The Life Giving Spirit

Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”

Genesis 6:1

Observe

This verse appears in the middle of what are surely some of the most mysterious and confusing few verses in the entire Bible. Sons of God (angelic beings), seeing how attractive and beautiful daughters of men are, take some to be their wives.

We’re dealing with a time when the human race was very young and trying to understand things that we have very little frame of reference for. Some have suggested that this is where the ideas behind the pagan gods originate from, supermen and superwomen who gave rise to human beings of unusual ability and strength.

An interesting idea, but we simply don’t know. For our study we’re concerned with what God says immediately after these strange happenings occur. 

In response to these marriages, and given what follows when God announces his grief over having ever made mankind (surely one of the most tragic verses in the Bible), God declares that his Spirit will not abide in man for ever. 

The idea being communicated here is that God’s Spirit is essential to life and that without him sustaining us, we cannot go on living. It is the Spirit of God, and not just some benign ‘Life’, that makes human beings different from other creatures. Humankind you see, has been created in the likeness of God to be image carriers of God, people who are supposed to represent him to creation. At our creation the Bible says: 

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Genesis 2:7

Whatever else this verse means it would seem the author of Genesis understands human beings to be those endowed not just with a fully functioning respiratory system but with God's breath, his Spirit within us. We are of the earth but we have the breath of heaven in us. 

Apply

As well as containing lots of significant and perhaps unfamiliar ideas about the relationship between God’s Spirit and mankind, we see here that our race’s unusually long lives in the early chapters of Genesis were a result of the Spirit of God in them. ‘My Spirit shall not abide forever,’ God says, implying perhaps one of two things: 

1. ‘I have been until now’ or 

2. ‘these marriages of the divine life with earthly life will not result in a return to the pre-fallen life, since man is flesh and contains too much of this earth’s corruption now.’ 

We’ll never know with complete certainty but we do know, and can see from these verses, that the Spirit of God is a life-giving and life imparting Spirit. He is the one who keeps us alive, keeps us breathing in and out and he is the one who sustains us throughout our lives. 

Pray

Father thank you that even in these more difficult parts of the Bible our minds are set racing and our imaginations are sent wandering. Thank you that your Spirit abides with us at all, that he sustains us. Thank you for the life you’ve given us and thank you for the mercy of not allowing us to live forever in this fallen state. You have provided a way of rescue for us that we might live again in the New Creation, free fro the curse of the fall, full of your Spirit’s life able then to live forever with you.