Seth: When Men Turned to God
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course, counting themselves “strangers and pilgrims on the earth,”
seeking “a better country, that is, an heavenly.”
Hebrews 11:13, 16
.
For some time the two classes remained separate. The race of
Cain, spreading from their first settlement, dispersed over the plains
and valleys where the children of Seth had dwelt. The latter, in order
to escape their contaminating influence, withdrew to the mountains
and there maintained the worship of God in its purity. But in the lapse
of time they ventured to mingle with the inhabitants of the valleys.
“The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.” The
children of Seth displeased the Lord by intermarrying with them. Many
of the worshipers of God were beguiled into sin by the allurements
constantly before them, and they lost their holy character. Mingling
with the depraved, they became like them. The restrictions of the
seventh commandment were disregarded, “and they took them wives
of all which they chose.” The children of Seth went “in the way of
Cain.”
Jude 11
. They fixed their minds upon worldly prosperity and
enjoyment and neglected the commandments of the Lord. Sin spread
abroad in the earth.
Length of Adam’s Life
For nearly a thousand years Adam sought to stem the tide of evil.
He had been commanded to instruct his posterity in the way of the
Lord, and he carefully treasured what God had revealed to him and
repeated it to succeeding generations. To the ninth generation he
described man’s holy and happy estate in Paradise and repeated the
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history of his fall, telling them of the sufferings by which God had
taught him the necessity of strict adherence to His law and explaining
to them the merciful provisions for their salvation. Yet often he was
met with bitter reproach for the sin that had brought such woe upon
his posterity.
When he left Eden, the thought that he must die thrilled him with
horror. Filled with remorse for his own sin and doubly bereaved in the
death of Abel and the rejection of Cain, Adam was bowed down with
anguish. Though the sentence of death had at first appeared terrible,
yet after beholding for nearly a thousand years the results of sin, he
felt that it was merciful for God to bring to an end a life of suffering
and sorrow.