Clough Genesis Lesson 20

Beginning of organized society – Genesis 4:16-24

The rise of Cain and his city is the first point in history where the sin nature has become corporate and collective. And what we’re studying in Genesis 4-5 is the collective expansion of the sin nature, watching it emanate in all the different sons of Cain, men who have been excluded from the garden, because this is an expansion of the sin nature we want to again review a few details about total depravity so we all understand what total depravity is and what it isn’t. We have to remember this and keep this in mind, that total depravity does not mean that man is as bad as he can be; total depravity means that man is tainted with sin in every area of his life. It doesn’t mean, again, that he is as bad as he could be because God’s restraining grace keeps him from actually pouring out the sin nature as far as he could if he wanted to have it all out. So therefore the doctrine of total depravity deals with all parts of man; it deals with his body, it deals with his human spirit, and it deals with his soul, and this is what we mean by “total depravity.” Maybe another word as we often use here, “comprehensive depravity” would be a better term, meaning that it’s in every area.

Let’s look at what total depravity means with regard to the body. People have argued that the human body, in fact all living things, violate what is known as the second law of thermodynamics, namely that as time proceeds systems all degrade, become more and more chaotic and that instead with living things you have a violation of this law. People say well look, you start out with a very simple thing and then you grow and grow and grow and get a complicated thing and so therefore growth, organic growth violates the second law of thermodynamics. Is that correct? Well, let’s look at it a moment. All you have to do is think of the difference between man’s initial state with the ovum, fertilized egg, you have a high degree of order and complexity. The final state of man is dust, highly chaotic. So since the second law says nothing about how fast decay occurs, it only says that in fact, given enough time it will always occur, then how can we argue that living things violate the second law, as our evolutionist friends do. They don’t, there’s a standard system of decay from the initial state, highly ordered, through the aging process to man’s death: to dust you shalt return.

Now this could be plotted on a graph this way with the rise of entropy very rapid because actually, it’s strange to think of it this way but a young baby is aging faster, at a faster rate than he will at any other time in his life. The most rapid degeneration occurs in infants, not adults, and the older you get and the more aged you get the slower the rate of aging. Well this just simply follows the time honored curve and it is a replication of the old second law of thermodynamics. So there’s what the decay does to our bodies.

Now if you’ll turn to Romans 7 we’ll see the spiritual implications of a decaying body. As our body decays, in Romans 7:18, Paul makes a comment about this situation. Paul says “I know that in me (that is in my flesh) dwells no good thing; for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not.” That is, “in my flesh” there “dwells no good thing.” And this is total depravity, there is nothing, no nerve knit, your central nervous system and all of its trained responses, all of these patterns, none of them are capable of producing divine good apart from grace. Left to itself, human nature is totally depraved and this means that our body resists righteous learned behavior patterns and therefore we see the result of the doctrine of total depravity on the body.

Look in Romans 8:5 to see the effect of depravity on the human spirit. “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit,” and the picture there is that the body becomes so all enveloping due to the fall, the human spirit is sinful because of its pride, and in its pride it falls under the body, so that the human spirit is shaped by the decaying body, if left to itself. “They that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh,” instead of the human spirit inputting spiritual truth and making a person conscious of that area of life, that’s not so; left to themselves we often track with the body. So the human spirit comes into bondage and we find, then, if the human spirit is in bondage and it’s carnally minded then obviously the soul or the mentality, it too is obsessed with the works of the sin nature. That’s total depravity in body, soul and spirit.

Now one other feature for review before we go any further in Genesis and that is the fact that human good, which is the product of the sin, remember the sin nature can only produce human good and gross sins; they are actually the same thing in a spectrum of degree and as far as God is concerned they affect Him like excrement would affect us. And this is a very apt picture that the Bible gives of this. We saw this from Isaiah 64:6 and Philippians 3:8. But man, because he can’t do anything other than accept Christ or reject Christ, since he wants to reject Christ he is left then with only this as a selection of production. So therefore, fallen man specializes in producing human good.

This human good, to show you how it comes out in history, can be spotted very precisely if an exercise is conducted, a little experiment and today we’re going to do two of these little experiments, two references to something in history, to show you what human good does to the Scripture. Here’s our experiment; we’re going to go back in time and take the data from Genesis 1 all the way to Genesis 4; we know this data, this doctrine, this history, was given to the human race and passed from father to son and father to son and father and to son and father to son, if the Bible is what the Bible says it is. If that’s the case, then we ought to be able to go to the traditions of tribes who have never been taught the gospel of Christ and be able in the mythology of those tribes to pick out remnants and pieces of Genesis 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now here’s the test; do you suppose that we could go back into ancient mythology and find pieces of Genesis 1-4? If we could, and we know that those pieces were preserved outside of Israel, therefore outside of the saving work of the Holy Spirit, then could we find from those pieces of mythology how man, left to himself, twists revelation.

Here’s one; I cite these particular two because they’re available to you if you want to personally track them; I’ll give you the references. The first one is found in Homer’s book, The Iliad, Book VI. It’s a story about a temple procession in the city of Troy and in this temple procession there would be an offering brought to Minerva. Minerva was one of the goddesses of Troy. Now the interesting thing about this particular procession in the city of Troy is that the offering brought to Minerva is clothing. I’ll read you the section and see if you don’t remember what part of Genesis this reflects, and as you listen to this poetic translation of Homer listen for two things. On the one hand you want to listen to pieces of truth and on the other hand you want to look, what have they done with the truth?

“The Phrygian queen,” in this case Hecuba, “to rich wardrobe went, where treasured owners breathed the costly scent. There lay the vestures of no vulgar art; Sidonian maids embroidered every part; whom soft side and youthful Paris bore, with Helen touching on the Tyrean shore. Here as the queen revolved with careful eyes the various textures and various dyes; she chose a veil that shone superior far, that glow refulgent as the morning star.” And the passage goes on to describe the great procession in which this great dress of the queen is then presented to goddess Minerva. Now does that remind us of something? Turn to Genesis 3:21, after man had sinned and he was naked, and after he tried to clothe his nakedness with fig leaves we know that God clothed him. And He clothed them, conceivably with sheepskin, we don’t know for sure but it’s skin of some animal and the sheep are mentioned in the nearest context so we suspect this is ram’s skin or sheep’s skin. And we described how this tunic that God gave Adam was all encompassing versus his fig leaves.

Now isn’t this interesting. Genesis 3:21 is remembered in the mythology of the Greeks and the Trojans but it’s remembered in a totally reversed way. Notice what they’ve done with it; they remembered that there’s a need for clothing but they reverse it. Who gets the clothing in this mythology? The gods get the clothing. In other words, man becomes god and now, though he is a naked god he is still a god in mythology, and therefore we must offer clothes to Minerva.

Now another reference to confirm this; Herodotus in his history, Book II, chapter 42, describes an annual ceremony that’s remarkable in Egypt. In this annual ceremony to (quote) “the father of god,” there was an annual ceremony of slaying a ram, skinning it, and giving its skin to the father of god to clothe himself. Obviously a memory of Genesis 3:21, in the ancient mythology of Egypt, but again who receives the skin? Not man, but the gods do. And so what has happened? We have deified Adam and Eve. Eve now comes down in history and she’s known as the goddess Minerva. Adam comes down in history to the Egyptians and he’s known as the father of the gods. Do you see the deification that goes on? That’s what total depravity does; we always deify the creature, we reverse grace. We remember part of the facts of history, enough to construct something that’s reasonable plausible to keep us entertained, but always twisting it, always ramming and cramming the spiritual truth into the wrong area.

And then we have other evidences. We have evidences again from Phrygia, which is the area around Turkey, of a goddess called by various names, one of her names is Rhea, the other is Cybele. At one place in the art forms of Phrygia Sybil is called by this name: mother of knowledge, and she stands in the art form holding up two pomegranates, which in the ancient world were considered to be the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now look what mythology has done; it has remembered Genesis 3, it’s remembered the fact that it was the woman who took the fruit and gave the knowledge of good and evil to the human race. But what has the woman become? She’s become a goddess that is to be worshiped and thanked for her task of giving us knowledge. So see the perversity of sin’s work; it remembers history partially but it twists it completely around. Her other name is the mother of all living and to Phrygians her name was [sounds like: kebah] sounds remarkably like the Hebrew word [sounds like: prebah] of Genesis 3.

So once again the chapters of Genesis, even though modern man likes to tut-tut and pooh-pooh that this is just legend from the past, all the ancient peoples remembered pieces of the Genesis narrative because we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. So wherever we go, whether it’s to China, whether it’s to India, whether it’s to Africa or North or South America, we find these myths occur. It’s the sin nature operating on truth. God calls it excrement and a solution is found in Psalm 119 in a passage that reads:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his ways? By taking heed, thereto, according to the Word. That’s God’s answer to the myths of man’s depraved nature.

Now let’s go to Genesis 4:16 and look at the city of man as it begins. This is a very sobering section, from Genesis 4:16-24 because it gives the first time in history that the city began, organized human society began and it’s a beginning that’s very, very different from what you’ve all learned in school. This particular beginning, which is the true version, not the false one, counters every human improvement scheme that we are faced with. We’re faced today with Messianic politics. The preamble of the United Nations reads: “We, the people of the world … (dot, dot, dot] in order to save,” (end quote) government no longer to maintain a just order but it’s also to save men, it becomes Messianic, and this the Bible-believing Christian cannot cooperate with Messianic politics.

And so we find that Cain was excluded from the garden before he developed a city, and let’s remember what the significance is. Here’s the east side of Eden, and inward, deeper into Eden there was the garden. So here’s the outer ring, Eden on the east side; there’s the inner ring, the garden. In the garden we have the presence of God. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden but not out of Eden. They were in this zone just lying east of the garden. Out from Eden there flowed a river that divided into four parts, the old Tigris-Euphrates of the previous world and the Pishon and the Gihon rivers to the south. And this situation we said was typified by the tabernacle in the Old Testament. The tabernacle had around it a fence with a gate open on only one side, the east. As you walked in the gate there was a bronze altar there and further west of the bronze altar there was a laver full of water where men would wash themselves. After washing you would proceed into the holy place, which really doesn’t correspond to anything here, and then into the most holy place where the presence of God was. The curtain between the holy place and the most holy place was embroidered with cherubs, remembering the fact that the cherubs stayed here at the east gate of the garden. And so we have a remarkable correspondence between the tabernacle of the Old Testament and the physical terrain and typography around Eden.

Adam and his wife stayed here and Cain, as we saw, was ejected out here to the land called the land of Nod, which is the Hebrew word, the land of wandering. Significantly we concluded last time, Genesis 4:14-15 that there was prohibited to man judicial authority; there was no fourth divine institution established as yet. Remember the divine institutions; remember that we have the first three established at creation. The first one is human responsibility; the second one, marriage; and the third one, the family. The fourth one was not established officially until Noah because the fourth one involves judicial authority, not just father or patriarchal authority, but judicial authority.

Now what is the essence of judicial authority? Taking of a life, with all due apologies to our anti capital punishment fanatics. The Bible says that capital punishment is the sine qua non of judicial authority. You’ve got to have the ability to take life or you don’t have any judicial authority. So the Bible says that this judicial authority, not having been yet given to man, was not permitted, Genesis 4:14-15, to be exercised against Cain for murder. Therefore Cain was given a mark or he was given a sign so there could be exercised against him no judicial authority.

Now we didn’t make this last point and we want to do this because it forms a backdrop to Genesis 4:16. When Cain left this area where the presence of God was, he would travel east, he established a city in the east. Now notice what’s happening to the distance between God and man physically; it increases. With each generation of man, man gets further and further away from God. Cain, having traveled further east and farther away from God now is denied any help, divine institution four, any traditional authority. Why is that? With this we are introduced to a very interesting concept about civil government and court.

In the Bible the court system is considered sacred. How do we know that the court system is considered sacred? Two very interesting reasons: one, when a trial is conducted in the Old Testament, when this trial was conducted there was a prohibition, wherever the elders met, the prisoner was kept, there’d be the defense attorney and there’d be witnesses. Wherever this was kept and this thing was exercised there could not be found in any close proximity to the courtroom a grove of trees. You say what does a grove of trees have to do with a courtroom. It’s simple; the grove is the sin of idolatry, and it said there could be no false religions imported anywhere near to judicial proceedings. Judicial proceedings were sacred. A second thing that tells us this is that the judicial proceedings were always monitored by the Levitical priests. In fact, the supreme court of ancient Israel was the high priest. So we know from all this the flavor of the Word of God that makes judicial authority sacred; it becomes an exercise in the enforcement of law under God. Now today we have remembered that in the courtroom. Those of you who have been on jury duty, what does the judge always wear when he comes up and he sits behind the bench. He always wears a black robe; that is a faint memory, though I’m sure the average judge doesn’t know why he does that other than it’s just tradition, the reason he does that is because centuries ago the Christians that set up the court system recognized that the robe distinguished him as a priest. And so the judge to this day still wears his robe in the courtroom as a priest carrying out a sacred duty of enforcing law. This is the background for that custom of the courtroom. It comes out of the Old Testament.

Now since Cain was strung out from the presence of God, what does that mean about judicial authority? Out from the presence of God means there can’t be any judicial authority because judicial authority depends upon the presence of God; therefore Cain and his city has no judicial authority. That’s the background for where we begin today.

Genesis 4:16, “And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. [17] And Cain knew his wife,” now this is the classic thing of skeptics when they give that condescending tut-tut, where did Cain get his wife, silly Christian? Well, silly unbeliever, he got it from his sister, where else in the first family would you get a girl? Now the reason is because when Adam and Eve had children, remember those children are only one generation removed from creation and so therefore their bodies don’t carry the accumulation of mutations and therefore sexual reproduction between close members of a family is not wrong; there is no danger. The reason it’s become wrong and prohibited as early as the Mosaic Law was seen in the royalty of Europe centuries ago, when you had hemophilia and giving rise to the Monk Rasputin in Russia and so on. Why did we get all that stuff? Because the European families inbred so much that their degenerate areas and the mutated genes just crisscrossed and came out in birth defects, and God doesn’t want us to have birth defects and so therefore marriage of next of kin is forbidden.

And it’s considered by the Mosaic Law unclean. But in the beginning, before the mutations had taken effect, before the fall had that long to exercise its degeneration on our bodies, of course brothers married sisters. After all, if you turn to Genesis 5:3-4 how long did Adam live. Look at verse 3, “And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years,” so from the time of creation to the time of Seth, which was at least his third child and probably more, he lived 130 years; I might suggest he and Eve could have had many… gone through many diapers in 130 years. And then you add 800 on to that and that’s 930 years. Now in 930 years who’s to say that they couldn’t have many children. Next week I’ll present some math to show you exactly what the antediluvian population might have looked like and to show you how quickly the population could have multiplied given a few conservative estimates. So we have a rapid expansion of this first family and Cain’s wife is Cain’s sister. It doesn’t require a genius to figure that out.

Next, “Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and she bore Enoch…” Verse 17 is the key to this entire section and we want to look at it very, very carefully. There’s a lot in what’s happening here and you can read it through so fast you don’t notice. Notice the elements; “he bore a child and the named the child Enoch,” so we’ve got to ask ourselves what’s the significance of that child’s name. We know all children at this time in history had significance because of verse 1 and verse 25. When the mother and father sat down to name their child, they named their child where they thought that child stayed in the plan of God. In other words, here’s the whole plan of God and they would name their son or their daughter for being a part of that plan, hence the name “Cain,” hence the name “Abel,” and so here “Enoch.”

We’ve got to answer the question, what’s the significance of Enoch’s name. Then we’ve got something else on our hands, because no sooner do they have a child and they name the child Enoch, and it says: “And he was building a city,” the word “build” there is a Hebrew participle, it literally translates “was building,” but I’ll show you, there’s a use of the participle called the future instance, and you use this, when for example, you’ll be going out your front door and someone will call on the phone, you’ll go back to the phone and they’ll say hey, what are you doing? I’m going to the store. No you’re not; you’re standing right there by the telephone, you aren’t going anywhere. But you will tell that person you’re going to the store. What do you mean? Because mentally you’ve got it all planned out, you’re involved in the process that’s going to eventually take you to the store. All right, there’s the use of the future instance participle just in our normal every day conversation. This is a second use of it right here.

Cain, and his wife, when they have their child, they say we are building a city, it’s a future instance, the city doesn’t exist yet but we are building it. We are now in the process, we are about to build a city. Now we’ve got tie that to Enoch’s name and then we’ve got to tie that to the last line of verse 17, when the named the city after the baby. So what’s the significance of the child’s name, the significance of the beginning of the city, and the significance of the naming of the city for the child? Let’s tie it together.

First let’s look at the name; what does the name look like? In the Hebrew it’s a hard “ch,” chioch [sp?] is the way it would sound and this word, chanoch [sp?], comes from a verb that means to train or dedicate for the future. And so this tells you something about how they thought of their son. Enoch, to them, was a Savior; it was the dawn of a new day; it was dedication to the future new age that was about to begin, and immediately they say—and we are building our city. So you have at this point in history the rise of the city of man, human viewpoint on a social scale where society is now organizing itself on human viewpoint principles. It’s saying that the future belongs to us, here, now, in the present, not to the promises of God, not to the seed of the woman business and all this future stuff, we don’t buy that future stuff, we’re out here wandering around the land of Nod, we’re not even near the presence of God, we don’t care about the presence of God or His promises. We care about the fact that right now give me security or give me death, I want happiness, security, and I want it now, and so we will build a city.

Now, one further element. How is a child who was named for the new age, how is this child brought into the city, in a municipality. All right, the connection is this. The highest divine institution that operates at this point is divine institution three or the family. And so they say that their future salvation lies with the family, it is our family and our children that will give us the new era and though we have been thrown out and cast from the presence of God we are going to rely on our beloved son and he will save us. Salvation, then, is coming through the family. And now we have an idolization of the family because man apart from the presence of God can only idolize the creation. He can’t use it properly, he attributes sovereignty to the son; he delivers omnipotence to the son, and so it is our son that will give us the new era. Keep in mind this is the whole background for the rest of this passage. You’ve got to understand verse 17 or all the rest of this passage is just so much disconnected facts. But once you get the key of verse 17 all of a sudden all of these other verses fit together in one beautiful connected pattern.

Now watch what happens. The man apart from the presence of God decides he’s going to save himself. And so he builds Enoch; he has Enoch and the city called Enoch. Now verse 18, from the beginning of Genesis 4:18 to the end of verse 18 is approximately 500 years of history; five centuries come and go and here are the men born during that period. Enoch gave birth to Irad; now I’m going to give you the best I can do with these names. These names all have some significance, some of them I have to guess at and frankly that’s what it is on Irad; his name means… it’s connected with some type of musical instrument or craftsman, and I think, if anything, my best guess is that he’s a craftsman, some sort of craft that he was good at.

The next man that you see there, “Mehujael;” now what is this man? Break the name up, “Mehu” is smitten,” Mehu-yael, the word “Mehu” is smitten and those of you who know a little bit know that El is your word for God and his name means smitten of God. And we don’t know what happened, whether he’s an early version of Job or what but anyway God began to discipline after the second and third generations in this antediluvian race. After this man we have the next man and his name is a different spelling if you look carefully, it’s Methusael, actually it’s a “sh” in the Hebrew, Methu is the word for man, Methu and sha is which is, and el is God, the man which is of God, and apparently this guy responded because his father was smitten by God, conceivably he responded to the gospel and was a believer; we don’t know but he seems to be named this way. Lamech, it’s anybody’s guess what his name means. So we have four generations mentioned.

Now observe something. The Holy Spirit could give us lots of details within verse 18 of what those five hundred years of history looked like but He did not choose to do so. Instead, when we get to Lamech the Holy Spirit stops the narration, because verse 18 is really the start of a genealogical table, like that big long one in Matthew 1, so and so begat so and so and so and so begat so and so, fourteen generations. But here the Holy Spirit stops with Lamech. Now that’s a signal; that’s a signal to you when you read the Bible to say the Holy Spirit’s telling you look, here we have history begin at creation, here we have the fall, here’s Adam, here’s Eve, here’s Cain, and here’s his line and it goes on for five hundred years and then at the end of the five hundred year period with Lamech something significant starts to happen.

And so the Holy Spirit says let me stop, let me pause here and let me show you what is happening, what is going on in the antediluvian society. Background: for the next two Sundays we’re going to study the antediluvian world; we’re going to study it in some detail and I’m going to narrate to you various things about science and technology that these people did and it’s going to appear at first glance that this is totally unrelated to spiritual doctrine. The reason I’m doing this is because I know where most of you are coming from. Most of you have come out of the same school system I came out of, namely, we have all been taught that history kind of evolved and built upward and it was made up of three stages after man appeared on the scene, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, with various subdivisions, Bronze I, Bronze II, IIa, IIb and so on, and then the Iron Age, Iron I, Iron II. And this has been so deeply ingrained in your mind that you think that the tools and technology started during the Bronze and came up into the Iron Age and back here in the Stone Age they were messing around like the Plains Indians, chipping their flints. That’s true, that is a true picture, but that’s not the antediluvian society that we’re talking about.

This picture of Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age is not the evolving of technology, that is the recovery of technology of the antediluvian period that had it first. What this is, is that after the flood man came out into an adverse climate and after the flood, yes, for a while he basically primitively survived; we’re going to study the cave man and the dinosaur, they’re all mentioned in the book of Job and we’ll go into the whole thing there. But before this there was an antediluvian social order of an extremely high caliber. That’s the society we’re studying and to differentiate that in your mind I have to keep chipping away at the human viewpoint that we’ve all generated because of our schooling. Our schooling has taught us not to think that way, our schooling has taught us to jam the Bible into this mold and so therefore, try as hard as we can to read Genesis 4 we read it the wrong way every time because we don’t stop, we don’t say now wait a minute, there’s something wrong with the whole scheme of things here because this doesn’t fit. So rather than stop we just kind of coast along and it all kind of comes out in a jumbled mess at the end. So to avoid this I am going very slowly through these details, and there are some revolutionary, startling things in this text. So I’m alerting you to that, that’s why we’re going to go slow through this section, even though it doesn’t look like the most exciting portion of the text in the Word of God.

So now let’s go to Lamech. There’s a section, and it has to be treated as a unit, from Genesis 4:19-24. So let’s look at that section for a moment. Notice verse 24, and read up one verse; verse 23 you see Lamech is the prime actor. So let’s group 23 with verse 24 and verse 19. Now if you look at it carefully you will notice verse 20, 21, 22 do not fit. That is, they’re talking about something different. So you go from verse 19, then out here you have verses 20-22, then you hop back to Lamech again in verse 23-24. It’s like a sandwich; one piece of bread, verse 19; second piece of bread, verses 23-24; and the filling, verses 20-22. Now how we have to interpret the passage is put this sandwich together and find out why it is bracketed this way.

Let’s look first at Genesis 4:19. “And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah.” Now the word “Adah” means adornment, and the word “Zillah” means shady or one that carried around a lot of ornaments. They’re both sensual names and the significance of verse 19 must be seen in the light of what I said about verse 17. In verse 17 what did we say that Cain was going to do? I am “building a city,” and I’m going to do it by deifying divine institution three. That is my savior, that is my god; I’m going to make the family my god. Now the family has to be protected but it can’t be deified. If you think all blessings flow through your family, baloney. Now family only functions when it functions under the laws of God. But the family by itself is just nothing but a collection of passed on depravity. It’s enjoyable when it works within the framework of God, but otherwise the family by itself, stripped of the laws of God, is depravity multiplied.

Now what Cain has done separate from the presence of God, he’s made the family as the integration point of his new city. What has happened to his integration point in verse 19? It’s self-destructive, with the rise of polygamy. And so the center of the family… the center of the family was monogamy, and it’s gone now to polygamy. The very center of the city was a strong family and in verse 19 the strong family becomes weak because polygamy has been introduced. This is always the story of evil. Evil self destructs; evil always decays; evil takes care of itself, Genesis 1:2, the creation by itself is in chaos, apart from God’s sustaining grace everything is going to fall apart. Cain’s family has now fallen apart. So whatever this era is that’s introduced 500 years after creation, this humanist period of time, it starts with the collapse of the home. So we have this, here’s our time line, here’s creation, here’s the fall, and here’s the rise of Cain’s city. We go 500 years into the future to this point, and here we have Lamech. By this time the family has been destroyed, and significantly with the destruction of the home you have the rise of technology. Now let’s look at the rise of technology to be further challenged, Genesis 4:20-22; this is the center of the sandwich. Remember we said these verses are centered like a sandwich. We’ve looked at verse 19 and now we look at the filling in the sandwich, verses 20, 21 and 22.

What does that filling tell us? Let’s read Genesis 4:20, “And Adah bore Jabal,” by the way, the two names in the Hebrew, the King James always translates it by “j,” they sound like this, [?]. “And Adah bore Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and such as have cattle.” Now “Jabal” means, by this time, when he gets in this situation, we have the rise of ranching operation, which means what? Let’s draw an implication; “father of them that dwell in tents, and have cattle.” If he has cattle he’s producing. What do you need to produce cattle? Animal husbandry, you have the science of breeding of animals. It’s already being developed, only 500 years after creation of the universe we have the science of animal husbandry developed on a commercial scale. “Tents,” … tents signify mobility; why does a rancher need mobility? To move his flock from pasture to pasture. What do you need to do before you move your flock from one pasture to another? Map, you need a map of water resources, you need a map of observation of your crop that’s growing to test whether it’s going to nourish your flock or your herd. So already, by the time of verse 20 you have the science of animal husbandry and mapping.

Let’s go further, Genesis 4:21. “And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all that handle the harp and the organ [pipe].” Now that has to be translated, the word “harp” means lyre, not a liar, a thing with strings on it, “harp” is just a big version of it. And the other one, instead of organ it’s kind of a flute like instrument. Now that is significant because verse 21 means the before you can make a lyre and a harp you’ve got to know a few things. What do you have to know? Musical scale, you have to know chords, and not only that you have to know math because to make a lyre these strings have to be of a certain length and the length has to be in mathematical ratio because the chords are in mathematic ratio; music is a deeply mathematical art form. And so math, elementary math, had to be mastered by this time.

Moreover, to make the flute we have the problem of resonating frequency, the problem known in math as harmonics, how we get on frequency in harmonic of another. This has to be done if you’re going to produce any kind of a musical instrument that works to produce more than two or three cords at one time. So not only do we have length of vibrating materials known, we have the length of vibrating air column known and [can’t understand word] of the flute, and you cut off the air column by opening the hole and you create the length of air that you need. So here now we’ve got math, we’ve got music, we’ve got mapping, we’ve got animal husbandry and we’ve got fine detailed craftsmanship with the materials that are being used in these musical instruments. So you see, man tries to subdue the earth and he’s throwing up in the sense that he’s subduing it in the wrong direction but he’s not wrong in that he is building a high technology.

Genesis 4:22, even more startling. “And Zillah, she also bore Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer [craftsman] in brass [bronze] and iron….” Now the King James Translation is a little screwed up. Let me give you the literal Hebrew here, he is “the hammerer of every engraving tool—[dash] bronze iron.” Now before verse 22 could take place a number of things had to take place in technology. This is metallurgy, the science of metallurgy, working with ores. What do you need to get your ore? Mining operations; and what do you need for mining operation? Mapping of the earth’s resources. So by the time of verse 22 extensive mapping had been done of the earth’s surface to locate ore veins, to locate where the gold was. For example, turn back to Genesis 2:11-12 for a moment, here’s a description of the mapping operation in the antediluvian world. “…Havilah, where there is gold; [12] and the gold of that land is good:” and then it describes other mineral resources, so the ancient people sent out explorers to find natural resources and they mapped them.

All right, so it was mapped. We have mining operations, mapping operations, digging operations, what else do you need? Transportation, the wheel must have been invented to haul the ore in. So you have transportation by the time of verse 22. What else do you have? Well, if you’re working with bronze and if they refine it the way we do they had to generate temperatures of 1100 degrees Celsius to break the copper out of the ore. If they’re working with iron they had to generate 700 degree heat to generate iron from the ore, to reduce it. And so if this is the case we have obviously a high metallurgical skill being developed at this point.

But now here’s the amazing thing. Apparently the ancient world had mastered another way of working with metal, a way which wasn’t discovered until the 1900s, in our own generation, because there are evidences from the past of electroplating. In ancient tombs near the sphinx we have jewelry that has been electroplated, gold and silver has been put on electrically. This is in the time of the Pharaoh’s, which indicates they had an ability to control electricity on an elementary scale and they were using it for electroplating purposes. Another illustration of this: there is a column near Delhi, India, called the Qutub column that is 23 feet high; it weighs 17 tons, made of solid iron, in the year 900 BC, here’s a date, 900 BC, and it has never rusted; it has been outdoors since 900 BC and it’s never been painted and it has never been coated. Question: How were these people able to construct a column, remember, no welding on this thing, it wasn’t made in pieces, there was one cast 23 feet long column, it was outside a temple and the books of the day indicate there gobs of these, this is just one that survived. How do you generate this big a column with a primitive metallurgy. Moreover, why is it that it doesn’t rust?

Well, this did catch the eye of a German scientist by the name of Albert Neuberger. He wrote a book toward the end of the 19^th century on The Technical Arts and Sciences of the Ancients. And he writes this passage about the Qutub column. “In 1891 the present author, in conjunction with Professor {?}prepared a sample of chemically pure iron by electrolysis, in the electro-chemical lab of the technical high school at Munich, Germany. All efforts to make this sample rust failed. Chemically pure iron, does not, then, possess the property of rusting.” This has since been found by others. In the museum at Oslo, Norway, they have nails that were taken off a Viking boat, long nails, rather large, and they were exposed to salt air and have never rusted. And so the Vikings were able to produce chemically pure iron.

So who says our little schoolbook picture of this slowly evolving technology of the human race is true? The ancients had already available to the means and I suggest that by the time of Tubal-cain they also controlled the power of electricity. I also make this deduction on another basis. Tubal-cain shows up in the world’s mythology as the god Vulcan, and if you read mythology Vulcan is god of two things; he is the god who brings forth metal and gives man fire, but he’s also the god who brings fire from heaven. Now the only fire we know from heaven is lightening and lightening is an electrical phenomenon, and so do we have resident in the mythology growing up around the god Vulcan a memory of Tubal-cain who was the first pioneer of electricity, electroplating, mining and metallurgy in history only 500 years from the creation?

Another little tidbit on this same line; there was a Chinese emperor who lived about 200 AD and when the archeologists began to dig into his tomb they discovered a phenomenal thing, a belt buckle. Not any belt buckle but an aluminum belt buckle. Now not until 1898 had anyone figured out, we thought, how to refine aluminum because in the process of getting aluminum you get aluminum oxide and the only way you break aluminum oxide that we do now is electrically. So now the question becomes, how did the Chinese emperor in 200 AD get his aluminum belt buckle, 85% aluminum. The only known process of generating that is electrically; so the question, then, goes back; these men did know a lot more technology. Now today, yes, Eric Von Danagan [sp?] and others are arguing that flying saucers came and gave us this high technology in the past. Rather what we as Christians can say, no, not the flying saucers but if this is history, here’s creation, here’s the flood, here’s the antediluvian civilization, here’s the postdiluvian civilization, the reason why we have this high technology here is that it’s a memory of this technology back here, that survived, pieces of it survived, and from time to time as I go through here I’ll show you more and more verified evidences of high technology in this ancient world.

So Genesis 4:20-22, are verses that show you the technology of Cain. Now the other part of the sandwich, Genesis 4:23-24. See the Holy Spirit is interested in telling us something. He’s telling us yes, there were advances made, man was subduing the earth but He was doing it in a frame of human viewpoint, he ruined his family unit, verse 19, and now verses 23-24 he ruins social order and justice. Lamech says listen, you wives, listen to my speech [“And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech”]; in the King James it says “I have slain,” it’s better to translate that by a gnomic perfect, “I can slay a man for wounding me and I can slay a young man who hurts me.” Now this is an escalation of violence. Before it was Cain, you have one/one, one person loses their life by murder, the murderer loses his life. But now look what’s happened to the violence in verse 23, it’s escalated, now if somebody loses their life, not for killing, but they lose their life merely because they wound somebody, so you have escalation of violence.

Notice something else in Genesis 4:24, even more sinister about the structure of antediluvian society. “If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold, I will be avenged seventy seven fold.” Now go back to Genesis 3:15; who said Cain was to be avenged seven times? God said. Who in verse 15 was the lawmaker? God! Who has become the lawmaker 500 years later in verse 24? Man. And so here’s the humanist renaissance that broke open the human race around 500 years after creation. You have a rise of technology and also a rise in depravity, the two teamed together are deadly and God never lets man get away with it.

You can say are there any hard evidences of what the high technology of the antediluvians looked like? Is there any place we can go for this and I think there is. We can’t look for the high technology in stone flints that are found on the surface. We can’t look for the high technology in the areas of Leakey’s discoveries in the African Rift because they are surface. Those are all discoveries that have to do with postdiluvial man, or man that came after the flood. What we want to do is find evidences of artifacts deep down in the earth. Here is one, a very famous one, it’s a pot that was found inside a piece of coal; this coal was mined in Arkansas I believe and when somebody chipped the piece of coal this pot fell out; it’s got a design on it, it was used; now obviously coal is deep down, far below the surface of the earth, and if we believe in one great flood that created a lot of the strata then we have to attribute coal to a flood deposit, and if, therefore this pot became encapsulated in a piece of coal it did so during the flood. Therefore this pot is a surviving remnant of the city of Cain, the city of craftsman.

Here is an affidavit signed by the person who found it: While I was working in the municipal electric plant in Thomas, Oklahoma in 1912 I came upon a solid chunk of coal which was too large to use. I broke it with a sledge hammer; this iron pot fell from the center leaving the impression or mold of the pot in the piece of coal. Jim Stahl, an employee of the company, witnessed the breaking of the coal and saw the pot fall out. I traced the source of the coal and found it came from the Wilburton, Oklahoma mine. Frank J. Kenwood, November 27, 1948, sworn before the authority.

Now there’s one further evidence that we’ve got and I can show you here. This was taken from a deep drill core and this is the so-called manta image; it’s a little thing that looks like a piece of jewelry, it must have hung from either a woman’s earring or her necklace but it was found thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. This wasn’t the result of a surface type deposit like you get at Leakey’s group or anywhere else, this is a deep deposit; it’s not contamination by some woman who happened to be there while they were drilling and it fell off as they brought the sample up or something; this was encased in the sample. So again we have a hard piece of data that suggests the earth’s surface was shaped in a lot faster, different way and there are lots of strange things we have yet to learn about our own past as a human being. The Bible, however, gives us this hint, if we would only but follow the Word of God.

So no human good is allowed and the city of Cain specializes in human good. And so we’re going to remember in closing the words that we say so often in our confession, using Psalm 51, “For Thou desiredst not sacrifice, else I would give it; Thou desiredst not burnt offering, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a broken spirit and a contrite heart, O God, Thou will not despise.” The high technology of the Canaanites, intriguing to us, wasn’t intriguing to God; God was looking for the broken and contrite heart and He didn’t find it, and so what you just saw was what He did to that high technological society. He crushed it, obliterated it out of existence because God is sovereign. There’s another city that God is interested in, the city that He is building and it’s called the city of Zion. To commemorate that we sing hymn number…