He Begat, He Begat, He Begat, Oh My! The Importance of the Begats

I keep thinking God is going to let me out of Genesis.  Apparently not ( I say with a smile).

Genesis is absolutely one of my favorite books of the bible. It just reveals so much on so many levels.  And,even though I’m chomping at the bit to get to The Prophets, and The New Testament, I’m happy to spend as much time in Genesis as God leads. 

It is the foundation of the whole Bible. Everything starts here, ‘In the Beginning’, (The name of Genesis in The Torah I’m told).

In it we find the origin of the universe. We find the origin of the earth and all it’s inhabitants. We find our origin, the origin of sin, the origin of civilization, the origin of religion and the list goes on.  Above all, we find the origin of the revelation of God’s plan for salvation.

But, and it’s a big but, we have gotten to the place in Genesis where people generally roll their eyes and skip over…The Begats, so and so begat so and so, and so forth. It can be pretty dry reading if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

You can find this portion of scripture, called The Generations of Adam, in Genesis Chapter 5. Please read for yourself and do your own study, as with everything, to verify what I’m about to tell you.

You see, The Begats are really anything but boring.

I find a couple of very important things we can glean from this portion of scripture.

The first thing we see is an established timeline.  These are the generations from Adam to Noah and we all know what happened with Noah.

What we can see from this timeline is that Noah’s father, Lamech, very likely knew Adam and for sure knew Seth, the righteous son God gave Adam after Cain slew Abel.

This means that Noah probably sat at his father’s feet listening to stories of the cherubim and flaming sword that were at the gates of the Garden of Eden (Genesis3:24). He heard possibly 1st hand what happened when Adam and Eve sinned and what had been lost.

The other thing you can see that we haven’t studied yet is, Abraham knew Noah’s righteous son, Shem.  The father of the Jews and in turn Christianity (actually Islam, too) didn’t just happen in a void. There are Hebrew histories that say Abraham stayed with Shem and learned the ways of God from him. God always has a remnant, I Kings 19:9-14, 18

Now for the whammy.  This is one of the most profound things in the whole Bible.

The generations of Adam spell out the plan of Salvation in the names of the patriarchs. 

God didn’t have a knee jerk reaction to Adam’s sin. God had a plan. We saw the beginning of God’s plan when he slew the animals to cover Adam and Eve in the garden.  He really shows it here.

I will say here that there are slight variations in the roots of the words I’m about to give you but not much.  The meanings don’t change. And, Cainan in the line of Adam is the Aramaic translation and should be Kenan (1 Chronicles 1:2).

Here goes.

Did you see that!?

Adam means man. Seth means appointed, Enosh means mortal and so on.

Man is appointed mortal sorrow. The Blessed God shall come down, teaching. His death shall bring the despairing comfort and rest.

Isn’t that amazing?

Remember, this is the Jewish Torah spelling out the Christian plan of salvation thousands of years ago. God knew from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8) that He would have to die to restore us to him. Jesus came willingly and fulfilled this.

I’m just going to stop right here and let you ponder this in wonder.