goes, “We aren’t sinners, because we sin. We sin because we’re sinners.” It’s our nature. Thank God we were born on this side of the flood! God has continuously reached out to humanity. He did it through Noah, through Abraham, through Moses, through the judges and kings of Israel, and ultimately through Jesus. While that’s getting way ahead of the story, the Bible’s connective thread is God’s ongoing effort to intercede in our behalf to overcome the sin we brought into the world. Preserving Noah and his family was a vital moment in that effort.
As we read through the Bible, we see God is always plotting to do us good. As our reading from Mark 2 reminds us, Jesus’ ministry brought healing to the sick, welcome to the outcast, and victory over the rigid ways of legalism. Such amazing good would ultimately be rewarded with crucifixion, which shows us the depth of human sin and Satan’s desire to defeat God’s goodness. That crucifixion resulted in Jesus’ ultimate defeat of sin, death and Satan, which is one more example of how God is, indeed, always plotting to do us good!