Relief From Painful Labor

There is a beautiful truth found in the life of the father of Noah. The genealogy is: Adam →Seth→ Enosh→ Kenan→ Mahalalel→ Jared→ Enoch→ Methuselah→ Lamech.

You see, Lamech longed for relief from God’s curse on farm ground, because of the sin that entered into humanity when Adam ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. So Lamech had a good reason to hope for solace.

Nature of the Curse

Genesis 5:29 reads: Lamech named his son Noah, for he said, “May he bring us relief from our work and the painful labor of farming this ground that the Lord has cursed.” The results of the curse meant:

• The ground would produce thorns and thistles, making food production difficult.
• Human labor would be marked by pain, sweat, and frustration.
• The earth would not easily yield its bounty; survival would require constant, exhausting effort.
• Ultimately, humans would return to the ground in death, highlighting the futility and sorrow introduced by the curse.

From this list, we can infer that the ground was very fertile before God’s curse. I owned a house that had a large yard. I used to tell my wife that I’d never seen anything like it. EVERYTHING grew in our yard – flowers, trees, blackberries. You name it, and it would grow without any effort from us; well from me; my wife worked the ground😉.

Anyway, besides the land being fertile, it took seemingly no effort for Adam and Eve to grow crops. In Eden, growing food was easy-peasy, which was good since those two started out as vegetarians.

We don’t have to “infer” about death. Death didn’t exist until there was sin – “for the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23)

Good News

Notice Lamech’s hope – “May he bring us relief.” Lamech was hoping for a savior. Noah was a foreshadowing of Jesus, THE SAVIOR, and after the flood, God made a promise:

And the LORD was pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood. I will never again destroy all living things. – Genesis 8:21 NLT

In this world, we all have Adam’s sin nature, we all live where the devil is the “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:1), we all are like Lemech, we need relief. Jesus fulfilled all of the Old Testament foreshadowings, all of the prophecies, all of the hopes for the “Anointed One of God” to provide total and complete reconciliation of people back to the pre-sin state; back to the Garden; back to God. That’s the kind of reconciliation that only Jesus can do.