To Read: Genesis 4

“Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” (Gen. 4:14) 

It was daybreak on the Serengeti. We drove through darkness to a concealed spot. About a hundred yards ahead wildebeests grazed like a giant herd of cattle. On our left, a lioness crept forward in a crouch about to reenact a morning ritual on the Kenyan plain. As for us, we were about to witness a unique saga.  As a believer in the Bible, I was about to see what God sees when we sin. The crouching lion was about to kill a wildebeest. The Lord knows that sin does not disappear because the deed is done. Sin crouches at the door of our heart, prepared to pounce again and again.   

The picture God painted in order for Cain to see for himself the truth of what he had done by killing Abel, was the same picture drawn for his mother in chapter 3. When God said to Eve, “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you,” he was embedding a blessing in the curse that had overtaken her when she and Adam refused to believe the word of God. Sin shatters creation. It sunders the human race. In mercy, God redeemed the condition into which the mother of the human race had subjected herself when he decreed that her desire would be for her husband and that he should rule over her. (see 3:16)  

Despite inviting sin to rule over the human family of which they were the head, God ordained that marriage should survive. Because a self-serving spirit is the enemy of the marriage bed, sin should have made marital bliss impossible for all. Therefore Eve’s God embedded the desire to be wedded to her husband in her curse. As for Cain, it is sin that is wedded to him. Like Cain, we have sinned. Sin is wed to every sinner. We are wed to our own wickedness. Religion is the way sinners have chosen to protect against the ferocity of sin crouching at the door of our hearts. God offers a different way. He commands sinners to trust the name of his Son. Our sin wounded Jesus Christ, who bore it away in his own body the day he was put to death on the cross. Christ, not religion is God’s way of salvation.

To Read: Genesis 5

“When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. And after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God: then he was no more, because God took him away. (Gen. 5:21-24)

Once during each of the three major eras in the history of creation, God took a human being directly to heaven. At the beginning of the New Testament era, Jesus ascended in bodily form from the top of the Mount of Olives. In the era before Christ and after the flood in Noah’s day, a whirlwind enveloped Elijah and he was swept off the earth directly into heaven. During the first period between the creation of Adam and the flood, Enoch walked off the earth straight into the presence of God.

What did God intend to show by taking Enoch, Elijah and Jesus directly into his presence? How Enoch departed is only hinted at, but Elijah and Jesus were seen to go. Was the reason for these three anomalies simply a challenge to our view of reality? We easily believe that ‘what we see is what we get.’ Eight times in Genesis chapter 5 it is emphasized that the descendants of Seth died. The death threat Adam received, should he disobey the Lord, extended to all those who descended from him. It is easy to accept that death is merely the natural result of being human. Apparently, to face death is to face reality. Taking Enoch without his dying exploded that myth. It is the unseen that is real. What is seen is only the apparent. Apparently, what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell are not as real as we imagine. To the Corinthians Paul wrote, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18) Faith is the attribute given to us in order to see the God that no eye has seen and to perceive his unseen hand.

To Read: Genesis 6

 “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth - men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground and bird of the air - for I am grieved that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. (Gen. 6:5-8)

What difference can one person make? Many Americans no longer bother to go to the polls because they despair that their one vote doesn’t matter. We are easily intimidated into feeling insignificant by the expansion of knowledge. The size of the universe is mind-boggling. The exploding population of the earth is threatening. The complexity of everyday living is overwhelming. Feelings of inadequacy and personal unimportance like these, might well have been in the mind and heart of Noah. The closing days of the world finally obliterate by the flood were culturally far advanced and permeated by wickedness. Noah, like his great-grandfather Enoch, walked with God. (Gen. 6:9) This lone man became the instrument in the hand of God to bring humankind through the judgment of his world to populate ours. 

Did Abraham fail when he pleaded with God for those living in Sodom? Abraham begins to plead for the city by asking the LORD, “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked: What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?” The LORD said, ‘If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”(Gen. 18:23,26) For some reason Abraham stopped asking for mercy when he was down to ten. Why did he not continue to ask for the city to be spared for the sake of just one? After all, he knew for sure that there was one righteous man in the place, his nephew Lot. God’s willingness to do good through one life was attested to the day Christ died. As Augustus Toplady wrote regarding Jesus, he “for a world of lost sinners was slain.” 

To Read: Genesis 7

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And the rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japeth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.”

(Gen. 7:11-13)

Humans worldwide have the memory of a catastrophic flood that wiped out an entire world system that was here before our own. One day in the future, a new world system will govern the planet. Those here in those days will be the survivors. Like Noah and his family, the occupants of earth in the future will have escaped a different kind of holocaust inside a different kind of ark. They will have made it safely through, not floodwaters, but through flames ignited by the wrath of God. The apostle Peter wrote, “…Long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.”

(2 Pet. 3:5-7)

To Read: Genesis 8

“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.” (Gen. 8:1) 

“But God remembered Noah…” Memory is God’s gift. It is one of the ten senses God has given us as those created in his image. Our outward senses are sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Our inward senses are imagination, estimation, fancy, common-sense and memory. Memory is the power to make the past present. To God, everything is always present. In one sense, he forgets nothing and no one. In the future, Christ promises to do for all who call upon his name what he did for his friend Lazarus when he called him from his tomb. 

Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth and our maker, wills to remember our sins no more for the sake of Jesus Christ. This is not true for those that deliberately refuse to come to Christ as he commanded. Because his is a heart of love, the Lord issues his command in the form of a plea. This he does to be merciful and gracious. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28,29) It will be a terrible day when those who foolishly refuse to obey the loving heart of God but it will be a day of great rejoicing when the Lord who remembers calls out from among the dead all those who call upon his name during this present day and age. Call to him right now.

Saturday:  Genesis 9 

Sunday:  Genesis 10

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