Clough Genesis Lesson 33

The Biblical philosophy of race – Genesis 9:18-29

We ended with the verse on the rainbow, Genesis 9:17. The token of the Noahic Covenant was the rainbow. When we mention the rainbow we pointed out certain physical features of the rainbow; something I’d like to stimulate in all of you is to think about general revelation. We try to do this quite a bit in teaching the Word of God to show that even though we dwell on special revelation, special revelation is an entrée to appreciating our God through general revelation. What do we mean by “general revelation?” General revelation is the silent revelation of God in the world around us in the structure of how man is made, in the structure of the external world is put together. This is all reflective of the craftsmanship of God. You can always tell somebody by his craftsmanship. And so when we talk about knowing God by general revelation, as per Psalm 19, we’re simply saying knowing God by looking at His handiwork.

Now the rainbow is one of these things that you can read quickly in your Bible and never just stop to think; look at the rainbow, think twenty-five hours on what’s involved in the rainbow, do some reading, what causes rainbows. Last week some were surprised about the fact that isn’t it interesting that the rainbow involves the juxtaposition of two different sets of rules. One rule involves gravity; in the field of gravity, on earth, with our particular acceleration of gravity, it turns out that a raindrop has to be of critical diameter to get the critical weight to fall, otherwise it’s held aloft by aerial turbulence, such as droplets, tiny droplets in the cloud or a mist or a fog. And we don’t have any rain, as such. So to get rain we have to have a droplet of a certain weight. Now if this were on the moon it wouldn’t work because the gravity field on the moon is less than the gravity field on the earth and so therefore the raindrops could be very, very large before they start falling and you would actually have the bow phenomena in a mist or in a fog on the moon, whereas you won’t get it in a mist or a fog on the earth, simply because the earth’s gravitational field is stronger and the drops fall.

Now we took that set of physical rules that God has of simple gravitational physics and then we take the other rule of optics and it turns out also that the droplets have to be of a certain shape, certain size, before light will refract, and you get the breaking up of the white sunlight into the component colors. And it just turns out (quote) “by chance,” that the size of the drops when the refraction process begins and the size of the drop when the gravity process acts are the same, and that’s why you don’t get fog bows, you don’t get mist bows, you get rainbows, and the Bible simply identifies this as an act of God, that the rainbow was designed to communicate to every member of the human race something quite valuable.

But that’s not all, here are some other feature; some of you brought these up. The rainbow uses two physical things that are used everywhere else to stand for the Word of God. What does the rainbow involve but water and light? Now isn’t it true that both water and light are used again and again in the Scripture as signs of the Word of God? What’s the significance of this? The Noahic Covenant is a covenant given to the entire human race. If it’s given to the entire human race it’s a verbal statement. So how appropriate that God’s signature be made up of precisely the two physical elements that are used everywhere else in the creation to stand for the Word of God—water and light.

Another thing about the rainbow; the rainbow takes white light and splits it up so you can appreciate the aspects of light. Now isn’t it interesting that God, before the fall, before sin entered the world God was righteous, just, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on. Take this attribute of love. Before the fall, before sin entered the world, God’s love was known just as God’s law. But after the fall God, when He loved the unlovely, when He loves the rebel, when He loves the sinner, when He loves this new creature that’s in rebellion against Him we call that “grace.” That’s an additional feature, not that it was added to God’s character at that time, it was there all the time, just like red, yellow, blue, green, like all those components are there in the light light, they’re just not refracted so you see them. So God’s love before the fall and before the flood wasn’t refracted; the rainbow becomes a symbol of God’s grace. We showed you that from the way it’s handled in later Scriptures. And so how appropriate that this symbol of God’s grace takes light and refracts it into its parts, like grace takes the attribute of love and expands it and shows you the various parts of the love of God.

We could go on and on and finally we could draw another fourth characteristic of the rainbow and that is the rainbow is a beautiful thing to look at; esthetically it’s a beautiful thing. Doesn’t that show us something of God? Do we ever think of God as a beautiful God? Ever think of God as the standard of all beauty? Of all esthetics? When we get finally to behold the throne of God there’s one striking thing; God will be overpowering to look upon but the other thing will strike you as a beauty you’ve never seen before. So here you have all these things wrapped up in just a simple craftsman like way, He put together raindrops as a sign of His covenant. So when you read Genesis 9:17, God said to Noah, this is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh, and you see the rainbow, just think, there’s His signature. Take your children out in the backyard and point to the sky and say look, that’s God’s writing, there is; man has never produced anything like it.

Today we continue the text; Genesis 9:18-29; the topic in this section of the book is race. I think we’ve covered every other emotional topic since we’ve dealt with the situation, we dealt with creation versus evolution; we’ve dealt with death, we’ve dealt with decay, sickness, menstruation, and other things from portions of the Word of God that shock people. We’ve dealt with the global flood, a very shocking thing if you are at all trained in historical geology, and now we’re here for another shocker, the biblical topic of race. And it’s interesting how racial prejudice in our day is built. If you saw the TV series Holocaust, in talking with several the almost universal response to that series is well, how could that ever have taken place. And if you saw the Holocaust remember the lines of Jews, oh no, they’re not going to shoot us, this just doesn’t happen, we disbelieve it. And when the underground transmitted to BBC during the war the content that this was going on, in Germany in Poland particularly, the BBC didn’t broadcast it because even the BBC didn’t give credence that this could possibly be going on on that scale; that is, until the British and the United States armies in their rush to the Rhine suddenly discovered Buchenwald and discovered Auschwitz and discovered the concentration camps. And there were some very shocked people because they couldn’t believe that racial prejudice could get this engrained into people.

Now racial prejudice has always been with us. Races, where they live together, always have friction and it’s true that the Christians have had their sins in this area; we confess this. But the difference is that when the Christian gets involved in racial prejudice at least we can say we are wrong by our own standards. Our own standard gives us the right of judging ourselves, so when the Christian is engaged in racial prejudice we can at least say that doesn’t refute Christianity, all it says is that Christians are living inconsistently due to sin. But in the 20^th century racial prejudice has been elevated by a new philosophy of evolution.

Few people understand what the subtitle of Darwin’s famous book was, in fact, few people ever even read Origin of Species. I wonder, how many people have been taught evolution in the public schools have ever been challenged to read just one chapter in Darwin’s book, Origin of Species, just one chapter. I doubt very few students have ever done that, yet they profess to be experts on the subject. The subtopic of Origin of Species is this, and few people know this: The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. That’s the subtitle of Darwin’s key work: The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. Now it’s true, in context of that particular book of Darwin by race he meant varieties of animals and plants; he did not refer specifically to races of people. Yet, in a letter he wrote it shows clearly he extended it later to include races of men. Here’s what Darwin said, (quote): “The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish [?] in the struggle for existence, looking to the world at no very distant date what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.” Darwin said that, not a Christian, Darwin said it, so next time someone throws it up to you that the Christians, in South Africa, for example, are racially prejudiced, just remind them of what Mr. Darwin said.

Here’s Thomas Huxley, so-called in history as Darwin’s bulldog, Darwin’s spokesman. He said, (quote): “No rational man cognizant of the fact believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man,” (end quote); not a Christian, Dr. Huxley said that. He said it as an evolutionist; the modern evolutionist doesn’t like this kind of baggage but it’s his baggage, not ours. Said a scholar who studied this whole era of history, (quote): “After 1859,” the date of Darwin, “After 1859 the evolutionary schema raised additional questions, particularly whether or not Afro-Americans could survive competition with their white near relation. The momentous answer by the evolutionists was a resounding no; the African was inferior, he represented [quote] ‘the missing link’ between the ape and the Teuton.” Who said that? The Christian or the evolutionist? An evolutionist did, so let’s make the evolutionist carry his own luggage.

Genesis 9 gives us the biblical philosophy of race. So since we live in an era when evolutionary dogma sets us up for racial prejudice on an unprecedented scale, and our own sin nature always aids, we want to look and get some sort of standards. And there’s some questions that ought to be raised on the text; when we go through here we’re listening to God speaking in this text. God’s giving us some standards; some questions we ought to ask God’s Word would be these: Is it true that all races are to live separately, or at they to be mixed? What about interracial marriage? What about the current thesis that racial balance to the nearest decimal point in the classroom is necessary for a fair education? These kinds of things; these are questions everybody’s asking so stop pretending they’re not being asked, they are. And if the Bible’s the Word of God then let’s relax and go to the Scriptures and not be afraid of what God says. So that’s the main subject for today.

Let’s start in Genesis 9:18 with Noah and his three sons. “And the sons of Noah, that went forth out of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth,” the emphasis in the Hebrew text is the participle they “went forth of the ark,” the ark disembarkers; in other words, all people who disembark from the ark are characterized under the authority of Shem, Ham and Japheth. The universal claim of Genesis is that all of you have the genes in our body of Noah and his wife, and all of us bear the genes of one of these three sons or maybe possibly a mix, but everybody living in today’s society inherits the genes of Noah and his sons. Those three names you see in verse 18, if you could trace your family tree and go back far enough, one of those boys on your father’s side all the way back is your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

So you’re looking at one of your relatives when you read verse 18; the question is which one. Maybe later as we go through the text you can pretty well guess which one but all of those men in some way figure into your family chain, your family tree. I would just add as a footnote to this if you’re a Christian, one of the exciting things to do is to trace your family tree. Some of you young people, before your grandparents die go to your grandparents and ask them everything they can tell you about your family and trace it using their data, as far back as you can go; learn about your family background. And the reason, it will help you in a lot of ways, including the practical ways of living the Christian life because if you survey your family back three or four generations you are going to see patterns of sin in your family that have recurred and recurred and recurred and they’re just peculiar to your family. Your family has those, and if you do that you will frequently see why you act the way you act. But this seems to be characteristic of your little clan, so knowing this it would help you in sanctification to be praying and be conscious of the fact that in your family this is how sin usually operates because we all have our brand. It will also help you realize your family strengths because every family has particular talents and strengths and you ought to know these. See, we live in such a generation when all of us are individuals, we don’t care what mother and father or grandfather is like and we rip ourselves off of our family heritage, forgetting that that family heritage says a lot to us, and if we would investigate and know it we’d know tremendous volumes about ourselves and the way we act. So Ham, Shem and Japheth go all the way back to the fountainhead of why we act the way we do.

Now the editor of Genesis, who is Moses apparently, adds quickly at the end of Genesis 9:18, in the Hebrew it reads this way, “now Ham—[dash], he was the father of Canaan.” In other words, the author of the text is very, very anxious that we understand there’s a historic connection between Ham and Canaan. Now Canaan is not a place name; it became a place name. Canaan is the name of a man; the land of Canaan got its name because the man lived there. We think of Canaan as a place, like we say a Texan lives in Texas and he gets the title because of the place he lives in, but not so, turn it the other way around; the city of Lubbock is named for Tom Lubbock, the man who was a pioneer, and so therefore we are called Lubbockites because we live in the place called Lubbock was named from the man who came here; it was his name attributed to this area. So therefore again the name of the person takes precedence over the name of the geography. This is true particularly in eastern Europe, for some of the sons of Japheth particularly left their names and some of the old, old cities in western Russia, in Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, are actually named, they’re remnants of some of the men who first settled that area, just like Lubbock. So remember this in studying history, the tremendous importance of the men who moved history, the father of Canaan.

Well, the Canaanite, the people who lived in the place where Cain came, in the time in which Genesis was put together, that is Moses day, which was about 1400 BC, in this time the Canaanites were damned; that is, the Canaanites had become so degenerate by rebelling against the authority of Scripture; they had become so engrossed in polytheism that God ordered their extermination in charam, or holy war. And when this extermination came about they were finally destroyed, David was the one who cleaned up the mess in 1000 BC. They were erased, or a subgroup or a culture that frankly had to be eliminated like cancer has to be eliminated from the body. Had the Canaanites not been eliminated from history you would not have the freedom you have today, it’s as simple as that. The Canaanites, if allowed to have gone on would have so polluted and contaminated the human race that there would be no future for us at all, so thank God they were eliminated from history. Those who were believers, like Rahab the prostitute, were incorporated into the community. Later on some remnants of the Canaanites went up to a place and they became known as the Phoenicians; they became great navigators; these were second cousins to them, and they went and they settled in a place called Carthage in North Africa. And it’s significant that as late as the time of Christ child sacrifices were still being done at Carthage, the still degenerate awfulness of the Canaanites persisted even through their cousins.

So the reason Genesis 9:18 has special reference connecting Ham with Canaan is because there’s a certain degenerate pattern that came out in the Canaanites that’s much on the mind of Moses.

Genesis 9:19, “These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth…” not “overspread” as it says in the King James, the proper Hebrew way of saying this is “the earth was scattered.” Now this is a metonymy here, in a way, because the earth stands for that which comes forth from the earth, mankind. And so in Genesis, you can compare this with Genesis 6:11 where it says the earth was corrupt, it doesn’t mean the dust on the surface of the earth was corrupt, it means mankind was corrupt, and so here we have the earth standing in, in metonymy, for all mankind, all mankind was to be scattered. See, this is the claim of universality, that you have in your family tree, back, one of these three sons, or several, maybe intermixed. But this is a claim for universality and once again those who deny a literal flood, a global flood, are in trouble because if you’ve got a local flood what happened? The local flood probably didn’t kill all men so some men survived and so you’ve got now a mixed race made up of not just the sons of Noah but some sons of Adam that didn’t get exterminated by the flood, that is, if you believe against the Bible in a local flood instead of a universal one. But those of us who are consistent and believe in a universal flood don’t have any problem here; we accept the universal statement of verse 19 that all humanity has descended from these three sons. The importance of pointing out that the earth here stands for mankind, it’s a sovereign interpretation problem we’ll get to in Genesis 10:25, just tuck it away that this is the way this author uses “earth.” He has a metonymic way of using ‘eretz, or “earth.” So the “all mankind” was to be “scattered abroad” from these three sons. Later in Genesis 10 and 11 I will show you the details of the scattering process; right now we just deal with the overall picture.

[Genesis 9:20, “And Noah began to be a farmer; and he planted a vineyard.”] The Hebrew reads this way, “And Noah, the man of the earth, began and planted.” The King James is not an accurate translation and I’ll show you the importance of this in a moment. Again the Hebrew, “Noah,” comma, “the man of the earth,” comma, “began and planted.”

Now it’s important that you see the title of Noah. I said “Noah, comma, the man of the earth,” we call that in English the apposition. So we have Noah, there’s the title; there’s his name, there’s his title, “Noah, the man of the earth.” Why does Noah, in this context, have a title “the man of the earth,” or “the man of the ground?” The reason is because he is the one who starts postdiluvian society. Our whole civilization that began with the destruction of the flood and has progressed to our day... this is the picture you usually get in evolutionary social studies courses, they never show you the antediluvian period, they just take pieces of the Stone Age and so on out of here, which is the post flood recovery. This whole thing started back here with Noah and the postdiluvian civilization is grounded on agriculture; that’s the force of this statement. That’s the root of our whole understanding of history. Now before the flood agriculture wasn’t that critical apparently because it was so easy to grow things; things were growing all around. After all, the dinosaurs could roam around and take a few tons for a box lunch in food, there was no problem and if they could find a few tons to eat for lunch you could certainly go out and pick a few berries and survive. So survival in the antediluvian world was easy; survival in the postdiluvian world is much more difficult and depends on the man of the ground.

So this is a tremendous statement. Just because these are simple statements don’t read them too fast; read them slowly and chew on them and be careful, they’re telling you lots of things. So therefore this shows you the primacy of agriculture; that is where it’s all at as far as survival in our own generation, our own history. “Noah,” then, “the man of the earth, began and he planted.” The reason these verbs are separated here is to emphasize that the planting is part of the beginning of the postdiluvian order.

Genesis 9:20, “…and he planted a vineyard.” Now he planted many things but this story is going to deal with a vineyard. Now the time frame once again. The flood occurred, Noah got out of the ark and at least five to six years, anybody that raises grapes knows that you just don’t eat grapes off a year old grapevine. So therefore there must have been a gap and what we have to, as Christians when we read the text, is understand that from verse 20 to verse 21 is a gap of years between those verses. And we want to therefore ask, why does the Holy Spirit skip lots of neat things that might have happened to Noah and just tell us this incident with the drunkenness. We’ve got to answer that question or we haven’t dealt with the text properly.

So Noah plants a vineyard, we know that he probably got his clippings from the antediluvian world, took them aboard the ark, they drank wine before the flood, we know this because of Matthew 24:38 says they were drinking and in the context they were drinking… they weren’t drinking water, they were drinking wine. So if they were drinking wine it’s not new to Noah. So now we’ve got to explain why Genesis 9:21? This looks so incongruous; here’s the hero of the flood and the first thing you hear about him after the flood he gets soused. What’s the problem; and moreover, as a result of his falling under the table here we have a curse given on the races. Why? We’ve got to answer this.

Let’s look at some of the details in the context. He was drunk, “and he uncovered himself [within his tent],” this is obvious if you’ve been around drunks, it dilates the blood vessels and the skin gets real warm and so he throws his clothes off just simply to get cool, he’s not running a nudist colony, he’s just trying to get cool; that’s the problem there. But the thing to notice about the text is there’s no insinuation in the context that this is wrong. Now in certain historical texts of the Bible, like Samuel and Kings, when somebody does something wrong there’s an explicit editorial remark that so and so committed the sins of Jeroboam, so and so sinned, so and so sinned, so and so sinned. In Genesis that’s not true but there always somewhere in the context is enough data so you get the definite impression something’s wrong. You see this with Abraham, with Isaac, with Jacob, with Esau, with Joseph; the author of Genesis is more gentle, he doesn’t go “well that’s a sin,” but he does it by telling the story so that you know pretty well that something’s wrong here. Yet in this story we don’t notice anything like that.

So we have to give pause and raise the question, is Noah being blamed for this drunken incident, and if he isn’t, does this tell us something unusual that happened. Now over the years people have made the suggestion, when they’ve read carefully this text, that the drunkenness was an accident on the part of Noah. You say well good night, if the guy raised a vineyard doesn’t he know enough about wine to know when you get tipsy? What’s the problem? Yet authors have insisted that this be an accident and interpreted as such, an innocent mistake that Noah has made, for which he is not held responsible.

Recently Dr. Dillow, in his doctrinal dissertation at seminary, came out with a lot of facts that support this historic thing and I think once again shows how interwoven the Scriptures are. If we go back before the time of the flood and look at the planet earth and we hypothesize that there was a canopy of water vapor on the earth, Dr. Dillow has shown in his thesis that this would increase the atmosphere by a factor of two in weight, that is, the atmospheric pressure instead of being 15 pounds per square inch, approximately, or 14.7, at sea level, was approximately 29 pounds or 30 pounds per square inch. The atmosphere, in other words, was twice as heavy. Now if the atmosphere was twice as heaven and if the atmosphere is made of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 gases, that means that the pressure of these gases, also the chemists call the partial pressure, increase by a factor of two in proportion. Now the question is since we know the equation, since Louis Pasteur’s day of what goes on with the sugar that’s in the wine, so the fermentation process, I forgot what alcohol is, in this formula you have sugar fermenting and in order to ferment it’s got to give off CO2.

Now for those who haven’t had chemistry this kind of an equation expresses what happens but it doesn’t tell you how fast it happens. It can happen very slowly; it can happen very fast. For example, when you get rust on a piece of metal that’s equivalent to burning; it’s just a very slow burn so it doesn’t create heat enough to get luminous gas, so you don’t notice that metal burns in order to rust, but it is, it’s slowly burning because it’s a process of oxidizing. What we call burning is rapid oxidation and when it’s extremely rapid we have an explosion.

Now it’s the same thing here; this fermentation process has rate to it and the rate will be controlled by how fast the CO2 can escape freely then the equation dries faster. But suppose now we increase the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere; now we retard the fermentation process. And so therefore Dr. Dillow has suggested that if the atmosphere were heavier before the flood due to a canopy then the people who lived in that day were drinking slowly fermenting and this would explain the accidental nature of what happened here, that Noah was not used to the fact that in the postdiluvian atmosphere, the CO2 pressure being less, that this fermentation process really speeded up and he probably chug-a-lugged a whole quart of this stuff and figured no sweat because he was used to the antediluvian slow fermentation. Now it turns out wow, what happened? And this is him after the flood and after the fermentation got going.

So then we would say in addition to support this is there was a test, believe it or not, the government has lots of money do to different tests, I don’t know why they did this one, but they flew an airplane at 5,000, at 10,000, at 15,000, and 20,000 and they had everybody sip an identical glass of some alcoholic beverage, I forgot what it was, it was a test, and they found out that the guy at 20,000 feet gets drunker faster than the guy at 5,000 feet, your tax money supported this kind of research. And the idea was to measure the effect of air pressure on drunkenness, and it was correlated. So again this would substantiate the fact that under high atmospheric pressure before the flood drunkenness, you had to really drink a lot to get drunk; after the flood—not so, and would correspond to what we have seen as what I call the curve of the cursing. Before the fall the curse was zero; then it increases at the fall to a certain level, and then at the flood God cursed the earth even further and he promises not to curse it again, but there’s this jump and so therefore lots of the decay process is speeded up after the flood, including the decay process of fermentation. So it’s not dogmatic, I’m not saying this dogmatically is the answer but I suggest from just the tenor of the text, in almost the incidental way the drunkenness is treated, this could very well have simply been an accident. Noah was not acclimatized to the postdiluvian world.

Now we come back to the main theme of race. Genesis 9:22, “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren outside.” Often people have said there was homosexual act involved here because the expression, “saw the nakedness of” is used idiomatically in the book of Leviticus for sexual actions, but the rule of Bible interpretation is that the first time an expression occurs it must be literal because you don’t build a metaphor on a metaphor, so therefore, since this is the first time I prefer that this is just simply saying “he saw the nakedness.”

Well what is so bad about seeing the nakedness? Two things; as we studied back in the days of creation, Genesis 2 and 3, nakedness in Scripture is a function of creation and nakedness is a term applied only to man. No animal is ever described as created naked. No plant is ever described as created naked. Why is this term reserved for man the way he was created, because remember, man was created and it says he was created without shame but he was naked, as though this is a peculiar characteristic true only of man. After all, what animals do you know that have to regularly put on clothes. Man isn’t putting on clothes just because it’s cold outside. Your body can acclimatize itself; you see these polar bear clowns jumping in freezing water to swim across the river, you can see the human body is capable of adaptation. So it’s not thermally, there’s no thermal reason for clothes. Therefore there’s some other reason for it and all men have universally felt the need for clothes.

Why do all men have this need for clothes? The reason for clothes is a spiritual reason; man apparently … the Bible doesn’t tell us directly but it tells us indirectly by all the metaphors that are used later, that the need for clothes is the need for righteousness, that man was created physically without clothes and he probably, this is a guess, but had he obeyed God’s Word originally in the garden he would have gradually been clothed with an aurora of light, but because man disobeyed, then his nakedness testified to his separateness away from this righteousness of God which had now become totally unavailable by his sin. And therefore what does man first do? The first act that man does after the fall is to clothe himself with fig leaves. It’s a bumbling human good attempt to make up for his need for god’s righteousness. And I brought in some fig leaves to show you it doesn’t cover too much and that’s why the Bible says, it’s a pretty not-nice way of handling the problem, it just doesn’t cover. So there’s a humor in the way the Bible speaks of Adam and Eve trying desperately to cover themselves with these little motley fig leaves.

Well, the fig leaf then becomes a symbol of human good in history and it’s significant that this human good symbol is used again and again in Scripture. It is also significant to note that when we are becoming Christians, when we become Christians we “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” This is said in Ephesians 4, exactly the word to put on clothes. We are given Christ’s righteousness; that’s a physical way of referring to justification by faith. In the Garden of Eden what did God do for Adam and Eve? He killed an animal, blood sacrifice; as a result of the blood sacrifice, looking forward to Christ, they received their first fur coat. And it was a coat or leather or skins that covered them, a tunic, from head to toe, perfect covering over against the fig leaf.

So we know enough of this to know that there are three responses that man can make to the problem of nakedness. He can claim nakedness as normal and this is a negative volition because what this is saying is I am innocent, I do not need righteousness of God and I am not a fallen being. That, theologically, is what nakedness is stating, except in one context, the Song of Songs, in the marriage relationship that is not true, for reasons which we will deal with in the Song of Songs series. But apart from marriage nakedness is never considered normal in Scripture. All right, fig leaf, that’s one response and that’s acknowledging you’ve got a problem but it’s covering up with human good, human works solution, and God’s righteousness, which we call +R, imputed righteousness from the cross of Jesus Christ which says that I need righteousness, there is something wrong, sin has even affected my body. In the Genesis text it intimates that the organs of reproduction have become the organs of decay and therefore this is why those in particular are said to be covered.

Ham sees his father, he “saw the nakedness of his father,” and theologically what he sees, he sees the fallen state of his father and he goes and he ha-ha’s it to his two brothers outside. There’s a flippant attitude to the authority of his father. This is, after all, his father and he doesn’t care that this is his father. And so betrayed here by this act is a certain attitude toward the family that Ham shows.

And so it describes in Genesis 9:23 how the two brothers come and they go backwards, there’s a modesty, a biblical modesty here, “[And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward,] and they saw not their father’s nakedness,” as a respect for their father. And finally, verse 24, Noah knows it. Now comes the blessing and the cursing, Genesis 9:25-27. This, more than any other place in the Bible, gives you a philosophy of society. It gives you a philosophy of race and we want to elucidate some of the major points now. [24] “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him, [25] And he said….” How the father in a home in the Bible times did this we are not sure except he must have had some revelatory information. He would take, and the Hebrew is very clear, though we’ve lost it in the translation, I’ll show it to you as we go through; what Noah is doing is he’s making a pun on his son’s name. The word k^ena‛an is the word to be submissive; so he says: submissive, you are going to be the most submissive of all; Shem, the Hebrew word for name, and he says the Lord God, which is the divine name, Mr. Name, you’re going to have THE name with you. And Japheth comes from the Hebrew word to expand, Mr. Expanse, you’re going to expand.

So the blessings and cursings here don’t look like they’re tied to the English names but they are to the Hebrew names. Apparently what happened under the sovereignty of God is that the mother and father would… here’s the physical birth of their children and the mother and the father would name their child shortly after birth, and the sovereignty of God would so work that the parents would name their child such that the name would betray the child’s future destiny; the name would be named after the character of the child. In other words, the child wouldn’t be named because he had red hair or Blondie because she had blonde hair or something, the children would be named for the soul. Remember in the Bible to name something is to know something. So when the mother and the father turned to give their baby the name, they have studied their child somehow, probably in the patriarchal period, with the aid of direct revelation, and have named their child. You know, if the woman is pregnant and this bouncy baby bounces around all the time he’s got a lively personality you might call him Bounce Junior or something and that would be an example of your naming the baby for what he is, not what he looks like or not what she looks like, but what her soul or what his little soul is going to be like. Well, the children had all received the names before the flood but at this point Noah, through the gift of revelation or prophecy or somehow foresees the character of his three sons. Now let’s see what he does.

Lots of things are detailed here so watch carefully. He has these three sons and he starts with Ham. Genesis 9:25, “And he said, Cursed be Canaan;” the son of Ham. Now the question immediately arises, why in verse 25 doesn’t he deal directly with Ham, when he blesses, in verse 26 and 27, and this is a problem; how do we explain this. Several things; first, Canaan most clearly in history showed the poor side of Ham. The sin, the –R learned behavior pattern of Ham that was shown by his callousness to the things of God most clearly would be shown up by Cain and in history they were eliminated. But there’s another reason, and that is, when God curses, or when you ever curse some… for a father, for example, to curse a son would mean he would curse himself. You see this when God says to Solomon all right Solomon, your idolatry has offended me, and I will take the kingdom away from you, but then he says no I won’t because of your father, David’s sake, so I will curse Rehoboam. So when cursing is applied the cursing is always kicked into the next generation. I’m not sure all of the ramifications; it has something to do with God’s grace, it has something to do with the solidarity of divine institution three and so on. I just observe that that is the case in Scripture. So here we have that process where the curse leapfrogs over Ham to Ham’s son.

Now who gave Canaan his name? Ham did. What did Ham call this particular son? Mr. Servant, that’s what k^ena‛an means, and if this son is going to be servant to Ham with his –R learned behavior pattern, then what is Canaan going to be but he’s going to have a double portion of –R learned behavior patterns and so Noah sees this and he says you are going to be “a servant of servants.” Now it’s interesting, by the way, that he is white, he is not black here; Canaan is a white man and he is called a servant of servants.

Now let’s go through each one of these sons and watch what happens. Ham, through Cain, and apparently applying to the other sons of Ham, in history will be known as a servant. It doesn’t mean a slave, this is not a justification as slavery is used, that all Hamites are supposed to be slaves; that’s not the point. The servant is one who serves the other two in a particular way; we’ll see just how in a moment.

The next one, Genesis 9:26, is Shem. “Shem” is the Hebrew word which means name and it’s significant, if you look at the verse, that’s the only verse of the three that has God’s name in it; look at it again. God’s name doesn’t appear in verse 25, His general name appears in verse 27, Elohim, that’s the generic name for God, but His covenant name, Jehovah, only occurs in verse 26, precisely the same verse where Shem, which means name, occurs. So this being the case we have name… by the way, this is not exactly equal to name, there’s ambiguities here but it’s a play, a general play, we’ll just call this a general relationship, so you have the general connection with Ham and through Ham will come the covenant. God’s future covenants will all be, always, through the sons of Shem; never through the sons of Ham and never through the sons of Japheth. You watch it, it’ll always happen in history, I’ll prove it to you in a moment.

Let’s skip now to Japheth. By the way, notice it says Shem shall utilize the work of Ham through Canaan and so on. The Hamites will provide the Shemites; I’ll show you an example of that in a moment. Japheth, it says, will also use Ham for a servant; Ham will serve Japheth, but Japheth “shall dwell in the tents of Shem,” now what does the expression “dwell in the tents of” refer to? In the Psalms you have expressions like Psalm 84:10 where it says so and so will dwell in the tents of wickedness. Now what does that mean, dwell in the tents of wickedness? It means to be wicked. All right, so what does it mean here to have Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem? It means he is going to be in fellowship with the things that come out of Shem. Japheth will have a close relationship with Shem, or we could say it conditionally, whenever Japheth has a close relationship with Shem then he is expanded and blessed.

Now let’s look at races and look at history and see who’s what. Let’s take the three men again, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and divide up and see who they are. The sons of Japheth are clear in Genesis 10; we can identify all the sons of Japheth given and they’re all Indo-Europeans. Most of you, probably, your family tree goes back largely to Japheth; most of you come, if you traced your home, comes out of the old world, comes out of southern Europe, northern Europe, the British isles, and if you do, your family is rooted back there, Japheth is your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandather. Japheth, then, is European.

Shem is the Jews and the Arabs, plus a few other peoples. These are clear in Genesis 10, so we are pretty clear on those two. Ham is not clear from Genesis 10 but we can tell who he is because we know Japheth and we know Shem and we know all three cover the entire human race, so we simply subtract off the Indo-Europeans, subtract off the Jews and the Arabs, and whoever is left are the sons of Ham.

Now look at something; when we subdue this we have the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Egyptians, we have lots of white races. We have the black races, we have the Oriental races, we have the American Indians, we have a large group; by far the largest people on earth are the sons of Ham. They outnumber the sons of Shem and they outnumber the sons of Japheth.

Let’s look now at the biblical philosophy of race. I’ve tried to summarize this and in ensuing Sundays we’ll develop it further. Here, categorized, how the Bible looks at races, and I want you to notice this to get a fair view so you can approach people of different races, in a relaxed way, as a Christian, with the Word of God, and have no problem. Each of these sons stresses a facet of humanity, like the rainbow takes the white light and diffracts it into various colors, what has happened here is the humanity has been broken down into three categories and these three categories, each one shows a strong point of the human race.

Take Ham, generally speaking Ham satisfies the need for man to physically subdue the world, because as I show on page 11 of the third Framework pamphlet, I give a series of basic inventions, basic things that have been physical tools for man; let me list some of these and you can check this out for yourself, just go to Encyclopedia Britannica or some encyclopedia, find out who invented these and find out which category they fell in. Here are some basic inventions that we need to physically survive and all of them were made by the sons of Ham: gears, pulleys, lathes, catapults, chain drives, fire piston, the gimble suspension, the suspension brakes, the cantilever principle, domes, arches, lock gates and lifts, steam engine principle, the clockwork mechanism, bock and tackle, copper, bronze, iron, cast iron, steel, cement, dyes, inks, rubber, lenses, bellows, glass, pottery, charcoal, carbon black, glues, preservatives, shellac, varnishes and enamels, all these were first brought into history by Hamites; nails, saws, hammers, braces and bits, sandpaper, rope saws, carborundum, stoves, plans, maps, surveying instruments, central heating systems, cotton, silk, wool, linen, and so on, just innumerable inventions. If you want more look at Dr. Custance’s book, Noah’s Three Sons. So Ham has contributed to the physical needs of man.

Now Shem, what has he done in history? Consistently the Shemites produce one thing; think, how many monotheistic religions are there in the world? Three; all three come from Shemites: the Arabs—Islam; the Jews—Judaism and Christianity. So what has Shem done in history? He has produced a correct theology; he has overthrown the paganism of his brothers. And so wherever we see Shem today we see a virile monotheism. Wherever Shem has gone he has left his marks of monotheism; wherever Ham has gone he has left his marks of inventive genius. Every major civilization on earth, whether you got to China, whether you go to Japan, whether you go to North America, whether you go to South America, whether you’re the Etruscans in the Italian peninsula, whether it’s the Mohenjodaro civilization of India, wherever you go, isn’t it striking, the first civilization after the flood was always Hamitic. Who first settled in the Arctic? Eskimos, they’re Hamites. Who first settled the Italian peninsula? Etruscans, they’re white Hamites. Who first settled the Mesopotamian valley? The Sumerians, they were dark-headed Hamites. Who first settled Africa? The Negro. Who first settled the Orient? The Orientals, sons of Ham. Everywhere and always, on every continent of the earth, Ham was first there and first subdued the earth and gave man the basis of his inventive genius.

And what of Japheth? Well, after he got through running around with loin cloths all over Europe for many thousands of years, Japheth finally got it together but interestingly he didn’t get it together until after Israel existed, and then when Japheth did, what is Japheth known for? Philosophy and science. Do you ever find philosophy outside of Europe, other than the Indian subcontinent, and there wasn’t it because the Aryans crossed the Himalayas and mixed with the population and you produce the early Vedanic philosophy. But everywhere and always when you have philosophy and systematic thought there you have Japheth somewhere in the vicinity.

So don’t you see, there’s no superior race in the Bible; there’s no need for the evolutionary dogmatism here; according to the Bible every race has its portion, its characteristic, almost like a counterpart to the body of Christ with spiritual gifts, this is the body of Adam with natural gifts. And every race contributes its natural gift.

Now let’s look further; in time each one of these three has dominated world history. The Hamites dominated history from the time of the flood until about 1000 BC when the Canaanites were eliminated by David. Most civilizations at the center of the world, the place where the diversification starts, Ham started declining about 1000 BC; true, he’s had recurrences with the Arab kingdoms and so on but generally speaking his major contributions were in that period of history. Shem’s major contributions were from 1000 to approximately AD 100 when the New Testament canon was finished; since then Shem has really basically contributed not much. Japheth has contributed from about 100 AD to 1945, just arbitrary, that’s about when the expansion of the west reached its peak; now we’re entering a new era when all three sons of Noah seems to be about equal contributors, which may be an adumbration of the fact that history is settling down for the return of Christ. So you have these three sons.

Now let’s look finally at a very important thing, the spiritual contributions and problems of each race, and here is where as Christians with spiritual insight we have something we can see about every race that will at one time recognize that some of them are not suited for certain tasks but others are. Take, for example, the furor raised by a certain California researcher about whether the Negro child in the public schools has equal IQ with the white child in the public schools, and much to the horror of many he has found some evidence that there may be an IQ difference. Well, here the non-Christian, even some evangelicals, oh, we can’t have that, and so we deny his work. Wait a minute, let’s not deny his work, maybe there is another deeper reason for this, and here it is: if the Negro child is having problems on tests that were designed for the Japheth, of course; what is Japheth’s prime accomplishments? In the area of the mental, in the area of abstract thought, this where a Japhetic child excels.

So it’s foolish to compare a Japhetic child with a Hamitic child because genetically all the way from the sons of Noah they have different gifts. That’s not to say the white child is superior. That’s saying in this area maybe, but that’s not saying character wise, that’s simply saying abstract thought isn’t all the picture, that’s all. So we can relax and if Dr. Shockley wants to represent his finds, fine. Dr. Shockley’s finds are fine. I, as a Christian, don’t get bent out of shape because his scientific data shows me something that’s disagreeable. And yet today there’s all this prejudice. Interestingly who in town right now, the most gung ho for busing, meet down at the Unitarian Church. It’s no accident; theologically wise, because that mentality has the sentimentalism that we all have to be patterned after Japheth or we’re not equal. Baloney! The Bible is saying there are deeply significant differences, just as much as some Christians in the body of Christ have the gift of evangelism and some have the gift of teaching and you can’t compare them, so you can’t compare certain races. They have different specialties and they are all to be used for God. This does have implications, incidentally, about what you do in a common classroom, and I think it clearly shows that common educational of the races is going to have a problem because certain races have certain tendencies and you’re going to have a horror of different curriculum; you’re going to have a very highly variable curriculum to teach Shem, Ham and Japheth in the same room.

All right, so that’s the biblical philosophy of race but one further thing; let’s look at what happens to each race when they go negative volition toward the Word of God and then what happens to each race when they go positive volition to the Word of God. Let’s take Ham, for example. When Ham goes negative to Scripture and negative to God’s revelation, what does he always produce? The most virile forms of paganism the world has ever seen. Example: the Canaanites. If you want to see gross polytheism look at a Hamite out of fellowship, but yet when the Hamite submits to Scripture what does he produce by way of divine good? He produces some of the most fantastic devotion to Jesus Christ of any race on earth. A Hamite who walks with the Lord is one who is a picture of the loyal servant. Some of the greatest devotional literature in the Church came out of China, some of Watchman Nee’s writing; some of them are excellent in this regard. Some are not; when he gets into areas that are theological he has a problem. But in this area, excellent, unexcelled. And some of the greatest devotional work was done in North Africa where you had a lot of Carthaginians won to Jesus Christ by a man by the name of Augustine. So you see, every race has its power to produce divine good; it’s just every race is going to be different.

Now this is not to say when you meet any given individual they’re going to fill this pattern; this is just a group characteristic, not an individual one. Let’s look at Shem. When Shem goes against the Word of God what does he always produce? You know that from the Old Testament, self-righteousness, the Pharisee is the example of the Shemite who rebels against Scripture, always cloaking himself with ethics and good works and proud of them; that is the Shemitic carnality pattern. And then what is the Shemitic when he goes plus R, when he submits to the righteousness that is in the cross of Christ, when he walks filled with the Spirit? What does he produce? Insight into God’s grace; think of David, what more gracious example is there in history than the Shemite David? The Shemite operating filled with the Spirit has the most powerful concept of grace of any of us that walk the face of the earth.

What about Japheth? Most of us fall into that category. When Japheth gets out of fellowship, pride and dominion, conquest and smashing everyone else, that’s what Japheth does; that’s historically what he’s always done, if he doesn’t like somebody he invades them and he destroys them. So Japheth gets wild when he goes out of fellowship, just smash, smash, smash, conquest and subdue and step all over people. But yet on the other hand, when Japheth gets it together he is an aggressive theologian and he aggressive at evangelism. Where have all the missionaries come from? Japhetic countries: Britain, America. And so you find these characteristics displayed in history time and time again.

So when we look at these little three verses here of Noah having a little family conference with his sons, a lot of history came out of this five-minute family conference he held. And so we read, Genesis 9:28, “And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. [29] And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died,” reminding us of the mortality that consumes us all. We’ll deal further with the racial questions and some of the questions I raised at the beginning next week.