We Are All Connected

Genesis 5:1-5 - This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.  Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.  The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters.  Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died. 

We are all connected…way back…even to the creation of man. We might never have all the answers to how two people populated the whole Earth…but we get a small piece of it here. This small piece...this genealogy of Adam…describes for us how God blessed the first man and woman…how God made man in his own image…and what names Adam used to help God show the basic importance of all men. These names…they are just some of the men…that will someday connect the first man…to the holy son of God.

They sure did live long lives back then….from Seth living a full 912 years…to Methuselah’s 969 (the oldest on record)…to Noah….whose father proclaimed, “Out of the ground which the LORD has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands." The genealogy of the first few men show the average lifespan of man as 906 years.  The way I see it...that was part of the curse God placed on man when he chose to disobey God in the garden. Some of the commentaries I read said the purity of God’s perfect creation and the vapor cover over the Earth prevented the Sun’s radiation from decaying the body as fast as it does today….but that is just theory. Life was given to man only for a season…even if it was a long season back then.

When I read these chapters of the bible that contain the endless lists of connected life…I am tempted to skip them…and think there is nothing important in them to apply to my life….but I know I must try and read the details carefully…to see how much God loved the life he created.  He had to have been so hurt…that man would disobey him… and it must have pained him so to banish him from that beautiful garden and curse the ground.  God knew how bad it was going to get…he knew he would see ten generations of his precious creation propagate the sin Adam chose to participate in. God knew that finally a man named Noah would have a heart that heard and obeyed God.

It always amazes me how much God must love us all…from Adam to Phillip James Simpson…the father that connected my humble existence to this first man…he has waited patiently for more Noah’s. He continues to love us and teach us how to be more like him…in spite of the way we ignore him….in spite of the evil he sees in our hearts. And sometimes we have a father…who gets a glimpse of the future somehow…and like Lamech ….they proclaim that their son….will do something special to change the world.

Father…I thank you for your patience in me this morning.  I thank you for showing me that I need to be a Noah in this world gone crazy.  I thank you for parents that taught me about you and showed me how important I am…who introduced me to you…to your body of believers.  Help me this morning to embrace the task you put me on the Earth to do…let the importance of my life…the life your son saved by his holy blood…be known in my heart. Let that love you show me daily overflow to others as I remember that I am connected to that first man and woman….and you created me in your image…to love you and walk with you every day….to show your love to others…so that they may walk with you too. Amen.