Clough Dispensations Lesson 3
The Dispensation of Conscience
We’re continuing our series on dispensations and last time we covered the dispensation of innocence and you remember that we are grouping all of these initial dispensations into what we call a pre-Israelite category of history which means at this point in time, throughout this whole period of time, there was no such thing as an elect nation. There was an essential unity of the human race and so therefore we characterize this period of history from Adam until the Genesis of Israel, approximately 2,000 BC, all that whole period of time is characterized as the age of the Gentiles because there was one unified human race.
We said last time that the age of innocence, this dispensation or this category of the Gentile history, extends from Genesis 1-11, that it is made up in turn of three dispensations, one is the age of innocence, the age of conscience, and the age of human government. These are subcategories of the general age of the Gentiles. We said that we would treat each of these categories or dispensations under four points; first we’d give the area of Scripture that would cover this age or where you go in the Bible to find out about this dispensation. Then secondly we will give the chief characteristic of each dispensation, and then we would give the amount of revelation available to man in each dispensation, and then we would comment on the unchanging things that remain in history to answer the people who haven’t the foggiest idea of what dispensations are, who think that dispensationalists are saying that there are seven ways to be saved. There aren’t seven ways to be saved; there’s only one way to be saved and there only ever has been one way to be saved. Dispensationalism merely looks at what changes from age to age but it doesn’t negate what remains constant from age to age. There’s a unity and a diversity here and the unity is the plan of salvation which remains constant with time. What does change from age to age is the amount of revelation that man has access to.
Now last time we said that the dispensation of innocence carries from Genesis 1:28 to Genesis 3;6. This is the section of Scripture that tells us about the age of innocence. The chief characteristic was innocence and by this we mean that Adam did not have his volition tested, and we’re not looking at the fall; we’re looking at before the fall; he didn’t have a…he didn’t complete his test; God had given him a test to his volition and he had not yet completed it and the sign that he had not yet completed it was that both he and his wife were naked, without clothes. This is a physical thing. This is why I want to show you, and I stressed this last time, because this story is literal, it’s not intended to be some allegorical thing where this is the Mosaic view of something. This is the explanation of why men wear clothes. Now it’s that simple; that is the explanation. And I showed you how Desmond Morris in his recent novel, man, called The naked Ape, pointed this out as a zoologist. It is curious if you’re an evolutionist, why of the 192 species of apes man’s the only one that doesn’t have hair. How come. Now that is a physical fact that is explained in the Genesis record. Moses isn’t writing a fancy story here; Moses is trying to explain certain things by this story and if you don’t believe this as a literal event, if you don’t accept the Genesis story as a literal event I think you’re going to find yourself in very deep water, because if I were an unbeliever I think I could tear you apart by simply showing that you’re being very inconsistent with the source of your faith. And if you’re going to be a Christian you might as well be a Christian all the way and if people don’t like the story, well that’s their tough luck, but we believe in a literal Genesis. We have to; it’s important to.
So therefore we say that man doesn’t have any clothes on and this is a unique feature in the animal kingdom, because man basically isn’t part of the animal kingdom, yet he has a body that resembles that of animals and the reason why this body is peculiar and unique is to draw attention to the fact that man has not fulfilled the purpose for which God designed him. And this is why throughout the rest of the Bible it’s no accident that the illustration of God’s imputed righteousness is always clothes, it’s always [can’t understand word.] It’s not an accident, this just didn’t happen, the writer thought this was a convenient illustration. The Bible doesn’t have convenient illustrations; those illustrations are grounded in the facts of history and the reason why clothing is used as a representation of the righteousness of God is because that’s what they are; they are a literal physical representation of the righteousness of God.
So we have Adam in innocence, and innocence he did not possess absolute righteousness; He did not possess it. He and his wife did not know that they were naked, but they were naked nevertheless. They did not have absolute righteousness. Why didn’t they have absolute righteousness? Because absolute righteousness can only come about by a volition that responds positively to God’s revealed will perfectly. And that’s how you generate +R, it comes about by positive volition, perfectly obeying the Law of God. Absolute righteousness is not God taking His attribute away from Himself and placing it upon man; God has an absolute attribute of righteousness but He can’t take a part of His deity and put it on man; that’s not what imputed righteousness is. When we are credited with righteousness we are credited with earned righteousness; this kind of righteousness, which can only be earned in history.
All right, where’s the source, where’s the point where this righteousness was earned? It was the obedience of Jesus Christ. And so Jesus Christ earned perfect righteousness by His perfect conformity to the will of God, and since this is so then God has the right to credit it to our account. If for some horrible reason the Lord Jesus Christ half way through His ministry made a mistake the whole thing would have gone down the drain…the whole thing would have gone down the drain, all the promises of the Old Testament you might as just open the drain and pour them all down and forget it and start all over again. And everybody in the Old Testament would have lost their salvation. The Old Testament saint was not saved in the same way we are; the Old Testament saint was saved in a promissory sense, that everything hung on the fact that someday Jesus would really come and do the job and if Jesus flubbed it, they would be hanging, as Jonathan Edwards said, in a thread over the fires of hell, and the thread would have broken. This is what would have happened if Jesus would have flubbed it.
So I want to re-stress this point in the age on innocence, that Adam and Eve in their innocency did not possess righteousness, and this is why we’re so insistent that when we get up and we evangelize, whether we use the word “justify” or we wish to make it contemporary with our own age and invent some other term, when you say God justifies you, the word justify does not mean just-as-if-I’d never sinned; it does not mean that, for if it mean that what it would really say is that it would just simply put you back in the Garden again and this isn’t really what you want. Let’s look at it this way; let’s look at it as a debit/asset sheet in business. Here’s the line where you break even on your profit and loss; there’s the zero point, everything below the line is red ink; everything above the line is black. Now Adam and Eve were at the zero point, they did not have any black assets, they were at the zero point. They had the opportunity theoretically and theologians debate this but theoretically you might say they could have earned it had they been perfectly obedient, theoretically. But they didn’t and when they sinned, which act terminated this dispensation, the fall terminated this dispensation of innocence, when they sinned they went into the red, and this is what we mean by sin. Sin is the arrow pointing in the negative direction. It would be a business man who after a period of time looked at his books and found they were in the red. So that’s what it means when we sin, we fall short of God’s glory, we’re in the red.
Now, forgiveness, when God forgives you what He does is eliminate the red and so forgiveness brings you back to the zero point; that’s what forgiveness does, but justification does more than that. This is what most preachers think of, just-as-if-I’d never sinned; that’s not what justification means; justification means God put some black assets there, He goes above the zero line, and actually credits to your account assets. And those of you who have been in the adult class can understand immediately why this implies eternal security because as I said any person who denies eternal security cannot hold to the doctrine of justification logically. The doctrine of justification says that I have credited to my account my whole life in God’s sight is one of perfect obedience, even though it isn’t, legally it is. And thus, that automatically implies eternal security because if my whole life is legally looked upon by God as wholly obedience then whatever act of disobedience I perform in the Christian life is totally irrelevant to my legal status. Now this is why it’s so dangerous to let go of these pieces of doctrine because you find… it’s like boring a hole in the wall, sooner or later the whole thing comes tumbling down. You can’t afford this; so justification is an important New Testament concept and if people would understand it they would have no problem with eternal security. They just couldn’t logically.
Now the other thing that we found about this dispensation of innocence and I want to review just briefly the three things that they knew; the amount of revelation that was available to them at this time in history. One was physical reproduction; this was a revelation to them. Maybe Adam and Eve had experimented or something but nevertheless, they were told to do this; they were told to do this. Physical reproduction was a divine command and has repercussions on down to the present day. Secondly, they were to defend the Garden of Eden, and this is why we place the fall of Satan before Genesis 1:2 and not between chapters 2 and 3. What were they to defend the Garden against if somebody nasty wasn’t out there? They were to defend the Garden of Eden. Thirdly, they were to subdue the earth outside of the Garden. Outside of this Garden they were to go out there and conquer it for God.
We derive certain principles from these and I also want to review these. First, the first thing we found by way of principles of the dispensation of innocence was that man always needs God’s Word. He needed God’s Word even in innocence. The fact that God has to reveal things is not because you’re a fallen creature; it’s not because I am a fallen creature, that’s not why God… God reveals His Word to me because I’m a creature, I can’t know about the infinite God unless He talks to me, that’s the only way I have of knowing Him. I can study all I want to but unless God speaks to me I don’t know anything about Him, and that goes whether you’re a fallen creature or not a fallen creature; that has nothing to do with it. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” And so therefore man is utterly dependent upon the Word of God. So therefore doctrine is the most important thing that the human race can know.
The second principle that we discovered was that sex existed before the fall and sex by itself is not dirty. People have made it dirty because of the fall of man but sex itself antedated the fall.
Thirdly, and this is a most important principle in our time, that every man and woman that you meet is the son of Adam. Do you really notice something; that when God made the first pair, He didn’t make the human race like He made the animals; the animals He made male and female but not man. When God made man He made him male and female in one person and after that Eve came out of Adam. What does this tell you? This tells you that there is absolute unity under Adam, even Eve came from Adam. God did not make Eve out of nothing, like He did Adam. God made Eve out of Adam so that you have total unity in the human race, a great pyramid that comes up to that one point, one person, Adam. So like the new race, one person, Jesus Christ, not two. Jesus Christ and His mother or something; it’s Jesus Christ alone, just like Adam alone.
And this is physical, I don’t want any of you to think tonight that I’m talking about this as though it were a story. I’m talking about this so that if you had a movie camera and were there you could have seen Eve come out of Adam, that’s what I mean to say to you. That is what I mean by a physical biological chemical origin point in Adam’s body; I believe and I believe you have to believe that all men come from one literal person. If you do not then you may as well throw out the whole New Testament, beginning with Romans 5. The whole thing assumes this and if you don’t accept the literacy of Adam and the literacy of Eve, really you’re an inconsistent Christian; to be honest you’d better just drop the whole thing. But if you want a consistent Christianity you have to accept the literalness of this. Eve has to come out of Adam. She literally did and so therefore Adam now is the head; out of his original body all the genes have come so that when you look out, for example, a missionary who’s addressing himself to another culture and another race, one of the things that he should remind himself of always is that that’s another son of Adam there; I am tied to him because of my physical descent from Adam. This is what the age of innocence is telling us; there is a unity in the human race that is biological and physical, and in a way spiritual, though that, of course, is another story. So there’s an inherent unity in the human race and I might add that it is only Biblical Christians that can make this statement; the evolutionists cannot make this statement. Only we can make the statement that man is a unit.
Three, the third principle which I would derive from Adam, or the fourth, whatever it is, is that there’s a mandate in the Word of God to go out and conquer the world and this includes scientific research. Don’t feel if you are a Christian and you have impulses in this direction, don’t be embarrassed because some ignorant Christian comes up to you and says that you can’t fulfill God’s will by doing scientific research; that’s nonsense, you just quote Genesis 1:28 to them, that you are fulfilling Genesis 1:28 by proper scientific research done as unto the Lord.
Now that summarizes the dispensation of innocence and things that remain the same from this point in the rest of the Bible is the nature of God, the nature of man, and the necessity of God talking to man; the necessity of God talking to man or Bible doctrine, verbal revelation.
Now we come to the second dispensation, the dispensation of conscience. The division point between these two dispensations is the fall of man. In a split second of time the human race was transferred from one dispensation to the next. One minute it was in the dispensation…if you had been there and you had watched your clock, as the second hand swept around the dial, the next time it swept around the human race had been legally transferred into another economy of God, the dispensation of conscience. And as we defined a dispensation last time, we said that a dispensation is a distinguishable economy in the outworking of God’s master plan.
So therefore we have a switch now; there’s a distinguishable economy that is changed. What are the Scriptures that describe the age of conscience? The age of conscience extends from Genesis 3:7 to Genesis 6:7. It’s a little arbitrary, some of those verses, but this is a rough outline of it. Now what is the chief characteristic of the age of conscience. If I asked you to stand up and tell me what is the chief characteristic of the age of conscience…well, it’s conscience, that’s why it’s called that. In other words, it’s not that conscience doesn’t operate in other dispensations; it’s simply that conscience comes into a fulfillment at this point in time, so therefore to see what conscience is like, turn to Genesis 3:7, the beginning of the age of conscience.
Genesis 3:7, this is a real fall now; this is not just Bible words telling you something; this is something that actually happened in history. I’ve been trying to think of a good way of getting this across to a college group that I’m talking to about how to communicate the gospel to a real modern type thinking student, and I thought of one illustration of the fall and I think what I’m going to do is to take a dish, a cardboard dish that looks like it, paper dish, I’m going to drop the cardboard dish on the floor and show that basically this represents what modern theology says the fall is; it’s just a piece of cardboard, it’s an interesting thing, it’s a good picture to look at, but nothing really happens; you drop a cardboard dish on the floor and nothing happens. But that’s not what the fall of man is; the fall of man is like dropping a piece of good china on the floor and watching it smash in front of you. That’s what the fall is in the Bible, something really happened here; this is a real, physical fall that happened in history and it’s important that we see this.
Genesis 3:7, this is the beginning of the age of conscience, “And they eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. [8] And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. [9] And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Were are you? [10] And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. [11] And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded you that you should not eat?”
Now here we have reference once again to the nakedness of man; this is not just an incidental embarrassing thing put into the text; it’s deliberately put in there by the author to draw attention to something. Adam is afraid, he’s ashamed in the presence of God because of his nakedness. If you were there and asked him he would have said yes, my physical nakedness, even though we say this is a sign of his spiritual nakedness, it’s physical. And he said I would be embarrassed to stand before my God this way, and God says why are you embarrassed, because all of a sudden now, going back to our diagram of the business sheet, Adam now has sinned and he’s in the red, and now his lack of assets, his lack of assets now shows up. Before he fell he didn’t need his assets but now he’s fallen he desperately needs them to wipe out the debt, so he can get back to zero. And this is why suddenly his eyes become open and I’ve got no assets, I’ve got no positive obedience credited to my account, I’ve got nothing whatever to be presentable to God, absolutely nothing.
You see, people say Paul made up all this doctrine of the fall of man and son on. Religious professors say Paul made all this up; it’s right here, it’s right here in the story of Adam and Eve. Why was Adam embarrassed in front of God? Because he knew he didn’t have any assets, he knew he was naked. The physical and the spiritual are one together here.
So what does this mean then? It means therefore that Adam at this point, in verse 7, both he and his wife knew this, they knew, they were conscious of the fact that they did not live up to God’s standards. What does this mean then? Verse 8, this is what conscience does. “They heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD,” and it means that man runs away, and that’s what conscience means. Conscience, when it operates in us is actually a signal light that shows and proves to you that you have a sin nature, and what is your sin nature? Your sin nature basically is this; it’s not something that means you go out and get drunk and do all these things; it leads to that but the sin nature is far more back-burner than that in the line of cause-effect. The sin nature shows itself in man by making man turn away from God; that’s what the sin nature does. Don’t think of the sin nature as something that causes pollution, necessarily, because too many self-righteous religious people become totally unaware that they too have a sin nature; they too are running away from God, except they do it in religion.
So here you have then the sin nature obviously shown by Adam and Eve’s reaction here in verse 8; they are running away and this is what it says in 1 Corinthians 2 when Paul says the natural man doesn’t receive the things of the spirit of God, and for years I had that explained to me as though the natural man didn’t understand the things of God, and that’s not what it’s saying, but when I first began to study in the Greek all of a sudden it dawned on me, Paul’s not saying the unbeliever can’t understand the gospel; what Paul’s saying in 1 Corinthians 2 is that the unbeliever doesn’t welcome what he hears. For the Greek word there to receive means open the door to your house and welcome the guest in. That’s what it’s talking about; the unbeliever can quote the gospel, I’ll take you through any number of books in my office written by unbelievers; they know the gospel, they know it, there’s no question they don’t know it, the question is that they know it and they turned away from it because they don’t like it. That’s what’s really going on.
So the sin nature is manifested in a horror of standing in the presence of God. Conscience testifies to the sin nature by doing this to you. We might summarize it by saying this, that conscience is an awareness of a disparity of between what you are and what you think God’s standards are. Now be careful what I said there; it’s an awareness that’s produced on the soul between two things, like a positive and a negative poll in electricity, you’re aware of a disparity between where you are, here’s where you are, and where you ought to be, where you think you ought to be. Now I didn’t say a disparity between where you are in God’s standard; I said a disparity between where you are and where you think you ought to be because conscience does not necessarily reflect the absolute standard of God…does not necessarily reflect the absolute standard of God. Proof: Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8-10 where Paul says believers in that day had weak consciences, they were not oriented to God’s standards. So conscience may or may not witness to God’s standards but witnesses to some standard and this is where the condemnation comes in. There is always this disparity; every member of the human race has conscience. Now you may come across once in a while people that think they don’t have any conscience and you look at their life and you say man, I don’t see any evidence of a conscience in this person, but if you looked hard enough you would find one. People have conscience.
I was just talking with one of the head
anesthesiologists in Houston this Sunday and he was telling me of an
interesting discussion they had at a recent convention of doctors, and he was
there and there was a psychiatrist that came to the convention to speak and the
psychiatrist was pointing out the fact that 40% of the physicians problems are
nonsense problems; in other words, 40% of the time that the physician is
treating organic disease he’s not treating organic disease because there’s
nothing there; it’s the person has a psychological problem think they have an
organic disease and they were making this point, basically that people invent
all kinds of things. 40% of the doctor’s
time is spent treating nothing that isn’t there because basically people think
they have the problems and they really don’t.
Now in the course of the discussion this psychiatrist made the crack
that man’s basic problem was guilt and most of the people that get sick, get
sick compensating in some way this guilt problem they have. And he went on and on and on, and he was
asked by a Monsignor who was head of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Houston, and
he said well then what do we do with guilt, what do we do when these people
come and they’re guilty; what do you do when you have a man come to you and
confess some sin that he did 20 years ago and because his life is falling apart
today he blames it on this thing back there.
What do you do when Sunday evening you’re talking about accidental death
and you drive your car down the street of
So this problem of guilt is very crucial and it comes and grows out of conscience. Now I want you to notice something else about verses 8-9, that conscience may or may not be identical to the Word of God. You see, Adam and Eve just heard the voice, but it doesn’t say they heard the words of the Lord God; they just heard the voice; they just were aware of His presence and so they took off. God doesn’t begin to speak until verse 11, that’s when God begins to speak and so often I’ve heard people say God speaks to me through my conscience. No, God does not speak to you through your conscience. God speaks to you through the Bible and through Bible doctrine. That’s where God speaks to you; your conscience may speak to you but that’s not the voice of God, that’s the voice of your conscience. God does not speak to man through his conscience; God never has spoken to man through his conscience and never will speak to man through his conscience. So conscience is not the voice of God, the Bible is the voice of God. God only speaks through His Bible, not through conscience; that’s the distinction.
Another passage in God’s Word that shows you conscience and how it works is in Psalm 51:5. Turn there and we’ll see how David…[tape turns] …if you feel that you cannot pray to God for certain specific requests that you know to be in the will of God, I would suggest that you have a guilt complex. And this is exactly what 1 John 3 says, that if you don’t feel comfortable talking to God there’s something wrong with you and what is wrong with you is a guilt complex. And this is what John says, “if our heart condemn us,” that’s what he’s talking about, conscience, I John 3. Well, here in Psalm 51 we have David troubled by the same thing, and after getting involved in quite a messy carnal situation, he finally says, Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Now that’s not talking about the act of conception being a sinful act, I’ve had that thrown at me. Nothing is talking about the act of conception being something sinful, David’s point is that his mother is a sinner, his father is a sinner, the whole system is polluted, physically. Spiritually yes, but physically it’s polluted, and it’s spiritually polluted because it is physically polluted and when the physical pollution is removed the spiritual pollution will be removed, that’s how close the spiritual and the physical are in the Bible.
And so he says, “I was shaped in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me,” he’s talking about the fact that he always possessed this sin nature, from the point of conception on he possessed it. Why from that point on? Because that was the beginning of the physical body; he always possessed the sin nature. And yet I hear this nonsense pedaled around by people who say, oh Paul brought out the doctrine of original sin, that’s Pauline, that’s not primitive Christianity. Well what do you do about Psalm 51? This is written ten centuries before Jesus Christ and here it is. So this is just a lot of what usually happens when people don’t read the Bible.
Psalm 51:6, “Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me know wisdom.” You see, this is what David said, in verse 5 he’s saying one thing, look, I was shaped in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me, and yet verse 6, I know God that you desire truth in my inward parts, and in the hidden part You shall make me to know wisdom. So there’s a tension in his life and every man faces this tension; you will face this tension, every time you pray you can’t help but face this tension. How can I be talking to a holy God? It never ceases to amaze me; I’ve got freedom to talk to a holy God. That should be a source of continual amazement, that you actually have this right. But David, this tension is manifest in his life.
Now turns to Romans 2 and you’ll see conscience work again. By this time you should realize that this mechanism which we have introduced in the age of conscience is a mechanism that operates down through history, never stops operating until Revelation 22. So conscience goes on and on and on and on and on. In Romans 2:15, talking about the Gentiles, and they say these Gentiles, what’s going to happen to them on the day of judgment, they didn’t have the Bible, they didn’t have the Old Testament, how are they going to be judged. And he says, “They show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness,” and it’s just like, to use an illustration, it’s like a man is born into the world with a tape recorder around him, and the tape recorder only goes on when you say the words “I ought to,” or “that’s right,” or “he or she ought to do this,” and the tape recorder only goes on when you say that and then cuts out. And then at the judgment seat God is going to take the tape and put on the tape recorder and play it back to you and He’s going to take your very own standards and say your works don’t even come up to those standards, how do you expect to come up to Mine. The works that you have done in your life don’t even reach this standard; how do you expect to reach My standard.
See, this is why the basic thing in the Bible isn’t sin, really; sin is a basic problem but before you get to sin you’ve got the problem that man was designed to produce clothes, he was designed so that in eternity he wouldn’t be naked any more, he’d have production, righteousness. And this is why in the last part of the Bible sin is not mentioned at the Great White Throne, men are judged on the basis of their works. Sin has been paid for on the cross, that has been past, solved. But the problem at the Great White Throne judgment is that man’s works don’t meet God’s criteria and since they don’t meet God’s criteria you have man never reaching the point to which God created him, to have clothes, to have absolute righteousness. And so here this standard that God uses in judgment, evidently Paul conceives of it as even their own conscience, he’s going to take and this doesn’t even work.
So therefore this is the chief characteristic and we said the Scripture that covers the age of conscience goes from Genesis 3:7 to 6:7; we’ve now said the chief characteristic from this point on and the rest of history is that man has conscience and it’s going overtime and it’s going to create tremendous problems. Some people have a tremendous battle with their conscience, a tremendous battle with their conscience. I don’t think you can appreciate this until you’ve seen some of the people I have, that have been struggling with this for years and years and years and never have gotten relief from this guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, and it’ll drive a man insane. People struggle with conscience.
The third thing about the dispensation of conscience is the amount of revelation available. For this turn back to Genesis 3. What was the content of the Bible doctrine in the age of conscience? First I would suggest that one great doctrine that all antediluvian people know was that they had a knowledge that God was going to judge; they knew this. Now this is something added, Adam didn’t have any concept of God judging; it comes in after the fall. Now man is suddenly faced with God no longer as his Creator only, but now he looks upon God and the Creator has suddenly become Creator plus Judge, and now he’s got to worry about the problem that he’s going to be judged, and you will find this in Genesis 3:24, in a very little noticed passage of Scripture and yet I think it’s one of the key passages to point this concept of God’s judgment out to the antediluvian civilization, that there was a worship center in that civilization and it’s mentioned in verse 24, there was a God ordained built temple that was existing before the flood and it was in a place in the Garden of Eden.
Genesis 3:24, “So he drove out the man; and
he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim,” these are flaming
angels, “and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way of the
tree of life.” I don’t take that
symbolically; that’s a literal spot on this earth, somewhere on this globe that
was actually located physically and the people in the antediluvian world knew
it. The whole race knew it and every
time they’d walk up there and see this place they’d see that flaming sword, the
sword of judgment. And don’t think they
didn’t know this. The antediluvians
people did know this and they saw that sword and that sword at the center, the
worship center of the antediluvian world, that sword was there, just like a
neon sign, there all the time to remind them that God judges, you cannot
approach God because this pillar of fire is in your way. So they knew that God would judge; they had
no access to His worship center in
Furthermore, amplifying this, under the same topic that they did have a knowledge of judgment is Jude 1: 14:15 where the preaching of Enoch is depicted and it says that Enoch preached about the details of how God would judge, and so that in this age, the age of conscience there was a tremendous amount of Bible doctrine about the fact that God was going to judge.
What else did they know? What other Bible doctrine did they know in
this world in which to respond? Well, God never gives a revelation of His
judgment without also giving a revelation of His grace, so the second great
doctrine that they knew in the antediluvian world was a knowledge of divine
grace. Where is this? Genesis
All right, the knowledge of grace; first they have a promise in verse 15, notice it’s a literal promise; it means conception, and so therefore even verse 16 comes in and says the woman is going to have sorrow and it’s going to be a tough thing and some women are going to die in the act of bringing children into the world, still it’s going to be a great thing because it’s that very thing that’s going to bring God’s answer into the world, and this is what 1 Timothy 2 is all about. It’s like God plays a game and its ironic that woman, who lured the man to destruction, becomes the instrument through which the man is saved, because it’s through the woman, and not through the man; see the man doesn’t do anything, this is the virgin birth, the man doesn’t do anything; it’s the woman and the woman alone that brings the Savior into the world, and it’s ironic that it’s the woman the woman alone that started sin off and it’s the woman and the woman alone that solved the problem by bringing the Savior into the world.
Genesis 3:20-21, not only did they have a prediction of grace but they had access to it in their own hour, “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living,” that is where Eve got her name, because Adam at this point believed on Jesus Christ. God had just preached the gospel to him and said your wife is going to bring into the world redemption and so Adam turns right around and calls isha, which is the Hebrew word for woman, and he says, isha, your name is now Evah, which means now you’re not just a woman, now you’re the mother of all living, you’re the one through whom God is going to reveal. So this shows you that Adam believed and this leads us to the fact that how are people saved? The same way as saved today, by believing on the Word of God. Adam took a promise of God, the promise was centered on Jesus Christ and what He would do and Adam was saved at the point that he believed in this promise.
Then in Genesis 3:21 as a result of Adam’s faith, “For Adam also and for his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them,” a picture of imputed righteousness, and even though the righteousness wasn’t legally available in their day, still God credited to their account on the basis of the fact that Adam believed, and so they had access to God’s grace. So that’s the second thing that they knew in the age of conscience; they knew a knowledge of judgment, they knew a know of grace, and then in Genesis 5:1 they knew something else that’s not so nice. In Genesis 5, the horrible repetition that you get here is death, just read it, “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; [2] Male and female created He them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. [3] And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness,” meaning now it’s not in God’s image, it’s in Adam’s image, it’s corrupt, it’s polluted, “…after his image; and called his name Seth. [4] And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begot sons and daughters” and so on, [5] And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.”
Look at this refrain, it’s morbid, Genesis 5:, “and he died;” in verse 11, “and he died;” look at verse 14, “and he died;” in verse 17, “and he died,” verse 20, “and he died, and the whole passage is filled with death, death, death, and so the third thing we pick up now is that man is experiencing the result of his sin, which is spiritual and physical death. Do you realize that this is reflected in the very word that Eve labeled her son when she calls him habel, because in the Hebrew what is habel, it means just a breathe, it’s vanity, it’s a waste of time, and she turns around and she calls her newborn babe habel, because it’s all vanity, it’s nothing. So you can tell at this point that Eve knows what the story is, she’s suddenly has woken up to a fallen world and she calls her own son fallen, habel, junk you might say, just worthless, not that that baby is worthless but just the whole world system is worthless. That’s what habel means; this is the theme of the book of Ecclesiastes, habel habelim, means vanity of vanities, that’s Abel’s name.
What is the fourth category of this dispensation. What are the things that are immutable from this time onward that flow through the rest of history and what are some lessons that we can learn. I think there are four main conclusions to draw from this age of conscience, very pertinent to our own day. The first one is one that you often hear the college radicals say, “I want to follow my conscience.” What did they do in the age of conscience? They followed their conscience and what happened? Do you see, following your conscience is insufficient and it has been proved so inside history, in the experiment between whatever year Adam fell, I have no idea what year Adam fell, I don’t believe it was before 7,000 BC, but from that time on to the time of the flood, whenever that time was, between 2500 and 3500 BC I believe, somewhere in there, in that time period, people did follow their conscience and it ruined the whole society of the world, just destroyed civilization. So conscience is not sufficient for social order.
Secondly, the second great conclusion we can draw from this is that a long life span and a plush environment cannot be properly dominated by man. Man always blames his problems on his environment. Here he had, not a… he had a fallen environment here but it wasn’t anything like the environment we live in today; this is a rich plush antediluvian world, very plush in vegetation, very plush in animals, amazing environment, anything would have grown. You can see this in the fossil record of the rocks, the record of the antediluvian world and you look at this and you say good night, look at what a plush environment these people had, tremendous environment and this environment is not sufficient for man; man cannot control himself and this is the test and conclusion of this period of history.
The third thing, and this is found in Genesis 4 and that is this; that the art and culture, science and technology are not sufficient either. You say where do you see art, science, music and technology in Genesis. I see it in Genesis 4 because in Genesis 4:17 it talks about Cain going in and building a city and calling a city after the name of his son, [18] “And unto Enoch was born Irad; and Irad begot Mehujael; and Mehujael begot Methushael; and Methushael begot Lamech, [19] And Lamech took unto him two wives,” polygamy begins, and notice what happens in this city, verse 21, you have the cultivation of the arts, you have the cultivation of science and technology because in verse 21 it says, “Jubal, he was the father of all such as handle the harp and pipe,” he was the first musical composer in the human race and it was in a fallen city. Look in verse 22, “Zillah, she also bore Tubal-cain, an instructor or every craftsman in bronze and iron;” people always say the iron age and the stone age are a bunch of bologna. The iron age existed from this point onward and what you see in the archeological record is a temporary forgetfulness, after Noah landed and the earth was reformed, and the earth settled down and you have the repopulation of the earth for a while it looks like man did forget his ability, he lost his ability to work with iron and he gradually reacquired it, and so archeologist reconstruct the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, but that’s not the evolution of man’s technology. Man knew these arts back here in Genesis 4 for it says right there as clear as can be, “he was an instructor in bronze and iron.” They knew this technology then, but man since in periods of time has lost it. Then it goes on to something that I want to cover next time when we get into human government, but just notice that culture is insufficient to satisfy man.
The fourth conclusion or application of this whole age is found in Genesis 6:1, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, [2] That the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair; and they took them wives of all whom they chose. [3] And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years, [4] And there were giants in the land in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, which were the mighty men of old,” Now this is a great verse that has been struggled over from the early church on down to the present time, are the sons of God angels or are they men? This is a tremendous problem; if you say they are men you’ve got the problem with the term; if you say they are angels you’ve got the problem, how did angels get in here all of a sudden. I prefer to go with the word, and take my theological knocks and say that these sons of God are angels, I see no other way bena ha Elohim can mean anything but an angel; you see it in extra-Biblical literature, you see it in Babylonian cuneiform, it’s always the word that refers to gods or angels, bena ha Elohim, I read it in the Ugaritic, the Canaanite, it always refers to this, never refers to man. So this term is a very special term and the way it’s set up in the Hebrew in verse 2, it says “the sons of God,” and “the daughters of men,” and the way this construction is contrasted in the Hebrew the writer is definitely drawing the categories between God and man, not between the daughters and the sons. And so it looks like the author is trying to say that angels began to infiltrate the human race.
How did they infiltrate the human race? Can angels procreate? No, angels cannot procreate but angels evidently can assume a human form and appear to men, and evidently at this time in verse 4-6 had the ability to intermarry with human women, and this would fit very well with your ancient mythology; your mythological patterns are structured this way so that your great Greek gods are all men, born of a god and of a human woman, and I think this is where all of this starts, back here in Genesis 6. I think this is a key to the world’s mythology, that the mythology is not just something that men have made up; mythology is distorted history; back in these days that the angels worked with the human race. How did they work with the human race? If we are to trust extra-Biblical sources we find stories about the angels helping men technologically and I think that it was here that largely were responsible for much of the construction in the antediluvian world, they intermixed here at this point. But to make a long story short, because it is a long story, in fact, if I were to exegete Genesis 6:4 alone that one verse I have spent 2 to 3 hours explaining to people. The principle here is this, that angels from this point on in history are not allowed to intermingle with people, with human beings. There’s a barrier, they can appear to people, the demons can influence them, but there’s just some sort of barrier here amplified in Jude and other passages that angels evidently in the antediluvian world did teach men, did appear to men, but now they no longer appear to men. I believe, a few of them appeared after the flood to men who were responsible for such things as the Code of Hammurabi, and other things, you look on these archeological frescoes and you see the god that’s handing this down to the men, and it’s obviously not a man, these men, these artists aren’t drawing something that they just imagined, they saw something and you see this man and he’s reaching up for the law and giving him is this angelic creature; you can see it, just look at Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Text, you see the pictures of this going on. These artists, I don’t believe they’d be making this up.
But these angels had intercourse with people, but the result of this problem was this mess in verse 4, that they were partly responsible for these tremendous men, these great giants, and I believe that we have footprints of these giants and we someday will be able to show these to you, about 18-20 inch long feet that these people had so they literally and physically existed.
This is the conclusion of the age of
conscience and next time we’ll deal with the age of human government.