He Walked with God

Read Genesis 5 in full and Genesis 6:1–8 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Enoch walked with God, and then he disappeared because God took him away.

— Genesis 5:24

After the violence of Genesis 4 — Cain’s murder of Abel, Lamech’s escalating boast — we might expect the rest of Genesis 5 to continue the same trajectory. The line of Cain is producing Lamech. The line of Seth is producing… what?

The answer comes in the form of a genealogy. Ten generations. From Adam to Noah. The line that began in faith with Seth and Enosh continues — through Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and finally Noah. Each name represents a man who lived, fathered children, and died. The text gives us their ages, their fathers, their sons, and — with one striking exception — their deaths. And he died. And he died. And he died. The refrain falls on every name. The wages of sin (Romans 6:23) are being paid out generation by generation. Sin entered through one man; death has spread to all.

But the genealogy is not only a chapter of death. It is also a chapter of hope. In the middle of the long list, the death-refrain breaks. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. Enoch does not die. Enoch is taken. The first hint of resurrection in Scripture appears, embedded in the middle of a death-genealogy.

And at the end of the chapter, another man is named. Noah — a name connected by wordplay to comfort. His father, a godly Lamech (not Cain’s Lamech), looks at his son and hopes for relief from the cursed ground. Lamech does not know exactly how Noah will bring comfort. The reader is about to find out.

Then comes Genesis 6:1–8. Wickedness has multiplied. The earth is filled with violence. God is grieved. He determines to act. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

This session is a transition. We are between two great movements of Genesis. Behind us: the fall, the first murder, the corruption of the human race. Ahead of us: the flood, the new beginning, the Noahic covenant. In between sits this chapter — ten generations of death, one man taken up, and another man found favored by God. We meet them now.

The Genealogy of Death

This is the record of the family line of Adam.

Genesis 5 announces itself with the second toledot of the book, and what follows is a genealogy unlike any modern reader is used to. Ten generations are listed. Each entry follows the same pattern: when this man was X years old, he fathered his son; he lived Y more years after fathering his son; and thus all the days of this man were Z years, and he died. The pattern is so consistent it becomes liturgical. Every entry ends the same way.

And he died.

The phrase appears eight times in the chapter — once for every man in the genealogy except two. (We will come to those exceptions shortly.) Adam died. Seth died. Enosh died. Kenan died. Mahalalel died. Jared died. Methuselah died. Lamech died. The refrain falls on every name like a small hammer. This is what the wages of sin look like across generations. Sin entered through one man (Romans 5:12). Death has spread to all (Romans 5:12). The Genesis 3 warning — for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die — works itself out across centuries, claiming generation after generation.

The lifespans are remarkable. Adam lived 930 years. Seth lived 912. Methuselah, the longest-lived, reached 969. These are not numbers we are used to. Some commentators have wondered whether they are literal years or symbolic numbers. The traditional Jewish and Christian reading — Luther’s reading, the historic Lutheran reading — is that they are literal. The world before the flood was different from the world after it. Conditions on the antediluvian earth may have supported much longer lifespans than the world we now inhabit. Whatever the reason, the text gives the numbers without apology and without explanation. These men lived very long lives. And then they died.

The Lutheran reader will notice something. The genealogy moves quickly, ten generations in a single chapter, but it moves deliberately. Each generation is named. Each is given a place in the line. The text does not skip over them as if they did not matter. Even in their dying, each generation is recorded as part of the line of promise. God is keeping count. He knows the names. He preserves the line. The seed of the woman, given by promise in Genesis 3:15 and renewed in the birth of Seth in Genesis 4:25, continues through every one of these deaths. Every and he died is followed by another generation. The death is real; the line continues.

This matters for the way we read the genealogy. It is not a list to be skipped past. It is the record of the seed-line that will eventually produce Abraham, David, and Christ Himself. Matthew’s gospel will begin with another genealogy — the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1) — and Luke 3 will trace the line all the way through Noah and the patriarchs of Genesis 5 to Seth and Adam. The line that begins in Genesis 5 ends, ultimately, in the manger at Bethlehem. The men who died were carrying the seed forward.

Enoch Walked with God

The pattern breaks at the seventh generation.

When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God for 300 years, and he had other sons and daughters. The entire lifetime of Enoch was 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and then he disappeared because God took him away.

Enoch is the seventh from Adam. His entry in the genealogy is the shortest of the ten — just four verses — but it carries the heaviest theological weight. Two things are remarkable.

First, the phrase Enoch walked with God. The Hebrew is hithallek im ha’elohim — a particular grammatical form that means continuous, habitual walking. Enoch did not just visit God now and then. Enoch walked with God as a way of life, day after day, for three hundred years. The verb is the same verb used of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day in Genesis 3:8 — back when walking with God was natural for unfallen humanity. After the fall, walking with God becomes rare. But Enoch did it. In an age when the rest of the human race was descending into violence — the line of Cain producing Lamech, the same generation that other men were chasing power and revenge — Enoch was walking with God.

And the second remarkable thing: Enoch did not die.

And he was not, for God took him. The Hebrew is striking. He was not — he simply was no longer there. For God took him — God took him into His own presence. Enoch is the first human being in Scripture not to die. The relentless and he died of the genealogy breaks at his name. The death-pattern that runs through the whole chapter is broken, in one instance, in one man. For Enoch, the curse of Genesis 3:19 — to dust you shall return — was suspended. He did not return to the dust. God took him.

This is the first hint of resurrection in Scripture. Or, more precisely, it is the first hint that death may not be the final word for the people of God. Enoch’s translation — the technical term for being taken up without dying — was unique to him. Most of the people of God will die in the ordinary way. But Enoch’s experience tells us something important: the wages of sin do not have to be paid out in death by every individual believer. God has the power to take a faithful man into His own presence without his ever tasting the dust. The exception of Enoch is, in this sense, a promise of the resurrection that will eventually come for all who walk with God.

The New Testament picks this up. Hebrews 11:5 names Enoch in the great roll-call of faith: By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. Enoch’s translation, the author of Hebrews says, was a result of his faith. He walked with God by faith. God commended him by faith. God took him by faith. Enoch becomes a witness, in the middle of the long genealogy of death, that faith brings the believer into God’s presence in a way that even death cannot interrupt.

His age at translation — 365 years — is also striking. It is, of course, the number of days in a solar year. Whether the number has symbolic significance or is simply the literal duration of his earthly life, the text does not say. What the text does say is that, after 365 years of walking with God, he was not — for God took him.

Noah, a Comfort

The genealogy resumes its death-refrain after Enoch. Methuselah lives 969 years and dies. Lamech (the godly Lamech, not Cain’s Lamech) lives 777 years and dies. The line continues. The wages of sin keep being paid.

But before Lamech dies, he names a son. And the naming is significant.

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah, saying, “This one will bring us comfort from our labor and from the painful toil of our hands because of the ground that the LORD has cursed.”

The Hebrew name Noach is related by wordplay to the verb nacham, which means to comfort or to bring relief. Lamech is naming his son with a hope. He looks at the newborn boy in his arms and sees, in him, the possibility of comfort from the curse that has lain on the ground since Genesis 3:17. The thorns and thistles, the sweat of the brow, the painful toil — Lamech longs for relief. He believes his son will somehow provide it.

This is reminiscent of Eve, several generations earlier, naming Cain with reference to the LORD’s help. Lamech, like Eve, is hoping for a deliverer. Lamech, like Eve, will be partially mistaken about the form the deliverance will take. Noah will not actually undo the curse on the ground. The curse will continue. But Noah will be a deliverer of a different kind — he will be the one through whom God preserves the seed-line through the flood, the one through whom the human race begins again, the one through whom the promise of the seed of the woman continues. Lamech is right that his son will be a comfort. He is wrong about how.

The deeper point — the point the New Testament reader will recognize — is that every generation in the line of the promise looks for a deliverer. Eve looks for one. Lamech looks for one. Every godly father in Genesis hopes that his son might be the One. None of them — until Joseph and Mary, in the fullness of time — will be looking at the right son. The promise of the seed of the woman is repeatedly hoped for, repeatedly deferred, and finally fulfilled in a child none of these ancestors lived to see. But their hoping was right. Their longing was right. They were looking, in the right direction, for the One who would come.

Lamech then dies. The genealogy concludes:

After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Noah is introduced. The line of the promise has reached the man through whom the great judgment-and-rescue of the flood will unfold. His three sons are named — Shem, Ham, and Japheth — and we are now positioned for the next great act of the Genesis narrative.

Sons of God, Daughters of Men

Genesis 6 opens with one of the most discussed and most debated passages in all of the Old Testament.

When humankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humankind were beautiful. Thus they took wives for themselves from any they chose.

Who are the sons of God, and who are the daughters of man?

Three main interpretations have been offered through the history of the church.

The angelic view. Sons of God is a term used elsewhere in the Old Testament (Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7) for heavenly beings, angels. On this reading, the sons of God are fallen angels who took human women as wives, producing the strange race of Nephilim mentioned in verse 4. The angelic view is the oldest interpretation in Jewish tradition; it is reflected in 1 Enoch and other intertestamental writings; and it may be what Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 are referencing when they speak of angels who did not stay within their own position of authority.

The Sethite view. Sons of God are the godly line of Seth — the line that has been calling upon the name of the LORD since Genesis 4:26. Daughters of man are the ungodly line of Cain. The passage describes the intermarriage of the two lines, the dissolution of the distinction between the godly and the ungodly. This is the interpretation Luther held. It is the interpretation that runs through most of the Reformation tradition. It connects directly to the two-lines theme of Genesis 4, and it avoids the difficult questions raised by the angelic view.

The dynastic view. Sons of God are kings or rulers, who in some ancient Near Eastern cultures were called sons of the gods. These rulers took multiple wives — a violation of Genesis 2’s one-flesh design — and the Nephilim were the offspring of these abusive marriages.

The honest answer is that the text does not settle the question. Each view has strengths and weaknesses. Confessional Lutherans have most often followed Luther in the Sethite view, and that is the reading we will lean on here: the godly line of Seth, after centuries of calling upon the name of the LORD, began to lose its distinction by intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain. The boundary between the two lines that had been visible in Genesis 4 was eroding by the time of Genesis 6. The community of worshipers was being absorbed into the surrounding culture. The salt was losing its saltiness.

What the text does say with clarity is the result. Verse 4 introduces the Nephilim — the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Hebrew word Nephilim may come from a root meaning to fall (hence the fallen ones) or it may simply mean giants (the Septuagint translates it as gigantes, the source of our English word). Whatever they were exactly, they were notable — mighty, renowned, perhaps fearsome. They are mentioned briefly here, and we will hear of them again in Numbers 13:33 when the Israelite spies see Nephilim in Canaan. They are not the central concern of the passage. The central concern is what verses 5 and following describe: the universal corruption of humanity that triggers God’s grief and the coming flood.

Whatever the sons of God are, the result of their action is clear. The world is becoming radically corrupt. The seed-line is being threatened. God will have to act.

God’s Grief

But the LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth. Every inclination of the thoughts of their minds was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and he was highly offended. So the LORD said, “I will wipe humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—everything from humankind to animals, including creatures that move on the ground and birds of the air, for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD.

This is one of the most pastorally tender, theologically weighty, and emotionally heavy passages in the entire Bible.

Notice what the LORD sees. The wickedness of man was great in the earth — not isolated, not localized, but pervasive. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Hebrew is sweeping. The intentions — the deep desires, the formative inclinations — of the human heart were only evil, continually. There were no exceptions. There were no clean spots. There were no off-hours of moral integrity. The corruption was total and it was constant.

This is one of the most important verses in the Bible for the doctrine of original sin. The Lutheran Confessions point to verses like this in their treatment of human depravity. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, defending Article II on original sin, quotes Genesis 6:5 directly. Human nature, since the fall, is not partly good and partly bad. The heart’s intentions are only evil continually. The will is bound. The natural mind cannot will the good. This is not exaggeration; this is what Genesis 6:5 actually says. And the Lutheran tradition has taken it with the seriousness it deserves.

Then comes the language that has caused theological difficulty across the centuries.

The LORD regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and he was highly offended.

Does God change His mind? Does God regret His creative work? Can the immutable, omniscient God be sorry about something He has done?

The Lutheran tradition has answered these questions with care. The language here is what theologians call anthropomorphic — language about God in human terms. It does not mean that God experiences emotion exactly as we do, nor that God did not foresee from eternity what man would become. What it does mean is that Scripture genuinely conveys the depth of God’s heart-response to human sin. God is not indifferent to wickedness. God is grieved by it. The God who pronounced creation very good in Genesis 1:31 looks at His creation now and is heartbroken at what it has become. The pronouncement of judgment — I will blot out man — is not the act of a careless or indifferent God. It is the act of a grieved God, a God whose love for His creation makes the corruption of His creation unbearable.

This matters pastorally. The God we worship is not a distant, unmoved abstraction. The God we worship is the God whose heart grieves at human evil. He grieved at Cain’s murder of Abel. He grieved at Lamech’s boast. He grieved at the universal wickedness of the days before the flood. He grieved most deeply when His own Son hung on the cross — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The God of the Bible is a God whose heart is engaged with what happens in His world. The judgment is not arbitrary. The judgment is the response of a grieved heart to a corrupt world.

And the judgment is severe. I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land. The Hebrew verb is machah — to wipe out, to erase, to obliterate. The same verb is used elsewhere of erasing names from a book (Exodus 32:33). God will erase humanity from the earth. The judgment is not partial. It is not local. It is total. The world that began with the breath of God in Adam’s nostrils will now have that breath withdrawn from nearly all who carry it.

Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. The judgment includes the rest of creation. The animal kingdom, created on Day 5 and Day 6 of Genesis 1, will be swept away with humanity. The flood will be a kind of un-creation — a reversal of the ordering work of Genesis 1, the chaos waters returning to cover the earth. The God who separated waters from waters on Day 2 will let them come back together. The God who let dry land appear on Day 3 will let it be submerged again.

This is the wages of sin pronounced on a global scale. What death has been doing one man at a time across the genealogy of Genesis 5 will now happen to the human race as a whole. Sin has its consequences. Sin reaches its full grown form. And God acts.

Noah Found Favor

But then comes verse 8. One verse. Eight words in English. Eleven words in the Hebrew.

But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD. The Judgment of the Flood

This is one of the most important verses in early Genesis.

Notice three things about this verse.

First, the but. The Hebrew word is the conjunction we, which functions adversatively in context. But Noah. In contrast to the universal corruption just described, in contrast to the universal judgment just announced, there is one man — Noah. The judgment is universal except. The corruption is total except. The flood will sweep away all flesh — except this one.

Second, Noah found favor. The Hebrew is Noach matza’ chen. The word chen — favor, grace — will appear repeatedly through the Old Testament. It is the word for unmerited goodwill, gift-character, gratuity. Noah did not earn favor. Noah did not deserve favor. Noah did not work for favor. Noah found it — the verb is striking. He happened upon it. It was given to him as a gift.

This is gospel. In a world where God’s judgment is just and total, one man finds grace. He does not produce the grace himself. He cannot have manufactured it out of his own works, because we will be told in the next chapter — Genesis 6:9 — that Noah was a righteous man and walked with God. The two truths stand together: Noah was righteous, and Noah found grace. He did not earn grace by his righteousness. Rather, the grace he found made his righteousness possible. The grace came first. The walking with God followed. This is the same pattern that runs through the whole of Scripture and finds its full development in Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith.

The Lutheran reader will hear in Noah found favor the same theology that runs through Article IV of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. We do not earn God’s favor. God’s favor is given to sinners propter Christum — for the sake of Christ — by grace, through faith. Noah’s experience in the days before the flood is a foreshadowing of every believer’s experience in every age since: in a world under judgment, grace is found, not earned. The favor is real. The favor is undeserved. The favor saves.

Third, in the eyes of the LORD. It is the LORD who sees. It is the LORD who evaluates. It is the LORD whose perspective matters. The same LORD who saw the wickedness of man and was grieved (verse 5), the same LORD who said I will blot out man (verse 7), now sees Noah and looks at him with favor. The change is not in the LORD; the change is in what the LORD sees in Noah. Noah is the exception in the eyes of the LORD. Noah is the man through whom the LORD will preserve the seed-line. Noah is the man through whom the human race will start again.

What happens next will be the story of how God saves through judgment — how the flood that destroys the world is also the means by which the world is preserved. The ark will be built. The animals will be gathered. The waters will rise. And one family — Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives — will pass through the judgment alive. The seed will continue. The promise will not fail. The line that leads to Christ will be preserved through the very judgment that ought to have ended it.

Gathering the Threads

This session has been a transition. We came into it from the murder of Abel and the violence of Cain’s line. We leave it on the threshold of the flood. In between sits Genesis 5 — a long genealogy of death — and the opening of Genesis 6 — the corruption of the human race, the grief of God, and the favor of God on Noah.

The session has taught us several things.

It has taught us about death. The genealogy of Genesis 5 is a long meditation on the wages of sin. Sin entered through one man. Death has spread to all. And the deaths add up, generation by generation, across the genealogy. And he died. And he died. And he died. The reader cannot escape the refrain. This is what sin produces. This is the world we live in.

It has taught us about hope. In the middle of the death-genealogy, Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. The first translation in Scripture. The first hint that death may not be the final word for those who walk with God. Enoch is exceptional, not normative, but his exception is a promise. The God who took Enoch is the God who will eventually raise all who belong to Him.

It has taught us about expectation. Lamech named his son Noah — comfort — looking for a deliverer from the curse on the ground. He was right that comfort would come; he was wrong about how. Every generation in the seed-line looks for the One who will come. None of them will see Him until the angel speaks to a young woman in Nazareth and a virgin conceives a son named Jesus.

It has taught us about the depth of human corruption. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lutheran doctrine of original sin — that human nature, since the fall, cannot in itself will the good — is grounded squarely in this verse. The Apology cites it directly. We are not partly good and partly broken; we are, in our natural state, deeply corrupt. Only grace can rescue us.

It has taught us about the heart of God. The LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. The God we worship is not a distant abstraction. He is the God whose heart engages with human sin and human suffering. He grieves. He acts. He judges. And He saves.

And it has taught us about grace. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. In a world under judgment, grace is found. Not earned. Not deserved. Found. The whole gospel is here in compressed form. The Christian reader hears in this verse the same word that the gospel announces in every age — that grace is given to sinners by God’s choosing, not by their working.

Next session, we open the flood narrative itself. Genesis 6:9 to the end of Genesis 7. The ark is built. The animals are gathered. The rains come. The fountains of the deep are broken open. And the world is washed clean — or rather, the world is washed back into the chaos waters that the Spirit of God hovered over in Genesis 1:2. Creation will, in a sense, be undone. And then, through Noah and his family, it will be made again.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

1. The genealogy of Genesis 5 repeats and he died eight times. What does it mean for our reading of this chapter — and of every cemetery we visit — that death is so persistently named as the consequence of sin? How does this shape our hearing of Romans 6:23: the wages of sin is death?

2. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Hebrews 11:5 tells us this happened by faith. What does it mean to walk with God? What does Enoch’s exception to the death-pattern teach us about the final destiny of those who walk with God?

3. Lamech named his son Noah — comfort — hoping for relief from the curse on the ground. He was right to hope, but he was wrong about which descendant would finally bring the comfort he longed for. Where in your life are you looking for comfort that only the true Seed of the woman can finally bring?

4. The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. On the historic Lutheran reading, this describes the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain — the dissolution of the distinction between the people of God and the surrounding culture. Where do you see this pattern in the contemporary church? How are believers tempted to lose their distinctiveness?

5. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lutheran Confessions take this verse with full seriousness as a foundation for the doctrine of original sin. How does the biblical depth of human corruption inform your understanding of the gospel? Why does the depth of the disease determine the depth of the cure?

6. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. Noah did not earn favor; he found it. How does this verse picture the gospel of justification by faith? Where, looking back, can you see that you have simply found what you could never have earned?

Looking Ahead

Session 8 opens the flood narrative itself. We will read Genesis 6:9 through the end of Genesis 7. The chapter begins with another toledot — these are the generations of Noah — and tells us, in verse 9, that Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and that, like Enoch before him, Noah walked with God. God speaks to Noah. The ark is designed. The animals are gathered. The waters rise. The world we have known is undone.

In the New Testament, Peter will read this entire episode as a type of baptism. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you (1 Peter 3:21). The ark — God’s means of rescue through judgment — anticipates the means of grace that Christ has given to His church. We will spend significant time on this typology in the next session. For now, prepare for one of the most famous narratives in all of Scripture.

Before next session, read Genesis 6:9 through Genesis 7 in full. As you read, watch for: the dimensions and design of the ark; the gathering of the animals; the way the text describes the rising and falling of the waters; and the phrase and the LORD shut him in in 7:16. Watch also for how the text echoes Genesis 1 in reverse — the un-creation of the world that creation set in order.

Closing Prayer

Lord God, who saw the depths of human corruption in the days of Noah and was grieved to Your heart, who did not abandon humanity but found one man through whom to preserve the line of Your promise — we worship You. Where the genealogy of our sin reaches back to Adam through every generation, the genealogy of Your mercy reaches back to Adam through every generation too. You preserved the seed. You walked with Enoch. You gave Lamech a son named comfort. You found favor for Noah. And You have given us, in the fullness of time, the True Comfort, the Seed of the woman, who has come to bring relief from the curse our father Adam brought into the world. Forgive us where the intentions of our hearts have been more like the world before the flood than like Enoch who walked with You. Where we have been tempted to lose our distinctiveness as Your people in the world, give us courage to remain salt and light. And bring us, with Enoch and Noah and all who have walked with You by faith, into Your eternal presence — by the favor we have found in the eyes of the LORD, not by any works we could ever have produced. Through Jesus Christ Your Son, our true Noah, who has carried us through the waters of judgment, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.