Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Yahweh said, “My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years.”“
(Genesis 6:3)

This is not an age LIMIT. Many people died older than a hundred and twenty years old: Aaron (123), Abraham (175), Jacob (147), etc. (see genealogy of Genesis 11 for more). There are two basic schools of thought about this.

First, that this is a MINIMUM. We are allotted at LEAST a hundred and twenty years. We can die before it, but that is premature. We can die at it, but that’s the minimum. We can go beyond it if we choose. I think the ‘catch’ is that in order to reach past the minimum we must be walking with God. The word for ‘strive’ means with a straight course, to contend, or to plead. This is an interactive guiding word. If we aren’t walking the path God laid out, aligning with Him, choosing His moral character for our own, and obeying Him in humble submission, there is no guarantee of more than a hundred and twenty years. But if we DO walk with God, we’ll be able to live as long as we’d like. As natural humans, we AGE. But we do NOT have to DETERIORATE. Moses got to a hundred and twenty with full vigour and good eyesight. Abraham was still capable of making babies. We can be healthy, active, fully functional, and climbing mountains at a hundred and twenty with nothing propping us up but our relationship with the Lord and the life the Father gives our bodies through Holy Spirit who lives within us (Romans 8:11). The sage Ibn Ezra writes: ‘THEREFORE SHALL HIS DAYS BE A HUNDRED AND TWENTY YEARS. Some explain that this refers to man’s life span. If we find some living longer than this, they are but a few. Our verse speaks of most people. However, this interpretation is not correct. Behold, Shem lived for six hundred years. Also, the generations that followed him lived many, many years beyond a hundred and twenty. It was only in the days of Peleg (Gen. 10:25) that the life span was shortened. From the days of King David onward it has been limited to seventy or eighty years. The correct meaning of therefore shall his days be a hundred and twenty years is as Onkelos explained, namely, that God set a time for mankind to repent.’

Second, that it was the time given to an ungodly world to repent before the Flood. Based on ages and time frames, it was a hundred and twenty years between when God said this and when the Flood came. The sage Rashi writes: ‘לעולם ALWAYS — for a long time. Behold, My Spirit has been contending within Me whether to destroy or whether to show mercy: such contending (deliberation) shall not be forever — meaning, for a long time.’ and also: ‘ו THEREFORE HIS DAYS SHALL BE etc. — For 120 years I will be long-suffering with them, and if they repent not I shall bring a flood upon them. If, now, you object, saying that from the birth of Japheth until the Flood there were only 100 years, remember that there is no “earlier” or “later” in the Torah (events are not always related in chronological order) (Pesachim 6b): the decree (regarding the Flood) was issued twenty years before Noah had any children — so we find in Seder Olam. There are many Midrashic explanations of the words לא ידון but this is transparently its plain sense.’