Genesis Chapter 5 Verses 1 – 2

• Notice that in the beginning of creation, in the day that God created man, or said differently, in the day that God completed His creation of mankind, the Bible says that He created them male and female. There are two explicitly understandable and distinctly evident truths that strike me here and they are 1) God created two compatible genders and 2) since this minute, this moment, this completed creation account, God has not changed. Why do I bring this up…?
• Since God created male and female, there have been some additional creations. We have male/females and female/males. Males that are female and females that are males. We have “memales.” People that are both male and female. We have males that were born males who undergo surgery to change their appearance to be a female and vice versa. And finally we have people that haven’t yet decided whether they are male or female. That’s a total of 8 additional categories…
• The two explicitly understandable and distinctly evident truths given without variation in the Bible however remain…that God created two compatible genders and since that completed creation account, God has not changed. So where have these new creations come from…you can answer mankind itself, you can answer culture, you can answer whatever you’d like BUT you cannot answer that anything but male and female were created by God IF you hold to the pages of scripture.

• Ready for ultra-shocking controversy? I have never heard this topic discussed this way by anyone else but let me share for just a moment what I see happening here…I truly believe that anyone at anytime in anyplace can be, has the capacity to be, many are even actively tempted to be homosexual. If that’s true, an I do so believe it is, then it must also be true that anyone at anytime in anyplace can be, has the capacity to be, many are even actively tempted to be heterosexual. And so each person has a decision to make.

• Folks may say, “There’s no decision here…I was born this way…” Listen, we just can’t accept that because there are plenty plenty PLENTY of innate ways we are, ways we could claim, “I was born that way,” that today we actively defeat and live as we ought to live. I’m convinced I was born arrogant. Haughty and loud with a bit of wrath just thrown in there for fun…But let me allow those things to define me…or more culturally relevant…to identify me…well I’m making the wrong decision…

• You see it all comes down to this. And I may be over-simplifying and if so then you over-complicaters can start a blog and comment until the power grid fails…God has created. It’s here in Genesis 5 as we leave the creation account and therefore God’s creation is complete…and in His perfect/complete creation He has created male and female. This fact of creation is observably true at the moment of birth, even before that as the human being forms in the womb…to change that, to decide to act in a contrary (I’ll say non-compatible) manner to this most observable facts…is simply a form of rebellion.
• The clay saying to the potter, “Why have you made me like this…I’ll change it,”…and so while the culture and the world and the talking heads say, “be what thou wilt,” what I hear is a person by person singular decision to chase after that which was not created by God. It’s clear here in the completed creation account of mankind and I have exhaustively studied this topic to completion…I just can’t budge because from Genesis to Revelation there are two explicitly understandable and distinctly evident truths repeated and never deviated from…God created two compatible genders and since this completed creation account, God has not changed.

• But there’s something else here in the first two verses of Genesis 5 that I believe God inserted knowing this topic in the last days would take center stage like no other generation before it…in verse 2 God says that He called them, “Mankind.” Why is that important…? Because He did not call them, “Manmean!” A defensive posture is almost always, by nature, aggressive and offensive. It’s just the way defense works. And as the church defends the scriptures…folks…we have to decide to overcome how we were born…and allow defense to be gentle, inviting and filled with God’s KINDNESS! You’ll see here that God blessed…and I pray that God blesses the churches ministry to anyone and everyone deciding to live as thou wilt…but do not miss this, I miss this all the time…God blessed mankind…He cannot bless “manmean” because that’s not His call or His character…(1 Cor 6:11)

Genesis Chapter 5 Verse 3

• Notice neither Cain nor Abel are mentioned in the line of Adam…tragic for them both…and now the scriptures will take us from Adam to Noah talking about each of their children and smart people have done calculations that with the amount of years and generations between Adam and Noah, by the time of the flood there could have been upwards of seven billion people on the earth!

Genesis Chapter 5 Verses 4 – 24

• There are several very interesting things going on here. First, this wasn’t the first Enoch. Remember, in the line of Cain, actually the first born of Cain, his name was Enoch and Cain built a city and named it after his son, Enoch. Here’s what strikes me about that…the people knew the people. Intermarrying of the people perhaps begins in the next chapter but the people of Cain, and this could just conjecture, knew the people of Seth to the point that they’re like, “Yeah, that’s a good name.”

• But also, Enoch literally means, “Dedicated.” Look at this difference. The first Enoch was dedicated to his city, from the line of Cain and dedicated to the things of the world…and here this Enoch, dedicated to God, walked with God…the difference? One escapes death. Man my heart is for my kids to escape unnecessary death in their life…death of hope, death of dreams, death of potential, death of joy, death of spark…all of those things die when you dedicate your life to getting for yourself…
• And then there’s the obvious…somehow, someway, Enoch escaped death because God took him.   A picture and pointer to the rapture for sure but the greater question is, where did he go? Did he go to Abraham’s Bay? Abraham hadn’t been born yet!? Did he go to heaven? Well, Jesus had not yet died for the sins of the world. Yet the law was not in place so without the law…oh man this conversation could go on and on…you want to know what I think? I don’t really know. All the Bible tells us is that somehow Enoch was a faithful man, pleasing to God. Hebrews 11:5-6…faith at the dawn of history, looking forward to and trusting in the coming Messiah, and in the blink of an eye, he is taken by God…

• What’s important and shouldn’t be missed is that Hebrews describes Enoch as someone who pleased God, someone who had faith (for without faith it is impossible to please God), and Genesis 5 shades that in for us in Technicolor when we read, “Enoch walked with God.” That is faith, man!

Genesis Chapter 5 Verses 25 – 29

• Big hopes wrapped around Noah…I wonder, when he started building that boat…cutting down trees and gathering supplies, I wonder what his own father said…Noah however had to listen to the Lord…

Genesis Chapter 5 Verses 30 – 32

• Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth…the fathers of all of the people of the earth today and we will dive into that and other interesting things next week as we continue our verse by verse study through the Book of Genesis!