Especially Genesis 5:29 demands our attention. Here the common pattern is interrupted for a second time. Lamech, Noah’s father, said some remarkable words at the birth of his son. The name of Noah has everything to do with what Lamech said. The name Noah
indicates relief and comfort. According to Lamech, Noah would bring relief to the people.
Are the words of Lamech a wish or is this a prophecy? I am inclined to understand it as a prophecy here. Especially since the Holy Spirit caused these words of Lamech to be recorded in the Bible. Otherwise, one might wonder what the point would be of including a random wish in the Bible.
The relief that Noah brought is that he gave perspective to God’s people. There is perspective for the future of the church, for the seed of the woman. It is the prospect that the road to the Saviour would not lead to nothing. Things were looking very bad for God’s people at that time. The church on earth had become rather small. When the flood came, it only consisted of eight people, while there were probably as many as a billion people living on the earth.
In their lives and their work, the believers felt pressured by their environment. They sensed that the earth was under the curse of God. Looking at it from a human point of view, the church’s position in the world seemed without any future. Then it was Lamech who prophesied that with Noah there had come relief and perspective for God’s people. Precisely in the life of Noah, God was about to reveal that he intervenes; that he ensures that the gates of the kingdom of hell shall not prevail against the church of Christ (see Matthew 16:18).
When Noah was 500 years old, he had his first son. In the time before the flood, he fathered three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
28 When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son