Clough Origin of Civilization Lesson 1

Preston City Bible Church 5-7-2000

We want to back in history to the time when what we call civilization began. We want to do so by exercising a strategy that I call strategic envelopment. Let me draw a diagram to illustrate the method here; I’m showing you the method besides showing you the text of Scripture because I’ve found this a useful thing to have in my mind, it kind of controls how I think when I’m involved in Biblical issues. Let’s visualize some topic, it doesn’t have to be the one we’re on this morning but whatever the topic or subject may be; it may be a very practical thing in your life, it may be a certain evidence of history, it may be an issue that’s come up in your home, it may be something that you were reading about, something you were exposed to I the media and as Christians Paul instructs us to bring every thought into captivity. And the problem is how do you do that?

I always visualize it as this surrounding envelopment, sort of almost like a womb of Bible doctrine and to look at the Word of God as the key to define a topic. For example, let’s deal with the cross. The cross historically occurred outside the city of Jerusalem, it was a Jewish man that was crucified—a historical fact. The world of unbelievers takes that topic and it begins to explain it in totally unbelieving terminology; it was an accident, it was a plot gone wrong, recently U.S. News and World Report had something in there about Good Friday issues, they always have something like that and what they do is they take a fact or a topic and then completely demolish it, Biblically speaking, and reinterpret the whole thing in the light of unbelief. There’s a hidden agenda that’s working. But we Christians have to pull the same stunt; what we do is we take the topic and we surround it with the Word of God, the interpretations of the Word of God and the explanations of the Word of God and this is how we ought to think, this is how we bring every thought into captivity to Christ.

Now I want to illustrate this technique this morning; what I want to deal with is the cosmos, the origin of the world system around us, the society, civilization, whatever you want to call it. And we want to go back in the Word of God to find out the origin of what we call today human civilization. In school we learn that human civilization developed over tens of thousands of years, that it existed, if there’s a time scale say here’s Abraham at 2000 BC, then civilization developed somewhere back here, 10-15,000 when it’d been a long time between bananas so we started growing things in the field and then we devised the farming and the agriculture in the so-called Fertile Crescent. The idea is that it took millennia, millennia, thousands of years prior to 2000 BC to get civilization going. The idea is that it was random, it just happened; we had people moving across the Alaskan, the Aleutian Strait, civilizing the North American continents, we had people spreading out from the Fertile Crescent, we had people in Africa and so forth, and these people intermingled and mixed and it went on for millenniums. This is al based upon the dating methods and this is all supposedly factual.

This morning we’re going to go back to Genesis and show how utterly different the Scripture handles the origins of civilization. We want to make some observations from the text. We want to look at some of the details in Genesis 8; in Genesis 8:20 we have the first act of Noah after the flood, after the destruction of the civilization that preceded the one we’re now in, a completely different…almost if you were to take a time machine and go back in time and look at the planet earth prior to the flood you would see that it would almost look to you as a totally different planet actually, the biology was different, the geology was different and so on. So verse 20 is the beginning of our civilization and these four events, I cluster them, the four events in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, there are many of them but four key events, and if you’ll hold these in your mind’s eye, this cluster of events, the creation, the fall, the flood and the Noahic Covenant, that cluster is the foundation for everything that we live in today; it’s the foundation physically, it’s the foundation socially, everything flows out of these four events so it’s really necessary to know that this is the basis of our faith; this is how we look on the cosmos and out of understanding these things and out of the doctrines that we get out of this, creation giving us the doctrine of God, man and nature; the fall giving us the doctrine of evil and suffering; the flood giving us the doctrine of judgment and salvation; the covenant giving us again God, man and nature.

Out of all these basic doctrines that flow out of and are revealed in these events, out of these we can understand why you have such apparently contradictory commands in the New Testament like these. In John 3:16 it says “God so loved the cosmos that He gave His only begotten Son.” But in 1 John 2, same apostle, same author, he says love not the world. Why are we commanded not to love the world when God says He did love the world? That’s kind of a paradox. It’s not a conflict; it’s just a different meaning in both verses but we want to look at why the cosmos, the world system is the way it is. So in our first service we’re going to deal with sort of the potential that God build into the human race, extraordinary potential, and why the human race is worth saving and why God in His grace chose the plan of salvation such that the human race would be perpetuated on into the eternal state. There was a reason He did that and He designed the human race in a marvelous, marvelous way.

So looking at Genesis 8:20 we find that “Noah built an altar unto the LORD: and took of every clean animal, and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Now you’ve heard all about the world religions but verse 20 is an observation of the first religious act in the history of civilization. So automatically what are our logical inferences? If verse 20 is credible, then it means that at the very fountainhead, at the very start of what we call civilization, people knew the gospel issue. There’s no such thing as a people group, a tribe or a nation who, in their antecedent condition didn’t know Bible doctrine, didn’t know the Word of God. What I call this section of Scripture is the Noahic Bible. When the human race settled into the present society, present earth, after the flood, everyone had a knowledge of the Word of God; there were only eight people out there, come on. Everybody had a knowledge of the Word of God. Now if you find a people group out there, and missionaries find them all the time, that are in darkness, do we say to ourselves, oh those poor people, they never heard, and we’re introducing the Word of God to them the for first time? No we haven’t; back in their traditions, back into their corporate memory, if they still have one, it’s not destroyed by the perversion of sin, back in that corporate memory there will be a remembrance of the early knowledge that was given to them from Noah. They all are descendants from Noah; you know, we all got off the same boat.

So the point is that somewhere back, if they don’t know now what happened? Looking again at this idea of strategic envelopment, how do we interpret that if we’re a missionary going out into a land of darkness? That the darkness came in after the light; the darkness has come about because of the perversion of sin. It’s as simple as that. Sin is destructive; it’s destructive intellectually, it’s destructive spiritually and so we’re walking into a destroyed society. Now why is it important to think that way? Here’s why. Wycliffe Bible Translators were basically thrown out of the University of Oklahoma not long ago and what’s so tragic about that incident is that in the history of linguistics the top people in translating the Bible and the theory of languages came out of Wycliffe. The cultural anthropologists that are so liberal today don’t realize it but that was a science that was done by Christians and Wycliffe Bible Translators were the people that pioneered that. Well, along comes the hippie movement of the 60s and 70s and liberalism takes over and now it’s offensive, if you are an intellectual, to be identified with these imperial Christians that are going around cramming the gospel down onto these poor native people; why are you bringing a white man’s religion into these tribal areas. Why do you insist that they conform to your narrow minded gospel; let them develop their own. Well, we see what happens when they develop their own; they develop perversions because of the sin in man’s heart, and we would be there too were it not for the grace of God.

So it totally changes your idea about missionary activity when you realize that in Genesis 8:20 ALL the human race had it’s fountainhead, as we know it today, originally worshiped God truly; they realized the need for sacrifice, they realized the need for blood atonement, obviously, there’s sacrifice going on here, there’s blood atonement going on here, nothing new. So when the cross of Christ is introduced to a tribe millennia after Noah it’s the same thing; no difference from the gospel of your fathers, it’s not white-man’s religion, this is your own. This is the stuff that you forgot, this is the stuff that you’ve put away, that you’ve suppressed. This is why I call these events “the buried foundation.” It’s actually a double-entendre because “buried” here means two things; it means buried geologically, the debris and sedimentary strata, that’s debris from the previous world, but it’s also buried psychologically, in the psyche of the human race, we have a collective amnesia, we’ve forgotten these things, deliberately so.

So that’s the background and we want to, as we continue through the verse study here, in Genesis 8:21-22 God says certain things, and He says that He will never again “curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth, and I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done.” Now obviously verse 21 is not a very flattering image of the human race. It’s a condemnation, you’d think you were reading the Apostle Paul when you read verse 21, but this isn’t Paul. This is the Old Testament, this is the old Old Testament, this is the Noahic Bible, this is the evaluation of what makes society tick. And God says “the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” So are we pessimistic about human nature? Well, yeah, we are, not ultimately because God’s grace can regenerate, but as the human race exists today, and this thing we call civilization, it is contaminated, it is indelibly and irreversible contaminated. We’ll mention more in the next service about some of the manifestations of that.

Then in Genesis 8:22 there’s a revelation of the geology and the geophysics of our surrounding environment. It says, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” What’s important about verse 22? Verse 22 is as revolutionary as verse 20 if you think about it. Verse 22 is a statement that the controlling forces, the physics that control rain, that control solar radiation, that control the earth’s motion relative to the sun, those physical laws are there by virtue of the Word of God, that God has structured these, in verse 22, in such a way that they will operate within bounds. Those of you who work math, this is the boundary condition on an equation. Where’s it coming from? It’s not coming from natural law. Verse 22 refutes the doctrine of natural law. When you go to school everybody likes to talk about natural law. Natural Law? Who made law? Is there a Congress called nature that passed legislation called Natural Law? Where did Natural Law come from? See, what the unbelieving heart tried to do is create surrogate truth, it’s actually a perversity, but as your eyes are opened as you study Scripture you will see this happen again and again and again and again, is that you have the truth here, God says it’s My word that controls the physics—My word.

Well, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, what do we like to do? Hide in the bushes, and God in grace has to initiate the conversation. We don’t initiate the conversation; He initiates it; that’s grace. So we hide in the bushes and that’s a picture of our intellect; we hide in the bushes, we know…we really know, after all, God’s Word controls history but we don’t like to be reminded that the Word of God controls history, so it’s a little more convenient to kind of re-think things and we attributes…nah, that makes it too immediate so let’s push, if we can get God just distance Him out of the system a little bit so we’ll create this thing, let’s call it Natural Law, we’ve got to have it because otherwise our equations won’t work. So we have Natural Law and by calling it, the mere act of calling it Natural Law itself is the agenda at work because now we can “safely,” (quote, end quote) discuss these truths out here and deny that they reveal the glory of God, because they are no longer revealing the glory of God, they’re just revealing somehow a natural structure that’s just there. But verse 22 makes the natural structure contingent upon God’s degrees. God decrees that “summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” That is the order that He has imposed by His will upon all things.

Now going on, Genesis 9:1, it says, “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth.” Now if you go back to Genesis 1:28 we want to do a little observation on the text here; let’s see if we notice something that’s changed. Between Genesis 9:1 and Genesis 1:28, so let’s compare and contrast those two verses; looking first at Genesis 1:28, “God said, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth,” three verbs, “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.” Now skip to Genesis 9:1, “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth,” the same three verbs. Now go back to Genesis 1:28 and look at the fourth verb, “subdue.” Now come to Genesis 9:1, where is the fourth verb? It’s missing. It’s because at this point man subduing of creation has become perverted; he is actually unable to truly subdue nature. And I’m not talking about just leaving coke bottles by the side of the highway; I’m talking about the fact that in a very serious way the human race has screwed up and we have wrecked the environment in a way that totally goes beyond the wildest imagination of the most ardent ecologist. No one in a modern ecology class today would agree with us that the Scriptural argument is that man in his sin has cursed the ground; God has cursed the ground, He has totally ecologically disrupted it because who was the designated lord of creation? el, with a little el, it was man. We are supposed to have ruled nature for God and we disobeyed him so nature rebels against us, and it’s just chaos out there in the system.

Going back to Genesis 1:29, you’ll notice a relationship exists; look at the text, “And I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the surface of the earth, every tree which has fruit yielding seed, and it shall be food for you. [30] And to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the sky, to everything that moves which has live, I have given every green plant for food.” Now come to Genesis 9:2, “And the fear of you and the terror of you shall be on every beast of the earth, upon every bird of the sky, with everything that creeps on the ground and all fish of the sea, into your hands they are given. [3] Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I gave you as I gave the green plants.” Now what’s different? Here, clearly we have a major biological difference. There’s no escaping this; we can kiss it off as fantasy, kiss it off as oh, that’s just the ranting and ravings of an ancient book, but let’s be honest to the text. What does the text say? The text says at this point, at the very origin of our civilization, when we come up to the flood, at this point, number one, we have a tremendous biological discontinuity with the past. Something major happens here and what major happens is a massive change in diet, a massive change in the relationship between man and animals.

Now let’s extend this logic out a little bit. Today most of us eat meat because it’s very easy, we go to the supermarket, we don’t see animals slaughtered; the blood and the gore aren’t there unless you have a farm and kill your own chickens or something, but apart from that nobody today actually understands what goes on when we take meat and we eat it. Genesis 9 is saying that in this civilization that began with Noah, it’s based on blood sacrifice in a very strange way. Maybe we never thought about it this way but animals regularly give up their life in order that you and I may live. Our entire civilization, every time we go to a meal, is built on blood atonement. It is a model, I believe, to teach us that when THE blood atonement happened, the categories are already built into and structured into our thinking. Our life depends on shed blood life.

And it’s interesting here too that Genesis 9:4 has a careful instruction, “you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood,” drain the blood from the carcass. Now why is this? A hunter once told me, he said you know, I read Genesis 9:4 and one of the things that it did for me was when I kill an animal for food and I sit there and I drain the blood out of it it’s almost like I’m pausing for a minute and realizing that this is a gift, and I’m paying my respects to what has happened here, and the blood is God’s portion and it goes back to Him. He has given me this food, the blood isn’t mine to take, and it’s remarkable that in verse 4 that truth of the shedding of blood and the draining of blood is preserved all through the dietary structure of the Old Testament; kosher food, one of the things, the rabbis don’t say that anything is kosher, set aside, special, unless the blood has been thoroughly drained.

Can you think of one place in all of Scripture where verse 4 is contradicted? Today’s communion Sunday and what did Jesus say? “Eat My body” and what? “Drink My blood.” You know, that’s the only place in Scripture where we ever drink blood. Now why is that? I believe that God set a category in place in the very dietary structure of every race, every tribe, every continent, knows ultimately that their lives each day depend upon shed blood as a picture of the final atonement and that verse 4 was put in there to make us realize that the blood isn’t ours; we can partake of the blood only when God gives us permission to do so, and He has done so in the communion of our Lord.

Genesis 9:5-6, and here we get into the installation, the new institution that God has designed to keep civilization going, and we’ll call this a political discontinuity. We’ve already had a physical discontinuity, which is the climate’s different, we had a physical discontinuity, we have a biological discontinuity, now we have a political discontinuity. You know, before the flood there’s no capital punishment mentioned except in one place; there is capital punishment potentially before the flood. Do you know where it was? Outside of Eden; what were the angels carrying, the guards that protected it? A fiery sword. Why were they carrying a sword? To kill people with, why else? And God’s security force around Eden was a group of angels; we don’t know much about it except the text says that they were there and they were guards and they were authorized to kill. Those of you who have been in the military have probably been around a military command post; usually somewhere around the military command post you’ll see this big sign and it says “Danger, use of deadly force authorized by the Commander.” And we all understand what that means; we don’t just walk in there, no matter who you are without security clearances.

So here before the flood capital punishment apparently could have been administered by angels. Now during the flood and just prior to the flood, who was it that apparently was messing around with the human race? “The sons of God,” the bena ha Elohim, so therefore after the flood now who becomes the agent of capital punishment? The sword is now passed from the angelic realm to the human race. So now humans, for the first time in human history, are authorized to take life and here we have the basis of civil authority. And that basis is capital punishment. Now I know a lot of people vibrate about capital punishment. In the state of Maryland right now we’ve got another crisis, first we have trigger locks on the guns so that we can’t defend ourselves when somebody breaks in the house; now we have the Governor of Maryland saying that the pressure is on him to commute somebody’s sentence because of a capital punishment issue and it may be legitimate in this case, there’s only circumstantial evidence involved. But, the point is that you know as well as I do that this is not a popular topic. It sounds so savage to kill people like this. Let me tell you something; I’ve been in prison ministries for over ten years. I have never seen the low down treatment of human beings as I have in the prisons. Basically if you cage somebody like an animal, I don’t know about you but I’d prefer capital punishment if it were me; sitting there, being treated like an animal in a cage for the rest of my life. So the way God has it, He has capital punishment, the right to take life.

Now one of the counter arguments to capital punishment, both Christian and non-Christian is that yeah, that’s nice in theory but in practice, given the court system and so on, in actual practice we don’t like that because mistakes can be made and you can accidentally kill the wrong person. That’s happened; the court system is not infallible. But you know what the counter to the counter argument is? What is the most famous trial in history? Was that wrong? And who died as a result of a wrong court decision? And was not this person who died as a result of a court screw-up the very Son of the one who authorized capital punishment? And was not the God who authorized capital punishment omniscient enough to know that when he authorized it He was basically setting in motion the wheels that would crush His own Son through a court accident? Of course He did. And God went and authorize capital punishment anyway. I think that says something about the role of capital punishment, that it is the core of civil power. It’s the core of the military. People never think about this; if you argue against capital punishment why don’t you just disarm; think of the soldier out there, he’s not murdering, is he? If capital punishment was wrong then every person in the military ought to get out.

So the basis then, politically, of a new institution, the divine institution of the state, and that goes on down through the end of time because in the book of Revelation Jesus Christ rules the nations with a rod of iron; is He utilizing His office in divine institution number four? Absolutely! So it doesn’t go away. Years ago there was a debate between one of the Mennonites in Pennsylvania, a man by the name of Yoder, and Gordon Clark who was a Calvinist, and they were debating capital punishment. And Reverend Yoder kept pointing… they were discussing Romans 13, the sword, and Yoder as an ardent opponent to capital punishment had to deal with Romans 13 and the way he dealt with it was to argue that that was a symbol of authority, and he eloquently portrayed this and everybody was listening intently, and then Gordon Clark got up for his rebuttal and he looked over at Reverend Yoder and he said, you know, I’m so glad to know that the sword is a symbol of authority in Romans 13 because in the very same verse it talks about taxes and tribute, so I guess I’m free now because the passages on taxes and tribute must also by symbolic, along with the sword, of government authority, so Reverend Yoder, I’m thankful for your position.

So this fourth divine institution that began here is the center and heartbeat of civilization. Yes, it’s due to sin, obviously, but so is the diet, so is the physical discontinuity. It is not the best world that God originally created, so what else is new? Given the fact that we have the fall, how do you rule in a fallen society? You rule this way, that’s the way God said.

There’s one other thing I wanted to point out in this text; as a meteorologist I can’t avoid this one, the rainbow. Genesis 9:12, God is making this covenant, and He says I’m going to sign My name, because every covenant…the word “covenant” is too spooky because it’s loaded theologically, if you want to kind of get a fresh start in understanding it substitute the next word for it; every time you see covenant, replace it with the word contract, and think of the last contract you had, business contract, mortgage, loan, think of a contract. That’s the idea, don’t get too spiritual about this… a contract; the Bible, as W.F. Albright said, who was the father of American archeology at Johns Hopkins, Albright said you know, as I’ve studied all the religions of the world, do you know what’s remarkable? The Hebrews are the only people in history to have made contracts with their God. It’s remarkable. What is the title of the two parts of the Bible in fact? It’s contractual language and terminology that is used here and no one else in world history has this. You ought to way wait a minute, what’s going on here? It’s because God enters into written deals.

Now if you have a mortgage on your house or you have a loan agreement on your car with a bank and so on, why do you bother with a contract? Let’s just think about it for a minute; why does anybody have a contract? It’s so that you set in place a ruler of behavior, a yardstick. Two people entering into a contract have assurance of a testimony, do I adhere to the contract or not. That’s why the contract has you will do this, you will do this, you will do this, and then you sign your name and get it authenticated down at the bottom. So God’s structure…now maybe you didn’t think of that but every time we build a contract in society do you know that we’re mimicking God who first made the contract. The first contract was God’s. Why did God enter into a contract do you suppose? To measure His behavior and ours; the same reason you and I enter into any contract. A contract, the language of a contract is a testimony to who is faithful to the contract and who breaks it; the covenant-keeper and the covenant-maker.

So God sets forward in the Scriptures the contractual agreement that was made and it’s to prove that man is a sinner and that God is faithful. And this is why passages in the Bible that talk about the land; you know, you get into this, good grief, the tribe of Dan does this; the tribe of Judah does this, and for crying out loud, I’d like something else besides real estate here. And then you go in and you get into the Gospels and the first thing you know so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so…now I’m in genealogy. Why are these passages in the Bible? Do you know why those little facts are in the Bible? Because they play out the contractual deal that God entered in. They are the testimony the historical testimony that He is faithful, and the details, you see, you can argue…capture this one; given the contractual nature of Scripture doesn’t that imply inerrancy? Think of the fact if you had a contractual disagreement; maybe you’re a contractor, maybe you loan money to someone, maybe you receive money from someone and there’s a problem there between you and that party, and you go to court. What happens in a court situation? You’d call on witnesses to testify to the truth on this point and this point, and you know, you’ve seen on TV and maybe been in one, and they go to some sincere person, you know, what kind of toothpaste did you brush your teeth with yesterday morning. Well, what’s that to do with the fact that you killed Harry at 3:00 o’clock? Well, it’s because they’re getting at some point. All these little points in Scripture are getting at the fact that God keeps His Word. And we violate, we violate, we violate, we violate, we violate, we violate. Where do you think the conviction comes from? Violation of contract.

Now all of that is contingent on one thing, that we’ve got an inerrant witness to the history of behavior, do we not? So if the Scriptures contain errors then they cannot be admitted as testimony and what happens to the enforcement of the contract. So implicit in the very idea of a contractual structure to Scripture is inerrancy. Once you grasp that there should be no problem with inerrancy; inerrancy is the only way you can testify whether God did it this way or did He screw up and skip it. How do we know that unless we have a Scriptural authentication of accurate history?

So it goes on here and God in this contract that He makes, he signs His name and it’s so interesting to me how He signs His name, with a rainbow. Now I’m a meteorologist and I always gravitate to passages like and one of the neat things about a rainbow is that it’s a complicated little deal. Rainbows don’t just happen; one of the problems that you have with a rainbow is that you have this water drop, it’s got to be of a certain radius, a little mist won’t do it, you never get a rainbow out of a small mist, never get a rainbow out of fog; you have to have a rainbow out of a raindrop and a raindrop by definition is large enough to fall in gravity. So you’ve got to have a radius drop of a certain size or you never get the refraction. The other thing that’s interesting is that you have white light going into this thing and it’s refracted into all the color and breaks down the spectrum.

Hold the place in Genesis 9, we’re going to visit another passage in the Bible, this is the place that nobody ever reads, the part in the Bible that there’s no fingerprints on the pages because you never turn to it; Ezekiel 1:1, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to understand a little bit about the simple thing of a rainbow. This is the spring, I don’t know about Connecticut but I know in Maryland it’s a great time for viewing rainbows, if you can see through the pollution. And the place to look for a rainbow is put your back to the sun; just remember, your back to the sun, you’ve got to look the same way the sun is shining; so if there’s a cloud or rainstorm gone by, put your back to the sun and look at the opposite side of the sky and see if you can pick out the bow. You see the whole bow, the higher up it is…actually it’s a circle, it’s not a half rainbow, but try to find the bow.

Now what is this bow? God designed raindrops; He designed the physics of light to refract like this but all of that is secondary to something else. God is a creative God and He has put this rainbow physics into the universe as a copy of something else that He has. Let’s look at the something else; Ezekiel 1:1, “It came about the thirtieth year, in the fifth day of the fourth month, while I was by the river Chebar among the exiles, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.” Now skip down to Ezekiel 1:28, this is the famous wheel vision, “As the appearance of the rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard a voice speaking.” Do you know what the rainbow is a copy of? It is a copy, a physical copy of what you and I would see if our eyes were ever opened and we saw the glory of God on His throne. Isn’t that pretty amazing, that He went and He designed raindrops and physics of light just so He could show us what His glory is like. And this is what the apostle means, “the heavens declare the glory of God.” And we don’t even see it this way; people say oh well, this is physics and that’s light; yeah, I know, but see, that’s myopia, back off a moment, look at the bigger picture here. What is the rainbow that you see in the sky? It’s an analog of His actual throne glory. If we were to see it we would see the whole bow around the throne of God; here’s the throne of God and it’d be surrounded with a bow. And that bow, we’d say oh yeah, I’ve seen that before. Now some of us are going to come up pretty stupid, the first time we see the actual glory of the Lord we’ll say huh, I never realized that, I was looking at it all the time and never realized it. But see now, we’ve learned something. When you see a rainbow think of the throne of God. He signed something there.

Turn back to Genesis 9:13, God says, “I set My bow in the cloud and it will be a sign of the covenant between Me and…” you? Not just me and you, it’s “Me and the earth,” in other words, the animals, man, who are the parties to this Noahic Covenant? Man and animals together, the whole earth. [14] “And it shall come about when I bring a cloud over the earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud; [15] And I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and never again will water become a flood to destroy all flesh.” That rainbow that you can physically see in the sky is the signature of God Almighty, and that ought to prompt some practical worship. When we see a rainbow next time thank Him for it; look at Him and say you know, I’m so thankful that You have signed on to this contract, that every day I live my life in an ordered environment that is totally dominated by the terms of the Noahic Covenant, that Your word reigns, not some obscure abstract natural law, but it is the living Word of God that controls all things.

So we come now to the earth in this ordered environment in Genesis 9:18-19. “Now the sons of Noah, who came out of the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. [19] These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated.” Okay, let’s do some logical deduction. Verse 19, what does that mean? One thing it means is that the DNA from your body comes from one of eight people, or a mixture thereof. There are only eight people here, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives so all races, all genes, all DNA came out of a family of eight. Now this explains something on how you can have such diversity on earth. Now one of the things that we notice on earth is that you have obviously different racial structures and so on, but just think about breeding experiments; when you breed animals for certain traits. If you have a pair and you start dividing it up early on in the sequence of generations you can get your biggest differences early on, if you divide them up early on. I mean, after all, look at the dog; one of my son’s a veterinarian and one of the problems dog breeders have today is that they’ve so thoroughly bred dogs that they’ve bred weaknesses into the genes and now there’s a big movement among breeders to try to bring mongrel genes back in to avoid things like dislocated hips and certain things that certain dog kinds have and it’s because the genetic structure has been so thoroughly inbred that we’ve bred weaknesses.

Here’s a got off a Time Magazine special one time, it’s a computer morph picture of trying to reconstruct the races. This woman doesn’t exist but I often think of this woman as sort of like an Eve, because her facial structures are built out of almost every race on earth. What they did is they took a morphing effect and they built in skeletal structures, eye structures and so on. It’s always fascinating to me to watch these racial structures. One of my daughters-in-law is a Japanese lady and we have fun all the time, we slant the eyes. And it’s marvelous to realize that all these racial characteristics that we think of came from one family; not a group, not a chaotic Darwinian randomization process, it all came out of a colonizing family.

I want to extend that to show you quickly, as it says in verse 19, it says “the whole earth was populated from this one family.” Now let me spike your imagination for a little bit. I showed you this last time to show you the brilliance of Noah and his sons; these weren’t some hicks that got off a barge. These guys brought high technology with them, a technology, by the way, that we haven’t exceeded until the 19^th century. Do you know it wasn’t until the 1800s that we built a boat bigger than the ark, nor have we ever answered this problem. Here’s a map of Antarctica; and this map is very interesting because it comes at a period of time, this upper chart is what the Antarctic continent looks like if the ice cap wasn’t there; in other words, underneath the ice cap there are river beds, river structure. Now there’s hundreds and hundreds, a thousand feet of ice on top of that right now and apart from radar mapping that’s been done only recently we didn’t know what the land looked like under there; it’s buried. Okay! How do you explain the fact that this ancient map has all of the bays and inlets mapped? It’s the mirror image of the other one, but if you look here you’ll see accurately depicted, somebody mapped this.

Now what’s so stunning about this piece of evidence is that in order to pull this off somebody would have had to have mapped it before the Ice Age. Furthermore, in order to get the map right you had to measure longitude. Now you can measure latitude okay, the angle of the sun; how do you measure longitude? You can only measure longitude one way; if you have a clock. Who had the clock that was so accurate that they could measure the longitude as well as the accuracy of the sun to measure the latitude; somebody did and it was done centuries ago…centuries ago, and I believe Noah’s sons did it, on the basis of other things we have seen in meteorology in the creationist school of thought, that basically the Ice Age followed the Noahic flood, it was contemporaneous with Shem down to the time of Abraham, that the climate was adjusting; that Egypt was settled in a very rainy, gooey, marshy land, hence the first Pharaoh became the first Pharaoh of Egypt because he was able to build dikes like they do in Holland. Now when have dikes been needed in Egypt recently? Furthermore, if you remember when Abraham went down and had his little deal with Lot, what does the Bible carefully say Sodom and Gomorrah was like? Why did Lot want Sodom and Gomorrah? Because it was lush. Anybody been to Israel to look at what it looks like today? And what was going on that twice drove Abraham to almost put his wife in a harem? Famine in the land, drought. So there were climatic changes going on all during this time as the earth readjusted, and we believe the Ice Age occurred not over many millennia but only in a mere five centuries.

Furthermore, if you plot Genesis 5 versus Genesis 11, we can do this Excel spread sheet, and click on exponential curve that fit, you get this kind of a thing; now what’s so remarkable about this is that we go from physically from one steady state to another, you can do this with a thermometer, ice and a glass of water. Take a thermometer, water at room temperature, drop an ice cube in it and then every minute measure the temperature and plot it on a graph and you’ll see finally the temperature comes down. If you’re moving from one steady state to another one during this time it’s not an equilibrium until it gets down here. Now I say what on earth was going on physiologically here? Something massive; we’re puny people; we are living physiologically at the 10% level of where Noah lived. Our health and our bodies are only 10% of the viability of these people, if we’re to believe the text here. What’s going on? Something massive is happening, and so the civilization that we now live in is radically different and came into being very shortly through radical changes.

One other final graph. This one I discovered a while back when I was messing around with numbers. Now what’s striking about this is, this axis is time, seven centuries. What I did is I plotted the age at birth in units of after the flood. Obviously Noah, Shem would go into prior to the flood so their line would extend actually to the left. But notice as you look at the decline in ages; see the length of these lines getting shorter and shorter. Now it never dawned on me before that that creates an interesting problem in history because it means, this is Abraham right up here. Now just look at who else was living when he was born; all these guys, at least they were dying just prior to his birth. So here at 500 years after the flood, between 300-500 all this generation died away so that by 550 when Abraham dies and passes the torch to Isaac, all of history is gone; the whole generation died away, suddenly and catastrophically it must have [can’t understand word]. These people were a lot more viable than Abraham was. Now what in the history of Scripture did God do with Abraham? What was his function? Five centuries after all this God called Abraham out in order to set up a missionary nation. Why did He do so? To conform to this complete die-off of this antediluvian; the Noahic Bible was going away, apostasy had set in, and now there needed to be a compartment within the human race that would save the Scripture, that would preserve the Scriptures and be the instrument for the coming Messiah who would be our Savior.

So these are some of the neat things that a careful study of Scripture will give about our original history. I want to conclude by a quote from a man who has studied Genesis 11 for, I guess 30 years, I knew him over this 30 year period, and he had this to say: Noah’s family has not been clearly conceptualized because there’s something truly frightening about such a family to scholars of the modern democratic era. By viewing Noah as a mere survivor of the flood rather than a builder of nations we have not only neglected his 350 year postdiluvian lifetime, but have ignored those spiritual ideas which made the Gentile world just that, a designed cosmos. In estimating the spiritual worth of Noah’s cosmos we are faced with the striking fact that if Gentile populous, if not the cosmos itself will survive all subsequent judgments into the millennium and eternal state. On the other hand, the prophecy of Daniel 2:44 reveals that this cosmos, as the seat of political authority, must be destroyed. Gentile political power must yield to the Messiah of Israel and in doing so will extinguish a peculiar regime dating back to Noah’s postdiluvian lifetime.

Our Father, we’re thankful for the gift of Scripture…..