Week 1 Genesis
One plan for reading through the bible is called the Reading Through Except-For Plan. The RTE-F Plan allows me to make the content-exclusions of my choice. For example I might decide to skip long prophetic passages, histories of terrible people, pointless legal-ceremonial detail, tedious or demanding chapters. I might decide to skip name lists.
All of Genesis five is a name list and if I was excluding name lists I would leap-frog five and go right into chapter six.
Chapter five lists people in Adam’s family (the Nutshell Version: Adam Seth Enosh Kenan Mahalalel Jared Enoch Methuselah Lamech Noah).
The first and last names are familiar. But it’s Enoch who really stands out in this list: after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years…Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.
No other man in the list is said to have walked with God. The text doesn’t say the others didn’t, but it doesn’t say they did either. But Enoch walked with God.
When you start reading through it’s easy to have the sense of being in for a 1334-page grind – like observing evolution in real time – before landing on NT shores. But here I’m just over a hundred verses in, long before the Lord or prophets or kings or Moses or Abraham or the flood and I find an antiquity-guy who had what he needed to walk with God.
Note: quote from Genesis 5:22-24 (NIV)