Throughout the Bible and until today, God has sanctified and sent His chosen ones to carry forth the message of His purpose and salvation. Although we are all born sinful, wretched, and blind, we have been saved out of our fallen condition, being reborn and begotten of God, and brought out of old creation and into new creation. What a gospel! Every day we are surrounded by the wages of sin, yet through this gospel — the ultimate message — we are saved and become part of a new genealogy. Who proclaimed this glorious message to us? Christ, in His incarnation, was sent with power as God’s greatest messenger to save us: “God, having spoken of old in many portions and in many ways to the fathers in the prophets, / Has at the last of these days spoken to us in the Son” (Heb. 1:1-2a). Through the Lord’s incarnation, the message and the messenger have become one and the same to us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Through His death and resurrection, the last Adam is our Messenger today, sent to us as the life-giving Spirit, and by Him and through Him we, too, are being sent out in this age.
Across both the Old and New Testaments, there is a sending power that has penetrated throughout the generations. Hidden in the genealogy recorded in Genesis 5, we see such a sending contained in one named Methuselah. In the original Hebrew, his name means “man of the dart,” interpreted as “when he is dead, it will be sent” (Gen. 5:21, footnote 1). This name is actually made up of two parts: methu and selah. Methu, meaning “man,” refers not just to any man, but to a man of war — of death and violence. When Enoch named his son, he was prophesying the coming judgment through the flood, which was sent after Methuselah’s death. In the second half of Methuselah’s name, the word selah and its root mean “to send, to send away, to send forth, to stretch out.” This sending out is used in context of a “weapon” like a missile or spear, but with a positive connotation — one used to guard the building at the change of a dispensation; the same Hebrew word is used when the Israelites rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall “with one hand doing the work and with the other holding a weapon” (Neh. 4:17). This word also has a meaning of organically branching or sprouting forth, just as with Joseph’s fruitful bough whose “branches run over the wall” (Gen. 49:22).
What is the significance of this name to us today? The timing of Methuselah’s life in the genealogy of Genesis is unique and meaningful. Before him, his father, Enoch, was the only man other than Adam recorded as having walked with God, and was the first mortal man to escape death since the Lord “took him” (Gen. 5:24). After Methuselah, the significance of this line of life continued to Noah, whose life brought about a dispensational change that resulted in a salvation from judgment through water and foreshadowed the church as the ark, the vessel to transition God’s people from the old age into the new. Methuselah is a powerful vector in this genealogical line that connects a man who walks with God and escapes death to the bringing forth of a new dispensation. His life serves as a juncture that corresponds to the closing of this age in anticipation of the Lord’s return. To us, Methuselah signifies a weapon being sent throughout the generations from Genesis to Revelation — a productive, fruitful sprouting that shoots forth toward the age to come.
As believers, out of our faith comes a sending: Christ is sent to us, and as beings transferred from the old creation into new creation, we are qualified to be sent out, too. Our faith makes us sharp, and our daily living has a precise destination toward which we aim. To gain this precision and power, every day we are going through a substantiation process. If day by day we remain in the old creation in our fallen selves, we will not be qualified to be sent out. But hallelujah! There is a Person sent like a weapon with a violent, powerful strength to pierce through our fallen nature and transfer us from death into life. At His first coming, Christ was sent by the Father as the shoot of life to die for our sins, penetrating time and space, traveling through each generation, and shooting through and annulling the offense of sin to defeat the enemy and to overcome death and degraded humanity. This very specific weapon — spear-like and sharp — gives us the power and precision to bring about the Lord’s second coming in the end times. As we seek His second coming, we, too, need to be quickened with this precise sending to fight, stand, and overcome this evil age. To be powerful, a spear must be pointed and thrown with accuracy. When Christ, in His precision and power, met us and saved us, this very Person conquered our fallen, rebellious nature, indwelling us, mingling with us, and bringing us from death into life. As a spear, Christ the sent One is precise to put sin and flesh to death; as a shoot, Christ is the powerful, organic life that is growing and regenerated in us to live a life fit for new creation in the eternal kingdom. Today, the fight is the same: to be sent from death into life.
In John 9, the Lord met “a man blind from birth” and healed him in the pool of Siloam, which means “sent” (v. 7). Like this man, we were all born in darkness — in an unseeing condition. While there were some who questioned if this man’s blindness was a result of his or his parents’ sin, the Lord revealed that it was “so that the works of God might be manifested in him” (v. 3). This man was in need of a powerful message, and through salvation, would carry that very message. As the Messenger, Jesus came to him and said, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is interpreted, Sent). He went therefore and washed and came away seeing” (v. 7). The blind man was able to be saved out of his condition because he received the Lord’s message and believed (vv. 35-38). In this way, his life became a living testimony with a message to all who would come into contact with him. Hebrews 11:1 says “Now faith is the substantiation of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This substantiation is the action — or the realization — of faith. When we received salvation, we received this very Person who is the substantiation of all things. Christ is the very message that became reality to us (John 1:14). The gaining of this reality — of Christ — is a daily and even moment-by-moment process, through which our old man is put to death. Just like the blind man, we find ourselves at the place called “Sent” where we meet the true Messenger, who opens our eyes and restores our sight in new creation. Through this substantiation process, we gain a new, precise vision so that we, too, can discern the need of this age and be sent out to testify of this Messenger.
In the same chapter of John, this man was brought before the Pharisees, who rejected his testimony and cast him out, saying, “This man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath” (John 9:16). As God sends forth his Messenger as His testimony on the earth, there is always persecution from religion — another line seeking to destroy and confuse the one true message. If we look back to Genesis, we see a similar challenge — a mimicry of the true message; while Methuselah’s name appears in the genealogy of Seth, a similar name — Methushael — is seen as a parallel in the genealogy of Cain, a line born out of rebellion to God (Gen. 4:18). At a glance, the meaning of Methushael seems positive: “who is of God” or “man of God.” Like Methuselah the name contains “Methu,” meaning “man of war, death” and “el,” meaning “god, deity;” in between the two, however, there is an additional Hebrew letter shin (שׁ), which implies a question. What was understood initially as “man of God” is upon closer examination a challenging query, “I am a mortal man. Where is this God?” Without an understanding of our need to be redeemed, to enter into judgment, and to enter into a new creation, Methushael only has the name; he does not have the truth of human living nor the reality of the Lord Himself. In contrast, Methuselah is also a man who must die, who is mortal, but instead of questioning God, he is sent out through the Lord’s saving and sending power toward a new era.
Today, as those truly after God’s ultimate desire in this age, we find ourselves on this fine line, and within our genealogy is a message we’ve been called to carry forward unto the Lord’s return. We have to be today’s Methuselahs, those being empowered and sent, carrying a precise message for the end times as the degradation of the world accelerates and judgment draws nearer. In Genesis, Methuselah went forward full-speed toward the judgment that was coming; he was not afraid, but embraced his role in anticipation of the flood that was to come. More than two thousand years later, we, too, recognize and embrace what is coming, and are being sent forth to declare the gospel. In our being sent, we must daily be substantiated to have precision and power; Christ in us is shooting forth and going beyond our limitations and expectations, like Joseph’s fruitful bough reaching over the wall. Through dying to our mortal self and through the sending, sprouting power of Christ, we can live in the reality of the kingdom life today. In the church life we have a sphere to live out this precise life — the ability to corporately live, walk and bring in the reality of new creation. We are those who have been sent, individually but also corporately, to change death into life, to transfer the age from the old to the new. Christ the true Messenger has come to send us forth, and to sprout in us, so that we can — today — be judged, be sanctified and live in the foretaste of the New Jerusalem.
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 8/8/2021, not reviewed by the speaker.)