Life after the Flood...

I am a teacher at JDA in South Carolina. I teach Pre-Calculus, Bible History, and 8th and 9th grade English. In my Bible History class, we have been studying Genesis from Creation to Joseph. One of my students brought up a question when we were talking about Adam's descendants and how long they lived.

Most of the people at the time lived to be between 800-900 years of age. The oldest, Methuselah, lived to be 969 years old. He might have been the oldest, yet he died before his father, Enoch, who walked with God and never died.

God became angry at the people for their immorality. He said in Genesis 6:3 that he would no longer let them live to be so old. They would have greater mortality and would live a normal life span no greater of 120 years of age.

That being said, one of my students likes to try and disprove the Bible. He tried to start a controversy about in the Guiness Book of World Records a person has lived to be 123 years old. First, the Bible says "NORMAL" life span. Second, the Guiness Book of World Records goes on to say that the average life span is 65 years of age and that only one person in 2.1 billion people will see the age of 115 years. If the oldest someone lives is 123 years on this earth since the Flood, then that is far enough away from 900 for me to completely believe there is no contradiction. The Bible also says 120 years and 123 is not that far off from that comparitively with the ages before the Flood.

Losing Souls for Christ...

One thing that happened to my six-year-old neice recently is that some of her first-grader friends told her that God doesn't exist. That we lied to them about other fictional creatures around Christmas and Easter and that we are lying to them about God too.

We lied to them that as long as they are good... and we have done the same with what God says to do...I have started to rethink my theology on raising children. One day soon, I hope to be a mother myself. Will I tell them these fictional characters are real and just hope they can tell the difference between lying to them and telling them about the one true God? I don't know...

If my not telling my children things are real when they aren't will make them one step closer to believing in God, then I am willing to give up that "joy" of a few seconds on Christmas morning for the greater JOY of having my son or daughter in the Kingdom of God!