"In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;..."
- IN THE LIKENESS OF GOD
5:1-2
By the grace and design of God, Adam began to proliferate. When we consider that humanity was made in the likeness of God, many of us focus on our physical aspects... and perhaps that's not incorrect. But our most prominent similarities to God are 1: our ability to create/proliferate as He does. The great Creator has made us creators. Not only are we able to procreate, but we also create with our minds, hands and interactions with others. We are able to create light and hope in others through friendships and relationships, familial, platonic and romantic. We are able to create opportunity and justice in places where there is none. We may operate on a smaller scale than God does, but our ability to create here is complex and impactful.
And 2: our spirit. Our conscious thought and visceral emotions. God is as present and tangible, and as unseen, as the soul within us. God is as impossible to deny as the being within us that maneuvers our physical body and interprets our physical world. We are most able to relate to Him when we read about His emotions throughout scripture. Our connection to Him is not necessarily in the length of our limbs or bipedalism or other physical characteristic. Our main connection to Him is the way and depth of how we feel. Such feelings as hope and despair, joy and sadness, long-suffering and mercy, and most importantly love, are our likeness with God.
Indeed God made us with characteristics that each represent a part of Him as a whole. God is our creator, our parent: a provider and a support. He created this family. The story of the family, of Jesus' family, begins here with this genealogy.
It began with Adam and his descendants. The efforts of a small family committed to the Lord resulted in Romans 10:13 "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." The whole earth invited to the kingdom, family of God.
- ADAM'S DESCENDANTS
5:3-18
After Abel was killed and Cain was banished, Adam and Eve had a son named Seth. The rest of the chapter is a list of names as several generations pass before the next person the Bible will focus on: Noah. Faith in God was still in it's infancy; in fact, many did not actually believe nor had they, as far as we know, received detailed instruction from God. That will come as the chapter continues, and the instruction will evolve as generations pass, becoming more modern as the cultural context progressed through time.
5:19-32
More members of Adam's descendants are listed. The first notable mention is Enoch. Enoch is a notable mentioned because of everyone listed, he is the one described as having walked with God. Therefore we know that he was an exceptionally faithful man. It is also briefly suggested (in verse 5:24) that Enoch did not die but was called up to Heaven by God before death on earth. This rarely happens to people in the Bible so it is worth mentioning.
The next notable mention is Methuselah, simply because he is the oldest person mentioned in the Bible: 969 years. It is thought that the lifespan of humans was much longer than it is now. It is understandable if that is a difficult concept to accept; what is important is what these people did and can teach us about the word of God, not how long they lived.
The final notable mention is Noah, another descendant of Adam and Even, who will take center-stage in Genesis in the next several chapters.