Lunchtime ponderings, over a really bad cafeteria burrito...

I was just sitting here thinking about Adam. Adam lived 900 years. That's a loooooong time! I never really thought about why God allowed Adam to live so long. I wonder how old he was when he was banished from the Garden of Eden...or how long he walked with God in the Garden before he fell. (Unfortunately, I don't have time to reference it at the moment...)

Anyway, other than Eve, Adam was the only person during his era who had ever experienced God. Because of his sin, all of the rest of the people were robbed of that opportunity. How sad that must have been. Did you ever think about how Adam felt as he looked into the faces of his descendants, knowing that because of his personal failure the fruit of his own body was robbed of having a personal experience with God? Wow...and he had to live with that reality a loooong time!

Today I read a devotional that spoke of Enoch.The devotional mentioned that Enoch was the seventh generation from Adam; which means that Adam was still alive during Enoch's lifetime. Enoch was amazing - the bible says that Enoch "was taken away so that he did not see death, and was not found, because God had taken him; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God." (Hebrews 11:5, New King James Version). I began to wonder how it was that this man, who had no access to God, could be that close to God. I mean, this was in Genesis 5, which is before Genesis 6, in which chapter we are told the story of how the earth was so perverse that God regretted making man, and destroyed the earth with a flood! These were seriously evil times, but yet this man Enoch knew God in an incredibly intimate way. How?

I'm imagining that very likely, Enoch's understanding of God must have come from Adam. At least indirectly, from oral tradition if not personally. All humanity could be traced back to Adam, so Adam was related to everyone alive. Doesn't it stand to reason that given the patriarchal emphasis of the time, Adam would have at least some kind of influence in the earth? Wouldn't most people have at least some awareness of the fact that their forefather, Adam, walked with God in the Garden?

I wonder what kind of preacher Adam was. What kind of questions did he get about the time he walked with God in the cool of the day? Could he even describe it? How candid was he about his personal failure (aka, 'the fall of the human race')? I wonder if people searched him out to hear the stories? Were they all mad at him? What did he have to say about Cain and Abel? I know that Cain was banished, and I wonder if he had his own version of the message to preach about who his father was and who God was, and what he was like. (I digress...)


So I am throwing out an untestable hypothesis that God allowed Adam to live so long for the purpose of preaching his story to his descendants, and teaching them what God was like. There would have been no one else to tell His story. Because God is just, there had to be someone to tell His story. How could He destroy the world because of its perversion, if the world had no clue about Him? Even in the midst of a perverse world, God will have a messenger to perpetuate the truth of Who He is. Even if it means extending a man's life to 900 years, or warning a man of an impending flood and instructing him to build an ark... and the list of His methodology could go on an on.


To me, this is a testament to a couple of things: 1) God will use even those who fall the hardest and leave behind the greatest and most devastating consequences to do an expansive work for the purpose of the Kingdom; and 2) God places an incredible importance on the spreading of the message of the majesty of who He is.

And these are just thoughts from a God-lover's heart...