Big Buts of the Bible

Read Genesis 5:1–5; Romans 7:18–25

Genesis 5 opens after an awful lot has gone wrong.

Abel is dead, murdered by his own brother. Cain has walked away from the presence of God. His descendants have continued down a road marked by pride, violence, and increasing disregard for God. The beautiful world introduced only a few chapters earlier is already deeply broken.

Feels like a good place for a do-over.

Do you remember do-overs from childhood? We’d be playing kickball in the street, somebody would miss the ball—or there would be some disagreement over whether the pitch was fair—and somebody would yell, “Do-over!” Everybody went back to where they were, the ball was rolled again, and you got another shot.

Golfers have a word for it: a mulligan. Bad drive? Tee up another ball and try again.

There are times when I wish life worked that way. Words we wish we could take back. Decisions we would make differently. Relationships we would handle more carefully. Years we might live differently if somebody could somehow hand them back to us.

But life doesn’t usually give us do-overs.

Grace gives us something better.

God Keeps Writing

Genesis 5 begins with what may appear to be one of the least exciting sentences in the Bible: “This is the written account of Adam’s family line.”

Here comes a genealogy.

But tucked inside that genealogy is an important story of grace. Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters, yet Genesis specifically follows the family line through Seth. At the end of the previous chapter, Eve explained the significance of his birth: “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.”

Don’t rush past the heartbreak contained in those words. A mother had buried a son because another of her sons murdered him. One child was dead. Another was gone. Nothing about Seth’s birth erased Abel’s death or undid Cain’s choices. Seth wasn’t a rewind button that returned the family to Eden.

But the story wasn’t over. God was still at work.

That may be one of the most important things someone with a broken story can hear. Grace doesn’t always give us back what we’ve lost. It doesn’t pretend the wound never happened. It doesn’t erase consequences or magically return us to the life we had before everything went wrong.

Grace meets us there and begins writing forward.

Broken, But Still His

There is another fascinating detail hidden in the opening verses of Genesis 5. The chapter intentionally reaches all the way back to creation:

“When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God.”

Think about that in light of everything that has happened since Genesis 1. Humanity rebelled. Eden was lost. Cain murdered Abel. Sin spread. Yet Scripture still describes human beings as bearing the likeness of God.

Broken, yes. Worthless, no. That distinction matters.

Shame can convince us that the worst thing we’ve done has become the truest thing about us. Addiction can leave a person wondering if there is anything left beneath the struggle. Grief can make us wonder whether there is enough of us left to rebuild. Fear, regret, failure, betrayal, and years of bad decisions can distort the way we see ourselves.

Genesis reminds us that human brokenness has not erased human value. But Genesis adds another detail. Adam had a son “in his own likeness, in his own image.”

There’s the tension. We bear God’s image, but we also bear Adam’s brokenness.

I Want To, But…

Centuries later, the Apostle Paul described that internal conflict with an almost comical number of buts:

“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”

If you’ve ever struggled with something you desperately wanted to change, Paul’s words probably don’t require much explanation.

I know what I should do, but…

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this again, but…

I really meant it when I apologized, but…

I thought I had finally gotten beyond this, but…

Paul knew the struggle: “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

We can know better and still not do better. We can genuinely desire change and discover that desire alone isn’t enough. We can make promises sincerely and later find ourselves staring at the wreckage of another broken promise.

That’s not simply the experience of someone battling addiction or an obviously destructive behavior.

That’s the human condition.

We bear the image of God. We also bear the fallen image of Adam.

But Grace Keeps Writing

And that brings us back to Seth. God didn’t erase what had happened in Adam and Eve’s family. Abel was still gone. Cain had still made his choices. Eden was still behind them.

But God continued the story.

Through Seth, the family line continued. Generation followed generation, and the promise God had made in the aftermath of humanity’s fall remained alive—the promise that One would eventually come to defeat the serpent and undo what sin had done.

Ultimately, that line leads us to Jesus.

And maybe that’s why an old genealogy in Genesis has something important to say to those of us carrying broken stories today.

You may not get a do-over.

You may not be able to change what happened. You can’t unsay the words. You can’t reclaim the years. You can’t make someone else’s choices for them. You can’t bring Abel back or undo what Cain did.

But God.

The God who continued writing after Eden is still writing. The God who brought new life after unimaginable loss has not become intimidated by the brokenness in your story.

When Paul cried out from the middle of his own struggle, “Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”he had an answer:

“Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

That’s better than a do-over. That’s redemption.

God doesn’t erase our past. He redeems it. He doesn’t deny our brokenness. He meets us in it. And He doesn’t look at the wreckage of a human life and conclude there’s nothing left to work with.

We fall. We wander. We break things. But grace keeps writing.

And that is where broken stories meet God’s grace.