Clough Genesis Lesson 21

Organized Society; Messianic Line – Genesis 4:25-5:24

As we go through Genesis 4 don’t be lulled into thinking that here we have something that isn’t as revolutionary as Genesis 1. Everything we’ve read in Genesis 4 strikes at the heart of the beliefs that we’ve been taught ever since grammar school, and that is the idea that civilization gradually evolved, we climbed out of the trees and left out bananas, put our tails behind and became nomads and then out from the nomads somebody suddenly discovered if you mechanically put seed in the ground you’ve got crops and thus was born in the cradle of civilization agriculture and farming. And then out from this you gradually develop the concept of the city. Such is the usual myth that is taught in our educational circles. The Bible, however, conflicts completely with this. We’re in total disagreement at every point of history here. The Bible insists, contrary to this picture, that Cain was a farmer first, he became a nomad, and a nomad represents a step down, not a step ahead, it represents degeneration and it’s due to an added cursing of God. So right away we have to say I’m sorry, we differ completely here. So that’s wrong.

The concept of the city was now late at all; it was very early, as we saw last time, Genesis 4:20-22 we have the advent of high technology within seven generations of creation. In verse 20 we have the cattle raising so we have the science of animal husbandry, animal breeding; we must have had at least some elementary knowledge of genetics to pull this off. When we look at verse 21 we see the father of all that’s handled the lyre and the flute. That must indicate at least an elementary knowledge of music, chords, and if that’s true then it must indicate an elementary knowledge of math; if that’s true it must indicate an elementary knowledge of physics for physics is sound, vibrating bodies, like the string and the lyre calculated to certain lengths to produce certain frequencies; you’ve got to calculate harmonics, in the flute you’ve got the same thing with resonation through a column of air that you open holes on and therefore lengthen and effectively shorten this resonating column of air. So you have all of these things, these that represent high technology at a very early time, and thus we are challenged once again.

We have the original city planner with Cain and city plan here was to plan for security in a fallen universe and it was apostate, and thus we have man legislating his own way. Remember Genesis 4:23, where Lamech, in the seventh generation insists that man, particularly verse 24, that man legislates law. He says, as a rule, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy and sevenfold,” and verse 23 must be understood in the context of verse 15 when God gave the first legislation about this vengeance business. So by Genesis 4:23 after seven generations man takes over lawmaking and begins to warp the law and create law based on his own autonomous emotions rather than on God’s standards.

So this was the past civilization. We saw last week by the slides that this was a damned civilization, eventually brought down by the cataclysm of the flood. You saw that little pot that had fallen out of a piece of coal, that shows you what is left of this great vaunted city of Cain with its high technology and low spirituality.

Now what we have in Genesis 4 from this point on is the story of the survival of the godly remnant. The earth is filled with the city of Cain. You mustn’t think of Genesis 4 and 5 as a story of merely two parallel lines, there’s a family here representing 50% of the population and a family here that represents 50% of the population. It’s not that at all; those statistics are all wrong. What you have is a very slender thread that gets narrower and narrower until by Noah’s time only 8 people out of a possible billion are believers. I submit to you that’s quite a small minority; eight out of a billion. And that probably is a fair presentation of the ratio between the godly seed and the city of Cain. Now the miracle that’s being recorded here in these chapters is the survival of this godly seed.

Let’s look once again at a time line, once again to challenge ourselves as to what we have been brought up to believe versus what is true. In history we have four great civilizations. We have the antediluvian, the postdiluvian, the millennial civilization and the civilization of eternity. Now in our history courses in school all we ever learn is a very warped version of the second one of these three civilizations. All we ever study in school are the remnants and the archeology and the artifacts of this postdiluvian civilization that recovered technology after the flood. But as we argued last time, all technological progress in the second civilization is not innovatus. The second civilization is merely rediscovering things brought by the first civilization.

We gave illustrations last time of the use of aluminum in China in 200 AD. Now if aluminum is being used in China but we didn’t discover how to smelt aluminum and by electrolysis get rid of the oxygen atom off the aluminum atom to get rid of the aluminum oxide, if we didn’t discover that by the Hall process until the 1890s, what we as Bible-believing Christian must say is well, I’m sorry, what’s happening here is not discovery; what is happening is recovery, recovery of a lost high technology that only now, in the 1800s and 1900s are we recovering back what we originally had. Yes, we’re able to do finer things; I’m sure Noah didn’t sit there with a pocket calculator and compute the size of the ark. But nevertheless we have evidence, as I’ll present later on, that Noah had access to electricity.

So if these things were available in Noah’s time and in the antediluvian period, then we have a whole set of gears to replace in our thinking about the rise and progress of civilization. These are the things that we want to be careful of when we read the Genesis text; don’t, because you see begat, begot, begat, begot, go to sleep and fail to see what all this is doing. You should feel it shaking the foundations, if you’ve really thought seriously about history, you should sense this. This is a rebuilding from the ground floor up.

Genesis 4, we ended with verse 24 and it has two final verses. These verses are necessary to finish off and conclude that era. Genesis 4:25, “And Adam knew his wife again; and she bore a son, and called his name Seth. For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.” Now this doesn’t mean that this is a third child Adam and Eve have had. Obviously they had at least three others because Cain married somebody, so we have sons and daughters being produced. What is significant in verse 25 is the establishment of the long thin line that will go down century after century after century in history culminating one day in a stable outside of Bethlehem.

Here you have the rise of the Messianic seed and this is the significance of what Adam and his wife are doing. Let’s put ourselves in their place for a moment. You’ve had many children, you’ve watched fratricide among your sons, you’ve taught Cain, you’ve taught Abel the Word of God, you’ve tried to bring them up as believers, one of them never did respond to his parent’s gospel presentation, finally turning into a hating murderer and slaughtered his righteous brother. And they’ve had to live through this catastrophe in their home. They’ve watched God personally kick Cain out, probably… really with mixed emotions about what this whole thing is that’s going on, attracted in one sense to Cain because after all Cain still is of their flesh, he still is their son disobedient though he is, and yet on the other hand, realizing in a supernatural way here’s God throwing this extra son of yours out and cursing him.

Now that’s the situation, so it looks like at this point the parents get together and they say okay, we’re going to become more aggressive spiritually in the situation, and so this seed, and maybe God reveals it in some way, again as the answer to the feedback card I said I don’t know, somehow they learn that this pregnancy is the pregnancy that has to do with the Messianic seed. So when the baby is born, verifies the son, then notice Eve is interested, sometimes the man will name the child but not always. Here the woman, she too has a right to name a child, “she bore a son and,” “she” subject of the verb called, “she called his name Seth.” Now the word “Seth” is the Hebrew verb appoint. If we were to read it the way it would sound somewhat it would sound like this: I will call his name Seth for God has “sethed” him to me; Seth is the verb to appoint.

Now what’s the significance of this name, this boy, Seth? Let’s do a parallel study a moment. Adam and Eve had Cain. Cain had a son and his son was Enoch. We said that Enoch meant dedication and there’s a remarkable parallel between the spirit of Cain and the Italian renaissance, the idea that all before the renaissance came Europe was in the dark ages. All of us have been almost schooled to the fact that it’s propagandized, brainwashed us so we have this thing in our mind that there was such a thing as dark ages in Europe. It was pointed out to me recently because I’ve used it and I’ve thought this way, it was pointed out to me by a Christian scholar that itself shows you how successful the humanists have been in programming us. We have been taught to believe that the period of European history when the Word of God was most prominent is the dark ages. And light only came after the Word of God was put down and man’s reason exalted, that was the renaissance, the new birth. So even the way history is taught is defying and demeaning and attacking the Word of God. There were no dark ages in Europe, period. The dark ages were full of light; the dark ages was a time when culture was preserved in the castles and the monasteries of Europe. The dark ages is a total misnomer invented by humanists to demean the Christian faith.

So in this period we have this renaissance of the city of Cain and Cain, you remember, he and his wife, because they’re idolaters, there’s no worship of God going on outside of Eden at this time and so Cain and his wife say we will stake our entire future on our son. And we will name a city and we will begin to build our city, our reference point in creation, autonomously by ourselves with our own works and our own assets. And we will pin our future to Enoch.

Now watch what’s happening to the other side. Adam and Eve have another son. By this time he would be the same age as Enoch though he’s only one generation so we skip this generation, Abel’s dead. So they have another son, Seth, age wise who’s like Enoch. Now look at the contrast in names and you see the collision of the program. One the one hand the program of man, the renaissance, we will build our new world, the brave new world. And on the other hand Seth, we accept God’s sovereign plan who has appointed us salvation through the Messianic line. And so right here in the very naming of the sons we have the theological battle begin. Seth…Seth means the gospel; who is elected, we name our son for God’s election, he is our seed.

The word “seed” in Genesis 4:25 is taken, if you’ll turn back to Genesis 3:15, it’s taken from the protoevangelium, the first promise of the gospel. There God said to Satan, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” and it doesn’t say at the end of that that her seed will bruise thy seed, it says “her seed will bruise you,” so there’s a direct attack by the seed of the woman against Satan and Seth is the first of a long line of men who will carry in their body the genes that will eventually be used to mold the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Seth becomes a very important boy, not only because of who he is physically in the plan of God but because of the fact that his parents declare war on the city of Cain; his parents do not go outside of the garden, they do not say Cain, your civilization is a civilization of the future, we join allegiance with you. Rather, Adam and Eve are very reluctant, they may pay visits to the city of Cain but they never place their citizenship there. Naming their son Seth means that Adam and Eve recognized their future hinges on the promise of God, not on man’s planning in the city of Cain.

Moreover it shows something else; the cycle that you see again and again operate in Scripture, first you see God act; God acts to bring about Cain and Abel, and then you have evil, negative volition that seeks to undo and destroy the acts of God. And then finally God, in grace, acts again and this manifests in a great way what grace is. That simple three step goes on a billion times in history; it goes on in your life right now, if you’re a Christian, you’re experiencing that same three step: God acts, Satan acts to undo the work of God, and then God comes in to undo the work of Satan. And over and over and over the cycle goes, but the cycle all began here with children and the first mother, the first father of history. They had a son, he was killed and God brought another son. So we have this great thing, the fight between the city of Cain and the city of God.

Now Genesis 4:26 goes on to describe more of that family unit. In the Bible, though there was a nucleus family made up of the father, the mother and the children, we’ll call that the nucleus family, one generation, nevertheless the Bible also seems to say that the living units on a large scale were made up of three and four generations, thus we read in the Ten Commandments: I am the God who visits the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and the fourth generation of them that hate Me. The picture there is that He blasts the whole living unit and in the living unit you’d have grandfather, father, son and sometimes you’d have the grandson, so you’d have four generations or at least three generations in a living unit. And remember, at this point in history what’s going on is that outside of the garden, there is the place that they meet God, and Adam and Eve and Seth have access to that altar before the presence of God. Cain does not, he’s building his city outside and apparently has no interest whatsoever in worship. After all, from Cain’s standpoint he was rejected once, why try again.

So we have Seth with Adam and Eve, and that’s why in verse 26 the emphasis is on also, “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son,” the “also” signifying that they seem to be clustered together in one group, “and he called his name Enosh,” in phoneticizing the word the King James made a mistake here, it’s not Enoch, it’s Enosh, and that’s significant. The war between God and Satan is shown in the names of these men. Cain—I have acquired; Enoch—is I dedicate the future to this boy. But now on the other side we have Seth, God’s plan, I appoint, and “Enosh.”

Now we have to get the flavor of what Enosh means. Enosh is a Hebrew noun that is almost a synonym of Adam; it’s used for mankind. But it’s a peculiar use of the word that catches our attention. Enosh is never used exactly like Adam; Adam is used whenever you and I would use the word “man” we’d just say mankind this, mankind that, etc., we’d use Adam. But when we brought Enosh into our conversation we want to cast a flavor of weakness on man.

Let’s turn to Psalm 8:4, this just shows you how the word “Enosh” was used. And it has a definite tone to it; you have to see the tone to realize what Adam and Eve and Seth are doing. They are up to something. Psalm 8:4, here’s where Enosh occurs, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” See, that’s not the picture of man in all of his majesty; it’s a picture of man sort of in low class, he’s sort of frail, weak, emaciated. Psalm 90:3, a psalm on old age, by the way, it’s one of the interesting psalms; it was written by Moses, not by David. You can’t read this but think if it were chanted it would have to be chanted in a minor key. “You turn man to destruction, and say, Return, ye children of men. [4] For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, as a watch in the night. [5] You carry them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which grows up. [6] In the morning it flourishes, and grows up; in the evening it is cut down, and withers. [7] For we are consumed by Thine anger, [and by Thy wrath we are troubled.]” There’s the flavor of Enosh.

So what is the significance, then? Why did Adam and Eve call their sons… let’s track it again. Adam and Eve have a son, Cain. He has a son, Enoch; this is the line of proud works of man. They form a counter line and they have a son named Seth, which means just God’s plan, if you want it simply. And Seth has a son, Enosh, and what does Enosh mean? Man is frail. God’s plan and the frailty of man. You see, they’ve got it all together; Adam and Eve finally have got it all together. And that’s the origin of the Messianic line in history, the sovereignty and power of God and the total frailty of man. What’s happening in the city of Cain? Exultation of man, man is so great, all good things come from man, history is evolving ever upward and forward in man. But the quiet godly line of Adam and Eve entertain no such illusion; they know that there’s nothing in man now that he’s fallen. The only thing that man has that’s valuable is what God has promised him and so the son, Seth, reminds them of this. Notice which is named first; first the promise of God, then the frailty of man. That’s so we don’t get discouraged. The sovereignty of God is always greater than the frailty of man.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 4. After they named Seth and after Seth has a son and he names his son then a notice is given about something new that starts in history. In Genesis 4:26 there’s this little note that you could read very quickly and never notice and go on. “Then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.” Now what’s that mean, “began to call upon the name of the LORD?” We’ll show you a reference what this means, but before we go there let’s just look a moment. When Abraham came into the land the first time you have him going to this place and to that place and to another place. Did you ever notice what Abraham did when he went to this place, that place and another place? What did he always do first? It says Abraham stopped, he built himself an altar of rocks and there called upon the name of the Lord. Then he goes some other place and he pulls up some rocks, does the same thing.

Well, what’s he doing every time he builds this rock altar and calls on the name of the Lord? Let’s do a little pretend game here. Pretend you are a Canaanite, and you see this guy come into the land and everywhere he goes he parks rocks and he sacrifices a lamb on the rock, and you walk up to this guy and you say hey, what are you doing here, what’s the idea of this rock bit and this altar? And Abraham’s going to tell you I am worshiping the God who is going to give me the land under my feet and yours. You’re going to do what? I’m worshiping the sovereign God of history and He’s going to give me the land. Well, He’s not going to give it while I’m here. He’ll give it to me; He’s also promised me children. Oh, where are they? I haven’t gotten them yet. But He’s going to give you children? Yes. In other words, every time Abraham went to call upon the name of the Lord it was a public confession of his faith in the gospel. Wasn’t it? Every time he’d do this, when he built a public altar, he would witness. That’s what it is, it’s really evangelization; it is worshiping God out in the open, where the unbeliever can see and it is declaring to that unbeliever that the Word of God is the issue, nothing else, not what man says, but God’s plan.

But calling on the name of the Lord has another flavor to it and we want to see this by turning to Psalm 49:11. We’re going to get at it by looking at a case where a person called, not with the name of God but with his own name and see what that means. One little note before we get there to explain something, it’s not “call on the Lord,” the Hebrew participle here could mean “call with the Lord’s name.” Now Psalm 49:11, it’s talking about the prideful, and it says, “Their inward thought is that their houses shall continue forever,” see, city of Cain mentality, “their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names.” And the flavor of that verse, do you catch it? It’s the belief in the sovereignty of the name; by calling the land with their own name they give that land enduring security—we call it with our name, it’s in our title and our homes will endure forever, and our dwelling places to all generations. Why? Because we’ve called it with our name, our name has power, our name gives eternal life to whatever it’s called over.

On the way back to Genesis stop at 1 Kings 18; there on Mount Carmel, Elijah facing the prophets of Baal, asks them to decide and in 1 Kings 18:24 this calling on the name thing occurs once again. And here is another example of how this phrase is used. Think carefully so when you read the Bible you understand; don’t fall for this sidewalk inane thing, well it’s just your opinion. Now come on, if I tell you the sun is rising do you reply oh, that’s just opinion? Get away from that and people who really don’t read or think always have that attitude that you can get anything out of the Bible you want to. Well you just don’t, you can’t. So the way we stop that is looking at these verses to get real precision.

1 Kings 18:24 is the challenge, now look at the way the challenge is phrased. Elijah has these two people with two religions and he says all right, “You call on the name,” “with the name,” literally, “of your god and I will call with the name of Jehovah; and the God that answers, let Him be God.” So what he proposes is a contest and he’s going to do it with the name, so calling with the Lord’s name involves entrée, what Elijah is saying I have entrée, depending on what name, if you come in the name of Baal see if you have entrée with the name of Baal, see if it does you any good. I will not put my confidence in that name, I put my confidence in Yahweh’s name and therefore I will use Yahweh’s name and see if that gives me entrée, and He does. It’s like today, we pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and this has very powerful meaning.

We use it all the time, we get used to it; but you’re about to see it right in front of your face because there’s a group of ministers now getting together to try to eliminate prayers in Christ’s name from Jones stadium during the football game, and people want this dropped because it’s offensive. Well, the Lord Jesus Christ tells us to pray in His name. So now either we listen to Texas Tech or we listen to the Lord Jesus Christ; I submit to you that Christ is a little bit higher in authority. And therefore Christians will respond to this either by not praying, standing at attention with your eyes open, refusing to pray at all unless the prayer is in Jesus name, or when the prayer is finished to say it out loud, “in Jesus name.” This would be the way to handle that kind of a situation, simply because Christ tells us to pray in His name and we don’t care what the city or what Tech or what someone tells us what we’re going to pray, we are going to pray in Jesus’ name or we are not going to pray, it’s that simple.

And so it was in this day, you call with the Lord’s name. And men began to do this and you began, therefore, at the end of Genesis 4 to have a public testimony to the gospel. That’s what it means. And we conclude, we’re at Genesis 5:1 and this starts a new book. Remember Genesis is made up of several books. We’ve looked at Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3 and Genesis 2:4 through 4:26. The first book was probably dictated to Adam by God. The second book we don’t know who wrote it but perhaps it was written by Adam, I think he’s a good candidate because the book breaks off in the seventh generation which is when he died. So he’s a likely candidate for the authorship and he concludes his book with Genesis 4:26 on the note that the light has been passed to the next generation. What would a father most want? Before he dies what does a godly man most want? He wants to see that his testimony is put into the next generation, and so the book shuts off with the fact that the light of the gospel has been transmitted.

Now Genesis 5:1, the new book; book three. “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” And here we have Adam’s progeny, the fruit of Adam, what he has left in history, and Genesis 5:1 begins the book that ends in Genesis 6:8. If you look over in 6:8 you’ll see how this one winds up, and by looking at the beginning of the book and the end of the book you’ll see the theme of the book. Book three has as its theme the preservation of the Messianic seed because it starts out mentioning the seed in verse 3 and it winds up in Genesis 6:8, after it’s narrated the total unbelief of the world, “But Noah found grace.” The seed has survived.

You see, what this is telling us is that that Genesis 3:15 thing, about the woman’s seed, and how Satan hates it and how Satan pounds it and tries to have a non-mortal wound to it. Remember what the promise was? The seed shall crush your head but you will wound its foot, or its heel. Well, here is where Satan is picking away, picking away, picking away, he’s got to destroy the Messianic line, but the Messianic line endures. Satan has destroyed the whole world by Genesis 6:8 but he hasn’t destroyed what he most wanted to destroy, and that is the Word of God and the promise of Christ. He can never get that far. Though he take the world with him, he still cannot get through to Christ.

Let’s go back and look at Genesis 5 and go through these genealogies to show you that there is a pattern here and some very vital lessons. Genesis 5:1-3 to start. “…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 they in which they were created. [3] And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness,” now notice the shift in language. Verse 1 and verse 2 have emphasized over and over the original creation but what do you notice different about those three. It says, “And Adam begat a son,” not on God’s likeness, but “in his own likeness,” so now we have something that in biology class they tell you is an impossibility, the inheritance of an acquired characteristic. Here you have the sin nature which is the inheritance of an acquired characteristic and it’s passed from father to son and so now Adam produces, but he produces an old sin nature. And the old sin nature now goes down through history. So Seth, though he testifies to the plan of God, in himself he is depraved; no longer will we have men born… not that Cain and Abel weren’t also born in Adam’s image but since the subject of Genesis 5 is the Messianic line the author wants us to note from the very start, look guys, these people are godly people but they all have a fallen nature. So it says “the days of Adam,” and it describes this humongously long lifetime, 130 and 800.

Now I want you to notice a little formula. Genesis 5:3-5 gives you this formula; it divides a man’s life into two parts, X and Y, and gives you a figure for X, a figure for Y, and then a figure for X + Y. Now this is the three parts of this formula: it occurs again and again and again; if you look at it it’s the same formula. That’s why this strikes you when you read it as monotonous. But it’s this formula repeated and then as each formula ends we have “and he died.” Now what’s that getting at? The fall takes its toll; instead of life there’s death, there’s all this great longevity but there’s still death, “and he died,” “and he died,” “and he died,” and where does it all start? Because in Genesis 5:3 Adam begets them in his own image and his own image is a death image and so they die. And so death occurs throughout the human race. No one is ever ready for death; it isn’t part of our being.

To pretend that we accept death as normal is to deny the Word of God. You ought never to be in a situation where as a Christian you really accept death as (quote) “normal.” You’re not made to die; I’m not made to die. I was talking about this with one of my boys and he was saying he’s too young to die; well, that’s the way all people think when they die, you’re too young to die, unless the person is just so fatigued and so tired they just give up and say I want to die in that case. But normal people never say… never get used to death. Death is just an abnormality and it’s because that’s the way God intended it. He never intended originally, in the original creation, that we die. This is why I had the reading ended with verse 24, where the formula is given and then it’s violated, because at the end of verse 24 there is nor formula that closes it out, there’s a missing link; there is no “and he died.” This Enoch in the Messianic line never dies. And it’s a reminder that death is not totally normal, it’s an abnormality.

Let’s look further at this X Y and X + Y formula. Let’s look at Genesis 5:3-5 and watch Adam’s life. X in Adam’s life, verse 3, “And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years,” so X equals 130; Y equals 800, so X + Y = 930 years, and the formula goes on to describe this for each person. Now if you went through the list, drop Noah off at the end because he’s a different situation, then you’d have nine data points. Now let’s just add all the Xs, all the Ys and all the X + Ys together and average them and see what happens. Here’s the average X, here’s the average Y, here’s the average X + Y. The average X that you would get is 117 years; the average Y is 730 and the average total is 847.

Now what’s remarkable about this particular set of figures is that it refutes the very common objection; critics and even Christians for a long, long time, many, many years, have tried to get out from under the pressure of reading all these large… ah, people couldn’t have lived this long, and so they try their best to make the Bible say something other than what it’s saying. So here’s their favorite tactic. The favorite device is to say well, I can explain that long age, it’s real simple; all they had were shorter years. They had a different calendar, they measured time differently. Ah, but let’s just see if that hypothesis works. Let’s divide all these numbers by ten, put a decimal point in here, make 847 84.7, make 730 73.0 and make 117 11.7. So we divide through by ten just to cut the figures down to manageable size. Now let’s conceive of somebody living 84.7 years; does it make sense that they’re having the Messianic seed at age 11? In other words, the ratio of these numbers is wrong if it’s a calendar problem. And for years this has been known.

This is why the Greek translators of the Old Testament, in what is called the Septuagint, sometimes when you’re reading you’ll see it represented by the Roman numeral LXX, they decided oh, we’ve got an answer for that, we’ll just add on some figures here and fudge it. And so they added figures here to make this ratio come out differently and apparently more realistically. But we don’t have to fudge the text and change it to something else. Let’s confess what the text says. It’s saying that people lived almost a thousand years before the flood. There’s no way around it, there’s no arguments, that’s just what the text says; man lived at one time almost a thousand years. Now if you were to live almost a thousand years or 847 and we subtract that from our present day, you would have been born in AD 1131. Now just a moment, what would you have personally witnessed in your lifetime if you had lived all the years from 1131? You would have personally remembered as a child talking to Martin Luther and John Calvin. You would have personally remember the day the word of Columbus discovering America got back to Europe. You would have had children who fought and maybe grandchildren who fought in the American Revolution. You personally witnessed all these great events, for almost a thousand years, that would have been in your memory, not written from a history book but in your memory, you experienced these things and it was your memory. You would be a history book walking around.

Now that’s the kind of powerful magnificent person that lived in the days before the flood. These people that lived before the flood were remembered centuries afterwards in the myths of men. For example, one of the oldest lists on the earth comes from the ancient civilization of Sumer, and as we go into these myths, as I’ve stressed in Genesis time and time again what do you see in these myths? Pieces of Genesis remembered. All these civilizations believed that men lived great ages before the flood. In this particular list they’re listing one man, Alleium [sp?] who lived 67,200 years; Alleger [sp?], 72,000, and so on, for a total reign of 456,000 years.

Incidentally, the modern evolutionist wasn’t the first one to blow up ages. Notice, and this is an interesting characteristic, all civilizations that I have ever studied that have numbers of ages always blow history… expand it, it’s only the Bible that contracts history. And that tells you something; there’s something that goes on in man’s sinful heart where it’s not controlled by the Holy Spirit that wants to make creation as far back as possible and I think I know why. I think the reason we all have a tendency to want to push the date of creation backwards in time is because it makes it more psychologically distant. Doesn’t it feel more comfortable to say that creation happened a billion years ago than to say it happened 4,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago? See, creation is put too close and it puts too much spiritual pressure on somebody so there’s vested reasons why people want long ages.

But we submit to you that this list reflects a distorted memory of Genesis 5. Another thing that makes us think that is notice how many names there are on this list—ten. How many names are in Genesis 5? Ten. How many names are usually in these kinds of lists and myths? Ten, sometimes it’s 8, other times it’s 10. Why? Why do we have myths all over the world with just ten names and the myths all say the same thing, that these people lived long ages? Is everybody crazy? The guy in South America just makes this up? The guy in Egypt just made it up? Everybody just made these things up all by themselves? No. They are the sons of Noah and their father, Noah, told them this, that back in my day this is how long people lived. Now we don’t have to go outside the Bible to see this memory operate. Turn to the book of Job; Job is a book that was written after the flood but he remembers this high longevity. So we can take the book of Job, it’s a very marvelous book, incidentally, before we’re through the Genesis series for those of you who are curious we will solve the problem of what about the dinosaurs and we’ll do it with the book of Job.

Job 8:8-9, most people don’t read the dialogues of Job and so they miss out on all these little neat verses. Well, here’s one. Before we’re through the Genesis series, incidentally, we’ll also show you cave men existed and Job talks about them and knew them. Job also knew that the glaciers covered the northern hemisphere and he speaks about them, we’ll show that in the book of Job. Job 8:8-9, this is Bildad in the discussion, Bildad says, “I inquire, I pray thee, of the former age,” that’s the age before the flood, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers. [9] (For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are like a shadow).” He’s consciously comparing the short life span of the present civilization with what he knew that had been told his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather, back to Noah, people lived longer before the flood. This is fact, not fantasy and it’s not myth.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 5 and this long list of so and so begetting so and so. And we count the names, one man succeeding one, one after another, all the way until we get down to verse 19, “And Jared lived after he begot Enoch,” now this Enoch is a godly counterpart to his Canaanite Enoch, he is the sixth man removed, the seventh in the list, sixth man from Adam if you want to count each one individually. And in this we have the… going down in this list here’s Enoch. I want to show you this list to show you something about the men overlapped.

See, in our civilization, you and I think of our sons living beyond us and our grandsons living beyond us; we don’t think of living in their generation but you see, that’s where we’re all pre tuned to operate in one frequency and we’re operating in another frequency this morning so just shut off that thought and come over and start learning all over again. There’s overlapping; Adam didn’t die until 930 years after creation, which meant, and this is the date of birth of the people in the list, he lived all the way down and saw everyone of these men except the last one, Noah. He lived that long. Adam lived until Lamech was born. So now look at your vast overlapping that you’ve got with such a high longevity. This is something that we’re not used to. Now think of the wisdom that could be transferred. This is how, I believe, the high technology occurred so rapidly. Between the creation and the flood there are 1656 years, there’s no gaps in this genealogy. And for 1,656 years it happened and in those 1600 years the human race developed fantastically. How, you say? Well, think how much you’ve learned so far and we live to be 70 years. Let’s multiply that by 10; how much could you learn if you lived 700 years? Don’t you see that you could accumulate vast amount of data. Moreover, if you had in your house grandma and she had lived for 800 years before your time, don’t you think that she could, over the supper table, give you a few pearls now and then. You see, you had tremendous transmission of wisdom in the family unit by this high longevity. So not only do you have each person accumulating a vast knowledge, but you have fantastic familial transmission of information and this just astronomically increases things.

A few other things to notice. Notice the oldest man who’s ever reported living, Methuselah; he died in the year 1656 after creation, he died the year of the flood, and this is the last man… now Lamech died before his father and then Noah survived. But here you have the list of the godly men; notice again the date in which they bore the Messianic seed; it wasn’t their first child in most cases.

That gives you an idea of overlap, now we’ve got one other problem we want to solve before we comment on Enoch. And that problem is what do you suppose was the population at the time of the flood? Is there a way we can guess at the population? Given the fact that we have Adam and Eve, we only have two people on the face of the earth, then 1656 years later we have n people on the face of the earth, can we guess what n equals. Yes we can; we can do this by a very simple mathematic, it gets hairy after the flood because you’ve got death but before the flood, since you don’t have that much death in the system you can use a simple geometric theory: 2, 4, 8, 16, this is geometric theory and geometric theories blow up very, very rapidly, and one that Dr. Henry Morris devised to estimate this goes like this: 2 x 3 raised to the n^th power, the reason for this is that he assumed that there were three boys and three girls, so you have existing model, the male, the female, so you take three males produced, three females, you just divide them up this way to make the math easier, and you have two times this, so each generation gives you three, you have two parents producing, so 2 times 3 to the n^th and this thing blows up to the figure by the 9^th generation of 774,000,000. So you know, come on, don’t tell me that we couldn’t have in 1600 years the world filled with people. In fact, the figure 774,000,000 equals the world population in 1850. So by the year 1850 AD we have reached, now we’re over, but by 1850 the world reached its antediluvian population, if this model is true. This model may not be true.

I ran another statistic with a slightly different formula based on the worst estimates possible. In other words, I estimated that each generation, instead of Henry Morris’ 90 year generations, instead of the fact you have a father here, he gives birth to his first boy when he’s 90 years old, I said look, let’s make the first birth equal to the Messianic birth, that’d 117 years, so I’m deliberately picking every figure I can get to get the minimum population and when we crank out in the final analysis we still come up with 120,000 people; that’s a bare minimum on the face of the earth just prior to the flood, almost the population of Lubbock. Now that’s with everything against you, the lowest possible figure. Now Dr. Morris’ formula that gave close to a billion, 774,000,000, do you know what the population growth rate was? Compute it out; 1.5%, that’s all the growth rate you need when you have overlapping and when you have people living this long. You don’t need a high population growth rate because of this overlapping device.

So when someone comes up to you and tells you that ah, come on, now this is ridiculous, they haven’t done their mathematical homework. We’re not talking about your opinion or mine; if you want the formulas I can give them to you and if you don’t know how to work exponents we’ll show you, take a log table or work it on your computer and you can work it out yourself, you don’t have to depend on me. It’s a very simple cut and dried, simple math problem. And it proves that the antediluvian population could have been very, very great indeed.

Now we come to Enoch and the significance of this great population. Enoch is the seventh man in the antediluvian world, the seventh generation. Now it’s interesting that his counterpart is Lamech, back in Genesis 4:20. Now something we said happened in the seventh generation of the human race. The reason for this is when you look at Genesis 4 it talks about verse 18, Enoch was born, Jared begot… Mehalalel begot Jared and it goes on through the list, and then it stops with Lamech. And you say why does the Holy Spirit suddenly stop the genealogy here and dump out all this data? Because something’s happened in the seventh generation.

Look at Genesis 5, you go through that formula, go through the formula, go through the formula and then you get down to verse 21, what happened? It stops and the Holy Spirit interrupts the genealogy precisely at the same place He did in Genesis 4 and gives us this humongously long data about Enoch walking with God and he wasn’t because “God took him” and all the rest of it, what’s that stuck in there at exactly the same point Lamech was in chapter 4? Apparently at this point the Canaanite civilization had undergone a renaissance and as the Canaanite underwent a renaissance it endangered the survival of the Messianic seed because the city of Cain was built in negative volition and human viewpoint and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it dominated everything, education, technology, the arts, the sciences, everything came under the dominion of apostasy and autonomy.

Now in this situation we’ve got a grave, grave, grave threat, and so the question is, in the seventh generation what was God doing to keep alive the Word. And the answer is Enoch. It says in Genesis 5:24 that “Enoch walked with God,” now if you were to look this up in your concordance you’d find that this is a technical expression; it is not walk after God, it doesn’t say walk according to God, it doesn’t say walk before God, it says “walked with God” and that’s only used twice elsewhere in the Bible. It’s used of Noah in Genesis 6:9, and it’s used of the priests that serve in the holy place in Malachi 2:6. So when you read, therefore, in Genesis 5:24 that “Enoch walked with God,” you are reading about one of the great, great spiritual giants of the human race. Just as apostasy increases and the blackness gets so thick that you can cut it, God brings into existence Enoch, and Enoch apparently is the man that upholds the Word in his generation and he is rewarded, because he is under such tremendous pressure to keep on teaching the Word, teaching the Word, teaching the Word, teaching the Word when everything is structured against him, that God rewards him with a rapture. And here is the first man who never saw death; he was taken to be with the Lord without going through the death process.

Well, what was so great about Enoch that this happened? Well, here again we are faced with an interesting mystery and an amazing thing about the book of Genesis. The usual person’s attitude to Genesis is that these details, well, you know, they don’t mean too much, after all it’s just a verse here and a verse there, you can’t make too much out of these notices in Genesis. Oh really! If we have 1600 years of history condensed into one chapter do you suppose that if something is included in that one chapter it’s significant? You’d better believe it. How would you like it, if we asked you right now to take one side of your bulletin and on that one side of the bulletin you capsulized the significant events that have happened in the last 1600 years of history? And you write it down; you take 15-20 minutes to think this thing through and you work it all out and then somebody gets it and they say well, you know, that’s just a detail. Wait a minute, it’s no detail friend, for every detail I put in there there’s a million other things that are left out. I only picked the most significant so their inclusion proves their significance.

So I want to show you some of the details that were left out of Genesis 5 and the Holy Spirit brought them into the canon at another point. Turn to Jude and you’ll see Enoch, he reappears, and over here we’re told about what he did. So when you see a little detail in the Genesis text you go ahead and make a big deal about it because it’s significant. Jude 14-15, here is our hero. “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam,” incidentally, the man who wrote this book happens to be the half brother of Jesus Christ. Jude grew up with the Lord Jesus Christ and was converted after resurrection, and poor Jude didn’t have his doctorate from Germany and higher criticism and he didn’t understand that Genesis had gaps in the genealogy so he just, in verse 14 said “Enoch was the seventh from Adam,” and he “prophesied of apostasy, and he said, Behold, the Lord is coming,” now here we’ve got a rare glimpse into the past, here is a sermon, a piece of a sermon back from that antediluvian society, “Behold the Lord comes with ten thousands of His saints, [15] To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” The word “ungodly” here is rebellion.

Now think a moment, what did we say was going on in that seventh generation? Over here was Cain, who was the guy? Lamech, that was when the humanist renaissance occurred in the antediluvian society and just as the humanist renaissance occurred God hardened up revelation and put it with a razor and said okay, you people have decided to build your city, you have said you’re integration point isn’t going to be the Word of God, you are not going to think about what I am going to do in history and be grace oriented people, you are going to be works, you’re going to be centered in this world, this city of Cain is your city and you proudly build your own legislation and organize your lives around it; okay, let me tell you something. And Enoch is the one that delivers this little sweet message, that this whole place is going up in smoke.

The interesting thing is that this is a prophecy, not of the flood, verses 14-15 is a prophecy of the second return of Christ. So now you’ve got an amazing thing, that before the flood they knew about the second return of Christ. Does anyone say that people were ignorant? What about the heathen? Did I hear a question, what about the heathen who never heard? Well what about the antediluvians that had all this data? People have heard, they’ve heard it a million times because Isaiah 40:21 says there has never been a generation in the history of man since creation that has been outside the domain of special revelation of the Word of God. All peoples have heard something, at least enough to render them culpable. We have to stop this morning because of time; we’ll go on next week to finish out the antediluvian society, but the thing that we want to remember, the big picture here of Genesis 5 is that though the population is reaching one billion, actually 774,000,000 if Dr. Morris’ guess is right, you’ve got Enoch here and by the time of the flood you’ve got 8 people, and look what you’ve got? 800,000,000 people against 8. Do you think you’ve got a hard time as a believer today in an unbelieving society. How’d you like to live with these ratios? 800,000,000… or 100,000,000 to one, that was the ration between believers and unbelievers in antediluvian society. Is there any wonder God sent a flood to destroy the society? If He hadn’t sent the flood what do you suppose would have happened to the 8? Eventually they would have been crushed by the force.

So the flood is good news, the flood is going to be salvation of the Messianic seed; they are going to survive. Next week, if you thought this was bad, we’re going to show you another little thing Satan had cooking to try to destroy the Messianic seed, but God’s Word saith it has been appointed and it shall come to pass.