Biblical
Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 24
After we finish the series
as far as taking the series events, I will spend four weeks going through each
of four appendices. One will deal with
the structure of the interpretation of Gen. 1-10, what all the big issues are
in interpreting that, not all the fine points but just the interpretative
problems. The second one will deal with
the biological issues; third, physics, astrophysics and chronometry issues, and
the fourth one with geological issues, obviously we’re not going to deal with
all the specifics. My intent is to go
through the basic overall case for the Scripture, the logic of the
argument. That’s why tonight I want to
start with the third question on page 90. We started at creation and worked our
way up to Noah, the flood and the covenant, and what we’ve tried to do is not
give a classical Bible study approach, but rather to give the major events of
the Scripture, and show how these are in total collision with the culture of
our time. And that the world is dark,
the Bible says, and that’s one of the things I want to explore because we can’t
be naïve as Christians. We live in
hostile territory, and we want to understand what the conflicts are. There are a tremendous number of Christians
that really don’t understand that we’re in a war, they’re like soldiers on the
front lines and they’re standing up and wondering why the bullets are flying
around. This is a war that we’re in,
and frankly we’re silly not to recognize that’s what happening.
The third question: “This
series of studies has the objective of furthering ‘worship and obedience in an
age of global deception.’ What have you learned about the deception of the
pagan mind? What specific examples from
modern thought can you now give to Paul’s words in Romans 1:21-23?” Paul said in Rom. 1 that it’s not true; we
said this a lot in the beginning, we haven’t reiterated this recently, but
Paul’s point in Rom. 1 is that men are not ignorant of God. What Paul’s point is… and it’s very
offensive, this is offensive even to Christians, let alone non-Christians. What Paul is saying is if we, if any person
out there, any non-Christian, anyone, says that it’s not clear to them that God
exists, what the Bible’s answer to that problem is, is not to try to prove that
God exists, to that kind of a person, any more than if you were blind and I
told you the lights are on and you didn’t believe me, I have a problem, trying
to communicate to you what I mean when I say the lights are on and you’re
blind.
The Bible insists that when
people say they’re not sure whether God exists, the problem is that they
suppress knowledge that they once had, and that’s true individually, it’s also
true culturally. That’s why the classic
proofs for the existence of God are often times not too helpful, for the reason
that what happens is we come together and say the non-Christian and Christian
mentality is the same, that logic is the same for both the Christian and the
non-Christian, that the vocabulary is always the same for the Christian and the
non-Christian, and because we have this common ground we’ll sit there and
reason from a common base. There is a common
base but it’s not the base that the non-Christian would agree is common. The common base is that we are all made in
God’s image, we’ve all been created by Him, we all have a conscience and we all
know very well that He is there and there are absolutes. What happens is that we define this abstract
thing called logic, or this abstract thing called facts, and we say that those
things are common to everyone, and we will, not those basis prove the
gospel. But the Bible turns us around
and says that the very concept of proof itself is Biblically derived. In other words, if God is there, then that
controls my view of logic, it controls my view of what facts are and what facts
are not, it controls everything. It controls
the very standard of proof. So the
problem is that you can’t get back far enough, and that’s often what the
problem is with common ground.
What we want to say here in
the third question is take a few minutes and review how deception exists in the
modern world. At what point is modern man terribly deceived. I don’t think it requires tremendous
intelligence, or spiritual perception for that matter, just to realize that if
the Bible is seriously to be taken, if you look at this document in front of us
and say that this is truth, you can’t read too far without coming into collision
with the whole culture, everything we’ve learned, the whole educational system,
everything, everywhere you go you’re into collision. So one of two things must be wrong, either the world is right and
the Bible is terribly wrong, or the Bible is right and the world is wrong, but
you can’t get these two things together.
As we have gone on we have
looked at these events of the Bible, and we’ve tried to say look, there are
many implications to all these things.
We spent 2-3 lessons just on creation, we spent time in the fall, we
spent time with the flood, to show that these events and the truths of the
narrative of Gen. 1-9 undercut biology, physics, geology, anthropology,
psychology, literature, the theory of language, every single area is in
conflict here, not one. The Bible
doesn’t leave us one thing, and this is why I believe this message doesn’t get
communicated too well by Christian academics, because it puts them in a
position where they have to fight everybody.
Obviously none of us are competent to handle the battle on every front,
and our job is not to try to start an unwinable war on every front, but it’s
simply to point out that as Christians we can’t be embarrassed and passive
about what the Bible teaches. The pagan
mind is deceived; it is deceived at the most basic point.
When we dealt with creation
we said something about man, about man’s design, and we said that man is
theomorphic, it’s not that God is anthropomorphic, it’s rather that He made us
in His image so we’re theomorphic, and as theomorphic beings we are made in His
image, just another way of saying we are made in God’s image, we have certain
features that are in direct analogy with Him.
And we outlined some of those, we said we have this thing called choice
and responsibility, and it somehow is a finite version of what He has that we
call sovereignty. We said that we have
conscience, the sense of moral responsibility that transcends society, that
transcends my peer pressure group, and that answers to His holiness. We said we have an attribute of love and
that love can’t really start functioning unless it functions in a secure
environment because the opposite in the Bible to love is not hate, it’s
insecurity and fear. It’s interesting, our
language has antonyms to it, but we have to watch it because everywhere the
Bible contrasts love it’s usually contrasted not against hatred, there’s hatred
there, obviously, but behind that hatred is a fear, “perfect love casts out
fear,” etc. So we have all these
qualities in our spirits that mirror His qualities.
The pagan mind is
tremendously deceived at who He is, that He’s not made in God’s image, that
God, if He’s there, and they may use the word “God,” He is just one of other
entities in this vast and mysterious universe.
So while they talk about God, the content of G-o-d, that word, the
content, is not the same as the content of Scripture. To get your head straight and to keep from getting screwed up you
have to keep going though… it’s like you have to keep bathing your own mind, creation,
fall, flood, covenant, and thinking through now wait a minute, is the God I’m
thinking of the Creator, the God who said in the beginning I’ve created all
things, heaven and earth. The pagan is
deceived as to the nature of God; he’s deceived as to the nature of man. Therefore he’s deceived on the nature of
what knowledge is, he’s deceived about the nature of logic, he’s deceived about
the nature of language.
Having been deceived in all
these areas, is it any wonder that the pagan mind comes up with theories
antithetical to Scripture and why we have a problem with aspects of evolution,
we have problems with how we measure time, we have problems in the area of
anthropology, etc. It’s no wonder. Man is a genius, we have been invested as
creatures with intelligence, and we’re going to have dominion. The question is whether it’s going to be an
evil dominion based on deception, or whether it’s going to be a godly dominion
based on truth. But dominion we will
have because we can no more stop doing things as people than we can stop
breathing. Man is elegant, he is an
elegant sinner, an ingenious sinner, or he’s an ingenious saint, but he’s not a
nothing, and that’s what’s terrifying about ourselves as preachers. So the pagan mind has been deceived from one
end to the other.
What we’re trying to do now
is we have looked at the Noahic Covenant in particular, and we said that the
Noahic Covenant represents an important contract that is made between God and
man, that there are parties to this contract, that the terms to the contract
are verifiable, and the Bible bears testimony by empirical reports of history
that that contract remains, the terms of the contract are open to verification,
just as any contract we would make is open to legal checking. That’s why people make contracts. So when we see the word “contract” start to
appear in the text with Noah’s time, we now have a very unique thing in
Scripture, and we’ve emphasized that this idea of the God of the universe
making a contract with people is not found outside the pages of the Bible.
This is one absolutely
unique thing about Biblical faith, that we have a covenant-making and
covenant-keeping God. We said that that
in turn has certain implications about nature, and one of the things we stressed
was that what we call natural law really isn’t natural law, it’s actually the
Word of God, so the Word of God controls nature, and the covenant is a
revelation of some of the background powers to be that are now controlling the
geophysical universe around us. The
geophysical universe is like it’s in a boundary condition, bounded by these
things in the Noahic Covenant. We have
the privilege of being able to open the Bible and turn to a passage in our
language that tells us from the God of the universe, what is the structure
behind the geophysical realities that we observed and measure. He says I have an agenda, and no matter what
you measure, no matter in what century you measure it, whenever you take your
observation I tell you in advance it will satisfy My Word, and My Word is (and
it’s the covenant) that this is a planet that will never experience a global
flood. It is a planet on which the
human race will survive forever and ever, “I make an everlasting covenant,” the
human race is not going to go away, it almost went away with the flood. So we have all this implication as far as
nature goes.
We want to move one more
step and look at man. We’ve looked at nature, now we want to look at man in
this new world of Noah. Let’s review
something else. After the flood you
have almost a recreated universe, if we’re to believe Peter’s interpretation in
2 Pet. 3 of Gen. 6-8. And when you see
this recreated universe it’s an analogy, or a foretaste, of the ultimate new
heavens and the ultimate new earth. In
other words, the past evil world has been absolutely catastrophically
destroyed and transformed, there are saved people, the eight people come
through the cataclysm, from the old world to the new world, and they are the
only people that survive. So going into
the new heavens and the new universe we have it populated, at the very
beginning, by believers.
What we want to look at is
what happens in that new universe. Turn
to page 91 in the notes. We have said
before that man had social structures, we call it divine institutions, and we
said the first social structure has been variously defined as responsibility; I
call it dominion responsibility, that’s given in Gen. 1. Divine institution number two is marriage;
the third divine institution is family. By divine institutions keep in mind, these are valid for all human
beings, they are not just for believers, it’s for believers and
nonbelievers. This is a structure built
into the human race and we also pointed out that when you see these things,
they are not social conventions. What
happens is that the pagan mind, in our time particularly but not uniquely, it’s
gone on for centuries, the pagan mind takes each of these things as either a
byproduct of genes, or a mere convention.
What do I mean by a mere
convention? I mean an arbitrary thing,
it just happens, we just happen to think that way as a society and that’s the
structures that we just have to think about, that’s all, that’s all it is,
nothing else, it’s not rooted to the very structure of the universe. That’s what we mean by conventions. The
Bible insists they are not conventions.
This is the pagan view, always has been. The Bible says it’s the dominion responsibility, marriage, these
are built-in structures ordained by God.
Each has been corrupted by the fall, so we have dominion responsibility
deeply twisted, we have marriage deeply threatened and competitive, the gender
war, we have the family hurt in the flood, not that these go away, but that
each of them has been terribly injured by the fall, so that the family, instead
of being a place where culture is passed on from father to son, mother to
daughter, what it becomes is sort of a quasi battle ground for authority,
humility and all the rest of the fights that go on. There has not been a non-dysfunctional family since Adam and Eve.
So don’t get guilt complexes, every family is dysfunctional, you may have your
area and I may have mine, but we’re all dysfunctional. We have been dysfunctional since Eden. This is the way we are after the fall.
What we want to do is say
wait a minute, God re-instituted these things after the flood; what did He do
about the structure of man, and here we pick up some interesting things that
happened after the flood. A lot of
people read the Bible and they just pass over this, zip right through it, and
never give it a moments thought. On
page 91 I preface all this issue of the divine institutions by a note about how
to interpret Noah, and to get at what I’m trying to say I’m going to put up a
little graph, the graph of what happened to man’s longevity after the
flood. I want you to think about the
implications of this graph in another way.
Previously when I showed that graph I was interested in showing just the
bare fact that you go from a high longevity, averaging about 930 years to this
tremendous drop in man’s longevity. We
said if you curve fit this you come out with an exponential decay curve, which
is interesting, a testimony to the feature, it’s a real feature, it’s not just
arbitrary numbers. That’s all we wanted
to say before because we were using this diagram before to simply show that the
flood had enormous implications, it wasn’t just somebody’s bathtub that
overflowed in the Mesopotamian River valley.
This was an enormously significant event.
We want to look at this
graph again, and ask ourselves if we were Noah at this point in time, and we
were Noah’s children at this point in time, what unique characteristic happened
in human history between this period, and this period. Let’s take three or four generations from
Noah to his sons, to his grandsons, etc.
In this period of history, just this period of history, we’re not going
to worry about this history, we’re not going to worry about the history that was
before the flood, because before the flood we have a flat curve, and this curve
eventually becomes flat. What hasn’t
been thought about is what the implication is for these four generations, from
Noah to the first groups out on earth after the flood. What would have happened to those four
generations that never happened before and never would happen again? It was an entirely unique period of human
history, because during that period of human history grandparents outlived
their grandchildren. That has never happened before that, never will happen
again. Right here if, this is all
predicated, if we take the Bible seriously, if we believe it’s really truthful,
if we believe that that is historical truth, if we believe that, then we have
to have the courage to start creatively drawing some conclusions about what was
going on here, and that’s what these two pages in the notes are all about. How do we interpret the Noahic era? Follow in the notes, I want to take you
through a little bit of history to start your mental juices going when you read
Genesis.
I mention a name of a man by
the name of Dr. John Pilkey, I went to school with him, he’s probably studied
Genesis 9-11 more than any person I’ve ever met or even read about. This guy has devoted probably thirty years
of research to those chapters of the Bible, it’s just been his hobby, and I
think he’s come up with some interesting things, I don’t agree with everything
he says, but I’m not competent to pass judgment on some of the stuff that he’s
found. Notice the paragraph that says:
“Pilkey has gone back to a Bible based historical school of scholarship known
as the ‘euhemerist movement’ that flourished in Europe in the seventeenth
through nineteenth centuries.
Euhemerist scholars sought to interpret ancient history through the eyes
of Gen. 9-11. They believed that
stories of pagan gods were actually garbled tales of the civilization founding
activities of Noah and his sons.” This
is a group of scholars that’s dropped out, the only scholar that you probably
will ever hear about of the euhemerist school, and that only if you like old
Christian books, you might have heard of a book called The Two Babylons, by Alexander
Hyslop. Alexander Hyslop is the only
one that modern evangelicals even read of these men, but Hyslop was late in the
group, there were other men before him.
All these men were
Bible-believing Christians; they lived in the era when ancient documents were
coming to light. What they decided they
had to do was explain this, and they were passionately interested in the
classics and the Greek gods and goddesses, etc., they wanted to put this
together, and they believed, there were Christians in the 17th, 18th,
and 19th century who had all this little data about mythology, and
they, as Christians, wanted to fight against that mythology. Their method of fighting it was to dissolve
the power of the gods and goddesses by saying they weren’t really gods and
goddesses, what they were, were the sons and daughters of Noah, and they would
go into elaborate details, tracing features.
These guys had it down to who was who, who did what, who Nimrod was in
Gen. 10 actually shows up under three or four different names, he appears in
Egyptian history under a certain name, he appears in Syrian history, and they
went into extreme details. If you ever
see the book The Two Babylons
you’ll see what Hyslop does, he goes into all kinds of details, fine print
footnotes, all kinds of stuff.
These men died out, and
their views just slid off the table and nobody bothered to pick them up and
thought that’s all obsolete history because after all, we know now that man
lived ten thousand or a hundred thousand, or a million years before, so
obviously such a mythological thing could never have happened in history. Pilkey went back and said wait a minute,
these euhemerists were godly Christian scholars who were on to something, and
nobody’s ever followed up on their work, so what would happen if you did
that. That’s Pilkey’s whole point.
On page 91, here’s where it
ties in to this graph I’m showing you.
Remember the graph of the longevity decline of man after the flood,
there’s a striking anomaly in it.
During the decline in longevity between Noah and Abraham, grandfathers
outlived their grandsons, a never to be repeated experience in human
history. This strange era, the
euhemerists believed, was the key to understanding how ancient civilization
exploded into view. It also furnishes
the clue to deciphering the tribal myths found around the world, that in fact
what happened was that what we call civilization suddenly erupts in glory and
grandeur. Suddenly you have Egyptians
with their mighty architecture.
Suddenly you have these high, very literate elaborate pictographs, you
have all this mathematics being done to compute volumes, etc. Where did this suddenly spring up? If you think about how you learned history,
did you ever get a good explanation for that?
On one page of the history book they show one guy that looks like he
forgot his banana; and on the next page we have the Pharaoh’s building a
pyramid, with all kinds of tremendous solid geometry relationship going
on. Wait a minute, how do you go from
bananas to pyramids? What’s the
transition here? And that’s what the
euhemerists were arguing about, the only explanation you’ve got is that
something like this happened, and this is very important to understand Noah
because the Bible doesn’t explain this, for a reason we’ll get into.
The Bible gives us the
Noahic story and the spiritual side, but the Bible passes over and doesn’t
mention much about what other things these guys did. Well, the “other things” that Noah and his sons did were
basically the start of what we call civilization. It was his grandchildren that started the pyramids, perhaps his
sons. They probably got the idea for
the pyramid probably from Mt. Ararat.
We don’t know that because they didn’t leave a document to prove it, but
why was there this passion in the Egyptian delta, which by the way was being
flooded, mind you, because the first Pharaoh, Menes, got his power because he
was able to stop the flooding in the Nile delta.
Where do they get all
this? We can’t prove this, but this,
but the very form of the pyramid is a form of stability, it will not go away,
it is not going to be knocked over, it’s not going to change it’s there today,
tomorrow, and forever, it’s a symbol of power and authority. Why did they build pyramids? Was it a memory of a fact, in an apostate
way, that I will never be disturbed again, as for example Nimrod did with his
tower to heaven, or what? We don’t
know, but we surely know that it was very early on, if we’re to take the Bible
chronology. We don’t have thousands of years here to get started. You only have one or two generations to get
this stuff going. So how does it
explode into view? It explodes into
view because of the fabulous genius and the longevity of these people, the
first few people that populated this world.
They passed this tradition on in tremendous rapidity, with great
creative force.
On p. 91, “If there were
only a few centuries between Noah and Abraham, then ancient civilization in
Egypt and elsewhere must have been established rapidly. Such rapid development of society could only
have occurred if there were brilliant leadership—architects, engineers,
farmers, political leaders—who spread out quickly into the earth to subdue
it. Pilkey notes that such a brilliant
core family behind the rapid origin of our civilization is inconceivable to
modern man. We cannot accept the total
‘god-like’ authority that would have been required for such a project because
of democratic ideas.”
I want you to read with me
through this quote, it’s got a lot of good stuff in here: “Noah’s family has not been clearly
conceptualized because there is something truly frightening about such a family
to scholars of the modern democratic era….
The fear of falling victim to merciless despotism is a democratic soul
of evolutionary thought, which refers the origin and maintenance,” watch this
sentence, “which refers the origin and maintenance of civilization to gradual
or powerless processes rather than to charismatic power.” You see, what he’s arguing here is that the
explanation for the explosive development of these high cultures is that you
had geniuses that controlled it. Noah
and his sons set out to really, literally design the world we live in, they
were the people that created society.
And they did it with god-like power. Their power was so awesome, living
this long compared to the people who came after them, that they began to be
worshiped as absolute gods and goddesses and despots. They had an awesome
degree of power, and the Pharaohnic dynasties of Egypt perpetuated that
power. Whatever Pharaoh said, Pharaoh
got. So the radiating power from Noah
and his family was enormous, probably due to this little feature of history
that occurred in that era.
As Pilkey goes on to say: “A
fourth millennium Pharaoh Menes is a harmless cipher; a third millennium
Pharoah Menes” meaning you don’t have that much time to get it started, “is
part of a sublime and terrifying spectacle.
The later chronology implies that Noah’s family was empowered to build
world civilization overnight. As democrats, we reserve the right to paint emperors
in our own image. We do this at the
risk of fulfilling the prophecy of Jude who warned that some of us would deny
the ‘mones despotes,’ Jesus
Christ,” the only Lord, the only dictator, Jesus Christ. Notice the word
“despot,” Jesus is called a despot in the good sense. Jesus, when He comes back, is not going to run an election
platform, He is going to rule as a dictator.
“…through a popular distaste for despotism in general. Prior to the democratic revolutions of the
later eighteenth advantage in positive evidence….”
Then if you look at the next
quote, “By viewing Noah as a mere survivor of the flood, rather than as a
builder of nations, we have not only neglected his 350-year postdiluvian
lifetime, but we have ignored those spiritual ideas which made the Gentile
world just that, a designed cosmos…. In
estimating the spiritual worth of Noah’s cosmos we are faced with the striking
fact that its Gentile populous, if not the cosmos itself, will survive all
subsequent judgment into the millennium and eternal state…. On the other hand, the prophecy of Dan. 2:44
reveals that this cosmos, as the seat of political authority, must be
destroyed. Gentile political power must
yield to the Messiah of Israel and in so doing will extinguish a peculiar
regime dating back to Noah’s postdiluvian lifetime.”
What he’s saying is we’ve
got to get a vision for what went on, the Bible doesn’t fill us in with all the
details, but secular history provides us with the facts. So turn to page 93 and look at the two
texts, we are looking at the re-institution of these divine institutions,
because whatever God did He reenergized these divine institutions, in spite of
the fact they’re now fallen, they were the building blocks of many high,
brilliant, well-educated high cultures.
In Gen. 1:28 vs. Gen. 9, I put them side by side so you can watch the
difference. On the left side is the
original institution; on the right side is the reinstitution after the
flood. I’m drawing attention to the
last part of that quote on the left, Gen. 1:29, “Then God said, Behold, I have
given every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and
every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.” But on the
other side, Gen. 9:3, it says “Every moving thing that is alive shall be food
for you; I give all to you as I gave the green plant. [4] Only you shall not
eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”
What strange thing has God done here?
All of a sudden, when He reconstitutes the first divine institution in
language very much reminiscent of Gen. 1, He begins to give an instruction
about diet that now makes us carnivorous.
Genesis 1:28-30 Genesis 9:1-4
“Be fruitful and multiply “Be
fruitful and multiply and
fill the earth, and subdue
it; and
fill the earth.
and rule over the fish of
the And
the fear of you shall be
sea and over the birds of
the on
every beast of the earth
sky and over every living
thing and
on every bird of the sky;
that moves on the earth.” with
everything that creeps on
the ground, and
all the fish
of the sea,
into your hand
they are given.
Then God said, “Behold, I
have Every
moving thing that is
given every plant yielding
seed alive
shall be food for you:
that is on the surface of
all the I
give all to you as I have
earth, and every tree which
has the
green plant.
fruit yielding seed: it
shall be only
you shall not eat the
food for you.” flesh
with its life, that is its blood.”
Why is this sudden
transformation? Now we’re meat eating. That was not mentioned in Gen. 1, a very
significant point. Do you know why I
know it’s significant? Because what
happens under the Mosaic Law to the dietary controls? Very elaborate. Who were
the original readers of Genesis? The
Israelites, who were living under a kosher diet regime. The origin of the clean and unclean meat was
[not sure of word, sound like passionate], it might not be to us but it was to
them, and they were the first readers of this text.
Therefore when we read this
little thing about diet and we just pass over, we’re Gentiles, we don’t pay any
attention to that stuff, we just eat.
They didn’t. This was an
important point to them. So now we have
to reflect on why meat eating starts in at this point. This is why on page 93 I mention, “God wants
us to respect the life that is given up, and acknowledge that it is His, not
ours. Gen. 9:4 limits our claims on
animals when we kill them for food. The
only exception given” in Scripture “by Jesus thousands of years later when He said
not only to eat His flesh but also to drink His blood (John 6:53-56).” In John 6 He says go ahead and drink My
blood. What’s stunning about that
announcement in John 6 is it flies in the face of the Noahic Covenant. A Jew would have been stunned by what Jesus
said there. Never ever before has
anyone ever authorized the eating of meat with blood, and Jesus, as though He
deliberately wanted to make a point, a point that would stun His Jewish
hearers, he says go ahead, eat My flesh and drink My blood, in total collision
with this regime that had been set in motion.
So this is not just
peripheral detail in the text, there’s something going on here in the
text. Turn to Gen. 9, we want to look
at some context. [blank spot, longer
than usual] Ask yourself, what is the
objective, in other words in verse 4, what is the concern God seems to have in
verse 4, 5 and 6. Look at those
passages. Verse 4, “Only you shall not eat the flesh with its life, that is,
its blood.” In other words, isn’t there
a reticence to say you can eat meat, BUT, the life that has been given up to
provide you with food is precious, and I’m putting little boundaries around it
just so you are reminded of what is going on here. There’s something abnormal, there’s something wrong, we’re living
in a fallen environment now, the Noahic world, unlike Adam’s world, Adam began
not knowing the difference between good and evil, Noah’s world starts out with
the knowledge of both good and evil, and involved in this is death, and all the
evil processes and decay and fallenness.
Now we have that man must
literally… what’s the act of eating?
Think about it. What more primitive basic thing to we do every single
day? We eat, and what are we doing when
we eat? Ask yourself, what happens if
you don’t eat? Eating is just basic
sustenance. What has happened here is
God has said that for us to be sustained in our lives we tread on the lives of
somebody else. To keep us alive someone
else has to die. That’s the life in the new world. It is a life of existence based on sacrificial death. In other words, eating is actually an
adumbration or a fore view of the saving work of Jesus Christ. Going into our carnivorous regime when it’s
authorized by God, with these little provisos that I don’t want you to eat the
blood, you’ve killed an animal, I recognize you have to eat and you have to do
that, but having done that, there are certain cautions, the animal absolutely
is not yours, it’s Mine, and you have taken from Mine to sustain yourself, and
I’ve let you do this, but there’s a caution here.
Notice how this reads very
nicely in verse 5-6, “And surely I will require your lifeblood; from every
beast I will require it. And from every
man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man. [6] Whoever sheds
man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed.
For in the image of God He made man.”
We’ll get into capital punishment later, but what’s the goal of verse 6? What’s on God’s heart? Is He authorizing this horrible thing called
capital punishment just because He thrills at it, or does He have something on
His mind. It looks like what you see on
His mind is in verse 6b, the last part of verse 6, “For,” explanation of why I
am doing this, here’s My explanation, “in the image of God I have made man.” Something very valuable and precious is here
that’s been destroyed. So what you get
out of verse 4-6 is the sanctity of life, and that life, whether it’s in the
life of the animal or whether it’s in the life of man, is something to be
cherished, to be honored, and to be respected.
Even though now man eats meat and he destroys animals in order that he
may survive, the act of doing it itself becomes something of honor, it is to be
done in an honorable way.
What you can’t help but
conclude in all this is that when God reconstituted this first domain, this
first dominion responsibility, this first divine institution, He forced us to
have to acknowledge that our dependency is not now, just as a creature eating
grapes, eating herbs, eating plants that don’t die because they don’t have nephesh.
The word “life” in Hebrew is “nephesh.”
Plants, you can say gee, there was death, plants die when they were eaten. Plants are never said to have hephesh, never. Only animals and apparently only certain animals have nephesh.
Animals that have nephesh are
animals in whom there is the breath of lives.
Someone breathes, that’s called life.
Now a Christian biologist can think, what’s the difference here between
a plant cell and an animal cell and botanist vs. zoological complications, but
be aware that the Scripture does make that distinction. So when Adam and Eve ate grapes, apples,
whatever else they ate, vegetables, whatever they ate they were not killing
life. Then comes along Noah and Noah
starts to destroy life to eat. There’s
a tremendous difference here, and it’s fundamental because eating is the one
basic thing we all have to do to sustain our lives.
So the very way we sustain
lives in the new world is by substitutionary death. What is this talking about?
You see, our civilization has been very cleverly designed. We don’t think of this, we think animals are
carnivorous, man is carnivorous, he just evolved from the apes, no
problem. But that’s an utterly
different than this, here we have a discontinuity in history, man changes the
way he eats in such a way that he now has to be sustained by sacrificial death
in a physical way. And what’s
interesting is that this is occurring to a divine institution for both believer
and unbeliever, which means that every member of the human race is sustained by
sacrificial death. That’s an
interesting point. It’s a set up,
because later, when Jesus, in John 6 begins to try to explain what He has done
on the cross, He uses eating and in particular meat eating as the illustration
of salvation. Who set that all up? For centuries man was eating meat to ingrain
within us that we are dependent upon death, we are dependent upon death, we are
dependent upon death, in order that we live somebody else may die, in order
that I live somebody else dies, etc.
Then along comes Jesus and says the same thing.
The pattern and structure of
the universe is in league and coherence and a logical connection with the
cross. So as we work our way forward in
history, it’s pointing to God’s solution.
So here’s one of the major things we want to see, and to see that this
is a serious point. The New Testament
makes a little commentary about this business of food. It’s always been an agenda of paganism to
try to erase guilt of sin, some way, shape or form. Therefore, whenever the
creation seems to be too clear in its message about God’s creator-hood and our
creature-hood, we got to drown it out and bury it. That’s why I have every
title in this series of notes, the buried truth of something, the buried truth
of this, the buried truth of that. What
am I getting at? Because sin buries the
truth, that’s what we’re getting at.
Not only is the truth literally buried in the ground underneath our feet
when we walk on sedimentary rock and we dig down and find animal death in the
rock, we’re walking on judgment. When
we drive our cars and use a gasoline product that comes from an oil field, it
comes from animals that have died; we can’t even drive our cars without killing
something. The very engines we use
depend for their existence on input from the death of life, animals.
So you would say paganism
has to do something with this, and indeed it does. The pagan mind has always played and toyed with getting back to
nature. It has always tried to undo,
for example, government, it has always tried to undo marriage and go to a
commune, it has always tried to undo the city and go to the country, it has
always tried to undo the eating of meat.
Interesting. Pagan religions are
almost inevitably vegetarians in the Far East. In 1 Tim. 4:3 notice the
characteristic. “Men who forbid
marriage and advocate abstaining from foods, which God has created to be
gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth.” Obviously in the context it’s talking about
men, verse 2, “hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a
branding iron,” and in verse 1, talking about these are basically “deceitful
spirits and doctrines of demons.” The energizing forces behind the pagan
mentality manifest themselves historically and socially in this position.
Why is there meat? Is there
some physical reason for it? I cite in
the notes one Christian doctor who thinks there may be a physical reason why,
when we transitioned from this old regime to the new, obviously something
radical is happening physiologically and anatomically to our bodies,
obviously! Apparently meat provides
something that is necessary for our bodies under this regime. Maybe some day we’ll learn what. All we learn today is all the dangers about
cholesterol and red meat and all the rest of it. But that’s not the final word: that’s NOT the final word! Someday somebody is going to figure out why
eating of meat is essential on this planet for us in our time, and we don’t
know why. The Christian doctor I quote
thinks it may have something to do with the concentration of protein with
spiritual conflict, that’s just her speculation, but I throw it in just to
stimulate some thinking about what possibilities do you think caused this.
So we’ve looked at the
reconstitution of the first divine institution. Let’s look at the second one, marriage. We’ll turn to Gen. 2 and note something we skipped because we ran
out of time. One night we started with
a little imaginative geography lesson.
You say what’s that got to do with marriage. We’ll get to that. We said that if you look at the text you
have a river flowing out of Eden, out
of Eden, as though Eden is some area out of which a river flows, and east part
of Eden there was a garden. The garden wasn’t all Eden, the garden was a garden
in Eden. And the river flowed out of that, and then
did a funny thing that rivers don’t do, and that is it went in four
directions. So this four-river scheme
seemed to have something to do with the structure of this antediluvian world,
strange world it was.
Modern scholars look upon
this as all mythical, this is a land of myth, and the reason they say that is
because you look at the names in verses 11, 12, 13, 14, you can say what you want
to, two of those four rivers are known, the other one flows around the whole
land of Cush, and the only way that could be, in the present earth, Cush was
Ethiopia, the geography just doesn’t fit.
So an obvious answer to this is that it doesn’t fit because the world
was different then. These four rivers
were remembered in history and the two rivers that came out of Ararat, the
Tigris and Euphrates, the first rivers probably that postdiluvian man saw, he
named them and he named them for the rivers he was familiar with, Noah’s family
knew these four rivers. They obviously
started naming things from the pre-flood world, just like York, Pennsylvania
named for York, England. So there’s
this renaming that goes on.
The human race grew and
grew, by the time of Noah’s day, so you have many families, you start out with
Adam, Eve is derivative of Adam genetically, an important point, God did not
make a pair, He made Adam and then He made Eve out of her, so genetically she’s
derivative of him. Then from this you
have the gene pool. The mystery happens here is that what led to this gene
pool, where did it all go? We know that
eight people were saved in Noah’s day, so we have Noah, Noah’s wife, Ham, his
wife, Japheth, his wife, and Shem and his wife. So here is where the gene pool
was saved. The interesting thing is, if
this is Noah, this is Ham, Japheth and Shem, Ham, Shem and Japheth obviously
are heavily influenced because they’re the physical sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife,
so they are heavy with their genes. The
only other source of diverse genes are the three women who married those three
guys; there is where another source of genetic material came from.
So marriage, through these
three women could well have supplied, because “be fruitful and multiply and subdue
the earth,” those three women are the only other source for the genetic
material for everybody that exists today.
Whether what we call racial distinctives occur because of some physical
transform after the flood, or whether in fact they were always there from the
start, whether basically what we call racial differences among men just simply
are genetic out workings of what was originally in Adam, if we believe that
though then these women become very critical.
What Dr. Pilkey’s research
shows is that the pagans universally remember that there were four matriarchs
that originated the human race. And
interestingly their names translate to the red matriarch, the yellow matriarch,
the white matriarch and the black matriarch.
Isn’t that interesting that those also just happened to be the four
racial colors. So the question then
becomes whether here, through Noah and these marriages that not only did God do
an amazing thing, not only did God save only people in one family, but that one
family just happened to carry key genetic stock for the entire diversity of the
human race that we see. I won’t go into
details but in Gen. 10, 11, and 12 we deal with how civilizations started and
we find that these racial traits show up in history again and again and again,
each with its strengths, each with its weaknesses. And it’s really a sound view of race. It’s amazing to me in a day when we’re talking about racial
structures and harmony, nobody ever noticed that the Bible has a very, very
interesting concept of race, how every race needs the other one, and whenever
you have, even to the point where Jesus was carrying the cross, there were
various races that were involved in the act of carrying the cross. So whatever God has done, He has always
utilized all of the races together.
Marriage, as it was
constituted after the flood, seemed to include the diversity that had started
since Adam and Eve, and out of this we obtain the racial distinctives.
What we’re going to do next
time is go into what happened with the family, because what happens here, when
we come to the third divine institution, this is where a major change
occurs. God reconstitutes the family,
but now the family becomes the source of the nations. We have a new thing here, and then God begins to add something
else, that He never added before, a new responsibility that is tied in with
nations, that is the origin of civil authority, the sword.
Just to prepare for that I
want to conclude by turning to Gen. 3:24.
Notice that the last verse of Scripture that describes what happens at
the fall says that right there at the gate of Eden, and this is the first time
in the Bible the word “sword” has occurred. “So He drove the man out; and at
the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword
which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.” The sword
is to kill, always in Scripture the sword is to kill; it’s a tool of
killing.
I work at Aberdeen Proving
Ground, we make swords, our job is to make the best weapons to kill the most
number of people in the most efficient way we can. I work with men who have put 20 to 30 years of their life in a
weapons system that is designed to kill people, and they get all excited when
one of them works. It’s a strange world, you sit down to lunch with one of
these guys and he’s all excited because his gun worked. There was a man there that was telling me
about a story that occurred during the Viet Nam war, our guys would be at these
fire bases, artillery support bases of the troops out in the field, and the
troops were out here and the VC would end run the troops and come in and take
out these guys at the fire bases. The
guys at the artillery post had big guns but not very many little guns, so what
they would do, and they were getting overrun by hundreds of these Vietcong’s,
they’d lower the gun down to zero elevation and fire into them. Well, you can fire a tank round into 200
people but the problem it does a great job vaporizing 4 people but there’s 80
more coming at you, it’s not an efficient tool. So this guy devised a round that would fit in the cannon that
would throw out about 10,000 spinning red hot razor blades, and it would shred
human flesh, and so he gave 3 of these rounds, one to one fire base, one to the
next one, one to the third one, and they were just waiting for one of these VC
attacks where they would try to mass attack one of our artillery bases and one
day it happened, and the guys lowered the thing down to zero degrees, fired it
and there was no big explosion, just kind of like a puff of smoke, and the GI’s
said well that didn’t work, so they go back to reload the gun with the other
ammunition, and they say wait a minute, where did they all go? And they were smeared all over the trees,
stuck with jagged pieces of metal and steel, they came back to this guy, and it
was hey, worked good, great, it worked.
So these are the guys that build swords. That’s their life profession, to build swords and kill
efficiently. That’s the kind of people
I work with, nice people.
But the point is, that
“sword” in Scripture always means killing, so in Gen. 3:24 when you have the
flaming sword, that is a killing tool, and it is the first use of execution.
Anybody who tried to get into Eden was summarily executed if they tried
it. And who was doing the
executing? Man? No, angels, apparently. Angels appeared to have the power of the
sword at this point in history. Now
what you read in Gen. 9 with the Noahic Covenant is the power of the sword
moves from the angelic sphere to man.
This is a momentous thing that happens in history. And all I say is what I started with is that
this is a mysterious time of history, a very mysterious thing, great changes
occurred with Noah and his family, and we do well to pay attention because it
explains things that bother us today, things that we don’t understand about
history. It gives us an outline, it
gives us a basis of working, and it’s all found because the author of history
wrote this text for us. Next time we’ll
discuss this issue of killing, the issue of the nations and the languages and
the races.