When I got back
from Biloxi
I wrote a lot
out, and studied and evaluated everything.
I did very well
until Genesis Chapter 5. Let me just
remark that there are these sections of the Bible which can be, shall we say a
“challenge” to read. Chapter 5 is one of
those chapters. It reads like a family
tree. “So-and-so lived seventy years and
begat so-and-so, and that same so-and-so lived after he begat the second so-and-so
eight hundred and forty years and begat other so-and-sos: and all the days of
the first so-and-so were nine hundred and ten years and he died.”
These sections
of the Bible can be somewhat dry and hard to stay focused on. It became a personal challenge to my new
found zeal to stay focused and find the golden nuggets of wisdom hidden away even
in those sections.
I asked the
question, “How can I rearrange this information so it means something to me?” I chose to focus in on the names first. I wrote out the meaning of each name. I’d heard somewhere that the names correspond
to historical happenings. I didn’t see
that, but it was interesting none-the-less.
I looked up each Hebrew word in the Strong’s Concordance and wrote out
its translation as well as the identifying number.
I didn’t feel
like I got enough out of that study.
I thought back
to my Operations Research background and asked, “What did they teach us about
showing time periods in Inventory Management Class?
Gantt Charts! Perfect.
I put the
following chart together based off of the information in Chapter 5, then added
to it as I came across more names in Genesis.
My chart was complete.
I took a step
back and looked at the Gantt chart then asked myself what can I learn from this
chart? The first thing I noticed was the
oldest man who ever lived (Methuselah) died the same year the flood came.
He couldn’t have
died in the flood, I thought, God must have waited till he died and then let
loose with the flood. Perhaps one thing
we can deduce is that he was the last living righteous man other than Noah?
Then I noticed
Enoch, who never actually died, it just says, “And Enoch walked with God: and
he was not; for God took him.” (Gen 5:24) He went to be with the Lord just 57 years
after Adam passed away.
I wonder if it
took Enoch 57 years to find out about Father Adam’s death. Then when he found out, he asked God where
Adam had gone, and God took him to show him and he just kind of decided to stay
there.
Other than that,
I noticed the duration of the patriarch’s lives getting shorter after the
flood. I’ve heard this described as a
result of the bursting of a vapor canopy.
The vapor canopy is described in Genesis 1:7, “And God made the
firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the
waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” Somehow, the vapor canopy seemed to increase a
person’s life span.
I thought a long
time about that chart. The more I
thought about it, the more I realized the chart had a lot to do with the
message I had put in my pocket that Sunday morning. The message was still on my mind, growing and
getting deeper with time and study.
Maybe the message possessed more insight than my young mind could really
fathom at the time.
