Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #6 of Genesis, chapter 5 and we are looking at Genesis 5:9-11:
And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.
At this point in the Biblical calendar, here is what we know so far:
So, upon the birth of Enos, it is 235 years from the creation. Now God is continuing His calendar, but He is not following the lifespan of Adam or the lifespan of Seth, but the calendar is now going to go through Enos. Again, it says in Genesis 5:9:10:
And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:
Up until the point that Seth begat Enos, we knew that Enos was an immediate son of Seth because of the use of the phrase “qârâ – shêm” in Genesis 4:26: “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos.” There is that phrase “qârâ – shêm” that means “called his name.” But when it comes to Enos and Cainan, we do not see the phrase “qârâ – shêm” used to indicate an immediate father/son relationship. Also, when we search the Bible, we do not find any additional information that would indicate that Cainan was an immediate son of Enos, so at this point we are not sure. Actually, the way that God has written the calendar the truth is that Cainan is not an immediate son. Remember, the word “begat” does not necessarily indicate an immediate father/son relationship.
So, let us go to Genesis, chapter 11 where the calendar picks up after the flood. It says in Genesis 11:10-13:
These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
Now let us go to the New Testament where a genealogy is given in the Gospel of Luke. It is in Luke, chapter 3 and you could read this in reverse because if you started with creation, verse 38 begins with God. Then from God there is Adam, then Seth, then Enos, then Cainan, and so forth. It says in Luke 3:35-36:
Which was the son of Saruch, which was the son of Ragau, which was the son of Phalec, which was the son of Heber, which was the son of Sala, Which was the son of Cainan, which was the son of Arphaxad, which was the son of Sem…
“Sem” is “Shem,” and again, it said in Genesis 11:10:14:
These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber:
In Luke it tells us that Cainan came after Arphaxad (not Salah) and, therefore, shows that Salah was not the immediate son to Arphaxad. This is the way that God has laid out His calendar from this point (and for a stretch) and then it will pick up again in Genesis, chapter 11. Enos is the Biblical reference patriarch of his day and the calendar history is attached to the lifespan of Enos, just as it will be attached to Noah in the future from the point that God is going to destroy the world in the days of the flood. He says in Genesis 7:6:
And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
We find the time references of the flood are tied to Noah. It says in Genesis 7:11:
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
The flood occurred in the year “600 Noah” and Noah would live after the flood 350 years and all the days of Noah totaled 950 years when he died. He was the Biblical calendar reference patriarch of his time period and he almost lived a thousand years.
In our day it is the year 2016AD and the “AD” stands for “anno domini” or “year of our Lord” and our calendar is also linked to an individual, the Lord Jesus Christ. Time has been tracked by most of the world for about 2,000 years according to the lifespan of the Lord Jesus Christ and when (they think) He was born. It is the same mindset today, even though we do not add the “AD” after we say the year and we are thinking only in terms of what year it is and most people do not even stop and think who the calendar is tied to, but the calendar has been tied to individuals since the beginning. For the first 130 years Adam was the calendar reference patriarch; then when Seth was born and for the next 105 years Seth was the calendar reference patriarch; then when Enos was born Enos became the Biblical calendar patriarch.
But now there are more options as more people have been born into the world, so God is going to make a change. He is not going to have Enos begat the next calendar reference patriarch when he is 90. That is not what it means. It means that when Enos was 90, an individual was born that would be in the line of Cainan and then Cainan would come later after Enos had lived 915 more years. In other words, the calendar would follow the entire lifespan of Enos and all the day of Enos were 905 years and then he died and in the year of Enos’ death Cainan was born the same year. Then the Biblical calendar would follow the life of Cainan until Cainan died.
You see, Mr. Camping discovered something that was unlike all of man’s previous attempts to uncover the true Biblical calendar of history and there were several previous attempts to do so. You may have heard of Bishop Ussher who was from the Church of Ireland in the 17th Century. He laid down a Biblical calendar based on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11, and so forth, and he came up with a creation date of 4,004BC. Of course, if creation was 4,004 BC, it would make the age of the earth just over six thousand years old in our time and it is just much, much too short. Actually, the methodology that Ussher and some others used was thrown off because where it says, “Enos lived 90 years and begat Cainan,” they assumed Cainan was the immediate son of Enos. We can see how they could make this error because God had established an earlier pattern that He now would break – the error was assuming that the word “begat” always means an immediate father/son relationship. In this case, Cainan was “begat” when Enos was 90, but he was not born then; he would not be born into the world for over 815 years after that point. So you can see how there would be a wide discrepancy of years. Even if you were just off by this one instance, your calendar would already be off by 815 years.
The result for these early generations that led up to Noah (the 10th generation) would be a miscalculated calendar that would be off by 4,397 years. There would be 4,397 years that would be missing by the time you got to the flood. Almost 4,400 years would not be taken into account because of the way God has hidden truth in the Bible with His calendar, which was very precisely set in place, end to end: upon the death of one Biblical calendar patriarch, the next calendar patriarch was born the same year and that individual’s lifespan would go on until he died and, upon his death, the next Biblical calendar patriarch would be born.
When people do not follow the proper methodology and they think that the word “begat” always means an immediate father/son relationship, then they end up thinking that from creation to Noah’s age of 600 when the flood began there is an elapsed timeline of only 1,626 years and 600 of those years are the in the days of Noah. This means that according to their calendar from the time of creation, if Adam died in the year 930, then about 100 years later Noah is born and 600 years into Noah’s life was the flood. Everything is jammed into a short span of time that does not allow for the necessary time that God has placed in His Word. Then they do the same thing with their calendar after the flood (Genesis 11) and that is how they come up with a very compact 4,004 years of the Old Testament, plus the 2,000+ years of the New Testament and when you put the two together, it is about 6,020 years, but the actual age of the earth from creation until Christ’s birth in 7BC was 11,006 years. They are off over seven thousand years on the Old Testament side. The error is on the Old Testament side where they have lost about seven thousand years because they failed to understand how God wrote His calendar.
You know, I think we have to take into the account that God had sealed His Word until the time of the end and that means the Biblical calendar was also sealed. These people did the best they could. The good thing that Bishop Ussher and others did when they tried to ascertain the correct calendar of history was that they looked in the right place – they looked in the Bible. They trusted that God created the world. They trusted the lifespans that were given, so all of that is good and commendable, but they were not able to penetrate the way God had hidden this information. It would not come to light until the Lord opened the eyes of Mr. Camping and he wrote the book “Adam When?” in the 1970s. That was even before God opened up the Scriptures at the time of the end in 1988, so why would God open up that information a couple of decades before the Great Tribulation when the Bible was unsealed? I think the reason is pretty clear. It was necessary that the calendar be available and known in advance of the details that God would later open up concerning the timeline for the Great Tribulation and the end of all things. These things were tied to the calendar, so you had to have an understanding of the Biblical calendar of history.
One of the major problems the churches have in regard to knowing “time and judgment” is because they have accepted, to a large degree, the calendar put forth by Bishop Ussher. And once they accept something, they never investigate further. Once they establish a “high place,” they leave it in place and they do not allow anyone to touch it and, therefore, with that mindset they cannot know where they are in history. Their timeline has no firm foundation of the creation date and the flood date and many other dates in the Bible, so they have no real grasp on the timeline of the world that God established in His Word.
God’s people, by God’s grace, began to make reference to dates like 1988, the 13,000th year of earth’s history and how Christ was born at the point of the 11,000th year of earth’s history, and so forth, but these things do not register with those in the churches because they have a completely different base of understanding regarding time. They have it in their Bibles (I think it is the Scofield Bible) that the earth was created in 4,004BC, so when we talk about these dates and the end of the world, it did not (and does not) register with a great many people within the churches and congregations.
Yet, this is an accurate Biblical calendar. It is amazing that when we go through the timeline we are going to come up with about 7,000 years more than in Ussher’s calendar and, yet, as we go end to end with many of these dates of the Biblical reference patriarchs, we are adding 815 years, for instance, that Ussher’s calendar would not take into account. Then when we go to the next patriarch, there are many hundreds of more years added, and so on, until there are almost 4,400 years accounted for in our Biblical calendar that are not found in any other calendar. We are working our way from creation in 11,013BC and we are going along adding thousands of years of what they (the churches) would call erroneous years to the calendar of time. Later on we will come to the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the 430 years of Israel in Egypt and then the wilderness sojourn and the period of the judges and the period of the kings and our dates will be demonstrated at each point along the way as we descend down through history to coincide with some of their own (the churches) accepted dates for the life of Solomon or the foundation of the temple. How can that be? How is it possible if we are incorrect by thousands of years? It would seem that when we got down to the later periods of time, we should be way off base with archaeological findings for certain kings, and so forth, but we are not off. We are right on target. We are right on the “money” with the lifespan of Solomon, after working all the way down from Adam and following this methodology. We will find ourselves right on target and how is that possible? It is because we are understanding the Biblical calendar correctly and it is only the Biblical calendar of history that allows for 11,000+ years of Old Testament history that truly enables all the events of the Old Testament to have time enough to work out. Some secularists mock the Biblical calendar of history and those that accept it because it does not give enough time for certain ancient civilizations to have developed because everything is so compacted. And, yet, there are remains of Mayans and there are remains of Egyptian empires that could not have been if Ussher’s date for the flood were true and the tiny amount of time he gave for Old Testament history to have worked out. It was absolutely necessary for there to have been a longer period of time.
If we would discuss things with someone presenting a secular chronology of some ancient civilization, we would say, “Yes, of course, the Bible allows for that to have happened because there were actually several thousand more years of Old Testament history.”
We will take a closer look at these verses in Genesis 5, verses 9 through 11 and we will come up with the next date for Enos and when his lifetime concluded and that will give us the next milestone in God’s Biblical timeline of history.