We see that grace in chapter 6—God showing favour to Noah and rescuing him and his family.  We see that grace in chapter 9 with God’s covenant to preserve creation and never again destroy it with a flood.  And we have seen that grace in the promise of the serpent-crusher. What about the serpent-crusher?  Keep following the line of descendants.  This section ends with another genealogy (chapter 11): from Shem to Abram.  The search for the serpent-crusher continues!  Abram will be the next great character in God’s story of salvation but he will not be the serpent crusher, we have to carry on many more generations until we come to him. 

  My dad loves genealogies—working on the family tree.  I know of at least one occasion where our summer holiday included a picnic in a graveyard—dad was gathering information from a gravestone.  I suppose the thrill is in the search, searching further and further backwards into history and the people who were there.

            There are genealogies in Genesis and they too are part of a search, but this search looks forwards not backwards, for it is anticipating someone that is to come.

            This search begins at chapter 3, verse 15.  There the LORD God says to the serpent:

 And I will put enmity

Between you and the woman,

And between your offspring and hers

He will crush your head,

and you will strike his heel.

            Note in this verse the singular ‘he’ and ‘his’!  There is an individual we are looking for.  We are searching for the offspring of Eve who will crush the serpent’s head?  [1]

Cain and Abel (chapter 4)

In chapter 4 we read of the first of Eve’s offspring.  Cain is the first-born.  Will he be the one to crush the serpents head?  No!  In fact Cain crushes his brother Abel!  In this murder we see how the breakdown in relationship between God and humanity inevitably leads to a breakdown in relationship among humans.

With regard to finding to the serpent-crusher Cain and Abel lead to a dead end (in Abel’s case literally!).  Abel has no descendants, and when we read of Cain’s (4:17-24) we see little hope.  The line from Cain leads to Lamech, who boasts of killing a man for striking him (4:23).

So where will the offspring of Eve that will crush the serpents head come from?  In verse 25 we read of the birth of another son born in the place of Abel, Seth.  A new line of descendants begins and immediately it is associated with the worship of God— at that time men began to call on the name of the LORD (verse 26).  This is the line of descendants that we are to follow as we search for the serpent-crusher.

The account of Adam’s line (chapter 5)

You might be tempted to skip over chapter 5 if you are working your way through Genesis.  Certainly it is not the most exciting read: ‘so and so had lived for a certain number of years, he became the father of someone else, he lived for a certain number of more years and had other sons and daughters.  Altogether he lived a certain number of years, and then he died.’  The pattern is repetitive!  But there are important things being taught here!

To start with a certain line is being traced, only one member in each generation is mentioned: we are moving in a direction towards one person.  This line, as we will see, continues right through Genesis and contrary to expectation it does not always continue through the first-born—it goes through Seth rather than Cain, Isaac rather than Ishmael, Jacob rather than his first-born twin brother Esau.

This genealogy also serves as a reminder that the consequence of sin—death. Again and again we read—and then he died.  People don’t like to talk about death, some even try to avoid the word.  Apparently there is a hospital in America that refers to death as ‘negative patient care outcome’[2].  However death is a harsh reality of life.

Noah (chapters 6-9) ‘Grace and Covenant’:

In chapter five the line leads to Noah who is introduced by his father’s hopeful words, “He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the LORD has cursed” (5:29).

Read More