Adam and Eve have another baby, whom they name Seth, and during his life, people begin to “call on the Name of the Lord.” What does that mean and why is that important throughout the rest of the Bible?
If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all scripture is from the CSB, slightly modified, unless I say otherwise)
25 Adam was intimate with (knew) his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, for she said, “God has given me another offspring(child) in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.” 26 A son was born to Seth also, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.
Hey! Adam and Eve are back in the story! The last time we saw them was when Cain and Abel were born, remember? Remember how Eve said that she had gotten Cain with God’s help? And how, although we are given names for both boys, there isn’t anything about who named them? These new verses start out very differently from the verses about Cain and Abel. Now Eve’s tune has really changed. Now, she sees that God has given her another child. Eve has changed a lot—she doesn’t see her new child as something she has “gotten” but something she has been given. Eve is now giving full credit to God when she has this new baby. And, unlike Cain and Abel, Eve actually names Seth. In the same way, Seth will also name his own son Enosh.
Remember last week? We talked about Cain’s descendants and all the important things they invented and did. One was a bad dude, Lamech, but the others seemed to be really creative guys. It sure looks as though Cain’s curse was only on Cain and not on the people who came after him. Well, from now on we’re never going to hear about Cain’s family ever again. Starting now, the story will be about Adam’s descendants through his third son Seth. From Seth and his wife will come some important people—some good and some bad. Until we get to the time of Noah, we won’t really know very much about the very long list of names we will read in Genesis 5. Only two men, Enoch and Noah, will be called out for being good guys. The rest of them, all we will know is how long they lived before having certain kids and how old they were when they died. Otherwise, zip, zilch, nada.
Does the Bible tell us anything else about Seth? Yes, in chapter five it tells us something very important—that Seth wasn’t created in God’s image but in Adam’s image. Does that mean that Seth looks like his dad? Kinda, but we aren’t talking about his physical appearance here, his eye and hair color. Humans were originally created in God’s image, but that doesn’t mean we look like God. It means that we were created to rule over Creation the way that He rules, showing His character to the whole world and caring for it like He does. It meant that we were supposed to show we were in His image by doing things His way but then something terrible happened—people stopped doing things God’s way and began doing things their own way instead. So, Seth was the image of Adam and not the image of God. We are all created with the capacity, the ability and potential, of doing things God’s way but we most often do things the way that the humans around us do things and so we generally end up behaving very badly indeed. When the Bible says that Seth was in Adam’s image, it means that Seth would follow the example set by his father and would not follow God perfectly in how he lives. Would anyone ever be born in God’s image again?
Yes! As the Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 1:15, Jesus was created in the image of God—and actually, Jesus is the image of God. I say created instead of born because Jesus isn’t like us. We all had fathers and we are a combination of our moms and dads but Jesus didn’t come from Joseph, only from Mary. His Father was God because his mother Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit of God. Do we know exactly how that works? Nope. The Bible doesn’t say. Guess it isn’t really all that important for us to understand and we probably aren’t smart enough to understand. Let’s look at that verse and a couple of others.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him.He is before all things, and by him all things hold together.He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col 1:15-20)
So, does that mean that no one can ever be made in God’s image ever again, like Adam and Eve originally were? Well, we aren’t born that way anymore but we can be remade that way, through Jesus.
You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator. 11 In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all. (Col 3:10b-11)
It’s very important for us to all understand that God didn’t make us to be hopeless! He has a plan so that we can be more and more like Him and do things His way, just as it was in the beginning before that crafty Serpent convinced Adam and Eve that God didn’t want what was best for them and was holding out on the good stuff. That’s nonsense, of course, but they were tricked into being suspicious enough of God that they decided to make a very bad one-way decision that led them into nothing but trouble.
Now, our second lesson in this week’s scripture is the beginning of two of the most important things in the entire Bible—prayer and worship. That’s what “Calling on the Name of the Lord” means. For some reason, in the second generation after Adam, the people decided to make a good decision for a change. I mean, that’s really what Genesis three and four have been about, people having choices to do great things or terrible things and choosing to do terrible things instead. Until now. Suddenly, in the days of Adam’s grandson Enosh, people begin to call on the Name of the Lord. This is probably long before Lamech is born. But what does that mean—calling on the Name of the Lord? Does it mean that they suddenly learned God’s Name and began to say it out loud? That’s what it sounds like when you translate it from Hebrew into English and so, a lot of people think that’s all it means but that is not what this phrase means when it shows up in the Bible—and it shows up a lot. Sometimes, we make the mistake of looking at the translation of a Bible idiom and take it literally. Like, if I stick my head out the back door and call my kids’ names, it probably means it is dinner time. But would I call “on” the names of my kids? Nope. That would be weird. If I call my kids names, I will use their names. If I am mad, they might hear their middle names too.
But calling on someone means that we are asking for help. Specifically, we call on God because He is the only one who can help us when we need certain things. In the Bible, we see people calling on the Name of the Lord whenever they need for Him to remember His promises because God’s promises are what we call covenants. And covenants are more than just promises or plans or contracts that can be broken if things don’t work out. When God makes a covenant, it is forever. When God said, in Genesis 3:15, that one of Eve’s descendants would crush the serpent’s head—He meant it. I personally think that Eve thought that would be Cain, but the Bible doesn’t say that for a fact. I think that as time went by, generation after generation, that the people knew of God’s promise and wondered more and more when it would finally happen and they could go back to the Garden—or at least get revenge on that Serpent. After a while, I believe that people stopped waiting for this deliverer to be born and started praying about it. They were tired of the curse on the Land. They were tired of the growing consequences of sin and death. They were tired of people getting older and sicker. They were tired of working very hard and just having enough to survive. And so, they began to call on the Name of the Lord to save them and to deliver them from all the consequences of what Adam and Eve had done.
Remember, these people didn’t have Bibles. They didn’t have a book full of the promises of God so they could look and remember how faithful He is, like we can. So, they would call on Him and say, “Remember us! Save us!” And whenever we call upon the Name of the Lord, that’s what we are asking, we are asking for Him to save us in some way—whether it meant to send the Messiah to crush the head of the Serpent, or to save the Israelites from slavery, or from enemy armies, or from famine or sickness. We call on the Lord because we know that only He can absolutely save us.
But you might ask, and a lot of people do ask—do we need to know how to pronounce God’s actual name if we want Him to hear us? And that’s a very good question. Now, in the Bible, whenever you see the word Lord in small caps, that means that that word is covering up the four-letter name of God. And that happens almost seven thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. It never happens in the Greek Gospels and other writings about Jesus. By the time Jesus was born, people hadn’t been saying God’s Name out loud for a long time and we actually never see Jesus doing it either. When they were no longer their own Kingdom, and when pagan nations (nations that worshipped false gods) were ruling over them, they seem to have decided that they needed to protect God’s holy name from being used in bad ways by people who didn’t worship Him. And it even became a crime to say it out loud. So, people stopped pronouncing those four letters, yod-hey-vav-hey and if it wasn’t for some old Greek documents from the time of the life of Jesus, we wouldn’t know that they pronounced it Yahweh, and I will link to a very long Jewish Encyclopedia article that talks about the Greek-era Jewish amulets that have the Greek letters on them that tell us how they pronounced it in the first century. Unlike Hebrew, Greek has vowels and so when Jews who spoke Greek as their language wrote down God’s Name, it had consonants and vowels, and not just consonants. I want you to think about that. What would your first name be with no vowels? Or consonants that make vowel sounds? My name would be spelled TLR. And if you didn’t know me personally, you wouldn’t know if I was a Tyler or a Taylor or a Tuler or a Telar or whatever. In modern times, Hebrew has what are called vowel points, and they are added above, below, or beside the consonants so that people who are not native Hebrew speakers can tell how to pronounce words. But in their street signs and newspapers, you have to understand the context to know what the words are and how they are pronounced. There are only a few words that I can read without all the vowel points. It’s just too hard for me. Maybe after the lesson today, you can write out your names with no vowels and think of all the ways it could be pronounced by putting in different vowels. It’s pretty funny. But, because of the two-thousand-year-old Greek amulets, we know that the Greek speaking Jews pronounced God’s Name Yahweh.
But, if your family calls Him Lord, or Elohim, or El Shaddai, or Adonai or Kyrios or God or whatever, that’s fine too. And I call Him God or Lord here on the radio. Now, in pagan religions, they believed that how you pronounced the name of theirs god was very, very important. They didn’t believe their gods were very smart and we have talked about that before. They thought that gods had different names—on one hand, there were titles of respect (just like the Bible uses, things like El and Elohim and Adon and Adonai), and on the other hand they had the regular name for that god (like Apollos, Diana, Zeus, Jupiter, Ares, etc) and on their third hand or maybe a foot, because we ran out of hands, there was their super-secret name that only they knew. And if you could find out the super-secret name, then you could use it to control them like a remote-control car. And we see this in ancient pagan myths like the story of Isis and Ra. Isis and Ra were Egyptian gods, and one day Isis, the Egyptian goddess of healing and magic, tricked Ra, the sun god, into telling her his super-secret name (which isn’t Ra) and once she learned it, she could make him do whatever the heck she wanted him to do. That’s called naming-magic and it is a very popular pagan belief. Of course, the Bible never says that we have to know how to pronounce God’s Name in order for Him to hear us. He is our only God, the creator of the heavens and the earth and all of us. When I say, “God” He knows I can’t possibly be talking about anyone else. I call Him by all sorts of titles and sometimes by the Name Yahweh, and I get my prayers answered—just not always with a yes! I mean, He is still God and He is not a vending machine where I press the buttons for a certain order and then get what I want. But the whole idea that we have to know exactly how to pronounce God’s name is something that came from other religions. It’s about the belief in magic, that how you pronounce something works like a spell. If you say things the right way then God hears you but if you don’t then He won’t. I tell you, the ancient pagans didn’t think their gods were particularly smart or powerful. I am glad they aren’t real.
But anyway, during the time of Seth and his son Enosh, people started calling on God to ask Him for help, to keep His promises, and to worship Him. Because, when we go to God for help instead of someone else, or when we go to God and tell Him and believe that only He can help us, that’s an act of worship. I bet you thought that worship is all about music! But nope, worship is about a whole life lived for God—listening to Him, obeying him, depending on Him, giving Him credit for this wonderful creation by thanking Him, and praising Him. What does it mean to praise Him? Well, praise can be musical or just words or in writing or in our hearts. When we sing songs about God, that’s praise. When something wonderful happens and we shout about how wonderful God is, that’s praise. When our prayers are answered and we tell everyone about it, that’s praise. Sometimes, my “loudest” praise of all if when I am lying in bed at night and my heart is so full of love for God that I just feel like it will burst.
I want to talk about calling on the Name of Jesus and why that is important. Of course, Jesus is God’s chosen Messiah who died to save us from sin and death. And calling on Him means that we are saying that we believe that God sent Him and that everything He did shows us who God is, and that we believe God raised Him from the dead. When we call upon the Name of the Lord Jesus, or you might call Him Yeshua or Jesus (Spanish) or Yesu or Isa depending on where you live, we are calling on Him to include us in God’s Kingdom because that is the only way we can be saved from the death and sin that the Serpent brought into this world when he tricked and tempted Adam and Eve into disobeying God and not trusting Him. In the book of Acts, written about the things some of Jesus’s disciples did after Jesus returned to God the Father, we meet a young man named Saul. Now, Saul loved God very much and God’s laws were very important to Saul. He believed with his whole heart that the disciples were wrong and that Jesus had led people astray from worshiping God. Well, one day, Saul was on his way to a city named Damascus, which still exists to this very day, and he was going to arrest all of the Jewish people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah. But Jesus spoke to him while he was on the way and blinded him. And for three whole days, Saul was so upset that he couldn’t eat or drink anything. The voice of Jesus—it told him that he was wrong, and that Saul was not on God’s side even though he was trying very hard to do the right thing. Jesus told Saul that He had work for him to do and that He would tell him all about it later. Let’s look at Acts chapter 9 to see the rest of the story:
10 There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” “Here I am, Lord,” he replied. 11 “Get up and go to the street called Straight,” the Lord said to him, “to the house of Judas, and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, since he is praying there. 12 In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and placing his hands on him so that he may regain his sight.” 13 “Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard from many people about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. 14 And he has authority here from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.” 15 But the Lord said to him, “Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to Gentiles, kings, and Israelites. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” 17 Ananias went and entered the house. He placed his hands on him and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road you were traveling, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 At once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. 19 And after taking some food, he regained his strength.
So, throughout the Bible, people have called on the Name of the Lord when they needed saving. And we see throughout the Hebrew parts of the Bible, what some people call the Old Testament, that God responded by saving the children of Israel in a lot of ways, some very big and some very small. But, it was never big enough that everyone could be saved but John 3:16 tells us that God loves the whole world, not just the children of Israel. He saved the children of Israel over and over again because, through them, God would save the entire world—everyone who wants to call on the Name of the Lord. He chose one family, Abraham’s family, and then He chose Abraham’s son Isaac instead of Ishmael, and then Jacob instead of Esau, and then Judah instead of his brothers, and then David and on and on and on until there came to be born Mary, and from her, Jesus was born. But each time, that was God’s choice, and He never started all over again with different people because God had made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God doesn’t ever break His promises. And so, Jesus was born in response to the prayers of all the children of Israel and all of the people going all the way back to Seth and Enosh who called on the Name of the Lord to save them from sin and death and all the curses that the Serpent’s tricks had brought into their lives. And we will talk about who or what the Serpent might have been in a few weeks before we talk about Noah and the flood.
All those people called on the Name of the Lord to be saved from all those consequences and God’s answer was Jesus. He lived a perfect life. He did things that the Bible says only God can do. Things like forgiving sin, healing lepers, curing the blind, walking on water, and even commanding the wind and the waves to stop. He could also do the mighty works of the ordinary prophets who came before Him, like Elijah and Moses. And God gave Him to us to save us—that was the way God decided to handle the problem of sin and death and all the consequences of what went wrong in the Garden. The prophet Joel said that, “everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.” And God’s choice to answer that prayer was His Son Jesus, His personal representative, created in His image and as His perfect image but who lived perfectly when Adam couldn’t. So when we call on the Name of Jesus, we are telling God that we accept His choice for saving us, that we believe that this is how God answered the prayers of all His people for so long. Just think if Jesus hadn’t come—we’d still be waiting and things would be horrible.
Saul thought he was serving God when he arrested everyone who believed that Jesus was God’s way of answering all those prayers for help and salvation, but Jesus came to him in a vision and set him straight. Jesus made him blind so that he wouldn’t be able to go forward with his plans and it sure gave him some serious time to think about everything he was doing and everything that had happened. And then, when he had thought for long enough, Jesus sent another Jewish man named Ananias to make Saul see again. And Saul became one of the greatest Bible teachers who every lived and he went out telling everyone in all the cities of modern-day Turkey and even in Rome all about Jesus and he made many disciples among the people he found, both Jews and Gentiles. God isn’t cruel or spiteful. Even when we do terrible things to hurt people, He can turn us around so that we can follow and serve Him. Ananias was worried about Saul, but later, under the name of Paul, he wrote many letters that made their way into the Bible.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.