Clough Proverbs Lesson 30

Cut-Off and Momentum; Principles in Divine Institution 3, (Family)

Before we start we have one question that was handed in and we want to answer this. You have said that there is no authorized organization above the local church. What then, do you do with Acts 15 when the elders write to the local church and instruct them in doctrine? Acts is not the only place; refer to 1 Peter 5 where Peter writes as an elder and witness to the sufferings of Christ. It would seem that there is a higher temple authority than the local church authorized in the Word. The answer is that there was during the time of the apostles; there was an authorized authority. Peter writes as an apostle; in 1 Peter 5 he’s writing also as elder but it’s “also.” His primary authority for writing is an apostle. And so in Acts 15, it was an apostolic council that was convened. Elders were there but it was by apostolic authority. And so therefore we find no evidence in Scripture for anything higher than the authority of the elder, that is the pastor and the board. Apart from this there was originally the apostles; no longer after the first generational apostles died out.

Turn to Proverbs 4. In Proverbs 4:1-4 we started with the section that dealt with the wisdom, the exhortation for wisdom in the family. This was an exhortation, the fourth great section of the book of Proverbs in this area, and this section stresses the fact that wisdom is to be transmitted through the third divine institution of family. So you have father to son, father to son, father to son and so on. There is a tradition of wisdom in the family unit. This tradition of wisdom is to be built up as David built it up for his son Solomon, and Solomon was trying to build it up for his son. That’s why it says, verse 3, “I was my father’s son,, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother, [4] He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words; keep my commandments, and live.”

This was a section which clearly shows how David taught his son and how Solomon carried on the tradition of his father. Now to understand why the family is so important to wisdom we have to go back and understand the three divine institutions. Divine institution number one; number two and number three. Number one is responsibility; and by the way, all these divine institutions being part of creation reveal what God is like. God has deliberately designed the creation so that it is analogous to what He is like. So if there is a certain truth about God’s character and man is made in God’s image and lives in God’s world, then we can know what God is like. We do not have to worry that what we are learning about God is just an accommodation that He is making to our minds. What we are learning about God is true and it is not an accommodation to the human mind. What cannot be taught us because of our limitations is not taught us. But what is taught us is true and it is not just a mere accommodation or an image or anything else, it is truth.

Therefore, there’s an analogy between how creation is structured and what God looks like, and in these three divine institutions that are the way man’s social life is constructed, each of these divine institutions reveal something about God. So the first one, man is responsible, shows us what sovereignty is like, that God is personable and chooses. And so being made in His image we also have a choice. The second divine institution, marriage, is an expression or an experience, let’s put it this way, it sets up an experience in which it is possible to understand what love is like. And so therefore we can understand what the love of God is like through the second divine institution. Now when we come to the third divine institution, which is family, when we come to this divine institution then we have an encounter with another aspect of God’s character, and that is His authority. Though it’s not an attribute it’s the authority of the Creator. And so the first temporal experience that all of us have of authority is the experience of authority in the home, largely from the father. And so the third divine institution then becomes a means by which the creature encounters the Creator’s authority. The family is established on authority, it is the locus of all authority in society. The government would have no authority if authority was not clearly taught in the home. And in cases where authority is not taught in the home then we have the repercussions socially in all other areas. So therefore authority is rooted in the third divine institution.

Again, this is just by way of background to appreciate the principles of Proverbs 4, we have to take our knowledge of the third divine institution and then we have to combine that knowledge of the third divine institution with our knowledge of what man is like in his soul. And when we look at the soul we find that man has two basic components, he has the body and he has the spirit. The body is inherited and given at the point of conception. And therefore, the flesh of man is, as it were, created, though on a secondary basis, by the parents. So over here we’ll write the word parents; the parents are the creators of the flesh. And it is the parents that build into the child his genetic inheritance, the kind of nervous system that he has, the kind of body, the kind of talents that he may have and so on. It is also the parents that contribute the decay principle by our inheritance through Adam. So the parents are the authors of the flesh.

God, however, is declared to be the author of the spirit. Turn to Hebrews 12:9, here are the two terms of the parents and God, both fathers come in one verse. “Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?” So you have two terms, “the fathers of our flesh,” those are the parents, and that’s on the left side of this diagram with the body, “fathers of our flesh.” But God is the “Father of the spirit,” and He is the creator of the spirit. And so we have, as it were, a dual makeup; on one side that which is inherited at the point of conception, and that which is given and birth and recreated at new birth by God the Father. The parent’s job basically begins at conception; God’s job begins, as it were, at birth. So we have these two sources and each of these two sources and each of these two sources are involved in the third divine institution. Let’s watch now, remembering this makeup of man, what happens in the third divine institution.

On the first side we have the parents; the parents know certain things about their children. Parents should recognize that their children have an inherited sin nature. And that inherited sin nature is going to have tendencies to sin in certain directions. Every person has two areas, an area of strength and an area of weakness. Some of these are developed by experience and behavior; others tend seemingly to be inherited. But whichever way it is, the parents being the generator of the flesh should know the flesh of their own children. They know what is right and what is wrong because if they are all spiritual they should have done battle with their own flesh in their own Christian life and having become familiar with the way their flesh behaved they should easily recognize the flesh principle in their children. So the first thing that the parents do is that they give an inherited sin nature to their children, to their offspring.

The second thing that they do automatically and it’s for good or for evil, is that they give their children a mix of foolishness and wisdom, or human viewpoint and divine viewpoint applied in practice which we will call foolishness and wisdom. Each family passes on a mixture of this. And it’s this principle that will lead to a lot of new ideas about the family that Scripture gives us. But each family is a transmission line for a mixture of some kinds of foolishness that are peculiar to that family, and some kinds of wisdom that are also peculiar to that family.

A third thing which all parents do to their children is that they give them an experience of authority. It can be a bad experience or a good experience but they do give their children an experience of authority. they can be very weak and permissive, in which case they train their children to say that all authority is weak and permissive, or they can be cruel and dictatorial in which case they’re going to train their children that all authority is cruel and dictatorial. Or they can be wise in how they exercise their authority, with a firmness, yet wit love in it, and in this case the child will orient to authority and have a very wonderful time in life because the child has got oriented in his early years to what authority is.

Now what does God do? That’s what the parents do. God also contributes to a child; first God gives an inherited nature at new birth. That new birth transmits the inherited nature from Jesus Christ so that at new birth the person is the recipient of Christ’s nature, just as the child at conception is the recipient of the sin nature of the parents. By new birth we mean the time a person becomes a Christian by faith in Jesus Christ. We do not mean the time a person joins the church or some other activity religiously. We mean the time that that person personally accepts Christ as their Savior.

A second thing that God does is that He makes available revelation. He makes general revelation available in the creation and He makes special revelation available in the Word of God. So God provides revelation and knowledge to the people. And this is the right of the child to receive both kinds of revelation. Finally, God gives experiences that are specifically designed to train that child.

Now let’s look at the two parts of the family mixture, since that is the crux of the whole thing in Proverbs 4, let’s look at this mixture between foolishness and wisdom that all of us inherit from our families, not genetically but behaviorally. Remember when we started the introduction to Proverbs we said that man is different from the animal in that when he faces a situation or stimulus he comes out with a certain response. Plants have an inherited type of response that’s automatic. Animals, on the other hand, have some learned behavior patterns so their response, though inherited, can also be partially learned. But man is different from both the plants and the animals in that man faces a situation and responds to it a certain way and man has two things going for him. He has a learned behavior pattern or patterns, plural, which he picks up through his experience, much of that experience being in the family, and he has understanding. That’s what man knows about it. So he learns and he understands. Together the understanding and the learned behavior patterns constitute wisdom, it the learned behavior pattern is +R, that is righteous learned behavior patterns; and the understanding is true understanding, then the product of all this is wisdom. So that in any given situation a man who is wise, has divine viewpoint understanding up here and he has +R learned behavior patterns because of his application to the Word, and therefore he comes out in responding to a situation, he responds in a godly way and there is a testimony produced over here.

However, let’s look at the foolish man and how a foolish man meets life’s situations and how he responds. The foolish man encounters a situation and since he is on negative volition toward divine viewpoint, the foolish man, then being on negative volition, develops various defense mechanisms that exclude his understanding. This man is in darkness. He has no +R but he has –R learned behavior patterns because over the years as he’s responded to life foolishly he has learned automatically to respond to life foolishly and so therefore he has a list of –R learned behavior patterns.

Now how does this come about? How do these defense mechanism work? It goes back to the problem of the conscience and the mind. The conscience has a lot of God-consciousness in it, enough so that what comes into the mind is being judged and evaluated by the God-consciousness. The man comes to the conclusion that something is wrong. In other words, the man may be exposed to some divine viewpoint through somebody talking to him about Christ, for example. And so the gospel is presented and the divine viewpoint goes into his mind, he has enough God-consciousness by Romans 1:18 and following to understand that that gospel is true, that that gospel answers to the categories that are already established here and so he comes to the conclusion that he, in rejecting the gospel, is wrong. And so he is condemned by his conscience.

Now man has a set of built-in defense mechanisms that come out at this point. Now it doesn’t mean that every occurrence of a defense mechanism is bad, I’m not saying that. But in this case the occurrence of these defense mechanisms is bad. But the God-consciousness comes out and warns him, you’re wrong, you’ve rejected the gospel of Christ and you know better. You gave this believer that spoke to you about Christ all the big long line that you didn’t know what God was like and so on, you know what God’s like, stop kidding. And you know all this stuff that you’ve put out to make yourself look halfway intelligent while you reject, I don’t buy Christianity because of the hypocrites or the usual arguments that you get. And you’ve thrown out that smoke screen and you may have everybody convinced in the conversation that you’re right; there’s only one person actually you don’t have convinced and that’s yourself because your own conscience testifies to you that you are wrong.

Now there’s nothing that you can do about your conscience. The conscience, according to Proverbs 20 is the candle of the Lord and it can’t be put out, there’s no amount of wind that’s going to blow out this candle. Therefore, what is going to happen is that the mind is going to start erecting a barricade to prevent condemnation from the conscience and the mind erects a barricade through various defense mechanisms which we have represented in summary form by the word “frisp” fantasy, rationalization, isolation, suppression and projection. These are just some of the representative sample of the defense mechanisms that every person has toward receiving the truth. And the result of application of these defense mechanisms basically is the erection of a barrier between the conscience and the mind, so that the Bible describes such a person going into darkness. Such a person is actually unable at this point to comprehend the truth because here’s his mind again; it’s cut-off now from most of his conscience, not all ways, there will always be a little gap there, but his conscience is mostly cut-off from his mind by a barrier that’s been built up through the use of defense mechanisms. As a result, the person will get some divine viewpoint pumped in through conversation, discussion, teaching of the Word, something, but because the conscience has been turned off so many times by the mind, the mind will not recognize it as truth and will just simply reject it; it will just go into the memory, down here is the memorized experience and a record will be kept of it and that’s it. So this person actually cannot understand divine viewpoint and this is why they are in darkness. And this is why they can sit under teaching ministry of the Word for year after year after year and never, never, never come to anything.

Now I’ll show you how this works out in practice. Every once in a while someone walks in here and they say oh, that’s too deep and so forth. There’s some doctrine they never heard before like the angelic conflict or something and this is just too deep for them. Well, this may be too deep for them at their existing level but the objective is that if you will constantly keep with it, keep at it, day after day after day after day, you’re going to catch up. The Word of God was written to be understood by every person and yet we have people right in the city of Lubbock who have the idea that because they’ve wallowed around on negative volition for so long and they’ve got such a strong wall that they truly do have trouble understanding divine truth. There’s no question they have trouble understanding but the problem is they just turn away from the truth. What they should do is just stick with it; it’ll take time but after a while as the mind latches on to more of this the conscience comes out here and they agree and we start erecting a divine viewpoint framework and you start responding to your conscience, this wall will come down and then you’ll understand. But it’s not going to come down overnight and this is what a lot of people don’t understand.

So therefore we have people come in with a very high degree of darkness and they attribute this to their lack of education. And so the usual excuse is, again this is another defense mechanism, they’ll blame it on their lack of education; well I can’t understand that because I never went to college. That doesn’t make any difference; you talk with some of the college graduates you’d know that college doesn’t do anything for you. So don’t use that as an excuse. Most college graduates today are not getting an education, they’re getting a lot of facts here and there in a few departments but that’s not an education in the old sense of the word. In the old sense of the word an education was the ability to formulate a worldview on which you could go out here and carry on a conversation in history, philosophy, math, science or something else and work from field to field and get a large view. That’s not being taught; in fact, that which you see why originally the institutions were called una-versities; it was to take the diverse elements of life and bring them together under one view and that’s how we got the word “university.”

But since Christianity has been rejected from the western world, there’s no framework to bring it all together and so a college education basically today basically is nothing more than an extended vocational education. Except if you want to make money the best way to do it is go and learn some vocational trades, like plumbing and electricity, you’ll be a lot better off than learning something like English literature. But people today who use the excuse that they haven’t been to college and therefore they can’t understand, this is unbiblical and it’s just another defense mechanism to avoid the issue. And I have never bought that and never intend to buy that because I’ve been through colleges and I’ve been working with college graduates for years and I don’t see that college does them anything, frankly. It prepares in some cases but the college thing is vastly overrated and the reason it is is because we have some parents that automatically think all they have to is send their little Johnnie off to college to get a degree and when he comes back he’ll be able to get more money. Listen, I have some friends who got their PhD’s and because they’re PhD’s can’t get hired. So degrees don’t mean a thing and it’s the employer who has obviously had to set some sort of minimum standard for employees and said oh we won’t hire anybody without a degree and such an employer actually is probably very foolish because he is cutting himself off of a vast number of people in the labor force that could be excellent employees. And just because they don’t have a college degree means nothing; in fact in some cases it means they would probably be a better employee. But the pressure that is placed upon us by both the employers, the government, and certain parents, has caused the worship of the degree.

So we have this problem of darkness that comes in and is usually blame don lack of education. Well, to whom was the Bible originally written? To PhD’s or to the average person in the field. The average person in the field and it was meant to be understood by them.

This, then is what happens to the foolish person, and so what happens? Here’s what foolishness looks like, so we’ll understand how we can get this mixture I’m talking about. A foolish man approaches the situation in life and responds to it a certain way. The basis of his response is usually defense mechanisms plus –R learned behavior patterns and that’s how he operates his life. Now where does he learn these –R learned behavior patterns? He starts learning them in the family. Where does he get these particular defense mechanisms? He imitates his parents. If his parents are on negative volition then the person, the child, will mimic his parents negative volition and you’ll find the children using exactly the same defense mechanisms that their parents taught them to use. I don’t mean to say by this that the parent sits down and tells the kid how to set up defense mechanisms; it’s not that explicit.

The idea is that the child, just by being in the home, just by watching the parents, just by watching and observing and not saying anything, but just observing, automatically, as it were, picks these things up and comes out with family foolishness, so that as a result in the third divine institution in any given generation, say this is your family, in the stream of tradition in your family, and don’t say your family doesn’t have a tradition because it does, if nothing else it has a name, at least you inherit the name, you inherit the way of speech, you inherit a certain vocabulary so you do have a family tradition and inside this family tradition is a mixture of foolishness and wisdom. And this has been the object of a certain set of principles in Scripture.

Now last week we showed the cut-off principle where God will forcibly terminate certain areas of foolishness in a family at the third and fourth generations. In other words, God will allow it to happen from generation one, to two, to three, to four and then when it gets down to the fourth generation and that foolishness inside the family from father to son, father to son, father to son, father to son, mother to daughter and so on, when that gets developed up to a certain point in certain areas God cuts it off. And we gave as an illustration of that last week Abraham and how Abraham transmitted to Isaac who in turn transmitted to Jacob who in turn transmitted to his twelve sons, a certain weakness or a certain family foolishness and God had enough of it and so in the fourth generation He made them cool their heels in Egypt for 400 years, until they were purged out, and that whole area of family foolishness was destroyed.

Now why does God do this? Why is there such a thing as the fourth generation cut-off? The reason for that is that God has designed the third divine institution before the fall and before the fall there was no death. Before the fall there was no –R. Before the fall there was no sin. And so the third divine institution was originally, before the fall of Adam, originally intended to transmit accumulated divine viewpoint and so the third divine institution becomes a powerful system for accumulation of divine viewpoint and of course, wisdom. Application: It was the family that was to be the divinely ordained channel for this. Now comes the fall. Now we always say that the fall, though destructive, never totally erases the original creation. So after the fall divine institution number one, divine institution number two, divine institution number three are still in existence, after the fall like they were in existence before the fall. However, after the fall each of these three divine institutions suffers a certain amount of decay. But they don’t suffer decay that destroys them totally. They suffer decay that affects them totally but does not destroy them totally.

All right, what is the result over here in the family? It means that in the family we now have that transmission line that was originally designed to transmit accumulated divine viewpoint, accumulated experience and gradually develop a body of wisdom in that family unite, we have the transmission still occurring, that hasn’t changed as a result of the fall but what has changed? The content of what is transmitted has changed so now the family becomes a powerful system for transmitting sin and for transmitting certain mental attitudes, for transmitting certain behavior patterns, a very powerful system. So God come sin with a fourth generation cut-off principle that says He will allow a family to go on for three and four generations but then he will step in and the systems that he used in Abraham’s family was He, we would say just exports, He just simply exported the family out, put them in captivity. So that’s one system. He can also use death. He can also use childless-ness, where the fourth generation simply will not produce children, the boys will never marry or if they do they never have sons or daughters, of if the daughters marry they will never reproduce or something like this, and you’ll have essentially a cut-off in that fourth generation.

So you can study various families and if we had facts on various families you could actually plot where God is applying in each family unity the fourth generation cut-off. It’s still operating around us today. And this Scriptural truth that is taught in the Old Testament is not something just for Israel. It is something that is going on in our own generation and those believers with spiritual eyes to see it, they’ll see it and those who don’t won’t.

But now that doesn’t solve the problem; the problem is, suppose you are in a family and you inherit this mixture, for all of us, basically, live in families where there is this mixture of foolishness and wisdom and there’s a balance. Now suppose you’re living in a family that has, for the sake of argument, 70% foolishness and 30% wisdom. Now the wisdom doesn’t mean that the parents of the children necessarily are believers. Unbelievers can have wisdom simply because they are creatures made in the image of God and they live in God’s universe. So wisdom is not the peculiar possession of only believers. Unregenerate parents can communicate wisdom to their regenerate children if the regenerate children just have some patience to watch for it. So wisdom can be transmitted from father to son, mother to daughter.

Now let’s watch this; suppose you are in a situation where you recognize, having taken in the Word of God, that you have this accumulation in your family. What can you do about it? There are two basic things to operate on, going back to the idea that wisdom is meeting life with understanding and meeting life with +R learned behavior patterns. Obviously to change this and to break out of this bad mixture that is going on and being transmitted down into your generation you’ve got to operate at two points. You have to change this, understanding and you have to change the second thing, -R learned behavior patterns. How do you change the understanding? This involves a crash program of study of the Word of God. You must study the Word of God systematically. Furthermore you must not only study the Word systematically but you must study the Word with the idea of applying it in every area of your life, constantly on the look out, can I apply more of the Word here, more over here, more over here, can I apply the Word to my economic life, to my social life, to my sex life, can I apply the Word of God over in the area of my job, can I apply the Word of God in the area of my education, always looking for areas of application. So a systematic and applied study of Scripture starts to increase this understanding and every time you do this you’re jacking up the percentage points. Say now you raised it to 40% wisdom and 60% foolishness, and that’s one way of operating on the mixture.

Another way of operating on the mixture is through the children and this is by training incentives, such as the book of Proverbs, we’ll develop in further chapters, the children, of enforcing +R learned behavior patterns and working to destroy –R learned behavior patterns. So those are the two points of operation in any given family to move into this area and you obviously see the importance of the parents in the process. The parents may inherit this mix and the parents may never get themselves out of the mix because it’s so thick in their own generation. However, they can transmit to their children something far better than anything they could give to them by way of finances, by way of education or something else. The parents can give to their children so that their children won’t have to inherit this horrible mixture that they inherited. They can break, change the orientation direction of their particular family.

Last time, as I said, we covered one of these principles involved in the structure of the family; that is the cut-off principle. Today we’re going to take two biblical illustrations of a second principle involved in all these mechanics and that is what we’ll call the momentum principle. A momentum principle is interesting. Briefly stated it’s this: The father and the mother can through spiritual growth, set up a momentum in the family tradition where you will have, say 80% wisdom, 20% foolishness, something like that ratio, or 90% to a 10%, and you can have a tremendously high ratio. The ratio, then, will protect your children from God’s discipline, even though your children may disobey the Lord. Now they won’t be totally insulated from His discipline, but those children will be protected from divine discipline in the extreme form by the amount of this strong tradition that you pass to them. Their children, the second generation removed from you, will not be. The momentum principle applies only to one generation; the cut-off principle applies to four generations. That was a reverse thing, that God will let your foolishness accumulate in a family to four generations and then boom, He’ll lower the boom on the thing.

The momentum principle applies only to one generation in the future and it means that actually you can invest in the lives of your children something that will insulate them from divine discipline. Now in America we have seen numerous illustrations of this by the fact that we have had in the past a very godly generation growing out of the 19^th century in many families. Many of you come from these families and many of you could stand here this morning and give testimony to the fact that your grandparents were a very godly group of people. Many of you can testify, those of you who can remember your grandparents will remember that they were believers, that they studied the Word of God as best they could. Maybe they didn’t have the best education but they had an accumulation of wisdom. Those grandparents, the second generation removed from you, invested their children with a certain amount of wisdom with the result that your parents inherited that wisdom. Now your parents may be unbelievers or they may be carnal believers but nevertheless, they were the recipients of this wisdom that was transmitted from your grandparents to them, so that, whereas the parents may have gone on negative volition, they have actually ridden on the momentum of God’s blessing to their parents with the result that they have been partially shielded from the result of their foolishness.

Now here’s where, if you life in that kind of a situation you have to be very careful. Suppose, for example, to get to concrete illustrations here, we have the grandparents taking a divine viewpoint view toward labor. And when they worked hard they worked not just to save money but those grandparents worked because they did it as unto the Lord. And whatever they did in life was done as unto the Lord. So the grandparents had a divine viewpoint view of labor and as a byproduct of this, they had a certain kind of wisdom about labor. For example, they had the idea of responsibility, that is if an employer came along and said you do that job, they did that job, they didn’t goof off; they learned responsibility on the job. Another thing that they might have picked up along the process is that when they did a job they did the best job they could do, regardless of how many hours it took; they didn’t have their eyes on the clock saying at 4:00 o’clock the union says I have to quit. Most of them didn’t have unions and they didn’t have human viewpoint enforced upon them like this. So here we have them doing the best possible job that they could do. That’s the second thing they’ve learned in this thing.

A third thing they may have picked up, the grandparents in divine viewpoint is a use of money that was thrifty. I don’t mean the classical Scotchman or something. I mean that they were thrifty with their funds, they invested, they saved. And so out of all of this in your family at the grandparent generation you have this wisdom that corresponds to the biblical view. Now along come the parents, they lived in the 20s and 30s when everything is breaking loose as far as theology is concerned and the parents start going to a liberal church. And they get on negative volition to the Word and they overthrow the whole thing. Now what happens? The parents, however, because they were raised in the second generation where they inherited all of this, divine viewpoint of labor, carry this over in their life so that the parents actually have a blessing because they, unconscious to them and through no credit to them, they were trained by their parents to operate this way. So there’s an accumulation of wisdom there that blesses them in a material way.

Now along comes you, you are in the third generation here; the zero generation if you want to start backwards, and so here are the children. Now the children have a tendency to assume that blessing is automatic because they look back at their fathers and mothers and say my parents are blessed and they didn’t study the Word, they didn’t do all these things and so on, so I don’t have to. But notice what’s happened, you’re misinterpreting something. The reason why those parents are blessed is because they shared on the momentum principle the blessings that their parents got; you aren’t under that and if you don’t get with the Word of God you will be disciplined and you will suffer and you will have catastrophe in your personal life. The blessing was automatic to your parents but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be automatic to you because you’re out of range; you are the second generation removed from the time when divine viewpoint prevailed in your home, and since you are the second generation removed you are in a very precarious situation because you can persist in the foolishness that you are now picking up from your family and you can add your load to it and produce it to the children in which case your children are really going to get clobbered by the cut-off principle. Or you can turn around on positive volition and start building into your children by the momentum principle positive volition toward Bible doctrine and invest blessing toward your children.

Now let me give you two biblical illustrations of this momentum principle so we can watch how it works in practice. First turn to Genesis 9:25. This is the outline of history for the postdiluvian era. There are three basic civilizations in world history: the antediluvian civilization; then the flood, then the postdiluvian civilization, then the Second Coming of Christ, then the millennial civilization. So there are three basic eras in world history. Now what you are about to read is a control of a history for the postdiluvian civilization. That is, from the time of Noah to the time of the return of Christ. During this time all humanity is divided into three groups, named here.

To get the basic context let’s go to Genesis 9:19. “These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread.” So verse 19 teaches that all of us… all of us in this room this morning, if we could have traces on our genes we would trace our genes back to these three men; everyone here is related to these three men, who in turn are related to Noah. Now it’s not a pure relationship to Noah because you also would have genes of the wives of the three men and that’s why the Bible traces our genealogy ultimately back to Adam. By the way, just one little footnote here, do you realize that all people are related to Adam because even Eve had Adam’s genes. Eve was made out of the side of Adam so there are no Adam and Eve genes; Eve’s genes are Adam’s, so that you have modified, suitably of course, but you have back to Adam and then out of Adam you have Adam and Eve. So ultimately everybody funnels back to Adam. But then on down through history, down to the flood you have Noah and his three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth. Now through their wives we have genes going back into the antediluvian period so this is why Paul, doesn’t trace all people back to Noah.

“These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread. [20] Noah began to be a husbandman [farmer]; and he planted a vineyard. [21] And he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and he was uncovered within his tent. [22] And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren outside. [23] 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. [21] And Noah awoke form his wine, and knew that his younger sons had done unto him. [25] And he said, Cursed by Canaan; servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. [26] And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. [27] God shall enlarge Japheth, and He shall dwell in the tents of Shem; Canaan shall be his servant.”

Now this provides us with an interesting and very complex outline to history but let’s survey what the passage is saying in its broadest sense, then we’ll come and deal with some of the specifics of it. What is happening here is that after the flood Noah, as the patriarch and authority in the third divine institution, for remember there is no fourth divine institution yet established, or it’s just being established here, Noah is, as the father, predicting the destiny of his sons. And he is saying first there will be Ham, then Shem, then Japheth. [Tape turns] … son’s names are given to us in Genesis 10 and 11, and if you examine these you will find that out of Japheth comes the Indo-Europeans; most of you people here this morning come from Japheth. Most of you probably have a high concentration of genes from Japheth. So because you are mostly of Indo-European stock, the Indo-European races, all the Celts, the Germans, and so on, the Anglo-Saxons, come out of Japheth.

The second group of peoples, Shem, from which we get the Semitics, the Arabs and the Jews, people in the Middle East, people of this stock come out of the stock of Shem. And then the people of Ham are a very diverse group and the only real way, because the names of Ham’s sons cannot be traced historically, Genesis 10 and 11 are very, very difficult at this point. The only way you can do it is to take the total number of races across the face of the earth, subtract off the Indo-Europeans, subtract off the Semitics, and what you have left are the races that come out of Ham. Now out of Ham comes such diverse peoples as Egypt, the Phoenicians, who later on become the Carthaginians, the American Indians, the first people on the Indian continent, not the later ones but the first ones, the old Indian or the Indus Valley civilization comes out of Ham. The Black races come out of Ham, all the colored races actually, the black, the red and the yellow races, the Oriental, the Chinese and so on all come from Ham. You can obviously see that Ham is very diversified racially speaking.

But here’s something else that’s interesting. If you study their languages you find each of these sections reflected not just in race but you find each of these three sections traced in language. For example, the Japhetic languages are all related to Sanskrit. If you want to study the languages of Japheth, study Sanskrit. Out of Sanskrit comes Greek, Latin, German, Spanish and so on. These are Japhetic languages. The Semitic, the basic core language for Shem is Arabic; out of Arabic you have Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic and so on. So Arabic is your key language to locate the Shemitic peoples. Now the language problem with the Hamitics breaks down just like the race; there isn’t any key language for the Hamitics; they are diverse racially and they are diverse linguistically. The Hamitics tend to be pictorial in their language, for example Chinese, what kind of a language is Chinese? Alphabetic or non-alphabetic? It’s pictorial. Another group of the Hamitics would be the Sumerians; is the Sumerian language alphabetic or pictorial? It’s pictorial. So generally speaking the sons of Ham have adopted pictorial language down through history and there’s a reason for that, because all three of these groups have a particular characteristic to their languages.

Let’s go back to Japheth; again, Hem, Shem and Japheth. Japheth, in his language always simplifies; Japhetic languages always tend to simplify with time. An illustration is the King James translation of the Bible; when the King James translation written in our language, the English language, when it was written the language was far more complex. This is why nobody can read the King James Version, it isn’t because it’s stupid, it’s because we’re stupid. Our language is so much more trivial than the King James English that we have a hard time understanding it. Illustration: you see these two words in the King James; how do you translate those into present American English today? You can’t. One of those words very nicely indicated singular, the other one indicated plural. How do you indicate it second person today in the English? “You,” and you can’t distinguish; we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between the plural and the singular in our English today. Now that is an illustration of the tendency toward simplification in all Japhetic languages. They are constantly in the process of simplifying with time.

The middle group, the Shemitic languages, Arabic, those languages tend to stay the same with time. For example, you can go to Israel today and speak the Hebrew that Moses spoke, basically; the language has not changed that much. So the Shemitic languages are very highly conservative. They don’t change with time. This is just a characteristic of Shemitic languages. The Hamitic languages, however, and this is what has given the Wycliffe translators all this difficulty, these are constantly in they process of generation. Two tribes in South America can live on two sides of a river and in 50 years both of them will be speaking two different languages; this is how rapidly Hamitic languages diversify. So the Hamitic peoples tend to diversify.

Now what is the prediction here for the postdiluvian civilization? The prediction is and I’ll explain verse 25 in a moment but let me just say in summary form, the Hamitic people, the Semitic peoples and the Japhetic peoples each contribute to the destiny and welfare of mankind. Here is the biblical philosophy of race and here is something you’ll never hear at all except for a few people that are interested in segregation or something and they camp on verse 25. That’s an obvious anti-biblical interpretation. Here is the true biblical doctrine of race. Each race that God has made has a job to do in history for the furtherance of man. The Hamitic people’s job is largely finished today; the Hamitic peoples were the pioneers after the flood and every major civilization began with the Hamites. Example: Egypt, Hamitic. Example: Sumerians, Hamitic. Example: Chinese, Hamitic. Example: Chinese, Hamitic. Example: Eskimos, Hamitic. Example, Indians on both North and South American continents, Hamitic. All the first civilizations in every continent are Hamitic.

So the Hamites have as their job the physical conquest of the earth after the flood. Every major technological invention has come out of the Hamitics. That may shock you, you may think that the West has invented the basic technological inventions—no, the West has perfected but not invented. Medicine, all major areas of medicine were already present in Egypt and Sumeria, including the drilling of teeth. All major areas of clothing were already invented by the Hamites. The Hamitic peoples have invented everything there is, the gear, the wheel, processes of food, freezing, medicine, operations, various forms of construction tools and so on have all been done by the Hamitics. They are a very, highly inventive people. The Chinese… gun powder is another illustration, gun powder came from China, it was not invented by the Europeans. So the Hamitic peoples are improvisers, the Hamitic peoples have the characteristics that they can survive anywhere. Go to the worst possible physical places of the earth; think of the Eskimos living in subzero conditions and they go on living generation after generation. And yet today, for the white man from the lower temperate zones to live in the arctic areas the only way he can survive is to borrow the technology of the Hamitics. To this day the modern clothing industry has never perfected the type of clothing that the Eskimos have today. It beats anything that we can come up with. And they didn’t have any science to do it. The Hamitic peoples always in history have tremendous inventive genius. This is why their language is always diversifying, they’re inventing terms for other things. So that’s the role of the Hamitics.

So this is why it says here, “he shall be servant of servants,” I’ll explain that a little bit more but anywhere you have that expression it means the best one; it is a Hebrew superlative. The Hamitics will be the best servants of man in that they will provide every basic tool that mankind has ever had. The white man has invented practically no… this is something to be humble about; the white man has actually invented no basic tools.

The Semitics; the Semitics come along and then in Genesis 9:26, “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem, Canaan shall be his servant.” This indicates that the Shemitic peoples will be the channel of God’s revelation in the world. And isn’t it interesting that all monotheistic religions come from the Semites. What are the three world’s monotheistic religions? Judaism, Islam, Christianity. From where did they come? Semitic peoples. So the Semitic peoples in history have always tended to be monotheistic and they have always tended to concentrate on a revealed Word of God.

Now what are the Japhetic peoples? The Japhetic peoples, verse 27, “God shall enlarge Japheth; he will dwell in the tents of Shem, Canaan shall be his servant.” “God shall enlarge Japheth.” First of all, the word “Japheth” means expansion and it means that the Japhetic peoples will tend to conquer. And in history they are always the conquerors. For example, what happened in Italy? The Etruscans, who a Hamitic people, are replaced by the Indo-Europeans coming down the Italian Peninsula. When you go to the Indian subcontinent, the Indus civilization which is Hamitic is replaced by the Arians crossing the Himalayas. Who is conquering who? Japheth conquers Ham. When you come to America, you have an obvious illustration of the Incas, the Aztecs and so on, of the Japhetic Spaniards conquering the Hamitic Indians. In every case the Japhetics are expansive and they tend to be destructive. The Hamitics tend to be the civilized peoples and when the Japhetics come in they tend to destroy the civilization and bring it down to a lower state. This happened to the Aztec and Incas civilization; the Spaniards never brought technology to America. The Spaniards destroyed the culture. The Aztecs and the Incas had some of the most fantastic inventions and some of the most fantastic architecture, and the Spanish brought nothing except adobe and even that was borrowed from the Indians. So the Spaniards did nothing except destroy. So we have that as a tendency of the Japhetic peoples.

But the second illustration in verse 27 is that “God shall enlarge Japheth, and Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem.” That is what saved Japheth. Japheth by himself is expansive, conquering and tending toward destruction. But on the other hand when he dwells in the tents of Shem, means he shares the blessings of Shem, he lives with Shem. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically, but it means that he borrows. Now let me give you a beautiful illustration of this. Japheth, down through history contributed basically nothing. For example, Japheth, say at the time of say 500 BC in the Milesian area started or tried to philosophy. The Greeks began philosophy but they never could get anywhere. Aristotle and Plato exhausted the possibility and eventually philosophy died so that by the time of Jesus Christ philosophy had died pretty much as an option for thinking men. You had it degenerated to stoicism and so on. However, when Christ came and revealed the New Testament and the New Testament subsequently was absorbed by the Japhetic peoples of Europe, because remember, which way did Paul go? Did he go east or did he go west? He went westward and therefore Paul’s evangelistic thrust was toward Japheth, not toward the Hamitic peoples. Paul’s thrust was toward the Japhetic peoples and as a result of the evangelization of the Japhetic peoples, out of that we derive philosophy and science, the two major contributions of the Japhetic people, both of which historically came because the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Britains, all of them adopted categories borrowed from Shem, and it was only historically after they borrowed the categories the Japheth ever produced anything. Western civilization, of which we are so proud, is sheerly a product of first Ham providing the physical things, because after all Shem, the Jewish people, they borrowed the technology of the Hamitics. For example, when Solomon went to build his temple who did he go to? The sons of Ham for the technology. So even when Solomon built his temple he had to borrow Hamitic technology.

So the technology has been contributed by Ham, the religion by Shem, and then the science and philosophy by Japheth. Whenever you have a great and powerful civilization in history it will always be when you mingle these three races together; when the contributions of all three races come together there you have a powerful civilization. Where you have the civilization isolated you tend to have it atrophy.

So what has this got to do with the cut-off, the momentum principle of the family? Simply this, Genesis 9:25, Noah said, “Cursed by Canaan;” now the question is why, if Ham is here, Noah is here, Ham is Noah’s son, and Canaan is one of Ham’s sons, he has some more, Mizraim, why is it that the curse goes to Canaan and not to Ham when both in verse 26-27, the curse carries to the sons, not the grandsons. The answer is that Noah, when he curses he is actually cursing Ham in the sense he is predicting the servile nature of the Hamitic races in developing technology. This doesn’t mean lower class, this is where the segregationism is wrong on this point; he is not to derive the fact that they are lower class in verse 25.

The “servant of servants” means that he is the first one out upon the postdiluvian earth and he is the one that sets up the technology. But the curse flows, particularly to the grandson, Canaan, because the

–R learned behavior pattern of the father was ameliorated or compensated by the fact that Ham, being Noah’s son, inherited some of the +R learned behavior patterns from his father. So in Ham’s generation this didn’t work out. It did not work out. Only the thing that worked out was that Ham committed this act, which was basically, I could go into that for an hour, but the act, basically of verse 22 -23 is simply a violation of paternal authority and we’d have to discuss that from the cultural standpoint, you’ll have to just take my word for it right now. Verse 22-23 is a violation of paternal authority. He says Ham, I notice developing in your sin nature a tendency toward violation of authority; now to your generation Ham it won’t get too far because of the momentum principle; you’ve already picked up enough from me to kind of keep that under control in your generation but let me tell you something Ham, your grandson, because you have that tendency, is not going to get this stuff; he is going to get the –R learned behavior patterns that you already have and so beginning at the level of the grandson you will have a tremendous violation of paternal authority and breakdown and so on. So therefore we have the momentum principle protecting Ham from the curse. Ham doesn’t get the curse, his grandson gets it.

We have another illustration of this in 1 Kings 11:9. In 1 Kings 11:9 we have David, Solomon and Rehoboam. Now the mixture in David’s house, like every other family, like your family has a mixture of foolishness and a mixture of wisdom. We come now to Solomon and Solomon just does a lot of goofy things and finally in verse 9, “The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, who had appeared unto him twice.” Now the last phrase of verse 9, “which had appeared unto him twice,” shows you the nature of the foolishness that is developing in David’s house. That is, that these people are developing a despising attitude toward direct revelation, so whereas God directly reveals Himself to Solomon, which is unheard of because Solomon wasn’t a prophet, he was only a king, God goes out of His way to directly reveal Himself to Solomon, and after directly revealing Himself to Solomon, Solomon despises it and turns away. So obviously, then, in Solomon’s generation you’re having negative volition; you’re having an increase in the family foolishness.

But here’s what God says, verse 9, “because his heart was turned from the LORD God,” verse 10, “And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods;” but he didn’t keep the commandment, in other words, rebelliousness. Verse 11, “Wherefore, the LORD said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done by thee, and thou hast not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely rend [tear the kingdom away] from thee, and will give it to thy servant. [12] Nevertheless, in thy days I will not do it, for David thy father’s sake; but I will rend [tear] it out of the hand of thy son.” So there again a cursing of God falls not upon the father but on the grandson. Why does this sin fall on the grandson? You say isn’t that unfair that Rehoboam gets clobbered with this? No, because this cursing has inside the cursing omniscience of the fact that Rehoboam also is going on negative volition and if Solomon had two units of foolishness in the family when Rehoboam gets through you’ll have thirty-two units of foolishness in the family. So his son, Rehoboam, is going to really exaggerate the foolishness of his father and develop and fill the family tradition with foolishness. And therefore the grandson receives the course of God.

Here are two illustrations of the second principle that we’ve been studying, the momentum principle. By way of review what have we covered? We’ve covered the third divine institution; the third divine institution is a transmission device for wisdom. After the fall, however, instead of transmitting wisdom it goes on and also transmits foolishness. And you can accumulate both foolishness and wisdom from your parents and from their parents. In order to protect man God has instituted various principles. One principle is the cut-off principle that applies in the third and fourth generation. That means that He will allow your family foolishness in certain areas to accumulate and then He will take some steps that intervene in your family history. The second thing He will do is that if you get on positive volition toward the Word of God you are making an investment that will last for at least one generation beyond yourself, and your children can be shielded from many things because you have taken the Word of God in, you have taught them, and they even may disobey as Solomon disobeyed but the final result of the disobedience will not come for the second generation removed from you.

With our heads bowed…