Heroes of Hate, Dark Ages, and the Grief of God

For the past few weeks, we've been exploring an account of “the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1), which up to now has mainly been a genealogy with stories sprinkled in (Genesis 5:3-32). Unlike the Cain genealogy (Genesis 4:16-24), here we've caught glimmers of hope we're looking at a new humanity, a righteous people of God. But as we try to wrap up these generations of Adam, our foot gets stuck in the mud of 'sons of God,' 'daughters of Adam,' 'fallen ones,' 'mighty men'... oh boy, quite the quagmire. These four verses that launch chapter 6 are nobody's idea of a cakewalk! They've been called “the strangest of all the Genesis narratives,”¹ “ambiguous by nature,”² “mysterious,”³ “cryptic and obscure,”⁴ “one of the most difficult texts to interpret in the Hebrew Bible,”⁵ “among the most debated texts in the entire Bible.”⁶ Well... don't you just feel encouraged?

It all starts by pointing us back to the time already covered by the chapter 4 and 5 genealogies; we're retreading ground previously gained.⁷ Those genealogies are all about how “the human began to multiply on the face of the ground” (Genesis 6:1). In pagan stories set in this time, humans multiplying doesn't go over as a good thing: “the peoples had increased, the land bellowed like a bull, the god was disturbed with their uproar.”⁸ But in the Bible, God doesn't mind that; actually, humanity multiplying is a sign of his original blessing (Genesis 1:28). So the human being, the Adam, is multiplying, “and daughters were born to them” (Genesis 6:1), just like last chapter told us (Genesis 5:4, 7).

Onto the stage step characters we don't yet recognize: “the sons of God.” A whole lot depends on who or what they are, but that's a big question we'll have to circle back to. For now, let's read what they did. “The sons of God saw the daughters of humanity, that they were good” (Genesis 6:2). The 'daughters of humanity' – we just heard about them a verse ago. But the sons of God see these human women and appraise them as good⁹ – which probably means, in this context, somehow attractive, beautiful, and desirable.¹⁰ That's often taken to mean that the sons of God feel a passionate desire, a lust for the women's physical beauty.¹¹

If so, they act on it: “they took for themselves wives” (Genesis 6:2). And some readers figure there's nothing going wrong here: “no commandment is broken.”¹² But notice the three key words: they see, they say it's good, therefore they take. Who's that remind you of? Eve in the garden, that's who (Genesis 3:6).¹³ That's not a promising sign. Acting out of their own vision, they take wives for themselves, like Lamech when he “took for himself two wives” (Genesis 4:19), making us wonder if the 'sons of God' here stick to one wife a piece or not.¹⁴ Notice, after all, that they take wives “from all whomsoever they chose” (Genesis 6:2). But it's in the pagan world, not in Israel, where people are said to 'choose' a wife.¹⁵ And the phrase 'from all' contrasts with God's warnings Israelites not marry Canaanite women (Genesis 24:37; Nehemiah 13:27) and mandates that their priests marry none but ladies of Israel (Leviticus 21:14; Ezekiel 44:22). Legally, “nobody [in Israel] could choose freely among all women.”¹⁶ But the 'sons of God' abide by no such laws. In at least one way (if not more), a boundary is being broken by “a mixing of things that should be separate.”¹⁷

Into this situation, the LORD himself suddenly speaks (Genesis 6:3), but what he says is hard to read – there are a lot of words that show up only here in the Bible, and I've seen totally different translations of this verse. God says his spirit – (the Holy Spirit? the breath of life?) – won't strive (or remain, or be strong?) with humans forever, since also he's flesh (or by their transgressing he is flesh?).¹⁸ All we can tell for sure is, God answers a problem. Somehow, the sons of God marrying human women could be thought to lead to humans exceeding all limits, like when the serpent promised to make humans like gods (Genesis 3:5) but then God refused to let humans 'take' what would let them live forever (Genesis 3:22).¹⁹ The LORD says he's not having any of that this time either: humans are still just flesh and have a limited number of days to live, either individually or collectively.²⁰ Because of this weird new situation, God has to be extra clear about this.²¹ And the way the story's written, God acts immediately, “before the story can begin to unfold any further.”²²

After that, we get a further comment: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days (and also after), when the sons of God came in to the daughters of humanity and they bore children to them. These were the Gibborim who were of old, men of the name” (Genesis 6:4). You'll note two weird words there. 'Gibborim' is easier: that means 'mighty ones,' like warriors or heroes. Then there are 'Nephilim,' who most scholars think are the same as the Gibborim here, children of the sons of God and daughters of man,²³ though some think they're unrelated.²⁴ 'Nephilim' means, literally, 'the fallen ones.'²⁵ Fallen from heaven to earth?²⁶ Fallen morally from prior holiness, like Adam and Eve?²⁷ Fallen, as in born abnormally?²⁸ Fallen in battle as a slain warrior, like when David laments “how the mighty ones have fallen in the midst of battle” (2 Samuel 1:25) or when Ezekiel sees “the mighty ones, the fallen... who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war” (Ezekiel 32:27)?²⁹

The big question of it all is, who or what are the 'sons of God'? Setting aside more crackpot ideas like aliens³⁰ or Neanderthals,³¹ one major theory is that they're angels, who – maybe assigned on mission to earth already, maybe looking down from heaven – decide they have an interest in human women, and so they show up, adopt human form, marry, and have kids who are just... all wrong. That theory sounds weird – it is weird – but that's “the earliest known explanation” of what's going on here,³² accepted with utter sincerity by Jews up to the time of Jesus,³³ plus Christians for the next couple centuries.³⁴ Gradually, though, people got uneasy with that theory. Didn't Jesus himself contrast “the angels in heaven” with humans who “marry and are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25)? So “how could it not amount to folly to say that spirits... desire fleshly things?”³⁵ No way can “spiritual natures have carnal relations!”³⁶ Only “mad fools” could buy that... right?³⁷

So some turned to a new theory, the idea that that the 'sons of God' were the upper class – maybe kings who claimed to represent God, maybe judges who acted like gods on earth, maybe the rich in general, maybe especially strong or skilled people.³⁸ This would then be a “self-deification of the powerful,” when “the ruling class became captives of their own appetites.”³⁹ In the second and third century, this approach became popular among the rabbis.⁴⁰ One problem (among others) is that nowhere else are judges or kings, as a group, called 'sons of God.'⁴¹

Around the same time, Christians, starting in Syria,⁴² began pioneering the soon-to-be-popular idea that the 'sons of God' were actually the male descendants of Seth in Genesis 5, while the 'daughters of humanity' were only the female descendants of Cain from Genesis 4, and the problem was then being “unequally yoked with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14).⁴³ This theory held sway for over fifteen centuries in the church, but the problem is that it's based on iffy translations of an earlier verse,⁴⁴ plus that it's Seth's family that's identified with Adam and is known for daughters, so the 'daughters of humanity' can't just be the people of Cain.⁴⁵

Most pastors I talked to about this sermon said they'd just leave things here: lay out a few major options, shrug, and call it quits. They said they'd leave it up to you to go read your Bible and try to make up your own mind, to decide whatever it means to you. That doesn't quite sit right with me. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), and so God breathed out these verses, he gave them a meaning, and so it must be profitable to teach from them somehow. After combing through as much of the up-to-date research as I could find, taking hundreds of pages of notes, and turning it over in my mind for several years now... let me tell you what I think makes most sense.

The cultures around Israel used the phrase 'sons of God' or 'sons of the gods' to refer to divine beings, deities.⁴⁶ They were often the chief god's courtiers and companions, those who make up the heavenly assembly or divine council, “the celestial entourage of God.”⁴⁷ 'Sons of gods' could also be a class term, meaning 'gods.'⁴⁸ The Bible has no problem with this: it says that when the LORD made the world, “the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7), and that on occasion “the sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD” in his royal court. In the Bible's view, they're never the LORD's peers: “Who among the sons of God is like the LORD, a God... awesome above all who are around him?” (Psalm 89:6-7). Later Israelites came to understand the sons of God as angels serving the LORD. But they could also be identified as “the gods of the nations” (Jeremiah 14:22), since “the Most High... fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8).⁴⁹ In Genesis 6, we're probably looking at pagan ideas about their gods.

The idea of gods sleeping with mere humans, especially a long time ago, was a common idea in the mythologies of pagan cultures around Israel; and so was the idea of them producing children who'd go on to be important heroes and kings.⁵⁰ This is, in fact, “a defining aspect of the time of the heroes.”⁵¹ Many pagans looked back at a heroic age when these sorts of things happened, a time of ancient human women “mingling with gods” and so bearing them “splendid children,” starting with “the race of illustrious kings.”⁵² There was then “a race of heroes, godlike men... called demigods.”⁵³ In Greece, for example, the hero Heracles was born when the god Zeus rushed down from Olympus, “desiring the love of a fine-girdled woman.”⁵⁴ The famous Argonaut heroes of Greek mythology included not only Heracles the son of Zeus,⁵⁵ but Ancaeus, Erginus, and Euphemus the sons of the sea god Poseidon;⁵⁶ Erytus, Echion, and Aethalides the sons of the herald god Hermes;⁵⁷ Ascalaphus and Ialmenus the sons of war god Ares;⁵⁸ Augeas a son of the sun god Helios;⁵⁹ and, oh, you get the picture. Even some Romans thought the founder of Rome was the son of a mortal maiden who “united in marriage” with the god Mars.⁶⁰ The Hurrians had a king named Kirta whom Canaanites called a son of the god El,⁶¹ and a myth about a boy named Silver who was fathered by the sky god Kumarbi and a mortal woman.⁶² The Babylonians looked back to legendary kings like Gilgamesh, “a giant in height, 18 feet tall...,” since he was “two-thirds god and only one-third human,” having been born to the god-king Lugalbanda and the goddess Ninsun.⁶³ Pagans often figured some of the ancient heroes of that age had ultimately been fully “changed into gods” themselves.⁶⁴

Although that was a lost age ended by the gods, who for unknown reasons had chosen to “destroy the lives of the semi-gods” in a great catastrophe,⁶⁵ pagans often celebrated that heroic generation as having been a golden age marked by justice, much better than our world and its people afterwards.⁶⁶ Those were days, they said, of “righteousness and piety,” when humans were often “guests of the gods, eating at the same board,”⁶⁷ and so the heroic race were “more righteous, better far,” than other generations.⁶⁸

Such heroes and kings might be gone now, the pagans said, but pagan elites claimed special privileges and pride due to being descended from these part-divine heroes.⁶⁹ The Sumerian king “Shulgi, mighty man, king of Ur,” started spelling his name with the symbol for a god,⁷⁰ and he claimed to be a brother of the god-king Gilgamesh.⁷¹ Plenty other kings claimed to be descended from gods and striving to earn godhood through their rule.⁷² Two noble families in Athens boasted their descent from Neleus son of Poseidon and Aeacus son of Zeus, respectively. The kings of ancient Sparta claimed to be descended from Heracles,⁷³ as did the ruling house of Macedonia, including Alexander the Great.⁷⁴ Julius Caesar thought his family was “descended... from the immortal gods,” tracing his heritage back to Aeneas the son of Venus.⁷⁵ It was a common pagan brag.

So in that light, what's going on in Genesis 6? God is giving Israel a way to take the wind out of everybody's sails. Genesis is saying, let's suppose for a moment that your myths are all real. Fine, say the pagan gods came and had kids with human women. Well, if they did, they that was an aggressive transgression of both natural and nuptial boundaries: like Eve, they blurred heaven and earth; like faithless Israelites, they married outside the law (Genesis 6:2). Those gods are, at best, idiots. It's like Psalm 82, where God “takes his stand in the divine assembly and judges among the gods” (Psalm 82:1), convicts them of being too ignorant and incompetent to deserve their godhood (Psalm 82:2-5), and declares: “I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.' Nevertheless, like humans you will die, and like one of the princes you will fall!” (Psalm 82:6-7).⁷⁶ And so these 'sons of gods' shouldn't really be called gods after all.⁷⁷ And their sort of religion is therefore wrong,⁷⁸ exposed in all its falsity by “the radical and subversive gaze of God.”⁷⁹

Where pagans thought some of those ancient heroes had been awarded immortal godhood,⁸⁰ Genesis says those pagan heroes are as “flesh and blood” as the rest of us (Genesis 6:3).⁸¹ The LORD marks here “a clear division between divine and mortal.”⁸² All heroes, no exceptions, were “mortal human beings;”⁸³ each did “die like a mortal.”⁸⁴ The heroes were 'fallen ones,' doomed from the get-go (Genesis 6:4). Not merely noble “heroes falling in battle strife,”⁸⁵ they were monsters of sin, fallen to damnation, for “the proud shall stumble and fall, with none to raise him up” (Jeremiah 50:32). Calling them 'Nephilim' might as well be naming them 'the losers,' 'the goners'! And for all their credit as “men of the name,” men with a heroic reputation sung about in legend, Genesis denies them any individuality (Genesis 6:4). “Their story is jarringly brief” here,⁸⁶ and their names and supposed stories are “lost in the dustbin of history.”⁸⁷ In Genesis, any pagan heroic age came and went and wasn't worth remembering. Such heroes of old were just “weeds sown among the wheat” (Matthew 13:25),⁸⁸ and those who claim descent from the ancient heroes are, at best, frauds.

And last of all, Genesis makes clear that the heroic age was no golden age of justice after all; it was a dark age of spreading evil, violence, and corruption (Genesis 6:5). All this time the 'sons of God' were impulsively looking at the goodness of the daughters of humanity (Genesis 6:2), the true God and Father was looking, taking centuries of evidence into account, and seeing something very different: that “the evil of humans was great on the earth” (Genesis 6:5).⁸⁹ These 'sons of God,' presuming to see and judge like God, were blind to what he can plainly see.⁹⁰ As humans multiplied (Genesis 6:1), so humans multiplied evil on the earth (Genesis 6:5).⁹¹

And this wasn't accidental or casual; it was deliberate, outward actions of wrong and harm which testify to an inward heart-rot.⁹² Where God had once “formed” man from the dust (Genesis 2:7) and day by day “forms the hearts of them all” (Psalm 33:15), the human heart turns out to all day be “forming” designs that are pure disaster (Genesis 6:5).⁹³ This picture of “constant, unceasing, and active devising, planning, and carrying out of evil” is a shocking dash of hyperbole showing what happens when we cut the brake lines amid our downward spiral.⁹⁴ “In the state of fallen nature,” we all have such an inborn “impulse to evil” that we “need the help of grace in order not to fall.”⁹⁵ Or, as Scripture puts it, “the hearts of the children of humanity are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live” (Ecclesiastes 9:3).

Here, instead of multiplying to “fill the earth” with God's image and goodness (Genesis 1:28), humans have opted to “fill the earth with violence” (Genesis 6:11). If “the one who sows to the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption” (Galatians 6:8), then humanity's become a gambler on the carnal slots, which always pay out their poison. God sees that “sin had reached its climax, ruling from the depths of the human soul and filling the breadth of the earth.”⁹⁶ As a result, the earth itself is polluted, corrupted, ruined (Genesis 6:13). Our savagery spreads to other creatures, who react to our beastliness by becoming beastlier; our behavior hurts the health of the land, as we pollute it and treat it like garbage.⁹⁷ The earth becomes unfit for God's purposes for it.⁹⁸

The other Sunday, facing the curse already on the ground, we read Lamech's dear wish for “comfort from our making and the agony of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). Now, those same three Hebrew words crop up again, in a “poetic interweaving of linguistic irony.”⁹⁹ Lamech's root for 'comfort' can also form a word for 'being sorry.' And God is sorry, remorseful, regarding his 'making' humans who produce agony or grief, not for our hands, but for his very heart (Genesis 6:6).¹⁰⁰ Now, God is all-knowing. “God sees what will happen many generations in the future as if it had already happened.”¹⁰¹ In fact, before God made one molecule of the universe, he knew each and every deed, word, or thought – good or bad – that would take place in his creation. So nothing catches God by surprise. God is sovereign and has no second thoughts. “God is incomprehensible and immeasurable, for whatever it is that we're able to know or sense about God..., he is by many degrees far better.”¹⁰² Nothing harms or shocks him or disturbs him, because “God always abides in his own glory.”¹⁰³ But for us to apprehend this God beyond comprehension, “the Bible uses words of God as if he possessed human passions.”¹⁰⁴ It may not be speaking literally, but it's definitely speaking seriously.

At the mind-boggling interface of the timeless God and our time and space, the only way we can begin to understand is to imagine God heartbroken, to imagine God disturbed, to imagine God disgusted. Only by such impassioned pictures can we reach out to the impassible God. As heavy as the curse weighs on the ground of this globe, so heavy does the evil of earthlings weigh on the mind of their Maker. As bitter and piercing as all the thorns and thistles, such are the arrows of our sins shot into the tenderness of God's purity. More noxious and rotting than the foulest decay to us is the stench which the corruption of creation causes its Creator. The relentlessly imaginative devisings of the human heart are what frustrate the holy heart of Heaven (Genesis 6:5-6).¹⁰⁵ These are agonies of a Father whose children torch the neighborhood and throw away their lives.¹⁰⁶

No wonder God's portrayed this way, to help us understand “the bitterness of our sins.”¹⁰⁷ So God is said to regret his creation, and resolves: “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth – man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heaven – for I am sorry that I made them” (Genesis 6:7). The cost of our dominion over creation is that they share the consequences for our corruption. Since all flesh had “ruined the earth in God's sight” (Genesis 6:11), God will therefore “ruin both them and the earth” (Genesis 6:13).¹⁰⁸ It's “both devastating and undeniably just.”¹⁰⁹ Because human evil had so thoroughly infected earth, the only remedy yet available was a system reboot, wiping things clean.¹¹⁰ ...Yet available.

But in the fullness of time, God would show a fuller solution to human evil, and that was to send forth his Son. God the Son took on human flesh, human blood, a human heart, a human will. And that will never once swayed toward evil. Here was a Son of God who never called evil good or good evil. Here was a Son of God who did not take as he chose, but always receives what his Father gives. Here was a Son of God who came to redeem the sons and daughters of humanity, offering liberty from first to last. Here was a Son of God whose giant goodness worked mighty works on the earth.

Embracing human feelings, he made visible and palpable the grief of God over sin. As he taught us stubborn crowds, “he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5). But in the end, over the very city whose unbelief cried for judgment, he wept hot tears of sorrow (Luke 19:41-44). Facing the darkest depths of human evil, his “soul was very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34). The Son of God offered his life to raise those who had fallen. Only through an agony shared somehow between God and man could the perfect likeness of God in creation take shape, and so “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). Now that, in God's sight, is a hero! He embraced our ruin and devastation, opening his heart to be pierced so sharply. He stretched all human evil from first to last on the length and the width of his cross, excruciatingly bearing it all, to blot out, not human life, but human sin (Psalm 51:9).

“Repent, therefore..., that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19)! And let us not, by further sin, “grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom we were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). “Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil and faithless heart” like the hearts of the failed heroes (Hebrews 3:12), and “do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (Zechariah 8:17). “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart” this day (Ezekiel 18:11), that you may “love the Lord your God with all your heart..., and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This is not easy. “The righteous one falls seven times – and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). In so rising again, “the one who overcomes will be clothed thus in white garments” for an eternal golden age ahead; “and I will never,” says this true Son of God, “never blot his name out of the book of life” (Revelation 3:5). Hallelujah! Amen.

Wars, Tears, and the Altar of God: A Communion Homily

As Josiah stepped to his pulpit, he knew this was an “unnatural and distressing war,” to pit them against their own brethren.¹ No wonder the public authorities had called now for a public day of fasting. A quarter-century ago, when Josiah graduated Harvard as a young man, he'd never dreamt that relations between the colonies and the Crown would grow so sour; but sour they did. Josiah watched as his adopted New-Hampshire raided forts for gunpowder and cannons, founded a constitutional republic, then joined the common declaration of thirteen united states. That was almost seven months ago; Josiah's father had just barely lived to see it.

News now rolled in of General Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton. But the people were troubled. Josiah could feel it. Why should there have had to be such war and strife at all? Were we not all once “friends and brethren,” a single people?² Why had brothers become enemies in war? Even here, neighbors might find themselves on opposite sides, some retaining a quiet loyalty to their erstwhile king, others fiercely committed to the fight for liberty, and yet others deeming a war against brothers to be a moral absurdity, whatever the cause. No one could be so “strangely and criminally inattentive” as not see the tension, the discontent, the social costs.³

For a fast day in troubled times, Josiah knew he had a responsibility to bring a message from the Scriptures, and so he turned his town's attention to the closing chapters of the Book of the Judges. These were the worst of ugly times, when “every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). The town of Gibeah, of the tribe of Benjamin, had descended into depravity worthy of Sodom (Judges 19:22-30). When news got out, the congregation had assembled at Mizpah, listened to the story, and demanded Benjamin surrender the criminals for punishment; but Benjamin not only refused, but mustered an army to fight against Israel (Judges 20:1-16).

The stage was set for civil war within God's not-so-holy nation. The people of Israel traveled from Mizpah to Bethel to consult God at his shrine as to how to go about this war; they were told that Judah should lead the way (Judges 20:17-18). And so in the morning, the battle was joined, believing that with God's command behind them, they'd prevail. But they didn't. Benjamin won an astonishing underdog victory, killing over twenty thousand of their brothers (Judges 20:19-21). In confusion and doubt, Israel consulted God in tears: “Shall we again draw near to fight against our brothers?” (Judges 20:23). And God told them that they must continue on.

“So the people of Israel came near against the people of Benjamin the second day, and Benjamin went against them out of Gibeah the second day and destroyed eighteen thousand men of the people of Israel” (Judges 20:24-25). It was another devastating loss for Israel. Now a tenth of Israel's army had shed their blood in battle at the hands of their brothers. What had gone wrong? As our friend Josiah preached the story, he believed “it pleased God to permit Benjamin to prevail against them in a first and second engagement because there were with them, even with them, great and grievous sins against the Lord their God, for which he would punish them in this awful way.”⁴ That fits with everything else the Book of the Judges tells us. Benjamin might be clearly in the wrong here, they might be in opposition to God's justice in this instance, but don't think for a moment that Israel as a whole is thereby innocent. The very fact that it's come to a civil war is itself evidence that sin has run rampant, that the spiritual state of society had come undone, that the social fabric was in tatters.

Pastor Josiah believed the same was true in his day.⁵ He had “no doubt but that America has been faulty in many things,”⁶ not to mention “the outward, gross, abominable sins that are so rife among us: extravagance, oppression, extortion, profaneness, intemperance, uncleanness, and the like.”⁷ “It is surprising to think how stupid, careless, and secure we in general are, under the very awful hand of God upon us. But truly, sirs, this will never do, to sleep on thus. If we do, I am afraid that God will presently rout us with a dreadful vengeance, for it is an awful thing – a matter of highest insult and provocation to Heaven – for a people thus to trifle and play with the dreadful shaking of the rod of God over them and the brandishing of his glittering spear about them. By and by, if thus we go on, and perhaps sooner than we are aware, God will make us to know our cost.”⁸

But back to Israel. In the wake of their second punishing defeat, the entire Israelite army heads to Bethel with broken hearts. There they “wept, and sat there before the LORD and fasted that day until evening, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD; and the people of Israel inquired of the LORD – (for the Ark of the Covenant was there in those days, and Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, ministered before it in those days) – saying: 'Shall we go out once more to battle against our brothers, the people of Benjamin? Or shall we cease?'” (Judges 20:26-28). The solution, in such times of sorrowful strife and national perplexity, is only found at the altar of God. There, over the altar, Israel sheds their burning tears. There, in front of the altar, Israel hungers and fasts. There, from the altar, Israel burns some offerings and then takes others as shared meals of fellowship with God. And so there, in the days of war, Israel tastes a share of God's peace.

What, though, does all this have to do with us? This story in Judges was over three thousand years ago. Josiah preached his sermon 247 years ago. But ask yourself, does our society today feel much more united than theirs? As you witness what this country is choosing for these and the coming years... do you feel terribly inspired? Or, like Israel of old, does it maybe make you want to weep bitterly? Are we not “full of envy..., strife, deceit, maliciousness..., gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil” (Romans 1:29-31)? I don't think many with their wits still about them would consider these to be our shining-city-on-a-hill days. Pastor Josiah pictured us pretty well in advance as a nation “zealously engaged, some on one side and some on the other, while they neither know nor seriously concern themselves to know with any clear, distinct knowledge,” cherishing whatever's right in our own eyes.⁹ Where can we turn when brothers are at odds, when the social tapestry is frayed and mottled, when calamity and calumny are the theme of the day?

Nowhere else but the altar of God. For the altar built by Israel in the days of Phinehas was a sign, an advance notice, of the sacred table set before us. Phinehas ministered in zeal before the Ark of the Covenant, but Jesus ministers in loving knowledge before his Father's face. “Only the blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, cleanseth us from sin, all sin. O come let us then, a polluted, guilty generation..., immediately lay hold on the hope set before us, embracing this great propitiation...”¹⁰ Here, we trade the bread of tears for the Bread of Life; we trade the wine of wrath for the Wine of Joy. Here at the altar, we grieve our shortfalls and look ahead to the promises in Christ. Here we taste the peace of which this world tries so hard to deprive us. So let us here offer our prayers and tears at the altar of God, not as “mere matters of form without heart,”¹¹ but as sincere cries for the fellowship with the God who desires “that there may be no division in the body” (1 Corinthians 12:25). And “may the Lord of Peace himself give you peace at all times in every way” (2 Thessalonians 3:16). Amen.

A Cry for Relief

We left off last week with the stunning destiny of Enoch, who so walked with God that, rather than have him die like the rest, God simply took him where death couldn't reach him (Genesis 5:21-24). But Enoch left behind him a family, including his son and heir Methuselah. Though some ancient Jews thought Methuselah's name meant something cool like “death is being dismissed,”¹ these days it looks more likely that it means something closer to “man of the spear,” as though he were a great war hero.² Why he'd be named such a thing, if so, is hardly clear, but the thing we all know about Methuselah is that, whether it's literal or figurative, he's got the biggest number listed for his years. He falls short of that fabled benchmark of a thousand by just thirty-one.³

Our focus, though, is the next step of the genealogy, Methuselah's son Lamech. If we're keeping up in our close reading of this chapter beside the one before it, we'll remember that name. Cain also had a descendant named Lamech. That these two chapters give us two men named Lamech – a name carried by nobody in the Bible or in the outside world other than these two guys – is hardly a coincidence; it means something. Scripture's asking us to have them stand next to each other, to look at them together.

In Cain's family, Lamech was the seventh from Adam; but in Seth's family, Lamech is the seventh from Enosh, the guy whose name means the same as Adam's. The first Lamech shows us the blossoming of Adam's Genesis 3 humanity; the other Lamech is the full flower of Enosh's kind of humanity, born to call on the name of the LORD (Genesis 4:26). In either genealogy, the Lamechs are the only two who've anything to say.⁴ Cain's Lamech utters a structurally majestic seven-plus-seven-word poem focused centrally on his own name and actions: it's all about the Lamech show (Genesis 4:23-24). This other Lamech utters a shorter ten-word line empty of every name but one: the name of the LORD (Genesis 5:29).⁵ Those words show Cain's Lamech being totally absorbed in power, boasting, and revenge, while Seth's Lamech is all about prayer, humility, and rescue.⁶ The old Lamech was a perfect life-taker; but this new Lamech will raise a total life-saver.⁷

The Lamech in Cain's family is obsessed with elevating God's defense of Cain into a pretext for insane overkill: he's so much better at vice than Cain, he'll avenge harm done to himself not just sevenfold but seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:24). Lamech advances 7 to 77. But this new Lamech – did you catch how long he lives? “All the days of Lamech were 777 years” (Genesis 5:31), the next step in the progression.⁸ Even though this Lamech has the fewest years of anybody in his line (besides Enoch),⁹ his living thus achieves a whole order of perfection beyond even Cain's Lamech's killing! Cain's line stops dead with an eighth generation from Adam, Lamech's children who excel in culture. But this new Lamech is a ninth generation from Adam, living on past everything named in Cain's legacy. And the reason is so this Lamech's son can be the tenth generation in the list.¹⁰ An old Jewish writer linked them allegorically to Israel's Day of Atonement, which began on the evening of the ninth day of the month and sternly freed Israel from work to fast and pray (Leviticus 23:27-32).¹¹

The point of the Day of Atonement, between the scapegoat and the sacrifice, was to relieve Israel of the buildup of sins, which ritually had been caught in the tabernacle like a filter that needed changed (Leviticus 16:16-19). The high priest would lay the heavy burden of Israel's many sins onto the scapegoat, which carried them off into the desert as though returning the burdens to their source (Leviticus 16:20-22). But Lamech didn't know about any of that yet. He lived and died too soon. Yet Lamech certainly knew something about heavy burdens.

Lamech confesses that the world he knows isn't the world he wants. (Is the world you know the world you wish it were?) Unlike the first Lamech, this one doesn't propose to conquer the world with his violent hands. Instead, this one confesses his hands can't fix the world. It all goes back two chapters to the judgment of his ancestor (Genesis 3:17-19).¹² There, the LORD says to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you!” (Genesis 3:17). That is, for Adam and his wrong, the ground – the 'adamah, in Hebrew – will bear the brunt. The source of Adam's very existence is under divine threat; it's “subjected to futility,” it's stunted and out of shape (Romans 8:20). Now, even after Adam is at last dead and gone, Lamech admits he's an heir to that same “ground that the LORD has cursed” (Genesis 5:29).

That curse turns simple work into sweaty, exhausting labor, that “by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Rather than things coming easy, rather than things being joyful, Lamech's got no whistle while he works, no more than Adam did. Work is hard. Work is rough. Work is taxing. Work wears him out, does a number on his mind and body. Work makes him stiff. It takes everything he's got. But he's got no other choice if he wants to eat. The desperate need of his belly and the bellies of those depending on him force him on, force him to be a slave of dirt, so that his blood, sweat, and tears are the price by which he ransoms life day by day.

And for what? Part of that curse meant that the ground's productivity wouldn't be what Adam had expected, and won't be what Lamech expects. Sometimes, rather than exactly what he meant to grow, rather than everything he poured his sweat into producing, “thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you” (Genesis 3:18). Thistles are one thing – weeds in the field, taking up resources and using them for something humanly useless, hardly helpful when we're counting on something nourishing but instead are consigned to “eat the herb of the field” (Genesis 3:18). Thorns are worse still – they prick, they hurt, they make us bleed as we scratch the dirt. They resist our dominion over creation, they're rebels, signs of the earth's anger with us. Lamech has felt them with his own hands. No wonder “in hardship you shall eat of it” (Genesis 3:17). And Lamech echoes that in his complaint about “our work and the hardship of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). There we have the third and last time that word for 'pain,' 'toil,' 'hardship,' shows up in the whole Old Testament; both the others were spoken to Adam and to Eve (Genesis 3:16-17).¹³ And this hardship, God says, is given to Adam “all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17), after which “you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). That's the culmination of the curse: after all, we are the ground, we're the dirt we till, we're the same base stuff skewed out of sorts, this matter out of sync with its Master and Maker.¹⁴

So that's what Lamech is concerned about: “our work and the painful toil of our hands because of the ground which the LORD has cursed” (Genesis 5:29). He lives amidst the burden of “hard labor and pain from which there seems to be no relief.”¹⁵ In this hard-scrabble life desperate for subsistence out of an uncooperative earth, Lamech is caught in a world that puts every pressure on him to be all work and no play, to see nothing of life beyond digging and planting, laboring and toiling for an uncertain harvest that too often disappoints, barely able to summon the strength to pursue anything human, anything beyond what the day's drudgery entails. One later Jewish paraphrase of Lamech's complaint puts it as “our work which does not succeed and the toil of our hands.”¹⁶ Lamech looks at his works, the things he's sought to accomplish, and he sees a litany of failures; his days are littered with crushed dreams and aborted attempts, with disappointing turns and roads regretfully not taken, with investments that never paid off, and with endeavors that backfired and did nothing but get him dirty.

That sentiment isn't just for poor farmers; it's for all of us, isn't it? Where one early Christian reader lamented here “the condition of distress and difficulty affecting the earth,”¹⁷ a commentary in our days just glosses it as “the hard and painful work of living.”¹⁸ Doesn't that sum it up? Oh, we talk about the way we've got to tough it out, etc., etc., but that doesn't change the reality. Living is harder than it was meant to be at first. Living is complicated and stressful and uncertain. It takes a lot out of us just to get through some days. It disappoints us with thistles. It pricks us with thorns. It dangles what we desire out of reach, and demands our sweaty efforts to get by. It bores us and saps our savor. Things we try don't always work out; sometimes they just make things worse. No wonder an earlier Jewish book paraphrases the subject of Lamech's complaint as “my grief and all of my labor and the land which the LORD has cursed.”¹⁹ That's a new word here: 'grief.' Life isn't just hand-scratching, it's heart-burdening and heart-breaking. Because we live in a world cursed on our account, a world of infected blessings, we're exposed to trial and tribulation, to anxiety and fear, to shame and sorrow, to difficulties and distresses, to pains and perils, to the vicious cycle of laboriousness and laziness and listlessness.

Lamech, for one, finds it hard to cope with the hard work of living. But rather than imitate his namesake in fool's game of mastering life by his fist, he lifts his dirty, thorn-pricked hands to heaven. He cries out for relief, not for himself alone but for the entire human race. He looks, he says, for “relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). 'Relief,' 'comfort,' 'consolation' – throughout the Bible, it often refers to verbal comfort in the face of anxiety or grief. When Joseph's brothers were scared by the loss of their late father's protection, Joseph “comforted them and spoke kindly to them,” reassuring them that they were safe with him (Genesis 50:21). When the Ammonite king's father died, “David sent by his servants to console him concerning his father,” heralding sympathetic solidarity in his grief (2 Samuel 10:2). Maybe Lamech's asking God for a word to help him feel safe, to lift his fallen spirits.

That would be good; that might be necessary. But it's often not enough (Isaiah 22:4). So relief can also be practical, some action taken to ameliorate or soothe a hurt. Job declares, “My bed will comfort me” (Job 7:13) – not by talking, but by being soft and inviting and giving him sleep, a refuge from his many woes. God describes a wounded child as “one whom his mother comforts,” not just by shushing him and telling him he's okay, but by holding him, kissing his boo-boo, bandaging his wound (Isaiah 66:13). In this way, Lamech cries out for a little “easing of the onerous, irksome, anxiety-producing, agonizing labor” by which he bought his days of life,²⁰ a taste of “immediate consolation” in the midst of his daily grind.²¹

But better still, relief can also mean something that doesn't just lighten the load but takes away the burden. The prophets celebrated in advance that “the LORD has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem” (Isaiah 52:9), “he comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden” (Isaiah 51:3). When exiles come home again, God calls that “comforting them and giving them gladness for sorrow” (Jeremiah 31:13). Lamech seems to want more than just a lighter load on the cursed earth; he wants the curse lifted away, relieved by being removed altogether.²² Lamech is looking in hope for someone to come “reset the proper order of the world which was lost” in the days of his ancestor Adam.²³ Lamech is crying out for relief from the curse itself.

And for whatever reason, he takes that hope and he invests it in his newborn son, expecting him to redeem what Lamech's hands have suffered and done: “This one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands from the ground which the LORD has cursed” (Genesis 5:29). One Jewish reader glossed Lamech's hope as saying that this son was born “to bring joy to the earth from all its destruction.”²⁴ Why all these hopes pinned on this little boy? Some have wondered if this boy was the first born after the death of Adam, meaning maybe Lamech hoped that, with the original sinner now reunited with the dust, this boy might inherit an earth beyond Adam's curse.²⁵ Others guessed that, in light of Enoch being taken by God somewhere beyond the reach of death, Lamech could easily make “a pious mistake” in supposing that “that happy day of fulfillment of the promise was near at hand” and that this child was the redeemer.²⁶ Some Jewish traditions imagined that Lamech's son was so unusual at birth – “whiter than snow and redder than a rose..., and when he opened his eyes, his house shone like the sun..., and he opened his mouth and praised the Lord of Eternity” – that Lamech panicked and ran to Methuselah to seek Enoch's reassurances that the boy was truly his son and was just destined for something very special.²⁷ But the early Christians found Lamech to be “a prophet” of “this radiant and most wonderful hope,”²⁸ attesting to “the good God's unspeakable love.”²⁹

And so, as a prophetic prayer, Lamech raises his son with “the hopes of humanity resting on his shoulders.”³⁰ He names that son 'Noah,' a name that comes, not from the Hebrew word for 'relief' that Lamech used already, but from a different but similar-sounding root meaning 'rest,'³¹ a curious fact long recognized.³² So far in Genesis, we've seen this verb just once, when God took Adam and 'rested' him, settled him, in the garden (Genesis 2:15). Later, Moses promises Israel that when they enter their garden of the promised land, “the LORD your God will give you rest from your enemies all around, so that you live in safety” (Deuteronomy 12:10; cf. Joshua 21:44). Some have thought Lamech was looking for deliverance from the evil society around him.³³

But Moses also reminds Israel that the Ten Commandments already commanded that every seventh day, on the sabbath, “your servant may rest as well as you” (Deuteronomy 5:14) – so Lamech, seventh from Enosh, hopes his son Noah, tenth from Adam, will be a sign of that commanded sabbath rest from our labors, the regular rhythm of relief Lamech doesn't yet see or enjoy.³⁴ The other way the Old Testament talks about rest is in escaping out of an oppressive situation. In the “affliction and hard servitude” of the exile, Judah “finds no resting place” (Lamentations 1:3), but the prophet promises a future day when “the LORD has given you rest from your agony and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve” (Isaiah 14:3). Lamech is “seeking rest from the hardship of mankind,” yearning to be set free from the pains that eat away his days and nights – a rest that will ultimately mean being free from his 'affliction and hard servitude' under the curse.³⁵

His cry is our cry! We want to live in peace and safety, we want to take a break from our labors, we want to be set free from slavery! Isn't that what everyone should want? Isn't it disturbing how wrapped up we as a culture are in our work, that it's infected our souls so much that it's where we seek our identity, where we take our name and our purpose, where we invest our sweat and tears? Isn't it sad how we treat ourselves and others like machines to produce and consume, produce and consume, all while worrying about the dangers of life and trying in vain to insulate ourselves from the inevitable? Don't we want rest, not from work as such but from agony and turmoil and hard service? I know I do. But everywhere in the Bible, rest isn't just from this or from that; it's always “rest for worship and obedience.”³⁶ No wonder God describes his temple as his “resting place” (Psalm 132:14) and says it can only be built by “a man of rest” (1 Chronicles 22:9).

In giving voice to his and our heart-cry for relief and rest that will free him to worship, and in openly naming before the LORD his expectation that God hasn't meant the curse to be forever, Lamech becomes “a man of hope and anticipation for a better future.”³⁷ And he invests those hopes in Noah.

How could Noah bring Lamech's better future to the world? Some later Jewish rabbis gave the guess that Noah invented a plough, which could harness animal strength to alleviate the burdens of farming by hand.³⁸ Some suggested Noah brought rest in the sense that all human works stopped during the flood,³⁹ or that death in the flood was a kind of rest for the people of his generation,⁴⁰ or that Noah gained 'rest' in being preserved from moral corruption.⁴¹ Others looked after the flood, at him bringing relief through the offering he made with its soothing aroma (Genesis 8:21),⁴² or at his invention of a relaxing glass of wine to enjoy after the day's work (Genesis 9:20),⁴³ or simply at the fact that in Noah a new and better humanity could inherit God's blessing.⁴⁴

But early Christians observed that “what Lamech his father says is not appropriate to the ancient Noah.”⁴⁵ After all, even if Noah did every one of those things, we're still toiling and sweating and dying among the thistles and the thorns. In fact, a different form of the same verb Lamech uses for 'relief' will show up ironically nine verses later to talk about God's regret in having made us at all (Genesis 6:6), turning Lamech's hopes on their head.⁴⁶ Noah brings, at best, “a temporary restoration of rest from the curse,” not its lasting solution.⁴⁷ One Jewish tradition observed that Lamech was really asking for someone to “console us from our evil deeds and from the robbery of our hands.”⁴⁸ Early Christians agreed: Lamech was seeing a son “to rid us from evil,” from all the troubles multiplied in the world by our own hands' “efforts and evil behavior.”⁴⁹ Noah can't do that. He can point you down, but not carry you down, the ancient path to “find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16).

The hope Lamech invested in his son Noah has to be handed down, generation by generation, until it comes to someone who can carry what Noah can't.⁵⁰ That calls for an ultimate Son of Noah – greater than Shem, Ham, or Japheth (Genesis 5:32), greater than Lamech, greater than Noah. One commentary observes that Noah, “while not achieving his father's highest aspirations, keeps alive the hope of a final deliverer.”⁵¹ Such a hope, such a call, can only be fulfilled by “the Spiritual Noah” who was to come out of the first Noah's line, “who is Jesus Christ.”⁵² Noah was born as “a type of Christ,” a shadow of the One who'd be his substance, the real Noah.⁵³

When it comes to the burdens of sin that have lain heavy on us from before our birth, “there is no doubt that the charges brought against the transgression committed in Adam have been remitted in Christ.”⁵⁴ As one medieval monk put it, “the relief or consolation with which this True Noah – namely, the Son of God – consoles us is the remission of sins that he grants to us.”⁵⁵ Like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, he carries our burdens of sin and guilt and curse into the desert of death.⁵⁶ “Christ redeemed us from the curse... by becoming a curse for us... so that in Christ Jesus, the blessing... might come... through faith” (Galatians 3:13-14).

And he invites us – us, who work and work and never seem to get anywhere; us who carry heavy burdens on our backs and in our hearts; us, who sweat for the bread of this world, who gnaw at the thistles of frustration, who scratch ourselves bloody on the thistles of pain and misfortune; us, who have calloused hands and blistered souls – yes, he invites us: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He echoes the words of the wise Jewish poet: “Come to me, you who are uneducated..., put your neck under the yoke [of wisdom]... See with your eyes that I have toiled a little and have found for myself a great deal of relief.”⁵⁷ That's what Jesus wants for us! He offers to teach us this new way of living, this divine wisdom and saving truth: “Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). He's the gentle ruler, he's the caring and compassionate teacher, he's the Savior who won't snuff out our candle that's fading to dark in its weakness (Matthew 12:20).

What happens if we humble ourselves at this Master's feet? What happens if we turn to work in his field, pulling his light and uncomplicated yoke of mercy? What if we trade our heart-breaking burdens, our burnout burdens, for his buoyant burden of heart-bursting joy (Matthew 11:30)? What if we trade our toils in the cursed earth for the cross that lifts us up from earth on itself? What if our thorns become the sufferings that sanctify and glorify? Then “you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29) – which not Noah but Christ can give.⁵⁸ In simple trust and obedience, Christ summons us from our sorrows and worries, our fears and frustrations, and makes us “rest from the works of iniquity.”⁵⁹ “Christ, then, has become our righteousness and rest.”⁶⁰

Not only does this Savior give us personal forgiveness, not only does he secure humanity's forgiveness, but he came to “bring about the restoration of the world,” for which “the curse must be removed.”⁶¹ And in offering up his life for his creation, Christ already has begun “delivering the earth from the ancient curse,” such that early Christians marveled that “through him God the Father restores all things to their pristine state.”⁶² Where those in hell “have no rest, day or night,” the “call for the endurance of the saints” is that those in heaven “rest from their labors, for their deeds” – the deeds of hands redeemed – “follow them” (Revelation 14:11-13). And when “the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven” to make all things new, it will mean “relief to you who are afflicted” (2 Thessalonians 1:7). Therefore, as one early Christian teacher said, when you read this passage, look to Jesus Christ, and “you will find him to be the One who has truly given rest to men and has freed the earth from the curse with which the Lord God cursed it..., this Spiritual Noah who has given rest to men and has taken away the sin of the world.”⁶³ Thanks be to God for this hope of rest, “the comfort of the saints!”⁶⁴ Amen.

The One God Took

If you were with us last Sunday, we began to tackle one of everyone's favorite parts of the Bible: a genealogy. Specifically, Genesis chapter 5 is the family line through Seth that connects Adam to Noah. But even though it gets pretty repetitive, we got some understanding by comparing it to a list Sumerians kept of cities and kings they said were before the flood. We appreciated, by contrast, that Genesis 5 doesn't celebrate kings but focuses on people as husbands and dads. But this litany of life also hammers home, time and again, the inevitability of death – Adam dies, Seth dies, Enosh dies, and so on – as “death reigned from Adam to Moses” (Romans 5:14).

Except... there's one weird paragraph in the genealogy that breaks the mold. I warned you last Sunday that we have a troublemaker on our hands! So who is this Enoch fellow? At first, he seems to follow all the rules, fit all the formulas. He, like the rest, is somebody's son, entering the picture when fathered by Jared (Genesis 5:18). He's got brothers and sisters (Genesis 5:19), he gets married, he has sons and daughters (Genesis 5:21-22). All pretty normal. But if you can count even on your fingers, you know to pay attention to him. Starting with Adam as #1, Enoch is placed as the seventh in line – and you know how the Bible likes that number!

There are three things about Enoch that break the mold. We expect we'll read that, after he fathered his heir, he lived such-and-so-many years; instead, we read that “Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years” (Genesis 5:22). Those words crop up out of nowhere! Whatever it means, it's different than living an ordinary life this side of Eden's gates. Second, we're used to everybody in this genealogy living between 890 and 1000 years, but Enoch's number is way off. “All the days of Enoch were 365 years” (Genesis 5:23). If these numbers are all symbolic, that one should be a symbol we understand. What pops into your head, even today, when you hear the number '365'? It was a year, wasn't it? But what kind of year? What defines that year of 365 days? It's the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun; it's a solar year. Which isn't the kind of year that Israel recognized with their mainstream calendar; it's never 365 days from one Passover to the next. This is... odd.

But then, third, we expect to read, after adding up Enoch's days to just 365 years, that 'he died.' It's been the promised pattern – after all, death reigns over humanity, it's a universal law. Given that Enoch's life has been so much shorter than the rest, if it ends in his death we'll judge him as low in honor.¹ But Enoch was different: he didn't just live, he walked with God – and so, even here where we expect his death, “Enoch walked with God.” So, rather than die, Enoch suddenly disappears. “He was not,” Genesis says. Nobody could find him, no matter where on earth they looked! Why? Genesis responds cryptically that “God took him” (Genesis 5:24). The last time in Genesis God 'took' anybody, it was back when “the LORD God took the human being and put him in the garden of Eden” (Genesis 2:15).² So early Christians accepted that this verse here means that “God transported him,” Enoch, “to paradise,”³ whether this meant the Garden of Eden on earth,⁴ or some paradise in heaven.⁵ As for the details, “we should not pry into secrets but be grateful for what is written.”⁶

To appreciate what Genesis wants to tell us about this Enoch fellow, it invites us to make three comparisons, the first of which takes us outside the Bible. Remember that this whole genealogy is in dialogue with the Sumerian list of kings before the flood. That list usually reserved its seventh spot for a man named Enmedurana, also known as Enmeduranki.⁷ His name means something like 'Lord of the Cosmic Ordinances of the Bond between Heaven and Earth.' The standard length of his reign was 21,000 years, but actually different editions of the king list give him anywhere from 4,000 to 72,000 years.⁸ He ruled from Zimbir, a northern Sumerian city sacred to Utu, the Sumerian god of justice and of the sun. (No wonder Enoch's linked to the solar year.⁹) The Babylonians had a tradition where this sun-god and the storm-god summoned Enmeduranki into the assembly of the gods, put him on a golden throne, and taught him secret mysteries to reveal when he returned to his city.¹⁰ But where Enmedurana visits his gods, Enoch walks always with the only true God. Finally, the Babylonians paired Enmedurana with a wise counselor, Utuabzu, who – according to their lore – “ascended into heaven.”¹¹

So Genesis is in dialogue here with the Sumerians and Babylonians. But it's also in dialogue with itself. In this genealogy, we've got to keep Cain's family in our peripheral vision. It's not for nothing that this descendant of Seth is named Enoch when Cain had a son also named Enoch (Genesis 4:17)! Like Enmedurana in Zimbir, the Enoch in Cain's family is absorbed in the city of this world. That's why Cain's son has that name, which can mean 'dedication,' like laying a cornerstone for a building project. But it can also mean 'initiated one,'¹² for this Enoch goes beyond the other and gives his attention to spiritual things.¹³ He answers his Cainite namesake that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). And so instead of an urban frenzy, this Enoch is set apart from the other one by his “exceptional piety and devotion to God.”¹⁴

As seventh in Seth's line from Adam, Enoch represents the fullness of Seth's way to be human, just as Lamech, the seventh in Cain's line from Adam, represents the fullness of Cain's way to be human. Where one blossoms in brutality, the other blooms in peace.¹⁵ Lamech clings tightly to defense of his earthly life and goods by any deadly means necessary. But Enoch, because he trusts God completely, is so unconcerned with these things that he freely gives them away; and so God snatches him away from Lamech's world without tasting death.¹⁶

Enoch shows us that, while “death may reign from Adam to Moses” (Romans 5:14), God doesn't take that as a final word. Enoch, born in original sin like the rest of us, may pay the wages of sin eventually, but that payday is deferred indefinitely for a special purpose.¹⁷ Early Christians concluded that “God took Enoch away to himself... to make known to Death that its power is not forever over all children of Adam.”¹⁸ He serves advance notice to Death itself that Christ is on the way! Enoch's sign “suggests the resurrection that was to come.”¹⁹

And if we want to know why it was that Enoch was chosen to step outside the “vicious cycle of sin and death,”²⁰ look no further than the double declaration that “Enoch walked with God” (Genesis 5:22, 24). We've turned that expression into something of a cliché, I'm afraid. But it's actually quite radical. Walking with God was how Adam and Eve were meant to live in the Garden, but after they taste sin, they do the exact opposite thing: they hide from God, avoiding fellowship with him. Enoch picks up, somehow, on the sort of relationship with God that the Garden was about. Different commentators describe Enoch's 'walk' as an “ongoing companionship of life” between himself and God,²¹ as a “supernatural, intimate fellowship with God,”²² or even as “a habitual, consistent, and constant relationship with God... each moment of each day.”²³

The prophet Amos asks, “Do two walk together unless they have agreed to meet?” (Amos 3:3). The answer is no. Enoch walking with God is no accident, but a daily intention of his pious devotion. He chooses to go with God where God is going, he chooses to submit his decisions to God and be responsive to God, he chooses a life that is consistently about more than the life of this world. As one medieval monk put it, Enoch “followed the will and commandments of God in everything..., God tarrying in him and possessing and ruling his heart.”²⁴ That's what it means to walk with God, and not aimlessly or away from God. And, as one old bishop observed, “it was for no short period that he followed this virtuous way,” but for the fullness of his life to the end.²⁵ We are, then, far too flippant about the phrase 'walk with God.' We use it much too loosely. It's a rare and precious gift, this walking with God. And yet we are meant, we are called, to walk with him, to allow God to be our ongoing companion each day, to have fellowship with him undisturbed by even lighter sins, to cultivate an observance of his will and a relationship with God through his Spirit poured out to us beyond what Enoch knew.

What's remarkable about Enoch's walk with God, moreover, is that Enoch didn't have to withdraw from his life in order to do it. Enoch walked with God while married to his wife. Enoch walked with God while changing Methuselah's diapers. Enoch walked with God while doing whatever he did to put food on the family table for a growing number of sons and daughters. In the words of one reader, Enoch proved “capable of achieving the highest moral perfection while remaining intimately concerned with the world around him.”²⁶ Enoch proves that eternity isn't only for a spiritual elite in the sense of ascetics who strive to distance themselves from worldly life to live like angels on the earth – as much praise as Jesus has for those who become “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12), and as much as Paul worries that “the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:33-34). To prove that you can walk with God outside a monastery, Enoch “was temperate and begot children.”²⁷ Enoch shows us, in the words of one great bishop, that “as long as we are on our guard, neither marriage nor bringing up children nor anything else will be able to stand in the way of our being pleasing to God.”²⁸

And Enoch did this – early Christians made a big deal out of this observation – long before the commandments and covenants given through Moses or Abraham or even Noah. Therefore, Enoch was “able to please God without the burden of the law.”²⁹ How? The New Testament answer is that “by faith... he was commended as having pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5). His reverent obedience, his mature worship – they all stemmed from the fact that Enoch had a fullness of faith.³⁰ Before any of the revelations given through Moses, Enoch had the faith that God exists and rewards those who seek him, and by that faith Enoch was able to walk closely with God (Hebrews 11:6). So, again as a medieval monk put it, by faith Enoch “performed the life and discipline of those who, in the faith of the Lord's passion, await the joy of eternal salvation, denying themselves and bearing their cross daily..., walking with the Lord and directing their course toward the entrance to Paradise.”³¹ Enoch shows us a lived faith amidst of everyday life, faith that yields “a long obedience in the same direction,” as they say.³²

By our standards, Genesis gives Enoch a long, long obedience indeed – over three centuries. But by the lights of Genesis 5, Enoch disappears as practically a young man in his prime. But even at his departure, that doesn't mean Enoch was done living, or that he didn't have a future ahead of him. Your vocation may be bigger than your days. Early Christians remarked that Enoch is “preserved until now as a witness of God's just judgment.”³³ And not only that, but in the Bible's last book, there's a mysterious passage where God will “grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth..., and when they have finished their testimony, the Beast that rises from the abyss will make war on them and conquer them and kill them..., but after the three and a half days, a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet..., and they went up to heaven in a cloud” (Revelation 11:3-12). Already by the third century, some wondered if Enoch and Elijah might be those witnesses.³⁴ Christians came to wait for Enoch to “return with Elijah for the conversion of this age.”³⁵ Though his 365 years were done, they believed Enoch still had work to do in God's plan – and though heaven is resting in God from earthly labors, our calling is bigger than our days, too.

Enoch receives so few lines in the Bible, and yet when it comes to this cryptic passage of Genesis that gives us so much wisdom, Martin Luther thought these words “should be written in letters of gold and be impressed most deeply on the heart.”³⁶ Ancient Jews certainly thought so, because of the earliest Jewish books we have outside the Old Testament, many of them are books about Enoch. People were fascinated by this mysterious guy in Genesis 5, they knew there had to be more to the story, and they weren't satisfied to have Enoch vanish without a trace or legacy left behind.³⁷ If Moses had his books, they were sure there ought to be “books of Enoch the Righteous.”³⁸ So some Jews began to write them themselves.

Out of the crucible of exile in Babylon, and then through a flood of Greek culture courtesy of Alexander the Great, ancient Jews were dazzled with a wealth of new ideas.³⁹ After Alexander the Great died in Babylon in June of 323 BC, Judah became frontier territory during decades of civil war between his generals fighting over pieces of his empire; they seemed to stride the earth like giants.⁴⁰ In that context, Jews turned to the perplexing passage where “the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took for themselves wives, whichever they chose” (Genesis 6:2), and so “the Nephilim were on earth in those days..., when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man, and they bore children to them” (Genesis 6:4). They came up with a story – and I'm not saying the Bible teaches this – about a group of 200 angels called Watchers (cf. Daniel 4:17) who came down to earth during the days of Enoch's father 'Jared,' whose name means 'descent'; one of them, Shemihazah, led the others in swearing an oath at Mount Hermon (north of Galilee) to marry human women and have children, despite knowing this would be a sin.⁴¹ These women proceeded to give birth to giants, whose fleshly human bodies could barely handle the spiritual immensity of having angels for fathers, leading to intense hunger, cannibalism, drinking blood – nasty stuff.⁴²

In this Book of the Watchers, when God gives orders to his chief angels to execute judgment on the Watchers and their violent giant children,⁴³ both of which have become unclean through their behavior, God's angels task Enoch, the 'scribe of righteousness,' with announcing to them their judgment.⁴⁴ The fallen Watchers beg Enoch to be their go-between with God, and to present their pleas for mercy,⁴⁵ but after he prays for them, Enoch dreams he enters God's heavenly palace and hears the bad news that the Watchers' sins are unforgivable and that when the giants die, because they're half-angel and half-man, their spirits will roam the earth as unclean 'evil spirits,' continuing to trouble and lead humanity astray until the day of judgment.⁴⁶ 

Around this tale are added an introduction, which is quoted in the New Testament (Jude 14-15),⁴⁷ and then Enoch's angel-guided tour of creation.⁴⁸ The last stretch of this tour sums up another early Enoch book, the Book of the Luminaries, where instead of the sun-god Utu/Shamash teaching Enmeduranki from the 'tablet of the gods,' Enoch is taught Babylonian astronomy from the 'tablets of heaven' by an angel named Uriel, 'God is my light.'⁴⁹ This book fiercely argues for use a 364-day solar calendar; following any other calendar, it suggests, is a sin.⁵⁰

Living under contentious but stable Greek rule, Jews kept writing books starring Enoch.⁵¹ One, the Dream Visions of Enoch, consists of two dreams Enoch had during his younger days before he got married, which now he decides to share before he leaves earth.⁵² One of those visions includes a story called the Animal Apocalypse, which retells the entire history of the Old Testament using animals, dubbing God as 'Lord of the Sheep.'⁵³ The other book, the Epistle of Enoch, is set up as Enoch's last words to his family.⁵⁴

But after these books, another was written in Mary Magdalene's hometown in Galilee while Jesus was growing up less than thirty miles away in Nazareth: the Parables of Enoch.⁵⁵ In it, Enoch relays messages about the final judgment from three 'parable' visions. In the first one, he sees that God, the 'Lord of Spirits,' has entrusted his secrets to a Chosen One who will vindicate all those who live righteously in the face of oppression.⁵⁶ In the second vision, Enoch learns that the Chosen One is also known as the Son of Man, who has been known by God since before the stars were made and who is destined to rule an everlasting kingdom while seated on God's own throne.⁵⁷ In the third vision, Enoch sees that this Chosen One, this Son of Man, is the one who will judge humanity.⁵⁸ And the kings of the earth “will fall on their faces in his presence, and they will worship and set their hope on that Son of Man, and they will... petition for mercy from him,” but time's up.⁵⁹ At the very end of the book, there's a great twist: God emerges from his fiery house, Enoch says, “and all my flesh melted, and my spirit was transformed,” and God announces to Enoch face-to-face: “You are that Son of Man!”⁶⁰

Are these books Scripture? Again, no, no they are not. But because these ideas were floating around Galilee at the time, they help us understand Jesus. In the Book of the Watchers, God tells Michael to “bind [the Watchers] for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth until the day of their judgment..., then they will be led away to the fiery abyss.” When Luke traces Jesus' family back to Adam, guess how many generations Jesus is after Enoch? You guessed it: Luke counts seventy (Luke 3:23-37)! And if the Watchers mixed heaven and earth with unnatural bonds of sexual defilement, Jesus unites heaven and earth supernaturally by being born of a virgin.⁶¹

In his ministry, where so many of his neighbors put their hopes in a heavenly Enoch and his revelations, Jesus declared that “no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (John 3:13). He makes clear that Enoch isn't that promised Son of Man; Jesus himself is the Son of Man. He reveals his identity to his disciples with Mount Hermon in the background (Matthew 16:13-17).⁶² His appearance on earth opens a window for mercy to those who repent, because if he's got authority to judge, he's got authority on earth to forgive sins (Mark 2:10).⁶³ And where Enoch held out hope for the righteous to one day feast beside the Son of Man,⁶⁴ even while admitting that “no human is righteous before the Lord,”⁶⁵ Jesus invites even sinners to eat at his table here and now (Luke 7:34). Jesus travels the land, overpowering the monstrously strong unclean spirits (Mark 5:1-13),⁶⁶ and teaching in parables that share many themes with some of the Parables of Enoch.⁶⁷ He has the authority to “reveal the eternal mysteries that are in heaven,”⁶⁸ and none is greater than the gospel “kept secret for long ages but now disclosed... to bring about the obedience of faith” (Romans 16:25-26).

Jesus emphasized the perplexing idea that the Son of Man, this glorious chosen figure, had come to earth to suffer with the outcasts (Mark 8:31). And that's exactly what Jesus does: after betrayed by a disciple who ought to wish he'd never been born (Mark 14:21),⁶⁹ Jesus carries his cross to Calvary; he dies beneath the mockery of the 'bulls of Bashan' (Psalm 22:12; cf. Matthew 27:39-44). But he rises from the dead in life more immortal than Enoch's, and the Apostle Peter adds that in the spirit he “went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison,” the ones who disobeyed God before the flood – that is, the Watchers (1 Peter 3:19).⁷⁰ If Enoch was sent to warn of God's preliminary judgment, Jesus goes to proclaim that he's accomplished God's victory at last!

Where Enoch was at best assumed into heaven, 'taken' by God, Jesus ascends through his own power and choice which perfectly harmonize with God's will. Enoch may have been taken God-knows-where, but, although he portrays these greater things as a sign of them, even Enoch hasn't yet “received what was promised, since God has provided something better for us, that apart from us [Enoch] should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:39-40).⁷¹ On that day, Jesus will be the Son of Man seated on “the throne of his glory” (Matthew 19:28; 25:31), sending those who rejected him into “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), but welcoming his sheep to his side in “the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).⁷² “Formerly you were worn out by evils and tribulations,” he might say, “but now you will shine like the luminaries of heaven..., and the portals of heaven will be opened for you.”⁷³ On that day, we will know what it means to confess Jesus Christ as our Lord, the Son of Man, the one to whom Enoch in faith pointed all along! For not Enoch the taken, but Christ the Taker, is Lord! “Blessed will be all who listen” to his words, for “that they may lean on him and not fall,” and so “they will be saved.”⁷⁴ “Our Lord is faithful in all his deeds and his judgment and his justice.”⁷⁵ “All who dwell on the earth will... worship before him!”⁷⁶ Amen.