Introduction

Hello everyone! Today we are going to study Genesis Chapter 5. When I was a new believer, as soon as I read such chapters like "who gave birth to who, and who gave birth to whom," I would skip them all and not read them. I guess everyone is like me. I didn't know what I was reading, even if I had read it. One day I was having a hard time with my Bible study. How can I find out about this "guy"? It was a pain! So, I prayed. The Spirit of God was so good that it opened my eyes.

There is not really any nonsense in the Bible. Whenever you read a chapter where there are repeated words, the repeated words are very important. Then I understood about people living and dying. Actually, God is quite humorous. He doesn't tell you directly that you have no hope and you will live and die. He just writes: "Who lived for how many years, gave birth to his sons, and then lived to be how many years old and died...

Today, let's start thinking about people live and die. This is the problem we are exploring. In fact, the worst thing about people is that they do not know they will die one day. You will find this quite interesting. Some people live more than 900 years; some people live more than 800 years; some people live more than 700 years; some people live more than 600 years; some people live more than 300 years... So, we will think that living more than 900 years is better than living more than 300 years. In fact, this is a human myth. The topic today is called "Comfort in the Labor and Painful Toil."

Why is "comfort in hard work?" Let's think about it carefully. What hope do people have in life? There is no hope. Later, I found that those who have hope in life have become a problem because those who live with special hope will produce a rat race, which in Chinese is called nei Juan.

Today, you go to observe carefully: if you admit that there is no hope, then it will be better. Because people do not know that they will live and die, they live a tangled, difficult, and laborious life. In fact, there is no hope; living in this world is toil and sorrow.

When we were young, we thought we might have many years ahead of us, and then we found that the days went by very quickly.
The life of a person is very short. However, when you are young, you can hope to get into a prestigious university. Some children do not get into a prestigious university, it is very difficult. If people don't know that you will die someday, they will take living very seriously.

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, "He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed." After Noah was born, Lamech lived for 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died. (Genesis 5:28-31 NIV)

Think about it: how can a man have hope in his life? There is no hope! If you think you have hope, then you are Cain. People take life far too seriously, which leads to conflict with others. 

Man Lives Without Hope

People think that they must live well, but in fact, many things are meaningless. Once people live too seriously, they will live like Cain; they will all become the ancestors of bronze and iron, playing the piano and blowing, becoming some very powerful people, but in the end, they will all die.

I hope you can listen to my advice; if you travel 500 years later and want to look at your urn again, you may not be able to find it. You will find that even if the Qingming Festival, no one is there to burn paper money, help you take care of the urn, or insert a bouquet of flowers. So people actually don't have much hope for living.

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6)

Sometimes it is easy for a serious person like me to live and forget that there is no hope in living, so I have to stop.

A few days ago, I found that I was inexplicably depressed, and someone asked, "Teacher, you will be like this too!" I said yes! Because I am alive, just like you. I don't know what's wrong with me. I feel that life is very hard and meaningless. Why do people feel that living is meaningless? Because it is just like Lamech, who felt that there was no point in living.

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, "He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed." After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. (Genesis 5:28-30)

You must have a strong resonance with me because this is a situation that we all often have, which is inexplicably depressing. How do we solve this situation? We have to imitate Noah because he solved the problem of living, which echoes our theme today, "Comfort in the Labor and Painful Toil".

This feeling is actually very bad because I don't know why I am living. As a result, I summed up one thing for myself: if I live but can't find the goal of living, even if the sun is shining, the birds are singing, it looks black and white in my eyes. Today I will give you this concept: if we do not want to continue to live and live without hope, then we have to find destiny. That is something for which I have to pay the full price.

Walking With God is the Only Way to Live

At that time, I was walking on the street, looking at things in black and white because I didn't have any purpose or hope of living in my heart. and at that time I felt that it was better to live a shorter life so that the time of labour and painful toil would be less. Then I looked for God, and God became my hope and my comfort, so today our church condenses this into the word "destiny".

Although we have a destiny and know what we live for, we sometimes still have a sense of powerlessness. For those who have no destiny, won't it be more painful and helpless?

 The revelation in this chapter is very important. It tells us that there is only one way to live, and that is to walk with God and live out our "destiny". This chapter is very important, and it talks about Enoch.

 When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. (Genesis 5:21)

This Methuselah was the father of Lamech, who was the father of Noah, and Enoch was Noah's great-grandfather.

After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked faithfully with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived a total of 365 years. Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away. (Genesis 5:22–24)

After Enoch gave birth to Methuselah, I guess he must have cried for God and then experienced God. From then on, he saw through life and death, and he knew he had to walk with God. He was the only one of these people who lived the shortest life, at 365 years old. Then he was taken away by God and disappeared. There was no more Enoch in this world, but he entered into eternal life. Therefore, today we need to know that there is only one way to live, which is called walking with God.

We need to have a destiny because ministering is not for the sake of the person being ministered to but for the sake of the person doing the ministering.

After Enoch gave birth to Methuselah, he walked with God for three hundred years. What exactly is this walk with God? It is to minister to the people of that time. If you are ministering to the people of that era, you will walk with God like Enoch, and God will walk with you and be with you every day.

That's why I encourage people to minister and be a blessing to others; that's called walking with God. We need to have a destiny because, without it, we don't even know how to live and will live hard. There are many problems in this world, and whether you are solving other people's problems or your own, you will have less sadness and live out the value of your own life.

There is only one path called walking with God, which can get rid of all the inexplicable feelings. For example, if I ask you to do transcription and text ministry, don't think that I need you to transcribe my recordings into text. It's just that when you listen to the recording to transcribe the text, you have less time to be sad and spend all your time on the right things.

If you are a person, you have to live out life. Because people can't understand life and death, they live in Cain's way. We have to see through these dreams in this world, and after seeing through these, there is only one way, which is to walk with God. If you don't see through, you can only live in labour and painful toil.

The two most important things in a person's life are blessing and cursing. We have labour and painful toil because God cursed the earth. In other words, walking with God will solve the problem of blessing and cursing. A curse is when you do something, there is always a demon to mess with you and make you work hard to do. A blessing is when God looks after everything you do, so walking with God solves all the problems.

Man Lives Hard Because God has Cursed the Earth

The reason why man lives hard on this earth is that God has cursed the earth, which is why Jesus Christ bore our sorrows and carried our curses. This solves the problem of the curse, and this is the key.

He named him Noah and said, "He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed." (Genesis 5:29)

The comfort we find here is the solution to the problem of toilful work, but sometimes we will still feel inexplicably sad and have a feeling of painful toil and labour. The reason is that God cursed the earth. After God cursed the earth, people lived on this earth, living under the curse. The longer you live, the longer you work hard. If I had not found God, I would not be alive in this world today, because I have come to the conclusion that it is hard to be in this world. It is better to live a shorter life. Then I came to know God. Knowing God, I have come to see man's life in this world as hopeless, so my hope is in God.

Man must solve the problem of blessings and curses when he lives in this world. If you want to solve the problem of blessings and curses, you must walk with God; if you want to walk with God, you must see through that man lives without hope. People live and die; there is no hope.

But if you think there is hope, you are living outside of God's plan. So, people need to know that the reason they work hard is because God cursed the earth, and many Christians don't know that. There are Christians who have cancer and insist that they are not cursed.

God Comfort Us

God will comfort us in our labour and painful toil and will become a comfort to us. Curses are the first issue that must be solved before God can comfort us. Jesus had died on the cross, and Noah saw the Son of God, Jesus Christ, die on the cross for us in his vision, and then he released us from the curse.

God wants to comfort us and solve the problem of our curse, so we should not live according to our original concept. The problem of living comes from the fact that God has cursed the earth, cursed the people, and cursed all these things. If the problem of the curse is solved, what we receive today is a blessing. If we trust God well, he will walk with us as he walked with Enoch. Then all the problems will be solved. As long as we have God's presence, we will certainly lack nothing in life.

In the Old Testament, Joseph was sold to Egypt, but later God was with him, and everything was his. As for the question of living, I used to work very hard, but there was no hope. Now it's different. Everything I do now is like doing it for God, and I live and prosper! The will of God for Noah was to have many children, to fill the whole earth, and to flourish on the earth!

A man with God must be a prosperous man; a man who lives like Cain is also prosperous but lives a hard life. Jesus has solved the problem of living, cursing, and dying for us!

If a Christian is still a Christian who is afraid of death, then the problem of death has not been solved. Christians should see through life and death. A spiritual man sees through all things, but no one can see through him because he sees through life and death and lives in prosperity! A spiritual person will have God's blessing on all the things he does and will work easily and prosper!

Today, God wants to comfort us because Jesus Christ was in the body of Noah. Then, from this branch of Noah, it went on to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and then David and Jesus Christ. The entire Bible, from Genesis to the book of Matthew, speaks of the genealogy of Jesus.

Some people may want to ask, "What about those people who die?" If they die, they die. All we can care about is whether we are willing to make a decision to live in this eternal hope from now on.

Whoever follows this path and trusts God has already seen through life and death, and from now on, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. We need to walk with God and become a man who has destiny. If discouragement suddenly comes, get up and minister, and the discouragement will be gone.

This chapter shows us a way, which is comfort in labour and painful toil. It is the solution to the problems of the curse, blessing, living, and death. Brothers and sisters, believe in God!

May God bless you!