Next month, as part of our Fundamentals Class on Sunday mornings (Room 1) I will devote one class session to the Great Flood (Genesis ch6-9). It’s a fascinating study and one I’m very much looking forward to. There’s a lot of material to cover as well and I certainly won’t get to everything, including the question of Methuselah…

The title of the article is the subject under consideration here. First of all, it’s a fact: Methuselah died in the year of the flood. Why is that a big deal? I guess it depends on if you are a pessimist or an optimist. Methuselah of course is the oldest man recorded in the Bible, having died at the age of 969 years (Genesis 5:27). It’s impressive, but then again, after you cross the 900-year mark (which six other people in the Bible accomplished), all the years kind of run together anyway.

As for the year of the flood, we can put some verses together to determine when it happened, relative to Methuselah’s life:

  1. Methuselah was 187-years-old when he had his son Lamech (Genesis 5:25)
  2. When Lamech was 182-years-old he had his son Noah (Genesis 5:28)
  3. The flood happened in the 600th year of Noah’s life (Genesis 7:11)
  4. 187+182+600 = 969 (the number of years of Methuselah when he died)

From this, a pessimist will argue that Methuselah turned wicked against the Lord and thus died, not only in the year of the flood, but in the flood itself, being punished with all the rest of the sinners. The pessimist would argue that since God looked down and found all of humanity in rebellion, and only Noah found grace in His eyes (Genesis 6:7-8) that God would have looked down and found Methuselah equally as wicked as all the rest, and while it still might have been possible that the old man died before the flood occurred, it wouldn’t really change anything, since either way he would have died wickedly. Noah was only able to convince his wife, their three sons, and their wives (eight people in total) to save themselves in the ark; all the rest were wicked and all the rest died. The pessimist might then make the point that Methuselah, despite coming from faithful stock (his father was Enoch, about whom the Bible has nothing but praise, and who never died but was translated directly into Heaven by God—Genesis 5:24/Hebrews 11:5), and despite living longer than any man, nonetheless succumbed to the temptation to indulge in sin, and fell into open rebellion. The pessimist would conclude with a warning: If it can happen to Methuselah, it can happen to anyone, so we must ever strive to remain faithful to God all the way to the end.

But what would the optimist say?

The optimist would say that Methuselah died in the year of the flood, but not in the flood itself, and that God had this in mind when he looked at the world below. When God vowed to destroy the world, he set a countdown of 120 years (Genesis 6:3), during which time Noah preached and built the ark (1 Peter 3:20). The optimist would say that God knew Methuselah and any other faithful in his day would be dead before the flood. The optimist would say that God knew, when the flood actually came, that Noah would be the only one with whom He found grace, and that the only ones alive that he would convince to board the vessel of safety would be his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law. Thus God, when He made the statement about the world being “only evil…but Noah,” was looking ahead to those who would suffer the judgment to come. In that sense, it’s a reverse of what happened with Sodom and Gomorrah, when God vowed to destroy the cities if Abraham could not find ten righteous people living there. God knew there weren’t that many, so His vow was never in doubt. And since we are not told specifically how Methuselah died, the optimist would choose to believe he was faithful and died in the months before the flood occurred, and that after he passed away, when there was no one else alive but Noah and those (still alive) that he convinced of the flood’s coming, the waters finally began to fall, and burst out of the deep places of the earth. The optimist would conclude that Methuselah, had he been alive when the flood occurred, would have boarded the ark with his grandson and kin. Instead he died before the cataclysm occurred, faithful to the end.

The point is this: We aren’t told whether he died in the year of the flood or in the flood itself, and a sound Bible argument can be made either way. There is an answer, but we don’t know it, and what we choose to believe perhaps says something about ourselves, and how willing we are to assume the best or the worst in someone.

If you’re interested, we’ll talk more about the flood in our class on August 8th.

~ Matthew