When God formed man, He breathed His breath into
man. God is life and that is life eternal. His breath of life into man was
eternal. Man was supposed to live eternally. Once man sinned, man was condemned
to die. God told Adam the bad news:
By
the sweat of your face
You
will eat bread,
Till
you return to the ground,
Because
from it you were taken;
For
you are dust,
And
to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:19
Now, because of sin, the days of man’s life were
numbered, though, at first, those days lasted a long time. We see from the
genealogies that man lived a long time in the Bible.
- Adam – 930 years
- Seth his son – 912 years
- Methuselah – 969 years (oldest in the Bible)
Then in Genesis 6, as man becomes more sinful, God limits
their age again, closer to a normal “old” age in today’s terms.
Then
the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal;
his days will be a hundred and twenty years.” Genesis 6:3
So people did not love for hundreds
of years throughout the whole Bible, only at the beginning of creation. During that time, people lived a long time in
the Bible because:
- God wanted to give them time to repopulate. If they had died off after only seventy years, they could not have formed as many families, tribes, cities and nations.
- The earth was pure and disease free. The oxygen rich environment created a better place to live.
- The humans that were born were more closely related to the perfect original. Copies of copies of copies tend to be less perfect.
- People lived in densely populated areas with family. Everyone was related meaning less the likelihood of war.
While it’s hard for us to comprehend that a person
could live hundreds of years, these facts make it very likely. We live in a violent, disease filled world,
but it wasn’t always that way.