How long have you got on the planet? We don’t leave in order, do we! Probably good to get your bags packed.
The earth had been swept clean by the flood. Just one family was left to re-populate the world. Noah, we read, is now 600 years old! How could people live that long? One person told me that the ancients used a lunar calendar, so a number like that should be divided by 12. Let’s see, then Noah was actually 50! But we also read in Genesis 5:21, “Enoch lived sixty-five years, and begot Methuselah.” So, wow! Sixty-five divided by 12—that means Enoch was five years old when he fathered his son! No, I’m afraid that theory won’t work. These people really did live much longer. The pace of life was slower, there was no pollution, in those years war was unknown, few diseases had developed, and the genetic bank was still fairly intact. Yet lifespans continued to drop. After the flood, perhaps in part due to intermarrying and the change in the planet’s conditions, the average lifespan dropped to 120 years (Gen 6:3). Then, as men grew wicked faster, the lifespan was shortened again. In the days of Moses, about 1500 BC, he wrote, “The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Ps 90:10). That’s about where we are now. Moses wrote in that same psalm, “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (v 12). Have you numbered your days? If you sleep eight hours a night, by the time you’re 75, you’ve spent 25 of them unconscious! Food prep and consumption, two hours per day? That’s a whole month of 24-hour days every year—6 years off your 75! A forty-hour work week for 40 years? Another ten years of 24-hour days. And so it goes, says Moses; there’s no time to waste. Make every day count for God!