How a parent aches when their child refuses to listen and gets hurt. How the tears fall when a child has been repeatedly given opportunities to come to Christ and dies in their sins instead. The quote that titles this piece is not from Genesis 5, but that is the chapter we are in today. Genesis 5, on the surface, is nothing more than the first mention of genealogies in Scripture. Understanding a person’s lineage would become a big part of Jewish life, and if someone claiming importance was unable to back it up with a supporting family line, they would be scoffed at. But in this particular genealogical list, we see God’s warning taking on physical consequences.
In the day in which Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their spirits died. Knowledge of Good and Evil did indeed come to them, but at great cost. At first, it would seem to them that the serpent had been right after all. They didn’t die, or so they thought. Life carried on for Adam for a grand total of 930 years. That’s almost one full millennium’s worth of time, and then the physical manifestation of what happened in the Garden of Eden showed up. Eternal life on earth had come to an end with that bite of the fruit 930 years earlier. Death had come to earth.
Scripture says later in God’s Word, Numbers 32:23 But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.
This means that whether it comes to light now, or down the road, the fact we have sinned will be revealed and have its consequences. For Adam, that final reality wouldn’t hit for many years. Sure he was having to work the ground in order to eat, having to kill animals to make clothing and cut down trees for shelter, but the full impact of his decision years ago wouldn’t hit till he found himself at death’s door. Now it was real. Now it was tangible. But now it was too late!
How many times do we engage in sinful behaviour because we don’t believe the people warning us against it? They make claims we just don’t fathom in our own minds and we forge ahead into the danger with our eyes wide open, figuring we know better than they do. But in the end it comes back to bite us and we find ourselves in trouble, wishing we’d listened. Why? Because we did not anticipate what they already knew.
Eventually our sins will find us out. Eventually the warnings that went unheeded will come to pass. It may take years, but it will happen. We call the results of such actions, the results of such willful blindness, consequences for a reason. Engaging in sin has its consequences and many times, these consequences must be lived with even after accepting Christ’s gift of Salvation at the Cross of Calvary. Murder victims don’t come back to life. Lost jobs may not hire back. Estranged family members may never reconcile. Life is not all rainbows and roses when you come to Christ. Consequences very often still have to be dealt with. The difference is that the Christian has the Holy Spirit’s guidance available in dealing with those consequences, and the Holy Spirit’s guidance that when obeyed, avoids the consequences of further sinful behaviour.
Genesis Chapter 5 ends with the birth of Noah, and the knowledge that he was 500 years old when he gave birth to Shem, Ham and Japheth. We have been left with the birth of one through whom another story begins and through whom a prophetic type would be cast. God had allowed Adam to experience the full set of consequences for his actions back in the Garden, but He wasn’t about to let the whole of humanity go that route without stepping into the situation first with an offer that would change the course of history. But first, some housecleaning was in order. God’s plan couldn’t be brought about without a painful purge.
It’s been awhile since I read the Bible from cover to cover, although I’ve done that many times in the past. So at roughly a chapter a day, I will occasionally be blogging about this journey through the Scriptures. I already spent two years in the Psalms in 2009 and 2010, blogging about that journey in my notes on Facebook, but who knows, if God wants me to revisit that journey when we come to that book, we’ll see. If you haven’t read through the entire Bible in awhile, there are various resources out there to assist you. You can do as I’m doing and just go one chapter a day, or you can pick up one of several different “Read the Bible in a Year” guides, or even The One Year Bible which takes you through three or four chapters a day from both the Old and New Testament and a portion from Psalms and Proverbs. One chapter a day will take longer than a year for sure. But as I said, it’s been awhile since I last did it in a consecutive manner. My next book took me on a whirlwind trip through much of the Scriptures back in the Spring, which is what I think jogged my memory about revisiting areas I haven’t been to in awhile. So we’ll see where this takes us.
