Genesis 4,5,6. Let the Games Begin.
A few years ago there was an unusual painting of a chess game in a museum. In the painting, a young boy sat on one side of the board and the devil sat on the other side. The boy had a defeated look on his face. The devil had a smile on his. On the chess board, the pieces were arranged in such a way that it looked as if the devil had the boy in checkmate. One day along came a famous chess master who was intrigued by the painting. He studied the chess board. After a while, he ordered someone to bring him a chess board and to set it up just like it was in the painting. Then he said, "I think I can save that boy."
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That is where we are now in Genesis 4. The devil checkmated Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Or so it appeared. The Lord made a promise to Satan in which He said, "I will save that man and woman." The promise had been made. A Redeemer would come from Eve to avenge her and Adam and crush Satan's head. Satan heard those words. In fact, the promise was made to him. Right then Satan knew that his life was in danger and that he had one of two options. He either had to prevent the Seed from being born, or he had to kill it once it had been born.
The paragraph above is the basic story of the rest of the Bible. No matter what you read, beginning with Genesis 4 you are always reading something related to the story line above. One could say the main story of the Bible is God's promise to bring His Redeemer. The sub-plot would be Satan doing all in his power to stop Him. To put it another way, human events of every kind take place in the Bible. That is the action taking place on the stage in FRONT of thecurtain. But BEHIND the curtain, directing all the visible action and giving it meaning, is the paragraph above. This is the part that is usually missing in most Bible teaching and preaching. This is why one can go to church all of his life and almost have no idea what the stories in the Bible are all about or how they are tied together.
But the second paragraph above can also be reduced to just ONE word: JESUS. The whole Bible is about Jesus Christ. Every event, every story, every person is about Jesus Christ. The Bible is not about moralisms or how to live your life or be a better person. It is PRIMARILY about Jesus. Application to one's life certainly comes from the Bible in many ways, but the Bible is about Jesus and the second paragraph above. Therefore, Jesus must always be presented as the primary subject when teaching or preaching Scripture. If He is not, then the teacher missed the real point of the Bible's purpose and message.
To put this another way, Revelation 12:1-5 gives a summary of the entire Old Testament and the four Gospels. The rest of the verses in Revelation 12 summarize the rest of the New Testament. In verses 1-5, a glorious woman appears in the heavens. She stands on the moon with a crown of 12 stars on her head. She is decked with radiant light from the sun. Her most noticeable feature is that she is pregnant with child and is about to give birth. Standing directly in front of her is a hideous, mutated crimson dragon with seven diademed heads and ten horns. His huge tail sweeps down through the universe. No matter where she turns, the dragon always positions himself directly in front of her because he wants to devour that child as soon as He is born.
To interpret, the woman was originally Eve and the Redeemer child she would bear. But the picture now is clearly figurative and Eve has become the church of the Old Testament. In the womb of the church in the Old Testament was "a male child, One who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron." (Revelation 12:5) That was Jesus, that Seed from Eve who was not born directly to her but was passed along from generation to generation through a chosen line in her family. The repulsive creature is Satan (Revelation 12:9). As the ages and events of Scripture passed, Satan watched and waited for the woman's Seed to appear. Many times he moved his king or queen directly into the path of the Redeemer in the Old Testament and attempted to end the game. But Revelation 12: 5 summarizes the Gospels like this: "...but her child was caught up to God and to his home." Satan attempted to kill Him. It appeared that Satan's queen landed right on top of the Redeemer at the cross, but the child escaped Satan's clutches by rising from the dead and ascending back to heaven. The rest of Revelation 12 is about the war that Satan is waging on the Child's seed in revenge since he had missed killing the Seed Himself.
As you read Genesis 4 and 5, you see the devil's strategy evolve as time passes. It speaks of the nature and the intelligence of this creature God made. Such affront and audacity before the Creator by one of His creations should have been unimaginable. But these ploys are masterpieces. They were effective then, and they are still effective today. Satan uses them over and over even until now as he wars against the church. It is amazing that a creature could devise and employ such bold, courageous, and defiant moves against his Creator. But here they are. There are four of them. He pulled out every stop to insure that his head was never crushed.
First, Satan Brought Direct Frontal Attack Against the Redeemer
As both Satan and Eve heard God's promise about the woman's Seed in the Garden of Eden, it would have been logical for both of them to assume that the first immediate offspring of Eve would be the Redeemer. The woman and the devil both probably concluded that since God's judgments in Chapter 3 were immediate, so would be His deliverance. So when Eve became pregnant by Adam, she must have deduced that the one-man cavalry who would avenge her was on His way. She thought that she had acquired the man promised to her. Thus she gave her first born son, Cain, his name, which means "Acquired", or, "I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord." The devil may have thought the same thing when he heard Cain's name and must have assumed that Cain was the Redeemer too. However, just as everyone was concentrating on Cain, another son named Abel, meaning "breath, vapor, or vanity" (indicating that both parents were already feeling the results of the curse on them), was born. Now there were two potential avengers. This was getting confusing. It is interesting to note that both Cain and Abel worshipped the Lord. So there must have been some revelation we do not know about to indicate the proper way to worship the Creator after Eden. One of the brothers conformed to that standard of worship, and one did not. Cain offered to God labor from his ground. Abel offered a sacricial animal, indicating atonement for sin by blood. The latter was accepted; the former was not. Since Cain had not made a move against the devil and the Lord also rejected Cain's offering, Satan realized that God was using misdirection to divert him from the Conqueror. He concluded the righteous son of Eve, Abel, was the Redeemer instead. Therefore, Satan moved swiftly in the heart of Cain with jealousy and hatred and with Cain's hands killed the woman's supposed Seed, Abel, just as surely as if he had employed his own hands. This method of a straightforward, personal assault to kill the Seed by directing someone else's hands would also be used by Satan as his very last act against the Redeemer in the New Testament. To make an analogy, Satan's most powerful tool was himself. He thought he saw the Lord's King on the board and decided to make a straight path to him. So with his queen, he swept all the way across the board down an unblocked lane and knocked Him off the board for an instant defeat. How simple that must have seemed to the Tempter to have dispatched The Promise with such ease. He had dishonored God in the Garden, and now he had dispatched his great Champion as well. The devil was no fool. He was a Grandmaster too. He could think ahead, and he could act instantly through another with abrupt counter-moves to the Promise when opportunites like that presented themselves. But Satan soon discovered that Abel was not the Seed either. The King wasn't even on the playing surface yet. It was only a decoy. If Satan thought he was confused now, there were going to be complications of mathematical proportions for him to decipher as time progressed.
Second, Satan Used His Own Pawns Against the Redeemer
Genesis 4 and 5 gives the history of two family lines - Adam's line through his son Cain and Adam's line through his son Seth. Genesis 4 is the development of Cain's family line. Through Cain's family can be seen man's efforts at carrying out part of the Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1:28 of increasing in numberand filling the earth, as civilization and cities (4:17) were built. The latter part of the chapter shows man's progress in subduing the earth as from the ground he learns to make tents, study animal husbandry, raise livestock, invent music and make musical instruments, and explore mining and forge tools. All these events imply a long passage of time and the development of society on the earth. But Cain's line also shows the evolution and maturity of sin, corruption, and violence in the human family through murder, revenge, and polygamy. Satan was at work in God's world so that when and if another possible Conqueror should mysteriously appear again, there were going to be powerful and creative forces of resistance under his command surrounding the Redeemer on every hand, forces so full of brutality and bloodshed that killing the Seed would require little effort from a world under the devil's control. If the devil's queen did not take Him out, then his rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns would be at his disposal if any other bounties appeared on the devil's head. When one reads Genesis 4 and 6, there is one word that best describes the known world before the Flood. Violence (Genesis 6:11). The seed of the serpent predicted in Genesis 3:15 thrived and increased with newly born disciples bred on violence and steeped in progressive decay to do Satan's will. There would be many people and a world system capable of eliminating any Conqueror.
In Genesis 4:25, God finally makes His first move against Satan. Whereas the devil thought the King had been eliminated, God put His King into play. He gave Adam another son, Seth. This is the second family line highlighted in these chapters. God is not hasty. He had a plan. Unknown to all concerned, there were centuries and millennia to go for Him to carry out His plan. God was going to take His time and set it all up just like He wanted so He would get the devil to do just what He wanted him to do. In the end, the diabolical Grandmaster would be a mere pawn in God's own hand, and the Lord would play him like a symphony. So Eve is given another son, Seth, which means "Appointed". She said that God had appointed another son in the place of her murdered son Abel. By faith, she indicated in this name she gave him that God's Promise had not been killed after all. The effect of this move was that the godly line rejoiced and expressed sure hope in the Lord through Seth by not only Seth's birth but his son's birth, Enosh, too. They began to give praise to God and call upon Him when they realized Seth's line was secure and continued on. If Seth was not the Promised Seed, then he was the father of Him. God was making good on His promise in Genesis 3. All of this commotion and the name given to Seth aroused the devil's interest afresh. So he swerved directly in front of the pregnant woman of Revelation 12 and focused keenly on this man.
Genesis 5 is almost like a shell game. In a shell game, a pea is hidden beneath one of three walnut shells. The Operator quickly shuffles the shells around while the mark tries to keep his eye on the one with the pea. Satan watched Seth and his children in Genesis 5 while God's hands flew like lightning on the board. Satan's eyes dazzled. It was very difficult for Satan to keep track of who was who and where everyone was. For example, Adam lived another 800 years after Seth's birth and "had other sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:4) Was Seth another example of God's slight of hand? Was Seth just another fake King? Was the real King in those other children of Adam's? In addition to this, Seth and his wife were very fruitful. Seth lived another 807 years after the birth of Enosh and "had other sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:7) Thus God's promise shrouded itself somewhere in the midst of Seth's line. But where? Though the devil lurked closely, the Promise dived beneath the visible surface like a German U-boat sliding beneath the dark depths of the Atlantic and hid Himself from the sight of the dragon as he slipped along silently from person to person over thousands of years without making a peep or move. "Which one is the Avenger?" the devil must have asked. Of the thousands, maybe millions, of children born up until the Flood, which one was the Promise? Quietly through the bedrooms of the ancient world and the boredom of normal family life, the Promise passed along through a few chosen men and women who unknowingly carried with them the Creator of the universe who would someday be man.
The New Testament lists two genealogies of Jesus Christ. One is in Matthew 1. It traces Jesus from Joseph back to Abraham through David to establish His kingly descent. The other traces Him from Mary to David to Abraham to Adam in Luke 3 to establish his kingly descent and humanity as a qualified man who was the Seed of the woman and the son of Adam and the son of Seth. The Jews kept strict records of the family line of the Redeemer in their genealogies for thousands of years that most people find boring to read. But these genealogies possess the proof needed for Jesus to one day make the claim that He was the Messiah and King over Israel. An imposter and fraud could be rooted out by the Redeemer's family tree contained in the sacred scrolls. All the names mentioned in Genesis 5 are listed in Luke 3:36, 37 because they are the men who carried the Promise in their loins back to Seth and to Adam and Eve.
As the Seed progressed through Seth's family, sin washed over the human race and strengthened its grip on every man. One notices that the long years of life men possessed at the beginning of Genesis 5 slowly diminish as he reads what happens after Genesis 6. All of Adam's children met the end that God promised in Genesis 2:17. The curse fell upon everyone. There is a sad refrain at the end of nearly every paragraph in Chapter 5, "and he died...and he died...and he died." Romans 5:12 says, "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned."
Third, Satan Flipped the Enemy's Pieces To His Side
The Promise finally passed to the last man mentioned in Genesis 5 – Noah and one of those three sons, Shem, Ham, or Japheth. We don't know how long the events of Genesis 4 and 5 took before the Flood. But we do know that it was at least thousands of years because of the long lives of the pre-flood people. The pre-flood world was a developed civilization. But it became a notoriously wicked world. While the Promise sailed under the radar of the dragon in Genesis 4 and 5, the Prince of Darkness worked in God's human creation through those chapters. What he did and what happened is all explained in Genesis 6:1-13. The earth had become full of vile and exceedingly sinful humans. His next ploy fused together the godly seed of the woman in Genesis 5 with the immoral and violent seeds of the serpent in Genesis 4. They melded together in intermarriage, "the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose." (Genesis 6:2) They had not stayed separate as they apparently should have, no more than they do today. Their blending had been so thorough that the rotten ingredients of Genesis 4 completely tainted and disintegrated the whole line in Genesis 5 so that Genesis 6:11,12 says, "the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence…all the people on earth had corrupted their ways." In Genesis 6:5 the state of the human race is described as "…EVERY inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was ONLY evil ALL THE TIME." Most likely even the godly line was infected to the core and became like everyone else. If the Lord's King was to have any moral sense and purpose at all, that moral sense would surely be dissolved and weakened by the parentage that brought Him forth. The termites of spoiled human nature in the godly line would eat His resolve and goal. The devil had moved powerfully against the Promise by establishing his own kingdom as dominant on the earth and was ready to crush the Seed.
Fourth, Satan Put God In the Position To Checkmate Himself
From every appearance, Satan controlled the board, and checkmate was his next move. But Satan wasn't going to make the checkmate move. God was. Genesis 6:3,13 says that God's wrath boiled against the people He had created. He so rued the day He had made them that He vowed that in 120 years His fury was going to wipe the floor of the earth with them and their wicked ways. It looked as if the devil had been so effective that God was going to turn His own queen against the line that carried His own King. Satan could not believe his fortune. Neither he nor his seed would have to eliminate the Promise. God was going to do it Himself. With His coming wrath against the world, God was going to hammer His entire creation to oblivion, including the person who secretly hid the Redeemer in his loins. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are sordid chapters on the history of man before the Flood and after God's Covenant of Redemption with Adam. Satan had turned the tables and forced God to back down and destroy His creation and their Redeemer.
However long chapters 4 and 5 took, there was still only one small piece of God's revelation known about his covenant Redeemer. He would come from Eve and her line, crush Satan's head, and the Redeemer's victory would, by implication, be even more extensive. Nothing else. There was only a seed about a Seed. There was no name given, when He would come, how He would come, and not even any wide-spread knowledge about his ancestors. There was (or had been) a godly line that believed in Him, anticipated Him, and carried Him. But everything now looked bleak and in jeopardy. All hope appeared to be lost.
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That is where we are now in Genesis 4. The devil checkmated Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Or so it appeared. The Lord made a promise to Satan in which He said, "I will save that man and woman." The promise had been made. A Redeemer would come from Eve to avenge her and Adam and crush Satan's head. Satan heard those words. In fact, the promise was made to him. Right then Satan knew that his life was in danger and that he had one of two options. He either had to prevent the Seed from being born, or he had to kill it once it had been born.
The paragraph above is the basic story of the rest of the Bible. No matter what you read, beginning with Genesis 4 you are always reading something related to the story line above. One could say the main story of the Bible is God's promise to bring His Redeemer. The sub-plot would be Satan doing all in his power to stop Him. To put it another way, human events of every kind take place in the Bible. That is the action taking place on the stage in FRONT of thecurtain. But BEHIND the curtain, directing all the visible action and giving it meaning, is the paragraph above. This is the part that is usually missing in most Bible teaching and preaching. This is why one can go to church all of his life and almost have no idea what the stories in the Bible are all about or how they are tied together.
But the second paragraph above can also be reduced to just ONE word: JESUS. The whole Bible is about Jesus Christ. Every event, every story, every person is about Jesus Christ. The Bible is not about moralisms or how to live your life or be a better person. It is PRIMARILY about Jesus. Application to one's life certainly comes from the Bible in many ways, but the Bible is about Jesus and the second paragraph above. Therefore, Jesus must always be presented as the primary subject when teaching or preaching Scripture. If He is not, then the teacher missed the real point of the Bible's purpose and message.
To put this another way, Revelation 12:1-5 gives a summary of the entire Old Testament and the four Gospels. The rest of the verses in Revelation 12 summarize the rest of the New Testament. In verses 1-5, a glorious woman appears in the heavens. She stands on the moon with a crown of 12 stars on her head. She is decked with radiant light from the sun. Her most noticeable feature is that she is pregnant with child and is about to give birth. Standing directly in front of her is a hideous, mutated crimson dragon with seven diademed heads and ten horns. His huge tail sweeps down through the universe. No matter where she turns, the dragon always positions himself directly in front of her because he wants to devour that child as soon as He is born.
To interpret, the woman was originally Eve and the Redeemer child she would bear. But the picture now is clearly figurative and Eve has become the church of the Old Testament. In the womb of the church in the Old Testament was "a male child, One who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron." (Revelation 12:5) That was Jesus, that Seed from Eve who was not born directly to her but was passed along from generation to generation through a chosen line in her family. The repulsive creature is Satan (Revelation 12:9). As the ages and events of Scripture passed, Satan watched and waited for the woman's Seed to appear. Many times he moved his king or queen directly into the path of the Redeemer in the Old Testament and attempted to end the game. But Revelation 12: 5 summarizes the Gospels like this: "...but her child was caught up to God and to his home." Satan attempted to kill Him. It appeared that Satan's queen landed right on top of the Redeemer at the cross, but the child escaped Satan's clutches by rising from the dead and ascending back to heaven. The rest of Revelation 12 is about the war that Satan is waging on the Child's seed in revenge since he had missed killing the Seed Himself.
As you read Genesis 4 and 5, you see the devil's strategy evolve as time passes. It speaks of the nature and the intelligence of this creature God made. Such affront and audacity before the Creator by one of His creations should have been unimaginable. But these ploys are masterpieces. They were effective then, and they are still effective today. Satan uses them over and over even until now as he wars against the church. It is amazing that a creature could devise and employ such bold, courageous, and defiant moves against his Creator. But here they are. There are four of them. He pulled out every stop to insure that his head was never crushed.
First, Satan Brought Direct Frontal Attack Against the Redeemer
As both Satan and Eve heard God's promise about the woman's Seed in the Garden of Eden, it would have been logical for both of them to assume that the first immediate offspring of Eve would be the Redeemer. The woman and the devil both probably concluded that since God's judgments in Chapter 3 were immediate, so would be His deliverance. So when Eve became pregnant by Adam, she must have deduced that the one-man cavalry who would avenge her was on His way. She thought that she had acquired the man promised to her. Thus she gave her first born son, Cain, his name, which means "Acquired", or, "I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord." The devil may have thought the same thing when he heard Cain's name and must have assumed that Cain was the Redeemer too. However, just as everyone was concentrating on Cain, another son named Abel, meaning "breath, vapor, or vanity" (indicating that both parents were already feeling the results of the curse on them), was born. Now there were two potential avengers. This was getting confusing. It is interesting to note that both Cain and Abel worshipped the Lord. So there must have been some revelation we do not know about to indicate the proper way to worship the Creator after Eden. One of the brothers conformed to that standard of worship, and one did not. Cain offered to God labor from his ground. Abel offered a sacricial animal, indicating atonement for sin by blood. The latter was accepted; the former was not. Since Cain had not made a move against the devil and the Lord also rejected Cain's offering, Satan realized that God was using misdirection to divert him from the Conqueror. He concluded the righteous son of Eve, Abel, was the Redeemer instead. Therefore, Satan moved swiftly in the heart of Cain with jealousy and hatred and with Cain's hands killed the woman's supposed Seed, Abel, just as surely as if he had employed his own hands. This method of a straightforward, personal assault to kill the Seed by directing someone else's hands would also be used by Satan as his very last act against the Redeemer in the New Testament. To make an analogy, Satan's most powerful tool was himself. He thought he saw the Lord's King on the board and decided to make a straight path to him. So with his queen, he swept all the way across the board down an unblocked lane and knocked Him off the board for an instant defeat. How simple that must have seemed to the Tempter to have dispatched The Promise with such ease. He had dishonored God in the Garden, and now he had dispatched his great Champion as well. The devil was no fool. He was a Grandmaster too. He could think ahead, and he could act instantly through another with abrupt counter-moves to the Promise when opportunites like that presented themselves. But Satan soon discovered that Abel was not the Seed either. The King wasn't even on the playing surface yet. It was only a decoy. If Satan thought he was confused now, there were going to be complications of mathematical proportions for him to decipher as time progressed.
Second, Satan Used His Own Pawns Against the Redeemer
Genesis 4 and 5 gives the history of two family lines - Adam's line through his son Cain and Adam's line through his son Seth. Genesis 4 is the development of Cain's family line. Through Cain's family can be seen man's efforts at carrying out part of the Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1:28 of increasing in numberand filling the earth, as civilization and cities (4:17) were built. The latter part of the chapter shows man's progress in subduing the earth as from the ground he learns to make tents, study animal husbandry, raise livestock, invent music and make musical instruments, and explore mining and forge tools. All these events imply a long passage of time and the development of society on the earth. But Cain's line also shows the evolution and maturity of sin, corruption, and violence in the human family through murder, revenge, and polygamy. Satan was at work in God's world so that when and if another possible Conqueror should mysteriously appear again, there were going to be powerful and creative forces of resistance under his command surrounding the Redeemer on every hand, forces so full of brutality and bloodshed that killing the Seed would require little effort from a world under the devil's control. If the devil's queen did not take Him out, then his rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns would be at his disposal if any other bounties appeared on the devil's head. When one reads Genesis 4 and 6, there is one word that best describes the known world before the Flood. Violence (Genesis 6:11). The seed of the serpent predicted in Genesis 3:15 thrived and increased with newly born disciples bred on violence and steeped in progressive decay to do Satan's will. There would be many people and a world system capable of eliminating any Conqueror.
In Genesis 4:25, God finally makes His first move against Satan. Whereas the devil thought the King had been eliminated, God put His King into play. He gave Adam another son, Seth. This is the second family line highlighted in these chapters. God is not hasty. He had a plan. Unknown to all concerned, there were centuries and millennia to go for Him to carry out His plan. God was going to take His time and set it all up just like He wanted so He would get the devil to do just what He wanted him to do. In the end, the diabolical Grandmaster would be a mere pawn in God's own hand, and the Lord would play him like a symphony. So Eve is given another son, Seth, which means "Appointed". She said that God had appointed another son in the place of her murdered son Abel. By faith, she indicated in this name she gave him that God's Promise had not been killed after all. The effect of this move was that the godly line rejoiced and expressed sure hope in the Lord through Seth by not only Seth's birth but his son's birth, Enosh, too. They began to give praise to God and call upon Him when they realized Seth's line was secure and continued on. If Seth was not the Promised Seed, then he was the father of Him. God was making good on His promise in Genesis 3. All of this commotion and the name given to Seth aroused the devil's interest afresh. So he swerved directly in front of the pregnant woman of Revelation 12 and focused keenly on this man.
Genesis 5 is almost like a shell game. In a shell game, a pea is hidden beneath one of three walnut shells. The Operator quickly shuffles the shells around while the mark tries to keep his eye on the one with the pea. Satan watched Seth and his children in Genesis 5 while God's hands flew like lightning on the board. Satan's eyes dazzled. It was very difficult for Satan to keep track of who was who and where everyone was. For example, Adam lived another 800 years after Seth's birth and "had other sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:4) Was Seth another example of God's slight of hand? Was Seth just another fake King? Was the real King in those other children of Adam's? In addition to this, Seth and his wife were very fruitful. Seth lived another 807 years after the birth of Enosh and "had other sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:7) Thus God's promise shrouded itself somewhere in the midst of Seth's line. But where? Though the devil lurked closely, the Promise dived beneath the visible surface like a German U-boat sliding beneath the dark depths of the Atlantic and hid Himself from the sight of the dragon as he slipped along silently from person to person over thousands of years without making a peep or move. "Which one is the Avenger?" the devil must have asked. Of the thousands, maybe millions, of children born up until the Flood, which one was the Promise? Quietly through the bedrooms of the ancient world and the boredom of normal family life, the Promise passed along through a few chosen men and women who unknowingly carried with them the Creator of the universe who would someday be man.
The New Testament lists two genealogies of Jesus Christ. One is in Matthew 1. It traces Jesus from Joseph back to Abraham through David to establish His kingly descent. The other traces Him from Mary to David to Abraham to Adam in Luke 3 to establish his kingly descent and humanity as a qualified man who was the Seed of the woman and the son of Adam and the son of Seth. The Jews kept strict records of the family line of the Redeemer in their genealogies for thousands of years that most people find boring to read. But these genealogies possess the proof needed for Jesus to one day make the claim that He was the Messiah and King over Israel. An imposter and fraud could be rooted out by the Redeemer's family tree contained in the sacred scrolls. All the names mentioned in Genesis 5 are listed in Luke 3:36, 37 because they are the men who carried the Promise in their loins back to Seth and to Adam and Eve.
As the Seed progressed through Seth's family, sin washed over the human race and strengthened its grip on every man. One notices that the long years of life men possessed at the beginning of Genesis 5 slowly diminish as he reads what happens after Genesis 6. All of Adam's children met the end that God promised in Genesis 2:17. The curse fell upon everyone. There is a sad refrain at the end of nearly every paragraph in Chapter 5, "and he died...and he died...and he died." Romans 5:12 says, "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned."
Third, Satan Flipped the Enemy's Pieces To His Side
The Promise finally passed to the last man mentioned in Genesis 5 – Noah and one of those three sons, Shem, Ham, or Japheth. We don't know how long the events of Genesis 4 and 5 took before the Flood. But we do know that it was at least thousands of years because of the long lives of the pre-flood people. The pre-flood world was a developed civilization. But it became a notoriously wicked world. While the Promise sailed under the radar of the dragon in Genesis 4 and 5, the Prince of Darkness worked in God's human creation through those chapters. What he did and what happened is all explained in Genesis 6:1-13. The earth had become full of vile and exceedingly sinful humans. His next ploy fused together the godly seed of the woman in Genesis 5 with the immoral and violent seeds of the serpent in Genesis 4. They melded together in intermarriage, "the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose." (Genesis 6:2) They had not stayed separate as they apparently should have, no more than they do today. Their blending had been so thorough that the rotten ingredients of Genesis 4 completely tainted and disintegrated the whole line in Genesis 5 so that Genesis 6:11,12 says, "the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence…all the people on earth had corrupted their ways." In Genesis 6:5 the state of the human race is described as "…EVERY inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was ONLY evil ALL THE TIME." Most likely even the godly line was infected to the core and became like everyone else. If the Lord's King was to have any moral sense and purpose at all, that moral sense would surely be dissolved and weakened by the parentage that brought Him forth. The termites of spoiled human nature in the godly line would eat His resolve and goal. The devil had moved powerfully against the Promise by establishing his own kingdom as dominant on the earth and was ready to crush the Seed.
Fourth, Satan Put God In the Position To Checkmate Himself
From every appearance, Satan controlled the board, and checkmate was his next move. But Satan wasn't going to make the checkmate move. God was. Genesis 6:3,13 says that God's wrath boiled against the people He had created. He so rued the day He had made them that He vowed that in 120 years His fury was going to wipe the floor of the earth with them and their wicked ways. It looked as if the devil had been so effective that God was going to turn His own queen against the line that carried His own King. Satan could not believe his fortune. Neither he nor his seed would have to eliminate the Promise. God was going to do it Himself. With His coming wrath against the world, God was going to hammer His entire creation to oblivion, including the person who secretly hid the Redeemer in his loins. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are sordid chapters on the history of man before the Flood and after God's Covenant of Redemption with Adam. Satan had turned the tables and forced God to back down and destroy His creation and their Redeemer.
However long chapters 4 and 5 took, there was still only one small piece of God's revelation known about his covenant Redeemer. He would come from Eve and her line, crush Satan's head, and the Redeemer's victory would, by implication, be even more extensive. Nothing else. There was only a seed about a Seed. There was no name given, when He would come, how He would come, and not even any wide-spread knowledge about his ancestors. There was (or had been) a godly line that believed in Him, anticipated Him, and carried Him. But everything now looked bleak and in jeopardy. All hope appeared to be lost.