The Refrain That Broke

Ordinary Means · A Genesis Study · No. 7

After the violence of Genesis 4, the text does something that looks, at first glance, like a place to skim: a genealogy. Ten generations, from Adam to Noah, each entry following the same form — when he had lived so many years, he fathered a son; he lived so many more; and thus all the days of this man were so many years. And then four small words, falling on name after name like a slow bell:

And he died. And he died. And he died. Eight times in the chapter. Adam died. Seth died. Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Methuselah, Lamech — each in his turn, and he died. This is what the wages of sin look like, paid out generation by generation. Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin (Romans 5:12), and here is death making its rounds, claiming every name on the list. The Genesis 3 warning — in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die — works itself out across the centuries, one funeral at a time.

But do not skim it, because the genealogy is not only a record of death. It is the record of the line. God is keeping count. He knows every name. Through all this dying, the seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3:15 is being carried forward — through Seth, through these long-lived fathers, on toward Noah, and Abraham, and David, and at last to the manger at Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke will both reach back and pick up this very line. Every and he died is followed by and he fathered — the death is real, and the line does not stop. The men who died were carrying the promise.

And then, at the seventh name, the bell stops ringing.

Two things break the pattern. First, what is said of his life: Enoch walked with God. The Hebrew form means a continuous, habitual walking — not the occasional visit, but a way of life, day after day, for three hundred years. And it is the very same verb used of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, back when walking with God was simply natural for unfallen humanity. After the fall, that kind of walk becomes rare. In an age when the rest of the race was sliding into violence, one man kept company with God as his daily habit.

And second, what is not said of his death. The relentless refrain simply… does not come. And he was not, for God took him. Enoch is the first human being in Scripture who does not die. For him the curse of to dust you shall return was suspended; he did not go down to the dust. God took him — into His own presence. The New Testament names him in the roll-call of faith: By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death… he was commended as having pleased God (Hebrews 11:5). Not earned, then — received by faith. The same faith that made Abel's offering acceptable made Enoch's whole life a walk with God.

This is the first hint of resurrection in the Bible — the first quiet evidence that death does not have to be the last word for the people of God. Most of the faithful, then and since, will die in the ordinary way; Enoch's translation was unique to him. But it tells us something the death-genealogy could never tell us on its own: that the God who keeps count of every name has the power to take a man clean out of death's reach and into His own presence. What happened to Enoch by exception is what God has promised to all who are in Christ — that the One who walked the Emmaus road as the conqueror of the grave will take His people through death and out the other side. The bell that tolls and he died over every name in Genesis 5 has, in Christ, already been answered: and he was not, for God took him.

The chapter ends looking forward. A son is born and named Noah — a name that plays on the word for comfort — and his father hopes for relief from the cursed ground. He does not know how that comfort will come. We are about to find out: the world has filled with violence, God is grieved, and He has resolved to act. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

Next time, the waters rise — and one family is shut into an ark and carried safely through the flood, in what Peter will call a picture of baptism. Read Genesis 6–7 before then.