Clough Genesis Lesson 30

Dinosaurs, Job 41; Noahic Covenant, Capital Punishment – Genesis 9:1-6

…there are contradictions between Genesis 8:22 that talks about the continuity and uniformity of nature and 2 Peter 3:10 which tells us about the heavens and the earth being destroyed by fire, and the answer is that there is uniformity promised to the end of mortal history and 2 Peter 3:10 deals with that final event of mortal history; one is talking about continuity until that point and the next one is talking about the final point.

Two other questions slightly off what we’ve been teaching but nevertheless I’ll respond to them. If we aren’t supposed to lie, why does Joseph ask his servants to frame his brothers to get them back? The answer is that the mandate not to lie is a conditional one in Scripture. And you’ll notice that people in history at several points in the Bible are commended for their faithful lying. For example, Rahab; another example would be the midwives of Exodus 1. If you do a Bible study of all the times that God commends lying it is done in conjunction with the state and involving various things of the fourth divine institution and so what I’ll do is when we get to the lying incident in Joseph I’ll address myself in detail the circumstances for Godly lying.

Exodus 32:14 mentions evil; what is the evil? [“And the LORD repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people.”] The answer to that question is in the context, Exodus 32:10, [“Now therefore, let me alone, that My wrath may burn against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.”]

How did animals get across the oceans to places like Australia? This is one of the evidences now being used to support continental drift because the floor in the fauna, the animals and the plants are usually in latitudinal zones; for example, you have the equatorial floor and fauna, you have the temperate flora and fauna, and then you have the arctic flora and fauna, and you can’t take a tropic plant across the Bering Sea bridge and back down again without destroying it. So the only way we explain the continuity is that the continents may have divided. This is one of the possible evidences for the continental drift. We might also extend that and I will later when we get to the tower of Babel but not only is the flora and fauna continuous from one continent to another, but architectural style is; one thinks, for example, of the pyramids as being solely Egyptian and yet the Aztecs of Mexico built pyramids; why did the two nations have the same architectural design if they weren’t off of a common base.

If there is intelligent life on other planets would they have to be fallen since the Bible says “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Well, if they were part of that mandate which is under man’s feet, yes; they also could be angelic beings in which case you have two categories of angelic beings, the elect and the fallen. But the real issue is that anything outside of the planet earth is incidental to the plan of God. It sounds arrogant to say this but the Bible says it so it’s a good excuse to say it. The Word of God says that the human race, and in particular the Lord Jesus Christ, is the head of the universe, not some purple creature from star galaxy 418 some place and therefore the human race becomes the control group in all of creation for the rest of creation. Jesus, in other words did not incarnate Himself as a Martian.

You have praised demonstrations and verbal classroom attacks on college professors in past sermons. What if someone would try to do this during one of your sermons? Would not this be a waste of precious teaching time? The answer to that is that I adhere to an absolute form of truth and therefore when I teach we’re teaching in the framework of truth and so therefore there’s a reason for listening. But where you have a professor or a teacher who stands up in the class, as many have done, and argues that there is no absolute standard of truth and argues that everything is relative, then I say that’s the perfectly moral thing to do, on the basis of what he has just taught you. If all opinions are of equal validity, if everything is relative, then the student’s position counts just as much as the professor’s, doesn’t it? Isn’t this a logical outworking of relativism? So I don’t think you catch my point; my point is that once you unleash relativism there’s no stopping it and if you’ll open your bulletins and look at the insert for Frances Schaeffer’s film, you should see one of the questions there about the business of taking things to the conclusion in the classroom, and that’s exactly his point as he mentioned in the film. Everybody was shocked during the Berkley free speech movement saying that this was horrible that these students were doing this. But as Frances Schaeffer points out why were they shocked because they had been carefully taught that all is relative. So it was just the students who had more courage than their professors to take the content of the teaching to its logical conclusion. And the Berkeley free speech movement was caused by the Berkley faculty, it wasn’t caused by the student; the students were simply acting consistently with what they were being taught in the classroom. So this is something we see, the older professors didn’t have the intellectual honesty to carry their conclusions out to the end; students did.

Last week you explained the cave man by some passages in Job but you didn’t explain why their bodies were so different as well as their mental capabilities. Careful… remember I’ve said and I’ve warned us here repeatedly about what I call buying the question, that is, you accept the human viewpoint context of the question. Now who said that the cave men IQ was less than our present IQ? And if someone told you that, what reason did they give you for saying that? Did they give you evidence that the cave man’s IQ was less than our present IQ. In the third framework pamphlet, page 9, I address this problem in which I deal with the problem of establishing the IQ of an extinct people. Now you see, this is easy to pronounce and easy to repeat the gossip that we’re always taught about the cavemen. Yeah, they looked stupid but it doesn’t mean that they are stupid. I remember on the MIT campus some of the greatest geniuses on the campus were the stupidest looking people you ever ran across. Some couldn’t eat their lunch without dropping half of it all over the floor. Now you’d swear these guys came from a funny farm some place. So appearance can be deceiving. Therefore, how do you measure the IQ of an extinct people? You can’t go measure them directly so the only way you can do it is measure what they’ve left behind. What is it that they’ve left behind? Have they just left little simple arrowheads or they’ve left simple tools? But if Dr. Custance, who addresses himself to the problem, points out: “The complexity of a device or a technique is, per se, no measure of the intelligence required to develop it. As a matter of fact, it is quite generally agreed that the essence of genius is simplicity of design. This applies to much creative activity. What could be simpler than the basic theme of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, or some of the profound observations put into the mouths of Shakespeare’s characters? Or such a formula as E=MC2. So simplicity of tools does not mean simple mindedness.”

All right, what else can we do? Well, if we can’t directly measure IQ off the tools, can we find people living today whose IQ we can measure but who are leaving behind tools like the cavemen? And indeed we can; two people qualify: (1) the aborigine of Australia, and (2) some of the Eskimo in northern Alaska and northern Canada. Both these groups of people are leaving behind, if they were exterminated today, and you dug up their areas they would be leaving behind tools reminiscent of the caveman era. So therefore let’s see what would happen if you went to an Australian aborigine or an Eskimo child and began to work with him as we would a white child or a black child here in the west and see then what his IQ would be. And this was done; particularly it was done during the 19^th century when missionary work came first into contact with these peoples, and here is an excerpt from one of the reports.

“A few years ago it was reported that an Australian aborigine named Carroll Blair, then 24 years of age was writing his PhD thesis on 15^th and 16^th century composers. It was stated he spoke German, Italian and English fluently, at a time when the successful education of the children of such primitive people was a matter of great surprise. There were many such reports. The honorable J. M. Cree {?} writing in the well known English Journal, 19^th century, 1905, gave a number of striking illustrations. “Repeatedly the writer states that these Australian aborigine children not only held their own against white children but very frequently, indeed, showed themselves to be superior in intelligence.” Another authority has written: “The mental distance between a living so-called ‘primitive’ and a civilized person is regarded as equivalent to thousands of years, but experience proves that this distance, where it exists, is equivalent to no more than a few days for man is everywhere and always man.” Who says the cavemen are stupid? That is just propaganda that you’ve been fed, and so we resist the notion that the cavemen were stupid.

Again we say the reason for the primitive appearance was two-fold: their environment caused them to wage a narrow life and death struggle with mere physical existence for their culture was very conservative. It had to be conservative. When you’re on the fringe of survival you can’t even experiment with the seeds because if you screw up the seeds you don’t grow your crop next year and you starve to death. So until life could get sustained after the flood everybody was just eking out survival; that was the name of the game. And wherever we have art of the caveman and the cave and so on it’s just as profound as anything else that we would have. For example, their graves are decorated. Why would they decorate their graves if they didn’t have a consciousness of the afterlife? So we find no evidence that the caveman was stupid other than the evolutionists wish that they be stupid.

The second reason why people think that cavemen are stupid is because of the appearance of their skull. Now the skeletal structure, the rest of the skeletal structure from the neck down isn’t that different from us; the head is deformed, and there are a number of theories as to why. Dr. Custance has written on environmental pressures as they affect the human skull, in particular if you have a group of people living for a long time, remember during that thousand years they are living at least 200-300 years, and they’re living a long time and the bones in the skull do not harden, like they do today, quickly, and they may have been years hardening. And right after the flood the diet had shifted from the antediluvian world, and it just turns out, as Custance showed in a series of charts, that the muscles from the jaw are attached to this very part of the head that is depressed on the caveman’s skull, and the theory he would put forward, and it’s just a theory, that the hard diet of meat which they were not used to eating during the many long years of the gradually hardening skull caused the frontal depression to develop. And if you want to read further in this area and you really got interested, Custance’s books, there’s a series of books called The Doorway Papers.

Returning to the Scriptures, we left last week in Job, we had just seen how radically different the Genesis text is from our usual illusions; we have seen how human viewpoint that we get in the classroom, that we get in our culture is very highly selective; we are fed a careful diet, carefully controlled to omit evidence of a young age of the universe. We are not told in school about leeching rates of minerals into the ocean; we are not told about the problem of why there is such great debris in the solar system when there shouldn’t be; we are not told why the moon dust is as thin as it is when it shouldn’t be; we are not told about radio halos in our physic classes. So therefore there’s a great gap in the amount of data that we are fed in the classroom and therefore obviously we have come to a position of disbelief in the Scriptures. We are not shown evidence of decline in history; we are only presented evidence that shows man has developed in history. And so therefore things like the Piri Re’is map that we showed last week is simple swept under the floor, kept in a drawer some place and never discussed. With that highly selective environment it requires us as Christians to bring out all of the data.

We’ve seen so far several things about the book of Job. We’ve watched that it reports great geological works, works that existed between the time of the flood and to the time of maybe Abraham and later. So we have at least a thousand years and maybe more of these kinds of things, continents still taking their shape, mountains building and gradually disappearing, tidal intrusions and volcanism. We also have seen from the book of Job the cooling climate; we’ve seen the African desert, now according to various historical observations, had large lakes on it at one time, the snow and the ice are reported in Job at the latitude of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and so forth. We find the ecological balance of the present day taking a long time to set up; the desert flora and fauna, the plants and the animals around these desert areas having rapidly developed after the flood waters receded and the continents attained their present elevation.

Now one of the things we have not yet seen in the book of Job is found in Job 41. It answers one of those age old dilemmas, one that everybody who teaches a strict Genesis gets asked sometime or other, and that is: What about the dinosaur? Now here again, if we were only taught to be more creative, really creative in our thinking we would have guessed at the answer long ago, for there are two elements never brought together in our education; one is, of course, the biological study of the dinosaurs, and then for those who have studied mythology, the fire-breathing dragon. And we’ve often associated the shape in our mind, kind of in an amusing half serious way, but I wonder if we’ve ever seriously questioned the idea that the fire-breathing dragons of the myths are remembered observations of dinosaurs that coexisted with man, and that they are not myths, they are simply distorted and half-remembered observations.

Here in Job 41 is one of these. Job 41:1, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?” The word “leviathan” there is a word later used for Satan; it’s some strange animal that is fished for, obviously in verse 1 referring to some sort of a marine animal. Notice verse 2 follows this out, “Can you put an hook through his nose, or bore his jaw through with a thorn? [3] Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? [4] Will he make a covenant with thee? [Will you take him for a servant forever?] [5] Will you play with him as with a bird?” The answer is no. Verse 7, “Can you fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with fish spears? [8] Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.” In other words, there’s a fierce large animal here, one whose skin resists spears, and therefore is a reptile, and it seems to be a reptile and some sort of a sea creature.

But let’s read further into the description. Job 41:14, “Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. [15] His scales are his pride, shut up together with a close seal. [16] One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. [17] They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered,” and so we have a very reptilian surface to this strange. Verse 18, “By his sneezings” or nessings “a light does shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. [19] Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. [20] Out of his nostrils go smoke, as out of a seething [boiling] pot or caldron. [21] His soul [breath] kindles coals, and a flame goes out of his mouth.” Fire-breathing dragon? It sure looks like one, and indeed the liberal critics of the Bible have been quick to note Job 41 and say ah-ha, here we have evidence of myths in the Bible; here Job and his friends are trying to discuss the problem of suffering and they’re using mythological symbols to discuss it.

There’s only one little problem with this: every other animal and every other natural phenomenal discussed in the book of Job is real; there is no symbolic natural phenomena in the book of Job. Why do we suddenly change the ballgame when we come to Job 41 and shift our rules of interpretation, because there are parts of the Bible where leviathan is a symbol, but when he’s a symbol he’s always a symbol of Satan, in Isaiah for example? So since when is a symbol of a symbol. No, this isn’t a symbol in Job 41, this is the real thing. This is the animal from which the later Satan symbol was taken, just as the snake becomes also another symbol. You don’t say the snake is a mythological animal. Rather we have this strange leviathan, or as we will say, identify it as a dinosaur. Well, say people, you know, verses 19-21 are pretty hard to take, fire-breathing; now that’s easy to take as far as a myth goes but fire-breathing animals.

Well, don’t be so sure you have complete command of all the interesting things in the zoological realm. Ever been out in your backyard at night and watched the firefly? Have you ever asked yourself how the firefly generates light on his body? Obviously by some photochemical process. The firefly doesn’t have a 100 watt light bulb, you can touch the firefly and he’s not hot. How does he generate the electricity or the light? From photochemical process on his flesh. Now let’s imagine that we had the skeleton… there isn’t a skeleton but let’s just pretend for the sake of illustration, let’s pretend we have the skeleton of a firefly but no flesh and we’re trying to make deductions about what the firefly looks like only the skeleton and not the flesh. Would we ever have guessed that this skeleton produced photochemically this light, this cold light that the firefly produces? No, not from the skeletal feature alone. We have to have been there and watch the fleshed out skeleton actually function before we would be sure that the firefly produces light.

Dr. Gish has extended this question a bit further in his little book, Dinosaurs for Children, in which he points out the bombardier beetle, a strange little beetle that has two little capsules in his body filled with various chemicals, and when faced with an enemy the bombardier beetle squirts these two sacs of fluid out and after they leave the surface of his body and they mix, they have a chemical reaction and it heats the fluid up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit which scalds his enemies. But he does it without burning himself, and he does it, again, through bodily, fleshly chemicals that he carries with him, ready for any enemy.

Now with both the firefly and the bombardier beetle existing, what right do we have to say on the basis of skeletal data alone that the dinosaur couldn’t have produced fire out of his mouth? Obviously we don’t have any reason for doing this other than the fact that we are secretly at heart evolutionists and we so desperately afraid our faith is going to be shaken by the Scriptures that we want to defend ourselves and call this a myth. This is not a myth; there is no myth in the book of Job. In the book of Job we have eyewitness historical observation from this time of history between the flood and Abraham, and obviously in loud and clear language what the book of Job is telling us is that man and dinosaurs for a while coexisted after the flood, until the dinosaur, consuming the volumes he had to consume in order to live, could no longer live because of the adverse climate, and died off, as geology tells us, before the ice age. So therefore the data fits together in a biblical framework.

And the dinosaur had certain characteristics in 41: 25; “When he raises up himself, the mighty are afraid;” if you ever see a picture of the dinosaur next to a man you’ll see why the mighty were afraid. You remember the photograph of the footprints I’ve shown, with the big dinosaur tracks? You can put gallons and gallons of water in that track; try it for yourself, drive down to Glen Rose sometime, lots of tracks, all over the place; put your foot in them; try walking in some of the dinosaur tracks. And then it says in verse 32, “He makes a path to shine after him;” indicating another fascinating feature to this creature, when he swims through the water, whatever the photochemical process was it left a glow in the water after him, “He makes a path to shine after him; one would think that the deep,” that’s the depths of the sea, “to be white.” So whatever this was it affected the acquiesce environment in which he lived.

Job 41:34 tells you why, on the basis of his biological behavior he became a Satan symbol for the rest of his postdiluvian civilization. “[He beholds all high things;] he is a king over all the children of pride.” So we have another disturbing observation from Job, one that doesn’t fit our brainwashed evolutionary propaganda that history just slowly evolved. Here we’ve got a historical example of some strange creature reported again and again in myth, which we have time and time again discarded as being worth anything; here it is in the Bible. Now if you’re a Bible-believing Christian you’ve got to take Job 41; you can’t take a razor blade, because you’re embarrassed about what’s going on in this chapter, and excise it from the text and set it over on a shelf and go on reading the Bible. You’ve got to take Job 41 with the rest if you’re honest.

Now let’s return to Genesis 8. For several Sunday’s we’ve looked at Job. For several Sundays we’ve looked at Job to supply a background of data of what happened after the flood. Now we come back to Genesis 8:20-22, for we’re studying the Noahic Covenant. It says in verse 20 that “Noah built an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Here is the first time the word “altar” is used in the Scriptures. And there’s significance to this. In the antediluvian era there was an area called Eden; in the eastern part of the area of Eden there was the garden and east of the garden there was a station where Cain, Abel, Adam, Eve, came, (Cain until he was thrown out), and there they met the cherubs, the fiery angels that guarded the east gate of Eden. And so presumably, for over a thousand six hundred years of antediluvian civilization you had the human race exposed to, more or less, God and His glory, physically exposed to God and His glory; a meeting place on this earth’s surface with God and His glory.

Now after the flood, when Eden was destroyed, there was no place for God and His glory on this surface and so therefore an altar was made and on the altar animals would be burned and the smoke would rise. In the Hebrew word it has… there’s a Hebrew word that looks like this, ‘alah, and this means to go up, and the picture of this sacrifice is where your eye would go up watching the smoke from the sacrifice as it ascended in the sky, and this points upward. And so after the flood the meeting place of God and man is now heaven, and now men begin to look up to God and not just horizontally at God on His holy mountain; men look up at the altar.

Another feature that we have studied in the past in verses 20-22 is man’s deep sinfulness in verse 21; the depravity of man is made very clear, and with the depravity a restraint on further increase of the curse. The antediluvian civilization lived in great freedom and out of that great freedom became a manifestation of total depravity and God said since man is totally depraved, therefore God is not going to permit man to be cursed any more because to do so would just simply destroy him. Then finally, verse 22, the promise of uniformity; the promise which forms the base of all miracles later on in the Bible. You see, behind all of creation stands the Word of God. Now this is contrary to the way we were taught; we are usually taught, well all you do is you go to physics and you get your F=MA, you get all your formulas and you plug in and get these nice little answers to the future and you can predict the future by these equations; it all is a nice, neat, uniform package. And then when miracles come up you can say well, miracles violate F=MA, ax head (stories of Elisha and Elijah) floats on the water, [2 Kings 6:6] a clear violation of this formula, and so since the miracles defy the formula we throw out the miracles, as though the formula has some immutable quality to itself, as though these physical laws have sovereignty in themselves, as though they can go existing all by themselves without any interference. You see, the moment we as Christians slip into a way of thinking that these formulas are actually telling us something absolute we are pagan because at the bottom of the formula…what supports the formula? The Word of God, and here’s one of your key texts in the Scriptures. It’s saying that the stability in nature is set by the Word of God.

That’s a pretty strong point so let’s see other evidences of this. Turn to Psalm 148:6; in this psalm is a reference to the Word of God that’s not in the Bible. I want you to kind of think of this for a moment but God has words that are not given in the Bible; God has words that are given directly to nature. We call it general revelation and Psalm 148:6 refers to one of these covenants or decrees. It says, “He has also established them forever and ever; He has made a decree which shall not pass.” Now what is it talking about? It’s not talking about people, it’s talking about natural phenomena. So herein is something interesting, and those of you who are engineers and scientists, think of this one: do you realize that as you study and try to state precisely natural phenomena, as precisely as you can with your research, that you are developing an exegesis of the Word of God in nature? I am a pastor-teacher and my job is to exegete the special revelation of the Word of God and I have my methodologies that are legitimate to do this, and as you work in the area of science you have your methodologies, which ought to be, incidentally, submitted to the special revelation. But nevertheless, having said that, you have as part of your calling to exegete the Word of God in the structure of nature around you. It’s not a game; you are actually learning truth and in so doing learning more about the God who made nature.

Let’s go back to Genesis 9, we’ve finished 8 and reviewed what we have stated before in chapter 8 and now we come to the covenant itself, as God begins to speak blessing to Noah. He says in Genesis 9:1, “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. [2] And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and up all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered.” Here is the mandate behind our present postdiluvian civilization. And the blessing upon Noah is a blessing to be fruitful and multiply. I want you to compare Genesis 1:28 with Genesis 9:1 because part of Genesis 1:28 is repeated and part is dropped. “Be fruitful – Be fruitful.” “Multiply – Multiply.” “Fill the earth – Fill the earth.” “Subdue and have dominion.” Those last two are dropped off in Genesis 9:1. Why? Why are they dropped off?

Before we answer that, do notice, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth,” with all due apologies to some of the hand-wringing people in the zero population growth club, the Bible insists upon population expansion and it’s very interesting, when you study history the only kinds of societies that have ever had zero population growth, broadly speaking, are societies that are corporately committing suicide, who have no will for the future, who have no optimism of the future, who are either degenerate in the fact they can’t handle their own resources and therefore don’t want to go on living any more, and therefore literally commit social suicide by a zero population growth or less, a negative population growth curve. It’s a sign that something is seriously, seriously wrong. This is not the mandate for irresponsible childbirth but it is, in verse 1, the mandate to expand, to be ever expansive. Given all things the Christian ought to plan for the next generation and look upon his children as the rulers of the next generation, and always look to the future because until Christ returns and when He returns is His business, we are to go on and occupy in His name.

But first, why do we not have “subdue” and “dominion” here repeated? The answer is found in the New Testament. Turn to 1 Corinthians 15, for this text is cited once again in 1 Corinthians 15:24, the very language of Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1 is repeated in 1 Corinthians 15:24. Here it says, “Then comes the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when He has put down all rule and all authority and all power. [25] For He must reign, until He has put all enemies under his feet.” “...all enemies under His feet,” there is the dominion, there’s the subduing. And the reason that the mandate to subdue and dominate is not repeated, it isn’t because man isn’t to do it; it’s rather the fact that this mandate to subdue cannot be taken apart from the headship of Christ. Under Christ we subdue; under Christ we dominate because Christ has replaced Adam as the federal head of the human race. The mandate of Genesis 1 stands, it’s rehashed in Genesis 9:1 but in such a way to throw emphasis on the fact that in order to carry out those last two of the five we must look to Christ, we must look to God, salvation and Him. And when we do that, then we subordinate.

Said another way, when you’re a Christian, don’t look upon your calling as limited just to your personal spiritual life. If you are a professional, then in your profession, that’s as much of your calling as anything else. If you’re a teacher, if you’re a housewife, whatever your occupation, you are to dominate and subdue and by dominating and subduing we mean this: imposing the Word of God on that environment, ruling it by the principles of Scripture. That’s what it means to dominate, and where Christians in rebellion refuse to dominate the heathen dominate the Christian.

Turn to Hebrews 2 and we’ll see this again. In Hebrews 2:5-9 we have Psalm 8 quoted, which is a rehash of Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1. Here it says in Hebrews 9:6, “…What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” And it goes on until verse 8, “Thou hast put all things in subjection under His feet. For that He put all in subjection under Him, He has left nothing that is not put under Him. But now we see not yet all things put under Him. [9] But we see Christ,” or “Jesus,” and so on and so on. In other words, again evidence in the New Testament, the mandate goes on, but goes on underneath the person of Christ. Christ is the One who fulfills these mandates.

So Noah isn’t given exactly the same thing because Genesis 9:1 occurs after the fall; Genesis 1:28 before the fall. So now that we’ve explained the distortion of Genesis 9:1 a little bit let’s turn back to Genesis 9:2; continuing God’s conversation with Noah, He next addresses the problem of ecology, for in the Noahic Covenant you have one of the great central statements in the Bible on ecology. Unlike Professor White and other critics of Bible Christianity who say that we Bible-believing Christian are the ones responsible for pollution in nature because it was the Bible that taught man dominating nature and therefore ruining nature, the Bible teaches care over nature.

Two things have to be said here; the first thing is that the Bible does not argue that man is to submit himself to nature. In studying some of the children’s textbooks, some of you parents ought to try this, in the next month or two new textbooks will be available and you read them, and you will see that the modern trend here is to elevate the Indian as the model of how man ought to be related to the environment. Now the Indian had many good insights, but the Indian had a very pagan relationship to his environment; he worshiped nature and he really did not care that much about nature; he couldn’t cultivate the soil on a vast scale, for example, and therefore the high plains, right here near Lubbock, were over-populated less than 100 years ago, not because there were too many people but because there were too few using the resources that God had given to them. But the Indian has now become elevated to the model in all of his paganism. The Indians, again, had many fine features but in their pagan relationship to nature they were utterly wrong. On the other hand, man is not to manhandle nature; we’ll see evidences of this very balanced way as we read through the text.

Genesis 9:2, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every” creature; it shows you the ruptured relationship after the flood between man and the zoological realm. I suspect, and it’s only a suspicion, that verse 2 is inferring that before the flood all animals could be domesticated, but that after the flood you have the origin of the wildness in animals, the fact that they are fearful of man, and there is a degraded relationship going on here between man and nature. Those of you interested in pursuing studies on the Bible and ecology I commend Frances Schaeffer’s book, Pollution and the Death of Man.

Genesis 9:3 goes on to describe a change in man’s diet, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” Now there the vegetarianism of antediluvian society is ended and you have meat eating. Every once in a while you have some person that goes bananas on vegetarianism and the point there is that vegetarianism was valid until the flood; after the flood, and I don’t know why, it may be due to some maldistribution of protein, but for some reason after the flood meat eating is authorized by God. It doesn’t mean that people in their sin didn’t eat meat before the flood but this is the first time it’s authorized. It also means that vegetarian doesn’t get points with God; vegetarianism is fine, if you want to go eat spinach all your life that’s fine with me but it also means that when you eat your steak you don’t have to have this guilty expression on your face, you can enjoy your steak. And if someone doesn’t like that you can quote Genesis 9:3 to them.

Now it says that the meat that is eaten, which obviously comes from the animal kingdom, has to be gained with due sensitivity to the animals. In Genesis 9:4 it says, “Bu the flesh with the soul thereof, which is the blood thereof, you will not eat.” Now this is not addressed just to Jews; this is addressed to the entire human race. Why? What is the blood? Blood, it says, is related to the soul; the soul equals the body plus the spirit in the Bible, and animals have spirits as seen in Ecclesiastes 3:21; as seen in Genesis 7:22, spirits of sorts. Now you don’t have to go home and evangelize Rover, but it does mean that animals do have some sort of spirit, not made in God’s image, but nevertheless a spirit; that’s what it says in Genesis 22 and Ecclesiastes 3:21. But the spirit is different than man’s but when it’s combined with an animal body it gives a soul, and the essence, apparently, in the soul is the blood; we don’t know why except 1 Corinthians 15 says that the resurrection body has no blood in it. So apparently blood is a feature of mortal history. We know it performs a very vital function and the Bible just isolates it as the sign of life.

Now the blood must be drained from meat before that meat is to be eaten, according to the Bible. Now there may be health reasons for doing this, but there’s also a theological reason. As one person said, it’s a very interesting sensation to kill an animal in the hunt and then carefully drain the blood from its carcass on the ground and realize that an animal has had to be killed in order to sustain you. Now that’s the point that the Bible is making in verse 4; it’s not saying don’t kill animals but it’s saying when you kill them make sure they’re killed for a reason and for a purpose; make sure that the animal conveys to you that a price has been paid to keep you living. Every time you eat a piece of meat some animal has had to give its life to make you go on living. So verse 4 is teaching us respect for the meat that we eat.

It’s also teaching us something else; it’s gearing us up in history to anticipate the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, who will die also that we may live, though obviously on a higher plain, but it starts back here with how the human race was originally instructed on how to handle meat products; handle them with care and with respect. Look at a piece of meat and remember, an animal gave his life that you might eat it. It’s not saying don’t eat it, but just remember what has happened.

Now in Genesis 9:5-6 we come face to face with a very hard, hard passage of the Bible for many, many people, the passage on capital punishment. “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. [6] Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” With the rise of the Noahic Covenant we have the fourth divine institution. Up until this point is reached in history we have three divine institutions. We call them divine institutions because these are institutions that are applied to all men, not just Christians, all men.

The first institution is responsibility; you must have, in order to make any of these other divine institutions, including the church, work; you have got to have people who are responsible. And that is something to find today. The Lubbock school system is entertaining the idea of having federally funded breakfast in all our grammar schools and one of the reasons for it is that they polled 10,000 parents and out of 10,000 parents polled, 7,000 said yes, they’d like their children fed in the school. Granted, there are cases of poverty but I venture to say, based on the behavior of a number of my neighbors, that they are simply parents who are too lazy to get up in the morning and feed their children. Day after day children go to the classroom and they haven’t even been fed, but their parents can drive a Lincoln or Cadillac. And so to take up the slack they’re going to compel the rest of us who do the job to pay for their negligence with federal taxes, all in the name, incidentally, of charity, misdefined—charity means I willingly give of my property to you under my volition, that’s charity. When the government comes in and tells me you are going to take that wealth and put it over there, that is not charity, that is Robin Hood government, and as the saying goes, Robin Hood robs the rich to pay the poor but finally winds up robbing both rich and poor alike to pay for Robin Hood, and that’s exactly where it leads. There are a few others who could afford it if they would stop their beer and cigarettes long enough so they could buy a glass of milk in the morning, but no, we have such a group of illiterate degenerates in the city of Lubbock that they have to bail out by forcing everyone to pay because we’re too lazy, it’s too hard to get up in the morning. There’s such a thing as an alarm clock and there’s also such a thing as going to bed at a reasonable hour and between the two it ought to be pretty easy to get up in the morning. But this is an example of a breakdown in the first divine institution, right here in our own city.

The second divine institution that we’ve seen in Genesis is marriage, and sex is one of the features of marriage. Three, you have family, and authority is one of the features of family. Every divine institution has some central mechanism to it and the family is where the authority originates. Now on our diagram of the divine institutions we indicate divine institution one, divine institution two and divine institution three, it’s clear because these are all positive institutions, that is, they are wealth producing institutions. They produce something.

Now after the fall we have the addition of a fourth divine institution right here in Genesis 9, and that is a negative institution; it restrains evil, it doesn’t produce wealth. Now if you want an example of this think of the farmlands all around the city and think of two simple things: on the one hand the farmer irrigates, he fertilizes, and he produces wealth in his field; on the other side he puts herbicide on the field to destroy the competition to his plants. Now if that farmer were to go out and coat his field from one end to the other with herbicides, which is a negative operation, he’d have a beautiful field, no weeds; only one problem, no wealth either because there’d be no cotton, no soybeans, nothing produced out of the field. So he’d have a perfect negative but nothing positive. Now that’s exactly where government is headed in our day. The government’s function is to destroy evil but government can’t create wealth. And of course, if you’ve noticed recently the foreign dollar is dropping like crazy; it could be a prelude to a depression and the reason it is is because you cannot continually print money, print money, print money, print money when there’s nothing behind the money. We’re just playing games with money with print on it. Ludwig Von {?} of the Austrian Economic School said government’s are fascinating; they are the only thing that can take a piece of paper worth something, print it and make it worth nothing. So we have in economics this principle, that suddenly, with the wave of a wand or a vote of congress we can generate jobs. You can’t, you just postpone a very horrible thing when you go into this situation and it’s a misunderstanding of a basic philosophy.

And when you come to Genesis 9:5-6 you’ve got the core of government and what is the core of the state in the Bible? It is capital punishment. Why? Because government’s judicial authority is derivative of one axiom; the government, in order to exist has got to have the power to take life or it can’t exist. Listen to Martin Luther, lest you think this is Charlie Clough’s unique exegesis. Luther said: “This was the first commandment, having reference to the temple sword. By these words, Genesis 9:5-6, temple government was established and the sword placed in its hands by God.” God is giving the sword to the state, and notice, this is something new. After the flood we have divine institution four; before the flood we did not have divine institution four; before the flood we had God apparently executing, God executed His sword. It was God who dealt with the matter of Cain. After the flood then God still is the source of the institution but now it’s derivative and so we have divine institution four operating under God to carry out God’s sword, please notice, God’s sword, not the community’s sword.

Even some of you who have studied the Scriptures as long as you have still aren’t straight on this because some of you have handed in feedback cards, which is fine, I encourage you to hand in feedback cards, but I notice when you hand in the feedback cards, several times when I’ve got into this subject, you always act as though you’re embarrassed by capital punishment because you’ve been hoodwinked by the liberal opposition into thinking that the sword is well, gee, you know, it’s community vengeance. It is not community vengeance! It is God’s vengeance; the sign of it is, persisting even into our own day, is the fact that when a court convenes what does the judge wear? He wears the black robe. Where did that tradition come from? That’s the priestly garment; granted, the average judge doesn’t know that but that’s all right; it is a residue of in the past when the Bible was understood this was the priestly garment because when the judge put on the garment he was standing under God and executing God’s judgment; not his, not the court’s, but Gods. And the sign of it was the acquisition of the robe. There was a little ceremony that was done to convey the power of God.

So now we have the Noahic Covenant centering in capital punishment. This does not mean to say that there can’t be mercy, that the sentence of capital punishment is automatic. That’s not true either. Do you know one of the key illustrations? David; David murdered and he is pardoned; he is pardoned by virtue of genuine repentance that occurs, and so there can be mercy. When we articulate capital punishment we don’t articulate it without mercy. The sin of adultery in John 8 was punishable by capital punishment according to Mosaic Law, but what did Jesus do with the woman caught in adultery? He said “Go, and sin no more.”

Having dealt with the problem of capital punishment we now come to the problem of arguments against it. I have watched this argument and watched this argument and watched these debates go on and on and on, and basically they fall into three counter arguments. Let’s look at these; you’re going to hear these from time to time and you’d better be equipped to deal with it. One of the arguments against capital punishment is that it does not deter, and they will quote statistics that it doesn’t deter. This in itself is debatable, I know because I have some friends that work with statistics that say that those tests are invalid. But nevertheless, even if their argument were correct there are two answers we can respond with? Number one, capital punishment wasn’t given primarily to deter anyway; it was given to execute God’s justice. Deterrence alone wasn’t the reason for it.

A second response to the first argument is that if capital punishment were done the way the Bible commends it to be done, namely in public and quickly, you would have, perhaps, deterrent; at least it would deter the guy that’s capitally punished. So notice in Genesis 9:6 why on this argument—it shall not deter; “for in the image of God made He man.” The reason for capital punishment is exactly opposite to what most people think. Most people think oh, that’s a bloody old vengeful commandment. What does it say here? It says it’s given because of the value of the victim. What about the girl that got raped and got her throat slit from ear to ear? Wasn’t she worth something? Ask her parents if she was worth something. You see, the principle behind capital punishment is restitution. Ultimately the common denominator behind all biblical forms of justice is restitution and you can’t fine someone for killing someone. Either in the Bible someone is pardoned or they are killed; there is no fine for murder in the Bible, [can’t understand words] one slave passage there in Exodus. And the reason for this situation is because the person murdered is so valuable only one thing can be brought in restitution—another life.

And if you’re not going to bring another life then pardon it and forget it, but don’t ever fine someone because the moment you fine someone for killing someone, or put him away in the pen, you have said the victim’s life is only worth four years, the victim’s life is only worth $10,000; the victim’s life is only worth some finite value and that’s what you’ve done the moment you set up a judicial system that works this way. The Bible is very precise and very careful; either total pardon or capital punishment, no in-between whatever. And that way the Bible protects the value of the victim. The people that get slaughtered daily in our streets, their value is worth something. The second thing; we say, again remembering our answers to the argument that capital punishment does not deter, one is it wasn’t made to deter, and secondly, it would if it was done properly.

The second argument against capital punishment is that the judicial process makes mistakes. This is most favored by Christians who argue against capital punishment. They argue that in the finite fallible world you can never administer the death sentence perfectly and you’re going to entrap innocent victims; at some point statistically you’re bound to entrap innocent people and innocent people are going to die. So rather than risk killing innocent people don’t kill anybody. That’s the argument that it can’t be applied. Here is the answer: the issue of capital punishment was given after the fall, not before the fall, therefore it was given to a fallible world. Moreover, was God not omniscient when He gave it and did He not know that one very famous person in history would die as a result of a miscarriage of justice, who is His Son? The trial and subsequent capital punishment of the Lord Jesus Christ, wasn’t that the miscarriage of justice that we could ever point to in history. Why is it, then, that God, who knew His own Son would be a victim of a miscarriage of justice, went ahead and authorized it anyway? Because it obviously is important to the survival of the human race; that’s the final answer. I’ve never heard anybody argue against that one, that the mistake argument can be answered by the fact that Christ’s was a mistake.

The third argument that is brought against capital punishment is that it is sub “Christian,” I will put the word “Christian” in quotes because that’s what’s happening; we are redefining what Christian means—sub “Christian?” Let’s look at the New Testament commendation of capital punishment. Turn to Luke 14; if we find capital punishment taught in the New Testament how can one argue it’s sub “Christian?” Is the New Testament sub “Christian?” Luke 3:14, John the Baptist to the soldiers; I remind you the soldiers exist with a sword by their side for one reason only. “And he said unto them,” these are the soldiers who were believers, “And he said to them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.” The “do violence” there is ripping people off, that kind of thing, unjust violence. But nowhere does he say sheave your sword. Why? Why isn’t there a command given in verse 14, when a soldier walks up and he says to John the Baptist I am a soldier, I am a professional trained killer, and that’s what the soldiers were in those days, professional killers, before we had mice in the military, and they were trained to kill; it was one job, killers. Why is it that John doesn’t say oh, you’d better quit the army, a believer can’t be in the service. Why don’t you read that in Luke 3:14? Obviously because they are to go on being professional killers.

Let’s look at Luke 22:35, here’s a beaut; Jesus is talking to the disciples, He’s talking about the days after He leaves this earth and leaves them all alone, and won’t be around to protect them any longer. He says, “When I sent you without purse, and script [bag], and shoes, lacked ye anything? And they said, Nothing. [36] And then He said unto them, But now, he that has a purse, let him take it, and likewise his script; and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. [37] For I say unto you that this that is written must yet be accomplished in Me,” sell your purse and buy a sword. Protect yourself, you will need it. There Jesus commends arming in self-defense.

Let’s look further; Acts 25:11, Paul comments on the death penalty. “If I be an offender, or have committed anything worthy of death, I refuse not to die,” is Paul saying the death sentence is wrong? No, he says it’s just, and I warrant a capital crime I am willing to go die for it. So Paul commends capital punishment.

Finally another passage, Romans 13:4, the…THE statement of government in the Bible; Romans 13:1-4 is THE classic passage, it has been studied and studied and discussed and written up for 1900 years and right smack dab in the middle of this classic passage what do you see in verse 4? “For he is the minister of God to thee for good.” Who? The state. “And if you do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain; [for he is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.]” Now what is the Roman soldier going to do with his sword? Wave it at you and say be good boys and girls, I’m going to hit you with it. Or, does he use the sword to kill. The Romans were great killers; they could chop you up five different ways with the machaira, and do it very rapidly and without sound, an amazingly efficient device. In fact, it would be very good when they take away all our handguns, one of you guys could go into a great business of manufacturing Roman Machairas and you can carry it, it’s only 13-14 inches, you can carry it inside your suit jacket and when one of these guys comes up you give him a quick surprise. And it’s a beautiful weapon; it can be used all sorts of ways, it’s got a nice point on it so you can ram, and then it’s got two sharp sides on it so you can slash back and forth, a wonderful weapon. We’ll use that when they take our handguns away.

So that’s the New Testament teaching on capital punishment. But somebody must be articulating these arguments. You say well didn’t you just get through with these three arguments; who all is saying these? I’ll list them for you: The Episcopal Church; The United Methodist Church; The American Baptist Convention; The United Presbyterian Church; The Presbyterian Church in the U.S.- Southern; The Christian Church; The United Church of Christ; The Lutheran Church in America; and The Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, (quote) “Capital punishment is contrary to the spirit and teachings of Christ.” Where are they getting their “spirit and teachings of Christ” from? I get mine from the New Testament. Now that’s where it’s come in our day, little wimps in Christian circles, the fairy crowd, who are responsible, tragically, and that’s the tragedy of all this, it’s always done in the name of good, always done in the name of godly values, and isn’t it ironic that it always reads to worse slaughter; it always leads to more suffering. The Neville Chamberlains of this world have brought more wars into existence by a posture of weakness than anyone who has been for an aggressive system of jurisprudence. The Noahic Covenant is the ground document for all civil government.

And so therefore, as we study further in the book of Genesis, when we go on in the detail of the Noahic Covenant we’ll see more and more of these details.