Clough Genesis Lesson 39

The sons of Shem – Genesis 11:1-26

Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, happened in some way, the Bible doesn’t tell us how, but in some way he fell heir to the records, apparently passed on through Adam, down to Methuselah, down through Noah, and on into his own generation. And these documents are called the books of the generations of something, and that’s why in Genesis 11:10 when you read this you ought to think of that as a book title. “These are the generations of Shem:” and it stops with the next book title in verse 17, “These are the generations of Terah,” and as you heard when the Scriptures were read this morning, this is one of those that appear to be boring passages of Scripture, that so and so begat so and so and so and so on. We’ll show you that it’s not quite so boring when you look at the text carefully.

But we want you to notice that in verse 10 we begin the sixth book of Genesis. These are books that we have looked at before. The first one was Genesis 1:1, and then it was Genesis 2:4; Genesis 5:1; Genesis 6:9; Genesis 10:1 and the present section. And each one of these deals with the outcome of the first sentence, so we would expect then, verse 10-26 to deal with that which Shem produced in history, and sure enough that is the subject of the book. We want to review those since we are starting this new book. We want to go back through and make sure we’ve mastered as Christians the basic thoughts and doctrines of the passage so far in the first 9 verses.

We have studied in this section on roots that God has created human society along certain lines and we are fools if we think we can second guess God and the structure that He has built into the system. We just waste our time, waste our energy fighting the structures that He has built, and we couldn’t use two better illustrations than these two divine institutions, divine institution four and divine institution five. The first three divine institutions were established creation and are wealth producing institutions; that is, that is where all genuine production occurs, and it’s deeply significant that in the New Testament, most verses in the New Testament are directed to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ in only the first three institutions. It’s very interesting.

People often say well the neglect of the New Testament to address the state and the neglect of the New Testament to address the problem of world history seems sort of an omission, but it isn’t. It’s because when salvation occurs and the work of the Holy Spirit occurs and we have the filling of the Holy Spirit occur in the lives of Christians, where that is manifested to the maximum is only in the first three divine institutions and the reason is because those three divine institutions are the producing institutions. That is where the maximum changes will occur at the point of salvation. That is where the maximum reformation will occur and that’s where we have as Christians the most control over applying the Scriptures. To our own personal life it is our responsibility as believer priests to confess our sins and maintain fellowship. It’s our responsibility to personally claim verses and promises of Scripture in trials and adversities. It is our responsibility as believers to marry fellow believers; it is not our motive in Scripture and it is not allowed by Scripture to marry unbelievers. And people get very offended when this point is made during the wedding service. Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t make the point, God did, and as a minister I’m not authorized, I have no authorization at all to marry a Christian and a non-Christian, and to do so would be disobedience to my office. I can marry two non-Christians or I can marry two Christians but I cannot officiate at a marriage of a Christian and a non-Christian to the best of my knowledge. And this is because the Word of God gives us mandates; it’s not because we think that’s the thing to do, it’s not because that’s our opinion, it’s because the Scriptures state it.

And similarly when we come to the third divine institution, this is where divine viewpoint is passed on to the next generation. And Christians parents who will not train their children in the Word of God and expect the pastor to do it, they expect the State to do it, expect always someone else to do it, you are shirking your responsibility. It is your responsibility to train your children and this is one of the great pleasures you can derive. In fact, that is one means which Christian parents have of establishing authority over their children and it’s just a process that happens over years of constantly training them spiritually. And the authority is automatically there.

But when we come to these last two divine institutions, these are different. And these are the two divine institutions that we have been studying, particularly in connection with the tower of Babel. The fourth divine institution is a negative institution; it does not produce a thing, never has produced anything except misery and therefore we don’t look to the fourth divine institution in a saving way. Now this is a critical point and I’ve mentioned this at least a hundred times during this Genesis series and yet I’m sure there are people who still haven’t grasped what I’ve said. The fourth divine institution is never a wealth producer.

Now what this means is that it does not have as its function to save society and yet we have leaders in both political parties, as we’ve studied in connection with the tower of Babel, who insist that it is the divine mission of the Democratic or Republican parties to save society. That is an interference into the role of the Church. It is the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ’s role to save society and not any political party. The role of the political party is to apply wisdom to the State and the function of the State is to restrain sin by judging evil. And in order for the State to function it has got to first have a criterion by which it defines evil. And as long as men are in high public office and they have no standard and they operate on the basis of their emotion, this is why government can’t function. If functioning means judging evil I’ve got to know where the evil is in order to judge. And I can’t find out where the evil is unless I have a yardstick for measurement, and that’s precisely the battle that the Christian citizen faces today—by what standard. We ought to make that in capital letters, put it on 3 x 5 cards all over our homes, all over our ballot boxes.

That’s the key, you don’t have to get into all the fine details of doctrine, just ask this one question and keep asking it and asking it and asking it and asking it no matter what the discussion is, no matter what the political party, no matter what level of government you’re at, always ask the question: by what standard are we making this judgment; by what standard? And you will inevitably find by man’s standards instead of God’s standards. Well, I think that we ought to have abortions funded by the federal government. And after all, there is clergyman, Rev. So and So from the First Liberal Church and he says that we ought to have federally funded abortions, as a modern example. But does Rev. So and So from the First Liberal Church give you why? Does he give reasons from the Scriptures why he takes the position he does? No! He’s going to be a long time giving reasons from the Scriptures because the reasons aren’t there in the Scriptures. So we have that as a problem in the fourth divine institution.

Man has always, since the tower of Babel, taken the fourth divine institution and transformed it into a savior, but whenever the government is transformed into a savior, it violates the principle of grace. Salvation has to be by grace and the government can’t be by grace, it is a works institution. Although Caesar, like God, welcomes a cheerful giver, he frequently turns the cheerful giver into a very reluctant one.

Now the fifth divine institution is something that was brought into history at the time of the tower of Babel and frustrates the dreams of the one-world socialist. The fifth divine institution is a system of fracturing culture and fracturing culture by fracturing the language. It creates portions and pieces in the human race so that, for example, if the people on a particular continent go apostate and rebel against the Scriptures and refuse to listen to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and their culture goes down, then that contamination won’t spread over into another culture. That’s the whole point and these create like holds on a ship so that if the ship’s hull is penetrated at one point the ship won’t sink, and the ship in this case is the human race, and when the human race is penetrated by apostasy it won’t go down because of these holds that have been created. And this is what so frustrates all the one-worlders is that they never can get their stuff together. An example would be communism. Communism ascended power in Russia, really it’s a Western heresy, and tried to unify the world under Marxist Leninism. And yet today, from Africa to South America to Eastern Europe to Asia you find the communists bickering; you find the Chinese unable to get along with the Russians. You find the Cambodians unable to get along with the Vietnamese. Why? Because Marxist Leninism does not provide the basis to overcome the fifth divine institution. Nor does the United Nations provide the basis, nor do all the other world banking schemes provide; nor does the trilateral commission and all the various apostate thoughts that are associated with that institution.

None of these are able to violate the fifth divine institution. God’s law stands there and they can hammer it with all the hammers they want to and they’ll just simply break their hammer. God does not intend that the world be unified at this time. The unification will come about only when the Lord Jesus Christ returns and the means for that unity will be the Word of God.

Now let’s think about summing this up by what we can do as Christians, knowing what we do now because we’ve studied all five of the divine institutions in Genesis up to verse 9. At that point we finish our study and now study something new; we start today, basically preparing for Abraham and the role of the Jew in history and the role of prophecy leading to the person of Christ. So it’s at a turning point and we want to make sure we can apply this kind of doctrine. The filling of the Spirit means that the word of Christ dwells richly in our heart, and if we are Christians and we are submissive to the Scriptures then we know that the filling of the Spirit is occurring, and unless the Scriptures are our standard, and unless the Scriptures are sought out, unless we seek God’s will in the Scriptures, we cannot walk by faith.

Therefore let’s think of some applications of these doctrines. What can we do knowing now what we know about the tower of Babel? What are some things we ought to be thinking of as Christians? First of all, what we have studied in essence is the world system. Now when you read your Bibles and you see this word in the text, nine times out of ten that means the Babylon type world empire the kingdom of man, so when you see that now, start thinking, use this doctrine so you can understand the text.

Turn, for example, to 1 John 5 as an illustration of how this will help you read this Bible. In 1 John 5 there’s a series of statements made and unless you have this background these statements don’t seem to mean too much. But now let’s read these statements in light of what we’ve learned from Genesis and see what we get out of the New Testament now. I John 5:4, “For whatsoever has been of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. [5] Who is he that overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” Now it talks here about overcoming the world; in other passages in John it talks about separation from the world. For example, if you turn back to 1 John 2:15 we are commanded to destroy our allegiance to the world system and yes, 90% of this destruction of allegiance has to do with our sin nature, our personal ethics in divine institution 1, 2 and 3, but also it refers to divine institution four and five. Let’s look at 1 John 2:15, “Love not the world,” and the Greek has the force that you are loving the world so stop it, “Stop loving the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” a very serious statement and therefore calling for separation from the world system. [16] “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but comes from the world system.” So we have this vast world system that is manifested in history in a four-tier system.

Daniel warned about this four-tier system. First of all it starts out with one’s attitude toward wealth and therefore in apostasy and violation of Scripture man always develops various financial schemes. Money talks and the New Testament says “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” That means all types of evil start with one’s use of money. If you watch how a person spends his money you have almost an infallible indicator of their faith; their faith is always exercised in a certain direction. If you want to know what a person really believes don’t listen to their words, watch how they use their money and that will tell you how, in fact, they operate. That will tell you, that’s the greatest revealer of their faith. Now wealth is misused in the world system and it’s misused in precisely these lusts, verse 16, “the lust of the flesh,” money is used to satisfy the immediate desires of the flesh; “the lust of the eyes,” I see that, I want that, and we confuse the difference between want and need, you know there is a vast difference between the two. Sometimes it’s hard to see but nevertheless we know at least God knows the difference between what we need and what we want. And so we have that problem, the problem of wealth based on lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes.

Historically this was shown most clearly in the rise of Western capitalism because the assets and the capital investments that went into Western Europe before the industrial revolution were accumulated savings, done by people deeply influenced by the Scripture to save for tomorrow. Never forget that; the industrial revolution in history did not come about because Uncle Sap gave all of his money to the thing; Uncle Sap didn’t even exist or at least he wasn’t existing in a very wealthy form at that time in history. It was because of latent Calvinist future orientation of the populous, in particular the middle class, that saved our wealth. And this is why, if we would just stop and think, this is why we are having problems in the under-developed countries of the world. You are never going to get developed third world countries until those countries are controlled by biblical ideas. The other people in the world that have had this attitude toward wealth have been the Japanese and the Chinese who have provided a tremendous industrial base in Asia.

So that’s the first base we have, the use of wealth, and that’s very much tied in with “love not the world.” The “world,” then, is a system of values that presses in upon us and it does so various ways. Many of you commented on the tract that appeared in the bulletin last week about 30 year mortgages and the usual comment was yes, that’s nice in theory but…. And the “but” is that the tax structure and everything else, the investment structure of our present society penalizes you for saving. It penalizes you for trying to use your money in a biblical way; that is this cosmos, that is the world system functioning in a highly visible way that you feel deep in the heart of your wallet.

Now let’s go to the second level and that is the cultural vision. Every society has a vision and the vision determines what it does. It acts as a sort of subliminal program that operates unintentionally. For example, many Christians have a very bad, very bad vision. The vision goes somewhat like this: Christ is coming tomorrow so therefore let’s sit back and let Him come. Let’s watch the fireworks, make sure we each get a front row seat and therefore enjoy the situation. Now that is a very bad image. If you have that image you are a fatalist; that means you are a very passive individual; it means that your Christianity will be like the Volkswagen commercial, we think small. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” This is the result of a very bad vision in Christian circles, thinking small, thinking that Satan, ala Omen II, will control the world, rather than the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s pessimism and it cripples any kind of Christian activity or optimism and so we have to watch that. “Love not the world.” And you see, one of the great things in verse 16 is “the pride of life.” And the world system functions on pride; particularly at this level does it function on pride because man wants a unified race, proudly, he wants old Adam to be the basic unifier, and if we “love not the world” we will have to say I’m sorry. We cannot unify on the basis of Adam; we must unify on the basis of Christ and we’ll not unify on the basis of Buddha, we’ll not unify on the basis of Bahaullah, we will not unify on the basis of Joseph Smith or any other person. We will unify only on the basis of the Lord; He and He alone is the basis for the future human race. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”

And then the intellect; we studied the intellectual dimension of the world system; education. And it must be controlled by one or the other; either it will be controlled by the values of the world system or parents will see to it they have enough say in the educational system that the Word of God will articulate itself, or Christians teachers in the classroom can push as far as they can to see that divine viewpoint dominates the classroom. The intellectual development is a demand because we read in the New Testament, “Casting down vain imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” Now how else can that be interpreted but challenging aggressively, as Christian believers in Christ, the environment around? Don’t be afraid and don’t worry if a non-Christian can temporarily snow you with a few facts.

I had a thing happen just this week with one of our people, taking a course at tech and this particular person was in this course and the professor, one of the education professors, we might expect it from them, they are the people that tell everybody how to teach but never teach themselves, you notice. These people have over the past five years, I’ve always noticed this; the most cheap remarks, the most hostile remarks against the Christian faith made on that campus comes from the education department. And this person said to one of the teachers we have here, talking about the golden rule in the classroom, and said well the golden rule comes from Confucius. Well, the person knew enough, the golden rule came from the Lord Jesus Christ; now it’s true Confucius did say something similar to that and for a time this person was deeply upset that they couldn’t respond to this professor who obviously showed that the golden rule came from Confucius and with the usual innuendo, see, you Christian, just spiting the Christian. And so I was able to help the person just simply look at the verse, let’s go over to Matthew and see where the golden rule is articulated and sure enough, when you read it the Lord says, going on about don’t do this unto your neighbor and so on, and love your neighbor as yourself, and then He adds, “for this is the Law and the Prophets.” “…this is the Law and the Prophets.” Now what did Christ mean by that? Who’s the Law and the Prophets? Moses. When did Moses live? 1440. When did Confucius live? 500. Who came first?

So the point here is, as usual, we have some loud mouth non-Christian ignoramus who tries to intimidate Christians. Now don’t be intimidated. I try my best from this pulpit to teach you most of the problems you’re going to encounter in every given text of Scripture because I’ve spent my life fighting this situation. And therefore, if you run into this situation don’t take it lying down; you come back if you have a problem, I’ll help you, we’ll go to the library, we’ll find the answer but don’t you let these non-Christian degenerate loudmouths dominate the environment; you are called as an ambassador to Christ to represent aggressively Christ wherever you may be. Now that doesn’t mean you have to be a snot about it. It means you can be very gracious, but it does mean there is a time and there is a place to open your mouth for the Lord Jesus Christ and not stand there like all the other Christians on campus, oh gee, he said it, it must be true, and go on, pass the exam and finish the course. Now that’s not holding ground for Christ, that’s not making our gospel credible. Who wants to follow a Christ like that? I wouldn’t if I was a non-Christian; gee, look at all these mice, we call them Christians. Well I don’t want to be a mouse so I don’t want to be a Christian. You see what kind of an image you give. And that’s what happens when you lose the battle by default and never speak up.

We undercut evangelism; it is contrary to what you always hear, these points of apologetics are deeply related to the ability to win somebody to Jesus Christ. You cannot win people to an impotent Christ who can’t even answer his critics, and we are the body of Christ. Right now Christ has no other mouthpiece except you. Now He’s going to have His say later, but right now, at this moment in history, there is no other mouth except your mouth to speak the words of truth and if your mouth cannot be prepared, cannot be trained, does not have the command of doctrine to speak the truth, who shall speak? And then what are we going to say before the bema seat, when we come up with about three people led to Christ when we had 458 opportunities, and I’m sure the Lord is going to say well, what were you doing? What did you do when you had all those opportunities? Well, there was this loudmouth non-Christian and he just kind of made me feel stupid. And I’m sure the Lord is going to wonder, what about My message and My being is something to be embarrassed about? Why do we have to be embarrassed about the person of Jesus Christ? Now that’s why we’re not having witnessing; it’s not because we don’t know The Four Laws or some little canned technique; the reason we don’t have witnessing is because we are secretly ashamed of Christ, we are too lazy to go back and study so the next time this loudmouth comes by we can put him in his place. And this has long been my theory why evangelism is not going, and again, it doesn’t mean being aggressive in the unfriendly sense; it means to be firm, polite, but nevertheless committed to this message.

So John tells us about the world system and he tells us not to love it. And finally we go into the political order, and as you go up this ascendancy of this four tiered structure it becomes progressively much more difficult to handle it; it just really does. And so don’t get discouraged, those of you who have tried to work in the area of politics and you’ve been beaten time and time again; you’ve just got a lot of clucks in high places. They’re stupid, most of them are unregenerate, they don’t know any better and they follow the spirit of this world, they’re committed to the spirit of the world, they are hostile deep in their heart to the Word of God and they resent you interfering. And that’s easy to understand. If you were in their place you’d be doing the same thing. So just don’t get discouraged; just hang in there and keep on plugging away.

Dr. Rushdoony has pointed out what, at this fourth level, happens in the world system. He calls it The Politics of Guilt and Pity. “The politics of the anti-Christian will inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt man is perpetually drained in his social energy and cultural activity by his overriding sense of guild and his masochistic activity.” How else do you explain the pronouncements of certain men who ought to know better? It’s masochism. If you don’t know what that word means, look it up. “He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally to save himself he demands the state do for him, so the state as man enlarged becomes the human savior of man.”

Now in verse 15 it says, “If any man love the world, the love of the Father” cannot, “is not in him.” Now how do we break away from this system? We start with a desire to receive the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s your first act at being a traitor to the world system. If you really understand the gospel, if we really understand what it means to become a Christian, right here is where you and I become traitors to the god of this world. We become traitors this way; we declare, by trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, that there is no salvation at any other point in history than the hill outside Jerusalem. We declare that our righteousness, the thing that alone will clean our conscience, that that imputed righteousness comes only through the cross of Jesus Christ, and once we say this, and we really mean it, we’re not just putting someone on or coming forward at an evangelistic service because our girlfriends are there, but we really mean business and we know that the righteousness that we share is Christ’s and not our own, what does this immediately do in our thinking? It destroys works of atonement and where you have particularly wealthy people behind all sorts of socialist schemes you are seeing masochistic activity, people who feel deeply guilty… deeply guilty, just for being wealthy, they think. But it’s not that, it’s their sin that’s the problem and they have no solution for their sin problem so they try to give to this, do this, do that, do this, put on this human good, partake of this, get rid of all the weapons in the world and so on, the greatest sin, of course, is the destruction of mankind. It isn’t! The greatest sin is the blasphemy of the Lord Jesus Christ. And they proceed on this premise and they screw up the whole system. Human good clogs the gears of the fourth and fifth divine institution every time. And it’s brought about by these people who are trying to salve a guilty conscience.

So the Christian, then, has to separate, and it means that he’ll do certain things. It means, for example, he’ll be careful about his wealth; it doesn’t mean, incidentally like one or two people took my last two sermons as I’m against wealthy Christians. I’m not against wealthy Christians; that’s great, if you can be wealthy more power to you. You be the one that lends the money, then the non-Christian has to call by your shots; you call the tune, make him dance to your tune, that’s good, that gives you power. Like the book of Proverbs says, wealth is health to the bones. And so therefore there’s nothing wrong with a Christian seeking wealth as long as he seeks it underneath loyalty to Christ and Christ’s Scripture. In the cultural vision and these other things, it’s simply gluing yourself to the text of Scripture; no matter how complicated the decision, trying to the best of your ability to see your way clear by going back to the text.

Now we come to Genesis 11:10 and the next episode in history. We are watching here a transition of dispensations. Up until this point in history the Word of God was transmitted to all nations. By the Word of God now we want to make a careful distinguishment between what we will call general revelation and special revelation. Those are two terms that theologians use, sometimes if you do any serious reading in Christians books you’ll see these words so let me just explain them quickly. General revelation means that God shows Himself in every fact of history. General revelation is Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork.”

General revelation means that the truth that 2 + 2 is 4 is deeply embedded in the doctrine of the Trinity, and the numerical nature of creation around us that we use in mathematics is there only because our God has a numerical nature. Has it ever struck you that only in Christianity does number pertain to God. All other religions don’t have numbers in the Godhead; only Christianity does with its three in one doctrine of the Trinity. So the quality of number is deeply Christian; a non-Christian cannot approach 2 + 2 = 4 like I as a Christian can. There is truly such a thing, without being facetious, as biblical math and non-biblical math. So general revelation is the fact and statement that every point in history, your body, the climate, the trees, the rocks, the chemical structure that exists around you, all testify to God’s handiwork. Did you ever see some of these funny looking animals? Every once in a while on a children’s program you’ll see on TV just weird things, and I’ve often taught my children to just say this: what do you think it was like when God sat down to His drawing board to come up with that? Do you think that animal, as funny as he is, shows you something about God? And I think it does; it shows you that God laughs. God created animals to be funny; God has a sense of humor. After all, God created us. So general revelation is deeply valuable so we can appreciate the character of our God.

Now the second problem is special revelation. Special revelation is God’s words, and Satan, for centuries has been attempting, one way after another, to destroy special revelation. He doesn’t mind general because he can distort general revelation if he can get rid of this. Once our instruction book, once the cookbook has been ripped off, he can give you all the food you want because you don’t know how to prepare it. And once special revelation is shot either by physical destruction, as in Jeremiah’s day when people went around and burned the scrolls, or the more subtle way now, where the liberals have taught us in our literature courses, from the time we were in Jr. High, as we got together our literature courses remember what we used to do? Sit around the room and say well now, what do you think this means, and what do you think it means, and what do you think it means, and after we have 20 kids in the classroom we have 21 opinions about what this author meant when he wrote his words.

Now I feel this very deeply as a pastor because my life has been trying to propagate a message that is written, and yet who am I trying to teach but a generation that has been taught in their English literature courses that how you interpret a piece of literature is strictly up your opinion, as though it’s a mirror, you can put anything there. That’s wrong. If I write a letter or you write a letter to somebody do you expect honestly the guy at the other end to read it any way he wants to read it? You don’t write that way, you don’t talk that way. We write and we talk words so the person at the other end gets something. Well, now why is it when we come to literature we don’t really believe that a book, written by Shakespeare for example, a play, or a book written by John Locke, or when we come to Aquinas’ book, that these books aren’t written to be understood. The guy has a thought here and he’s trying to communicate it. Yes, it’s hard but he has an idea; he doesn’t intend his book to be interpreted 42 different ways. Now if we grant the human author that, how much more the divine author of the book you hold in your lap.

Don’t you think God wants to communicate content to us? Don’t we think that God is very dissatisfied; we look, oh, well, that’s just your opinion, and use that kind of an approach to Scripture. I often wonder what it must be like to be in the counsels of heaven, when He looks down and He sees people reading His own Word—well I can’t understand that, it’s whatever you believe. And here God has intended that the Word be understood. So that’s our problem, we have to consciously lean up against this in our own day as Christians. You’ve had that happen to you, haven’t you, when you’ve tried to make a point from the Scripture and somebody that’s just playing games with you says well, that’s just your opinion. What do you mean it’s just my opinion? Is the sun rise today just my opinion? Well, yeah, that happens to be the opinion of a few other people too. And that’s the answer to the Scriptures, when you talk to somebody and somebody gets something out of it, is it just his opinion? No. Be ready to ridicule that position because if you don’t you’re never going to get to first base with someone who is seriously seeking truth from the Word of God. That is a chunk, a human viewpoint that just clogs the pipe and oftentimes I have suspected in our witnessing we have come across that; we haven’t recognized, hey, that’s what’s clogging the message. It’s not the message that’s the problem, it’s the clogged pipe, and where did the pipe get clogged? Way back in Jr. High English class, that’s where the pipe got clogged, when they were taught to misread literature.

So when we come to Genesis and we come to Genesis 11:10 and Shem, we come to the preservation of special revelation. Remember Noah had three sons. The first son, Ham, gave us the physical foundations of every civilization on every continent. Japheth has given us the ability to systematically organize ourselves. Japheth is a fantastic manager and an aggressive person. He’s the typical American male in the business world; that’s a Japhetic picture. Now Shem, his job is going to be now the picture of Scripture. From this point on, from Genesis 11:10 forward in your Bible these brothers of Shem fade away; they’re not mentioned much except later on in prophecy. They fade away because now who occupies center stage but Shem and his sons. Why? Because Shem has as his objective in history to preserve special revelation.

Do you want to know why that’s so important? Those of you who are Christians seated in this auditorium this morning could not be here if Shem had not existed because had Shem not preserved the Scripture, and his lineage, we could not look at the Bible this morning, and if we don’t have this we have no Jesus Christ because we only know Jesus Christ from the Scripture; special revelation precedes a knowledge of Jesus Christ. So therefore this special revelation has to be preserved and what do you think was one of the things God gave the sons of Shem. When we look at them in history everywhere we see a son of Shem we see something, and that is their language doesn’t change with time. Shem and his sons, because they are the protectors of the Word of God, have a highly conservative language, whether is Arabic, whether it’s Hebrew, whether it’s Aramaic, or Ugaritic, or whatever, these languages, Semitic languages, do not change basically with time. A small child in the modern state of Israel could communicate with Moses with no difficulty, there would be some vocabulary problems, the word for chariot in the Old Testament is the car, you buy a [says Hebrew word] today with no horse in front of it. But nevertheless, Moses would get the point; he’d look around for a chariot and see a big Mercedes going by some place and therefore you would have a sum communication occur.

Now at this point in time Shem begins his function. So let’s watch the text and if you notice, verses 10-17, the ages begin to decline. Notice; Genesis 11:10, [These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begot Arpachshad two years after the flood.] Look at verse 11, “And Shem lived after he begot Arpachshad five hundred years.” Verse 13, “Arpachshad had lived after he be begot Shelah four hundred and three years.” Verse 15, “And Shelah lived after he begot Eber four hundred and three years.” Verse 17, “And Eber lived after he begot Peleg four hundred and thirty,” now watch what happens, verse 19, “And Peleg lived after he begot Reu two hundred and nine years.” Verse 21, “And Reu lived after he begot Serug two hundred and seven years.” Verse 23, “And Serug lived after he begot Nahor two hundred years.” Did you notice what happened there; you can see this for yourself.

Those of you who are more inquisitive, take a piece of graph paper, diagram this, put your dots age at death and here’s what you’ll get. After the flood the ages start to decline to the point of Peleg, and then after the Peleg the curve goes like that, it breaks. Now we don’t know why that break occurs other than it’s just there but we know from Genesis 10:25, when Eber and Peleg lived, there’s a little note there, and you can quickly see this by your eye. I want you to look at the form and the way it’s written. See in Genesis 10:22, verse 23, verse 24, skip verse 25, verses 26, 27, 28, 29, see how small those verses are. Now see how fat verse 25 is? That is an obvious warping of the form of the text. And when you see a warping in a regular form of the text, that’s the Holy Spirit’s signal to put something in there; he couldn’t underline it so he warped the form and the form is warped with this little note, “…in his days the earth was divided.” And that’s a signal that something went on here; apparently here is where Babel occurred, and perhaps continental divisions was involved in some way with this. That’s up to some creationist geologist some day to find out.

So at this point, at the days of Eber and Peleg the line drops quite rapidly, but all during this time, all during the collapse on down to Genesis 11:25 where you have “And Nahor lived after he begot Terah an hundred and nineteen,” [26] “And Terah lived seventy years, and begot Abram,” you’ve got the link between the flood and this man, this great man we are going to start studying on Sunday morning, Abraham, the father of those who believe. The link between the flood and Abraham is inconsequential as far as the Holy Spirit is concerned; all the Holy Spirit is interested in is telling us that special revelation had been preserved over that time interval.

To show you how effective it was, turn to Genesis 14 and we’ll explore a very interesting feature of history, one that is often contradicted by what we learned in school, particularly in history courses. A while back, when I was reviewing textbooks, I noticed there was a textbook used by the state of Texas that made this statement. I believe this was an 8^th grade history book and it said: Monotheism did not really begin in history until the time of King Solomon. Till the time of King Solomon??? Solomon is 1000 BC, monotheism didn’t begin until Solomon’s time??? Wait a minute, even liberals don’t believe that any more. Abraham is usually taken by the liberals to be the first monotheist. So I asked the publisher, I wrote a report out before the state textbook commission, I said hey, what’s with this history text here, this is wrong; where’s your justification. So they came back and they had 14 books that this author had used, assuring me, incidentally, the man meant no harm because he was the choir director in his Greek Orthodox Church. And I thought that whether he was choir director or not doesn’t have much to do with this point about the textbooks. So therefore a long list, 14 books, from the publisher. So I looked at the list, went down each book very carefully; only four of the 14 books cited were primary sources, that is books that really deal with the facts; the others were just discussions of those four books. And then I started looking at the four books; one was the book by Julius Velhouse [sp?], it was written in 1850, a really current source. And then the next book was on the Dead Sea Scrolls that had absolutely nothing to do with the question. The second book was on the Dead Sea Scrolls, also had nothing to do with the question. And the fourth primary source was by Professor Kaufman of Hebrew University in Israel, whose whole thesis was that monotheism began with Abraham, not with Solomon. So I went back to the publisher and I said hey, you’ve got a little problem here. Those four books, two of them are totally irrelevant to the question, one is outmoded and a hundred years old, and the only one that is contemporary and relevant argues exactly the opposite of your textbook. No answer. So that was one textbook that we got axed from the Texas system. But that’s the kind of stuff, and it creeps in.

Now let me show you why that is a false picture. Here’s the picture we get in school; religion started back here and they were dancing around in their loin cloths with polytheism, and when they finally gave up their bananas and got real we have monotheism. And this nice picture of man’s religion is spiritual advance, after all, Time/Life has it in technical, it’s got to be true. So what does the Bible gives us. The Bible says way back here, at the time of the flood, you had monotheism. And Genesis 14 is one of the examples of the Bible how people worshiped before Israel came along. Genesis 14:18, Abraham is coming back from battle and he’s greeted by this mysterious figure, Melchizedek. Melchizedek represents what religion was like before Israel came to exist in history. “And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine; and he was the priest of the Most High God.” That is the title God was known as in ancient history; He was known as the Most High God, not Jehovah, although His name had previously been revealed. But generally speaking this was His title, also known as El, short for Elohim. And He is known in great myths way back as the Most High God. And when you study myths of people and go way, way, way, way, way back you don’t find… repeat, you don’t find polytheism, worshiping the sun, the moon, the trees, the birds and the bees and all the rest of it; you find one God being worshiped and He’s called either the Supreme Being or the Most High God, and that’s exactly what the Scriptures are reporting here. This text is reporting what religion looked like in about the year 2000 BC. If that’s the case, there is no religion evolution, there’s no evolving going on here at all.

You have a primitive monotheism and this degenerates into polytheism; the line goes the other way. It doesn’t go up, it goes down; that’s the way our sin nature is. Listen to the comments of one of the greatest living scholars on mythology from the University of Chicago, Professor [sounds like: Mersi Iliad]. He talks about the disappearance of the Supreme Being in man’s mythology. He says, “The disappearance of the Supreme Being did not find expression in an improvement of religious life. On the contrary, it could be said that the genuine religions appear after…” “after the Supreme Being has vanished,” that is, He’s dropped out. “The richest and most dramatic myths, the most extravagant rituals, gods and goddesses of the most various kinds, ancestors, [can’t understand word], secret societies, the priesthood, the temples, all of this is found after the belief in the Supreme Being disappears from history.” Now how come? Because man is a sinner. I’ll show you the passages that show you the real case for the development of religion.

All this, by the way, is to show you why the sons of Shem had, as their duty, to preserve divine revelation or the Word of God and in preserving it they kept monotheism alive. Let’s look at two texts; one in Deuteronomy 4, this gives you the condition of the nations at this point in time. When God called Israel into existence, most of the nations had already drifted into a degenerate polytheism. Deuteronomy 4:19 describes their state: “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou see the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and all the host of heaven, you would be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. [20] But the LORD has taken you,” there’s a difference; the nation Israel was saved from this horrible degeneration. Mythological religion and polytheism began after… began after these sons had drifted away from Shem. When that process was going on, yes, there was mythology.

Now we have a few other points to clear up and we want to spend the rest of our time summarizing this idea, showing you a few passages in the New Testament and dealing with some of the problem of evidences, because people ask why do I, in the Sunday morning service, deal with these evidences. It’s because I know some of you have questions about it; my job is to feed you the Word of God so it will be credible to you.

Now here’s one of the critical assaults that’s going to be made on you for this belief in Genesis 10 and 11, and that is, the critic will puff out his chest and say ho, ho, ho, at this point the tower of Babel occurs only 200 years after the flood, does it not. Well, that’s what Genesis 11 appears to say. All right then, ho, ho, ho, there aren’t enough people in 200 years from just three families to build a tower, so therefore the Bible is wrong, ho, ho, ho! Well now before we ridicule the Scriptures let’s just be a little careful and let’s take some objectivity about it and let’s look and see what we can do with a little math. Those of you who have had a little math know what geometric theories do; they blow up very, very rapidly. And these kinds of series, when you start with 2, you come to 4, 8 and so on, you can easily see, you don’t have to go too many generations before you get tremendous numbers. Henry Morris, in some of his writings, has done this on a simple scale of trying to show that a geometric progression over 200 years could yield about a thousand plus people at the time the tower of Babel was built. That would be enough, it’s kind of small but that would be enough to build a tower.

However, more recently a man who’s into population equations has developed a graph from a computer; these equations are very, very difficult, though [can’t understand word] processes are involved in this and probabilities, and so it can’t be done on your little hand calculators, this is a little more powerful than that. So he’s worked out these population equations, or he’s used population equations to apply to the problem. Here’s interesting facts that kind of blow your mind. Think of this now, only 200 years from the time of the flood to the time of Babel, plus or minus 50. Let’s suppose that each family, during this time there’s no death because the longevity is greater than 200 years, so eliminate death, and also high reproductive potential beginning at age 20. Now if each couple would have a child once every ten years, the human race would have died out, the equations yield nothing simply because after a while it would die out. Let’s suppose a child has a couple every eight years; that’s impossible, after all, look at the Lubbock Bible Church nursery, we’re running much better than that. A couple having a child every eight years, let’s suppose that’s true. Here we’d have a thousand in 200 years. Let’s suppose a couple has a child every seven years; look what kind of a figure we get here for the tower of Babel, a hundred thousand people.

That’s how quickly this series blows up and it’s astounding but you can work it out, there’s no argument about it, all you have to do is take the equation, plug it in and you’ll get the answer out the other end. And the equations aren’t made by Christians; these are standard population type equations. And if you want to go for real hype, you can take a couple, if every couple that existed, including Ham, Shem and Japheth and their wives, would have a child, and all their sons and daughters had children once every five years you would have a population at the time of Babel approximately ten million. Now where was the ho, ho, ho that we heard from the critic that said the tower of Babel was an impossible thing to be building. We don’t hear ho, ho, ho, we hear fact, fact, fact from the math involved. So we answer our critics on that basis. Those of you who would like to pursue this it’s in the June, 1977 issue of The Creation Research Society Quarterly.

We’ll conclude by turning to the New Testament in a tribute to the sons of Shem. The New Testament authors are deeply sensitive and aware of the great role that the sons of Shem performed in history and you have here in Romans, twice made, the remark of what they did. Romans 3:1-3; here Paul is talking about the Jew, the son of Shem, and he says: “What advantage, then, has the Jew? Or what profit is there of circumcision? [2] Much every way, chiefly because unto them were committed the oracles of God. [3] For what if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faithfulness of God without effect? [4] God forbid.” His point in verse 2 is that sovereignly the sons of Shem, whether they personally believed on Christ or not is not the point, the point is that sovereignly in history, independently of whether individuals believed in Christ, they carried the oracles of God. The phrase, verse 2, “the oracles of God,” is another synonym for the Word of God or special revelation.

Romans 9:4, if you have a Jewish friend, that’s one of the things, and they ask you sometimes, why do you like the Jews in the light of all the anti-Semitism that exists. One of your quick answers ought to be I like the Jews because they are God’s instruments to preserve the text of Scripture, an excellent opportunity to then lead into the gospel. Paul says in verse 4, “Who are the Israelites; to whom pertain the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises.” In other words, they are the channel for the preservation of special revelation.

Well, where does this leave the world? Let’s go to another section of the New Testament, one we’ve seen before by the same author; Acts 17:26, Paul’s address on Mars’ Hill to the Athenian Gentiles. Now when he went to Mars’ Hill he too was deeply conscious of this. He says in verse 26, God “has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth,” there’s the dispersion from Babel, but all during this time this dispersion is being sovereignly manipulated in the environment. God doesn’t just allow the human race to expand and expand and expand anywhere it wants to. Everywhere people are settling, that is under God’s control. Notice what he says, He “has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” God is sovereignly at work in the environment, physically, climatically, in all ways.

Acts 17:27 tells you why; verse 27 is one of the answering verses for the question, why does history go the way it does? Why, for example, do the communist Chinese come in and strip the civilization of Tibet and everybody, Lowell Thomas at the end of World War II went to Tibet and he said this is a horrible thing to have the Chinese come in here. Here’s an example: the Tibetan culture had become so demonically dominated that I believe one reasons communists broke it up was because of verse 27, “That they should seek the Lord,” that’s the reason why these things happen in history. God manipulates history so that “they,” who’s “they” in verse 27? The people in verse 26, “all nations,” “That all nations should seek the Lord, if by chance the might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us.”

And then he talks in Acts 17:30 about the ignorance, and don’t misread verse 30, that’s not talking about innocent ignorance, it’s talking about verse 29 ignorance, idolatrous ignorance. “And the time of this ignorance God has overlooked, but now He commands all men everywhere to repent.” Notice “all men” again in verse 30, the same people that He hopes will seek Him out. [31] “Because He has appointed a day, in which He will judge the world” by the Lord Jesus Christ. So you see, today the world is again addressed by a message. Where did this come from? The sons of Shem. Who were its authors? Where did all the stories take place, and who was always involved with the stories? The sons of Shem. Has Shem been faithful to his calling? Yes. And whenever the Gentiles, or the sons of Japheth, prosper, it is because they dwell in the tents of Shem.

We’ll conclude by singing….