04 - Genesis 4–6 - The Rise and Fall of the First Civilization

Revelational Foundations Series Lesson 4

The Rise and Fall of the First Civilization

Fellowship Chapel
06 February 2022
Charles Clough

© 2022, Charles A. Clough
www.BibleFrameworkApplied.org

This morning is our fourth and last time going through some of the chapters in Genesis 1 to 11. At the beginning of this presentation I’ll reference a diagram that’s available as the third slide in the slideshow link on the website. We’re going to review what we’ve been doing for the last two or three times. Because the theme this year [for the chapel] is the foundation is Jesus Christ …

What I’ve tried to do in this series is say, yes, Jesus is the foundation; but if we have been raised, if we are new believers and we been raised in the church, when we hear Jesus is the foundation; I think it’s a tendency to just visualize Jesus as the foundation of our personal, individual spiritual life which He obviously is. But what we’re trying to show is something that was lost back in the 1920s in the evangelical church and that was the liberals (the modernists) came in and basically politically outmaneuvered the conservatives. This is why in that era of the 1920s people call it the era of the “roaring 20s”. They usually think of the drinking going on. A lot more was going on than just the life at the bars.

It was a time when every major denomination, other than maybe a few conservative ones like Southern Baptists, were taken over by modernist theology. Young men had gone to Germany. They’d gotten their PhDs in theology; but when they came into the pulpits of America, they used biblical words; but they did not mean the biblical meaning to those words. A lot of people were fooled into thinking this is Christianity, but it finally exposed itself and you had a split.

Now what we want to think about when we come to the Lord Jesus—we just sang about the glories of creation—is that the Jesus we know in our personal life as believers is also the Creator. When John starts his Gospel, he talks about “and the Word”, and so on; and what he’s doing there with the Word is saying that Jesus Christ was the One who spoke the Creation into existence.

Slide 2

Here’s Colossians 1:16–20 in the New Testament. Let’s follow Paul’s logic here in this passage. He says, “By Him.” The “Him” here in context is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. So, when you read this, let’s try to visualize what Jesus did.

“By Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible,”

So, we’re talking not just about the geophysical universe. We’re not talking just about the human race. We’re also talking about the individual principalities and powers. We’re thinking about the sons of God in Psalm 82, Psalm 89. These are these beings. Some are righteous. Some are not. And we showed various passages about that last time.

But here are some of the works of Jesus. He was the Creator. He spoke the universe into existence. It was the Lord’s. We use the word “Lord Jesus,” of course, for God incarnate; but we’re talking about God the Son before He was incarnate. He created the world. He assigned to man the task of subduing the Earth. Jesus was the One who at the Fall of man in His incarnate form, the Son of God cursed Satan and the ground of the post-Fall geophysical earth. Speaking to Adam and to Eve, He did not curse them, but He made their dominion work harder.

So, Paul says,

“By Him, all things were created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones,”

Look at the number of nouns here in this sentence. This is the whole spectrum of the invisible world.

“All things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.”

Those are the invisible ranks. There’s a hierarchy of these powers.

“All things were created through Him and for Him.”

So again, we want to expand what we are thinking when we say Jesus is the foundation. He’s the foundation of everything.

“He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.”

So now it’s a further assertion about the pre-incarnate Son of God. Not only is He before all things, but He holds everything together. Son of God and He is the head of the body.

Now he gets into the dispensation of the church.

“The Head of the Body, the Church … the firstborn of the dead that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness [of the PLEROMA] should dwell.”

What that means is, that you don’t see it so much in the Gospels of Jesus flashing forth with His omnipotent power, but you see it in several places. It’s very restrained because Jesus was on a mission of mercy.

But, think of what happened at the wedding feast. You have this gigantic urn of water and Jesus walks over to it and basically turns it into wine. Well, think about—what is wine? Wine has millions and millions of carbon atoms. Where did the carbon atoms come from? They weren’t there before. It was just hydrogen and oxygen. All of a sudden, He walks in and we have carbon atoms and everything gets organized and it’s wine. So that’s His power.

We see that in other instances; but again, it’s like a lampshade on a bright light. So, it might be some excuse then for us thinking that we are in the position of minority, and we are, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a worldview that encompasses everything. If we are to believe who Jesus is, the Son of God, and He is everything and He has assigned dominion to the human race; that means He has truth in every area and that the Bible is a sourcebook that undergirds all of creation.

One of the things I mentioned the first time we spoke was when the fundamentalist-modernist controversy formed, we lost a lot of ground. But we lost a lot of ground in the late 1700s and 1800s. The world was prepared for Darwin by Lyell and the other people. There were godly historical geologists at that time, went out and did a lot of fieldwork uncovering evidences of rapid deposition, but they made a political and social errors. They were independent believers. They were kind of Lone Rangers here, Lone Rangers there. They did not get together in a group; and so, they didn’t reinforce each other, and didn’t share their findings. And they lost out to the uniformitarians that got together, formed their journals, published, and excluded the flood geologists. So, they lost that battle.

But today there is no excuse for us because we’ve been 90 years since the fundamentalist-modernist debates. There are groups now in the Christian community where specialists from different areas are getting together. They believe in the authority of Scripture. It’s encouraging to know this and that’s why I’ve tried to hopefully strengthen your faith and confidence in the Word of God. These are people and I’m associated with one working on climate. If you’re interested, we have some of the papers up here, just copies of one that I published for the Cornwell Alliance.

Who is the Cornwell Alliance? The Cornwell Alliance is a group of theologians, economists, and creation science people who are tired of hearing the propaganda, who are tired of being suppressed, tired of being excluded from journals; and we’re going to publish our own.

So, it’s been so effective that Senators in the United States Senate have said they’re going to introduce legislation to try to convict us of whatever—corruption or something—that we are all funded by the oil companies. Most of us are living on Social Security by the way—not any money coming from oil companies to report. But the point is, it’s encouraging that Christians are getting together, grounded on the authority of Scripture.

We have certain people teaching philosophy. We have legal scholars. We have great organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom. There are 3,500 attorneys who are Christians who believe in the Word of God who are ready to go in whenever Christians are bullied in the schools—whether they’re bullied in their companies—because the bureaucracy out there has not kept up with constitutional law.

They come in and they say, “Well, you can’t do this. You can’t wear that. You can’t speak out.” Yes, we can. ADF will immediately get one of these lawyers on that case and then they can go. They have a specialized group. I think it’s about 300 or 400 attorneys who are specialists going all the way up to the Supreme Court.

So, these are battles. And guess what! They’re winning 80% of the legal cases. These are sharp attorneys; and they’re encouraging one another instead of just being the Lone Rangers. We have educators. We have some of the finest teachers that are working in Christian schools and also in public schools.

In public school, you’ve seen some of the cases where there was a coach in Virginia, a Christian, who refuses to use the wrong pronouns for his students. He calls them by their anatomical name and has refused to do it. So, the school system comes down against him and says, “You’re going to lose your job.” He says, “I will lose my job, but I am not going to deny my Christian faith. You are imposing your secularism on me, so it’s not just me imposing Christian faith on you. It’s the other way around.” Sure enough, his case is going before the Supreme Court. The robustness of Christian attorneys is there, and we need to exploit that and support them.

Another thing wherein the law which I was very interested to see this. The lawyers on the Christian side have said that the biblical definition of marriage and family is the only definition that we will accept. Now that is going to have severe repercussions.

In the handout, I go through some of the implications. By doing this I’m just trying to show that when we read Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and Genesis 3, it carries implications for how we should think about every area.

So, when you read in Genesis 1—what did we say about Genesis 1? It is the only history of the universe that was observed all the way back to the creation. None of the others—whether you use radioactive dating or whatever—the point is, it’s not direct measurements. Of course, you remember that string thing that I showed [in a previous presentation from one end of the auditorium to the other. Here we have the 67 feet, or however long it is from door to door, a line that represents Earth history and 1/2 inch of those 67 feet is the only area we have measurements. So why should we be intimidated by a nonbiblical view of the universe? 

The seven-day week made the point that people have tried in history to change the calendar. The Communists with all their arrogance tried to have a 10-day workweek because they thought that would be more efficient. They found out the human body doesn’t work that way. You have to have the cycle. So, isn’t it interesting? Every continent, everybody has a seven-day week. What do we read in Genesis 1? When did it start? It started because God created the universe in seven days.

Then we have in the other implication, the most important implication, we have to keep this in our mind all the time because our sanctification, the gospel of Jesus, how we live, trusting the Holy Spirit to grow us in Christ. All that is predicated on two-level view of reality. That is, you have the Creator who goes from eternity to eternity. There was never a time when Father, Son, and Spirit did not exist and there never will be another time either.

Slide 3

But we’re creatures. We’re down here at the second level and therefore we have a relationship. How should we—we don’t do this all the time. But how should we as creatures come before our Creator? And we are to have a certain attitude. That attitude is humility. The only opposite to that attitude is arrogance.

So, unbelief is really whether it’s us in our weakness and unbelief or of people who are just unbelievers; their lives have to be built on an arrogance that “I as a finite limited creature, I somehow can ascertain reality. I somehow can define truth.”

How do you do that? You have a limited data set. You’re finite. So how are you going to come to these conclusions?

Then we have that fact that all creatures who are people (the human race) have according to Paul, Romans 1—and this is encouraging if you have a family, you have people in your family and you’ve prayed for them, maybe for years and years and years, but the encouraging thing to keep up doing what you’re doing even though you’re discouraged, even though it seems not to be doing anything is this. That person you’re praying for, knows very well God exists. They have an inborn sense of deity. We know this because one day they’re going to be judged before God.

What kind of defense do you think they’re going to have? Come before the Great White Throne and say, “Well God, your original revelation was very insufficient for me. It wasn’t sufficient.” I don’t think that’s going to pass.

The point is that everyone has an individual responsibility. Does that mean everybody is a believer? No, but every person who exists reacts or doesn’t react to their sense of deity. Those of us who are Christians, maybe we were prodded into seeking meaning like I was. Or, we had a person come to us and we never thought much about it, and we became a believer. But we have the individual. The other thing to remember about this responsibility, the sense of deity, is it’s not group. It’s individual; and that’s a fundamental thing about life. We are individually responsible.

Critical race theory is wrong because it suffers from a logical contradiction called hasty generalization. You can’t hastily put people in groups because there will always be an exception that doesn’t fit your group. So, it’s a faulty logic that’s behind that whole thing.

Let me go through Genesis 2—some of the implications that God in Eden apparently judged from Ezekiel 28. Apparently, God’s headquarters, as it were, is in a great mountain. How do we know it was in a mountain? Because Genesis 2 says the waters flowed out through all the Earth. Waters flow downhill with gravity, so it must have been a high ground.

Anyway, at that point we have God making man and He shows us Adam and Eve (or He showed Adam). He has a garden there. “Adam, you’re in a garden.” What we said was this is a very important observation for a Christian biblical view of ecology and environmentalism. God has given the human race (us) a dominion mandate that the meaning of our lives is to go out, live our lives out, and part of that is making productive use of natural resources. It doesn’t mean raping the environment.

It means this is our Father’s property; and we’re to use it and develop it because God said, “I developed this one little acreage.” I don’t know how many acres it was. “I’ve developed the acreage. This is a garden. Now outside this garden is a wilderness that’s not developed yet. Your job is to go out there and develop the natural resources that I’m giving you as part of the human race.”

Then He creates the woman as the helper to this dominion mandate. The woman that comes in ... If you want a biblical picture of Eve and why it says she’s the helper to the man ... It doesn’t mean she’s lower ranking. In fact, if you read Proverbs 8 carefully, it’s very interesting that wisdom, that skill in life, is said to be feminine, Lady Wisdom. It’s interesting in Proverbs 8 how Lady Wisdom says she is with God. This is wisdom pictured as a woman. She says, “When God created, I was there. I was at His right hand.” So that’s the higher-level picture of the role of the woman. With her, we have marriage and family.

Now there’s a little trick that’s going on by the LGBTQ community. Every once in a while, they convince some Christian to write a book to defend LGBTQ goals. What they do is they say, their lead argument is, “Well there are only five verses in the Bible that even hint at a problem with the extramarital relations and so on. There are only five verses that deal with that.” Wrong. The Bible is a sequence of pedagogical development of truth. Where is marriage first seen? It’s seen in Genesis 2. Where is family seen? In Genesis 4. So right there you’ve got a definition that holds for the rest of Scripture. We’re not looking at individual verses, though they’re there. We’re looking at the definition. The primary definition of marriage and family is in Genesis 2.

It’s interesting because there are three distinct truths about human nature. One is that we’re individually responsible. That means that it can’t be denied. We can try to blame shift, but we are responsible beings. The second thing is there are only males and females, not 32-1/2 genders. The third thing is there is family, and families are the only basic social unit. The social unit is not the community. The social unit is the family.

It was interesting. Some of you, many of you, I think get Imprimis from the Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College, by the way, is one of the finest educational institutions. And do you know why they’re fine? Because back in 1965 or somewhere around that time, maybe it was earlier, the government tried to tell them how to run their campus. They said, “If you don’t run the campus the way we want you to, we’re going to stop all your loans and student loans and the rest of it.” They said, “Go ahead.” And Hillsdale basically cut off all federal funding to the campus, so they are free to do what they want to do educationally. So that’s what makes them high-quality.

Dr. Arnn is the head of the college. He has in this month’s Imprimis, he’s discussing two questions—how to destroy a great republic and how to stop it from happening. When he’s talking about a critical error, and it goes back to Genesis 2. Here’s what Arnn says about how people are made; and that’s being violated by top-down management. Listen to what he says. He’s talking about, in this context, the parents in Loudoun County which was ironic. The heart of the oligarchy lives in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties around Washington, DC and of all the places that have parents coming in and objecting to the way their kids are being educated—where is it that God worked it out? Loudoun County. So, that’s what he’s addressing.

The story about the parents of Loudoun County is about …

And here’s what is critical. It goes back to Genesis 2. Listen to what he says.

“The story about the parents of Loudoun County is about the natural right of mothers and fathers to raise their children.”

That’s the third divine institution. It’s family.

“To interfere with these rights is to interfere with the nature of the human being. To interfere with parents’ love and concern for their children is to interfere with human nature itself.”

He says:

“These facts about human nature were well known during the American Revolution, the very revolution that is besmirched by the members of our ruling class today just as it was besmirched by the ruling class at the time of the revolution. It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by the former ruling class in England that led to the American Revolution. These recent stories from Virginia show that we Americans do not seem to like that interference any better today. In addition to the right to make a living, the right to raise our children, we have the right to participate in our government even if we are not experts, and the right to look to the heavens and not to our ruling class for guidance.”

I’ll repeat that sentence.

“… the right to look to the heavens and not to our ruling class for guidance. We have these rights because we …”

And I love the way he designed the sentence.

“… have these rights because we—every single one of us—were born with them sewn by God into our nature and we cannot find our earthly fulfillment without them.”

So, dealing with more than just a political issue. This is a violation of the way we are made. It’s part of the Christian worldview.

Then we come to Genesis 3, and we find that announced there, very clearly revealed, is a cosmic war between the defectors from the unseen realm and the fallen mankind. They’re fighting over the dominion of the earth. Satan’s idea was he was apparently very angry that God created man with this dominion mandate. “I’m going to stop it,” he said. So, we have a battle going on.

Then we have Adam and Eve built so that they can be saved. That’s why we have the fact that we have the imputed sin of Adam, but we also can have the imputed righteousness, if we trust in Christ. Christ is like the second Adam. He’s building a new human race and what Christ has in His perfection, that righteousness, can be passed and imputed to those who believe in Him. Adam’s sin is imputed to all of us because we all come out of him. Not so in the invisible realm. They’re all individuals. So, we have this vital truth in Genesis 3.

Slide 4

This is a thing. I wanted to show you just the sequence of events. This is one that I have shown here from time to time. Here are the choices. There aren’t 3-1/2 choices here. There are only two choices that you can make. Either we hold that God created everything very good and at a subsequent time we have the Fall. If in between the Creation and the Fall, we had a perfect existence, then from the Fall, a line through till the final judgment (and by final judgment I’m condensing them altogether), we finally have good and evil separated eternally. Their evil is eternally quarantined. So good and evil coexist but within boundaries.

Now, if you don’t believe the Scriptures you are left with paganism, the ying-yang. You have to deal with good and evil forever and ever and ever. Is that the kind of existence that you think you want? That’s unbelief. Sadly, people don’t think it through. It’s either one or the other. There is no third choice here. So, in your discussions, maybe with unbelievers, you can bring this up from time to time.

Slide 5

Let’s now go to Genesis 4. Here we have the emergence of what I said in that previous slide, the first civilization. The first civilization lasted for well over a thousand years between the time God created and the Flood. So that is the first civilization. We want to look at it and see what happened. So, it says:

“Adam knew his wife and she conceived and bore Cain and said, ‘I have acquired a man from the Lord.’ And then she bore again, this time his brother Abel.”

Abel though, that word for Abel is a word used in Ecclesiastes for vanity. So, we don’t know why she names her second son Abel except it’s kind of a hint that he’s not going to be around very long. It wasn’t that she knew that necessarily. It was just like we often do. We see the Lord use a word that we have. So, the point is that the word Cain means a possession versus Abel that has just no comment.

Now it also says that

“Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.”

Both of those are dominion. Then let’s go to this.

Slide 6

“In the process of time, it came to pass, Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord. Abel also brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat. The Lord respected Abel in his offering, but He did not respect Cain and his offering. And Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell.”

… which is the Hebrew word for depression. Scholars have wondered why God picked Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. Oftentimes we’d say, “Well, it’s for the blood.” It was a blood offering, and it wasn’t blood for Cain. The problem with that is, in the Mosaic Law, a presentation could be with no blood. It could be grain. It could be all kinds of things.

Several scholars have pointed this out and I think this is an interesting thing where they say if you look carefully, the description of Abel’s offering is different from the description of Cain’s. In Abel, he brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat, and we know from the Mosaic Law code, the context of that is, that’s the best. In other words, he had a flock; but he deliberately offered the best that God had given him back to God. Cain just brought some stuff from the ground. So, we kind of think that it was just that being cheap on his research.

Slide 7

“So the Lord said to Cain, ‘why are you angry?’ ”

By the way, it is the first counseling case we have in Scripture.

“ ‘Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you don’t do well, …’ ”

and this is the warning He gives Cain. He says:

“ ‘… sin lies at the door.’ ”

I’m using the New English Translation here.

“ ‘… It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.’ ”

And of course, he can’t subdue it by his arrogant feelings. We can’t subdue it by our works. We need the Lord’s … We need to be restored our Lord. We need to be humble. We need to ask Him to help us. Well, he hasn’t even believed yet, apparently.

One of the other themes in this section of Genesis is Genesis 3, which has spoken about two seeds, the Seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent. What Genesis 4 does, it introduces us to the first examples of the seed of the serpent, Cain, and the Seed of Eve, which is Abel.

Slide 8

So, the Lord then counsels further.

“Cain said to his brother, ‘Let’s go out to the field ...’ Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him … Then the Lord said to Cain …”

Notice how each time the Lord comes in these conversations, He starts with a question. Why do you think God starts conversations with questions? Because it’s like tennis. He knocks the ball over the net, and you’ve got to respond to it. So, starting with the question precipitates hopefully some thinking.

“The Lord says to Cain, ‘Where’s your brother Abel?’ And he replied, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

This kind of a smart-mouth answer.

“ ‘I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ”

Imagine saying that to the Lord!

“But the Lord said, ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. So now you are banished from the ground, and when you try to cultivate the ground, it will no longer give the basis for you.”

So now Cain is further dammed, so to speak, further restrained by God and disciplined. But here’s something else in this passage that I think when we read our newspapers and we read about … For example, in the last couple of years in New York City 300 people have been murdered that probably would not have been murdered had we followed the older police operation of getting the criminals early on when they break a window or when they jumped the turnstile. But we don’t do that anymore. We coddle them. Teach them how to be better criminals. That goes back to Genesis 3. They’re in denial that the human race is depraved. That’s why you have the silliness going on in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and New York. The policies are all assuming everybody has a perfectible human nature. “Treat them nice and they will all be good boys and girls.”

So, we have this episode. The blood cries out to God.

Can you imagine God hearing? Reading? He knows the blood of people who have been murdered. That’s God’s attitude.

Slide 9

In Genesis 4:19 we have the development of the seed of Satan. This is some of Cain’s progeny here. The thing to glimpse from this is the inventor of craftsman in bronze and the iron, and the ones with the harp and flute.

What we’re saying there is the arts and the sciences were created because people weren’t cavemen. They didn’t evolve. They weren’t stupid. They were using the brains that God had given them. However, as the last sentence, Lamech was a polygamist. Then he says,

“ ‘I have killed a man for wounding me ... If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech will be 77-fold.’ ”

So, we have the arts and the sciences developed, but used for murder and violence. Great accomplishment. See why we want to review history a little bit.

Slide 10

Adam knew was wife again …

This jumps back in time. Genesis 4:19–24 jump back to what Adam and Eve are doing.

“… and bore a son and named him Seth. ‘For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel whom Cain killed.’ And as for Seth, to him also was a son born.”

You have there:

“Then men began to call on the name of the Lord.”

That’s the Lord’s covenant name. So, we have the Seed of the woman, now doing their thing. Minority? Yes, but nevertheless they are developing a faithful lineage, which will result eventually in Lord Jesus Christ.

Slide 11

“Enoch lived 765 years and he begot Methuselah.

This is a different Enoch from Enosh.

“After he begot Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had sons and daughters. So all the days Enoch were 365 years. And Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him.”

That first rapture has happened in history.

Slide 12

Then we have the strange passage in Genesis 6. In Genesis 6 we read this.

“It came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.”

Commentary on this passage is found in 1 Peter and Jude that our pastor went through when he went through Jude. I just put those two verses up there so we can see biblical authors and how they were interpreting Genesis 6.

“The spirit by whom Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison who formally were disobedient …”

Notice the spirits in prison.

“… when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the Ark was being prepared. …”

That’s from 1 Peter 3:19–20.

From Jude 1:6-7:

“and the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day, as Sodom and Gomorrah … went after strange flesh ...”

So, there’s a sexual thing to these kind of things that happen. Well, all we know is that the result of these, that sons of God and the daughters of men that sometimes people like to make it just, well, they were human people from Cain’s line that went in and intermarried. It’s not talking Cain’s line. The idea here is when men, adam, that means mankind, was expanding the sons of God and the daughters of man. Look at those two phrases. One is talking about a kind, the sons of who? The sons of Adam? No. The sons of God. The daughters of Seth? No. The daughters of men—man. It’s adam, the word for mankind. It clearly has two distinct things going on there, two distinct categories.

Slide 13

Then we read the Lord said after this statement. God had it right here with the first civilization.

“ ‘My Spirit will not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh, yet his days will be 120 years.’ There were giants (Nephilim) in the earth in those days …”

Those are the genetic freaks from the intermarrying.

“And also afterward …”

Meaning that happen after the Flood.

“… when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. They were mighty men [the Gibborim] who were of old, …”

These were giants. We see this in the Book of Deuteronomy when they are going into the land. Remember when the spies came back? What did they say about the inhabitants? They were giants, right? I love how Moses structured this.

In Deuteronomy 3 he says:

“If you hear this people generations later you doubt there were giants in the land go over …”

And he gives you the location in Deuteronomy 3:11. He says, “Go ahead and look at the bed of King Og. When we conquered him, he was sitting on the wall looking at us and his bed was 13-1/2 feet long and 6 feet wide.”

Now all we know, and the Bible doesn’t give us many details, but the Gibborim seem to be genetic freaks. The Goliath, and the sons of Anak, are called Gibborim and they all had six fingers and six toes. So, whatever went on here with this intermarriage, it caused genetic problems. There’s something wrong.

Slide 14

Even today, people who are giants have a genetic problem. Here’s the tall man Robert Wadlow who was 8'11" compared to two women of normal size. This is back in the 20s. You can see the cars in there.

But King Og was 12-1/2 feet tall. So, this guy is 8'11" basically almost 9 feet tall. Imagine what the giants in the land were when they were 12 feet tall. So, it’s kind of a contrast here with what men and creatures mess around with God it always results in bad things.

Slide 15

Well, this is the curse for the Flood. I’m trying to run here so we have some Q&A time.

Slide 16

The Doctrine of Judgment Salvation—here is an example of why if you master a few historic pictures and you can imagine yourself in that moment of history, it helps you think your way through the Scriptures. The judgment-salvation describes God’s relation in His work on Earth at the Flood. But it also describes God’s work on Earth with the Exodus. And it describes what He’s doing now.

When God judges, He also simultaneously saves. So, we have grace before judgment. We have when He does judge, perfect discrimination. There are no erroneous people killed accidentally. These are perfect discriminations. Think of the Exodus. Think of Noah’s ark, and by the way that’s sobering, isn’t it?

Of the population of the first civilization, probably in the millions, there were only eight believers in Noah’s time. Not too many people. One way of salvation. They weren’t three arks. There was only one ark. And salvation requires faith in God’s promises—always requires faith—they had to put blood on the door [by faith] in Egypt and so on. Finally, both man and nature are judged. That’s the synergistic relationship between man and nature.

Slide 17

Let me show one other thing and then we can have a video, I hope. We’re looking now at the Genesis text; and we’re asking, given the dimensions in the Genesis text, how stable was the ark? Dr. Morris had done this. It is very stable if you take the center of gravity. Take a block of wood. You can show this yourself. The Babylonian pagan idea of the Flood was the ark was a cube. So, what I suggested to some teenagers back years ago, I said, “Why don’t you get some balsa wood and cut a cube out and then get balsa wood and cut the size down for the dimensions of the ark. Put them in an aquarium and take your hand and make waves in the aquarium. Which one is stable?” The cube tumbles. The ark doesn’t. So again, it goes back to the dimensions.

So, what I want to do now is have Jason—what he’s going to do. I hope that we’ve got the video … working out is this is a section about eight minutes or five minutes of a video done to report what creation scientists have taken from the data of Scripture and try to fit the observations to known physical processes to see how God possibly could have executed the Flood.

(From the video)

“… 2000 years later humanity had turned so corrupt that God sent the Flood as a judgment against us for God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the Earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And God said to Noah, ‘The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’

“God instructed Noah to make an ark, a word that means box or chest, to specific dimensions for materials and construction and Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him. And Noah and his family entered the ark, along with two of every basic kind of land-dwelling, air-breathing animal with nostrils. These add up to about 5,000 pairs of animal kinds needed to reproduce all the variety and animal life we have today.

“Then in the 600^th year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the 17^th day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. These two events, the fountains of the great deep breaking up and the windows of heaven opening, began the first day of a 371-day-long calamity that resurfaced the earth and killed everything that moved on land.

“Hot magma mixed with steam pierced the earth’s crust. Giant rips or tears ran thousands of miles across the planet. Scalding hot magma vaporized massive amounts of water that jetted into the atmosphere. The water fell back to earth as intense global rain along with torrential rain from heaven for 40 days.

“Worldwide catastrophic rifting caused massive mud-filled tsunamis to speed across the ocean floors, then on the shallow ocean floors killing everything in their path. The first mega sequence wipes out mostly shallow marine habitats. The bursting fountains of the great deep spew out megatons of magma and carbon dioxide. Sure enough, the first mega sequence rocks show a spike in volcanic activity and massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

“During these first 40 days, intense water currents overtopped most of the flooded continents. Water-laden sediment travels at highway speeds. Thick sediment blankets start covering low regions of the continent. Fossils show that the first three mega sequences bury the shallow seas that were filled with marine life as these deposits have almost no trees or land animals. All three mega sequences covered similar environments across North and South America and Africa. The three continents mapped so far. One global cause, Noah’s Flood, best explains this one worldwide effect.

“Then by the 40^th day of the Flood, the absurica mega sequence began hitting. The map showed that this is when things got much worse. Something shoves the water over the tops of even the high lands from that ancient world. The newly forming ocean floor offshore is so hot that it starts very thick pushing up the ocean waters from beneath. The sea level rises dramatically. Molten magma rises and fills the widening gap pushing the mid-ocean ridges wider.

“The hot ocean floor shoves against the continents and then slides beneath it like giant conveyor belts deep beneath the earth in some places. Rather than the conventional model that has the seafloor spreading slowly, this runaway subduction actually happened quickly moving at about 5 mph due to the heat caused by the friction and pressure of the rapidly subducting plates.

“As the diving ocean plates subduct under the land, they push down the continental edges and then release them, creating tsunami cycles that blanket the continents. Just how tsunamis happened today only more intense and frequent.

“For example, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth largest in history was a magnitude 9.1 earthquake that occurred in 2011. This earthquake was caused by an undersea megathrust about 45 miles east of the Japanese coast. At the center, there was a 160-foot slip between the overriding plate that was part of Japan and the underlying Pacific plate. The sea bottom rose about 23 feet when the fault unlocked and the resulting earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami that was 133 feet above sea level and traveled inland for 6 miles.

“The tsunamis occurring during the Flood, however, were different, much different. With the ocean ridge bursting open rapidly and pushing the ocean floor under land continents on a worldwide scale, tsunamis were happening in cycles. Several every hour and with long stretches of subduction zones active at the same time. The incoming phase of a tsunami has a much higher speed and is highly turbulent, which keeps the sediment in suspension, but it leaves behind layers of sediment as it slows down and the retreating phase.

“This cycle repeats several times every hour during the 150-day inundation stage of the Flood, first entombing the shallow marine life, followed by land creatures in different habitats and elevations, leaving behind what we see today in the fossil record.”

Okay, we’ll have to stop it there. There is a lot of evidence that the creation science people have uncovered. I’ll just conclude with a few slides and then we’ll have the Q&A.

Slide 18

Here’s an antediluvian artifact. People say there’s no evidence of humanity. This is in the Cretaceous rim of coal. A guy was splitting coal in a mine and out popped this pot. A pot is obviously a human artifact.

Slide 19

An example that we’ve seen before is poly-strata fossil. The tree apparently didn’t know it was supposed to live there for 2 or 3 million years while the mud slowly accumulated around it. Clearly, the tree was buried rapidly before it could decay.

Finally, all here in Maryland drive out on I-68 out west of Hancock. You can see this for yourself. Here’s the Sideling Hill and you can see that the strata here is curled. Here is a close-up. Now, look at that. Could that have happened after it had turned to rock? It had to have happened while it was flexible in order to turn.

So, there’s lots of evidence out there, just want to encourage you that Christians are getting together and doing their work, critiquing each other are producing stuff that should be encouraging to us is the Word of God.

Q&A

Mike: Thank you so much Charles and the one thing that I know as Charlie and I had talked about; one thing that he wanted to do was to cause us to really be strengthened and encouraged in several ways in our faith in God and in His Word and the authenticity. I’ve just so appreciated that thought. As we kept talking that was his whole thought. So, I talked to him each week in the comment on all these incredible things and gosh, maybe we should just give God thanks for Charles. What an incredible time that we’ve had.

(Audience applauds.)

Mike: We wanted to take just a few moments because there may be some questions that you may have for Charles. If that be the case, we were going to have him answer some of those. So, does anybody have a first question that you’d like to ask Charles over anything over these last several weeks? Anybody?

(Jim asks a question; first part not clearly recorded.) They had all kinds of other stuff where they made implements of bronze and iron which means there were people who were mining and knowing how to mix the chemicals together to create new alloys and stuff like that. They made music. They did all kinds of stuff but …

Charles: (Answer not clearly recorded)

Jim: What I was going to ask is there is all this stuff but it’s the sons of Cain that did this. The Bible doesn’t tell us as much about what Seth and his people had done.

Charles: Well, they don’t because you’ve got to think about how Genesis—it’s highly selective literature. I mean the guy that Moses or the editors consulted, obviously source materials, but they had to abbreviate. They had to pick the high points. You have to read Genesis 4, in light of Genesis 3. Genesis 3 sets up the theme of the two seeds. So, Genesis 4 develops the seeds of Satan that Genesis 4 does not develop. It just lets us know that there is a Seed of Eve there. They don’t tell us what they’re doing, but they are clearly in a minority. So, we know, obviously, they got less and less because of the Flood. If you think of the world population, only the eight saved people in the entire world. I mean think of the improbability of belief.

(Jeek asks a question but first part is not clearly recorded). Now with even within the church is this whole issue of the Rapture. I know that’s something different than what we have talked about, but it is an event that is unknown right now and it doesn’t make sense. I think as you were talking about this whole event, it is also wonderful to know that the Bible talks about another event that is yet coming; that it is not unknown in terms of science. And men are going to be surprised. The whole thing about it is that now that the church is going through this whole issue and the debate that is happening, how do we engage the culture about the coming event that is going to happen, meaning the Rapture?

Charles: Well, the Rapture is not unprecedented. Elisha and Enoch are two previous raptures that happened. We don’t know… They’re obviously supernatural events that happened.

But I think the more sobering way of discussing things is, the Bible presents several earths. This planet has gone through cataclysmic changes. The Flood is one. The curse in Genesis 3 is one. And we’re going to have the whole geology of the earth changing at the Second Advent of Christ. So, I think we need the Rapture—it’s a private church thing, but you have the Tribulation. You’ve got the Millennial Kingdom forming.

How did the Millennial Kingdom get to be the Millennium? Because the Earth is transformed. The Earth’s climate is better, so you have there a transformation. The hermeneutic or the rule of interpretation is set up by the Flood. That tells us how to interpret catastrophic Scripture.

And people, the Preterists … One of the signs that one of the Preterists says is that all the cataclysms of the Book of Revelation, they’re symbolic. They are just for politics. Well, excuse me, but the Flood wasn’t imaginary. The Flood wasn’t for politics. So, the hermeneutic is solid from the Flood and now you take the same hermeneutic and apply it to the Second Advent of Christ in the future events. So, we have a way of interpreting the Scripture that’s consistent.

Paul: … Adam’s sin and then I go to the Flood and after the Flood it would appear that the Earth was completely changed. So, was the curse removed? It says that I will give you green plants. So, I’m wondering what took place between the beginning of the Flood and end of the Flood? It seems like things were changed and no longer …

Charles: Well, the curse on the Earth lasts until it is removed. I think it’s in Revelation where it talks about there’s no more curse. So, there’s no precedent for saying that the curse was removed. What did change is you have a different kind of Earth on the other side of the Flood and it is still dominion—it still holds. You still have the animals and by the way, something else.

Those of you interested in genetics, think about this. The Bible very carefully describes the two male and female animals coming to the ark. It does not say Noah chose those males and females. It says they came to Noah in the ark. Do you know what’s going on there? There’s genetic selection happening.

What do you mean genetic selection? God had to pick the sample of the dog kind, for example. He had to pick a male and female wolf, basically, who had the genetic health to adapt to the new ecology of the Earth after the Flood. Now you have bears that have to accommodate to the Arctic and they have to accommodate to more moderate climates. So, whatever those males and females were, they had to be genetically capable of preserving that kind in the New World with an ecology that Noah couldn’t have known about.

One of the exciting things and again goes back to groups, getting to know people. These groups say you can … We don’t have all the answers, but at least we can go to the lawyers. We can go to the creation scientists. We can go to the Christians who are doing a great job in education. Here you can go to the geneticists who are creating a new model.

Instead of natural selection, they decided to chuck natural selection. Nature doesn’t select anything. What they are doing is they’re going to continuous environmental tracking. The amazing thing is that all the way down to the genetic level, there’s an adaptation that can happen.

For example, one of the scientists at the ICR discovered a fish group that when those fish are in dark waters after two and three generations they’re born without eyes. You take the same fish that are blind, put them in water where this is light and in three generations they get their eyes back.

Now, what does that tell you? It tells you the finesse of God’s engineering. He has engineered these male and female animals so they can adapt and survive by an amazing mechanism that we don’t have a clue how it works. There is something down the genetic level that builds an eye or makes a person blind. How does that happen? These are the wonders of God and how great He is.

Yes, Di, you know the scientist that discovered CET. He taught your Sunday school class.

Di: I was interested in your comment that you see Cain and his descendants of the seed of the serpent, but what I see is the intermarriage in Genesis 6 as the actual introduction of the seed of the serpent where the sons of God … Lucifer was a son of God. It says so in Job, right? He came before the throne. The sons of God intermarried with humans in order to establish the seed of the serpent on Earth.

Charles: Say that again.

Di: So, it talked about Eve’s seed in Seth, and you made a comment that you thought Cain was the seed of the serpent or evidence of the seed of the serpent. But I think Genesis 6 where the sons of God, probably including Satan, intermarry with humans in order to establish the seed of the serpent. In a wide variety of genetic experiments that resulted in the nephilim and probably a bunch of animal hybrid type things like they’re trying to do today with transhumanism and (?) and other things. They are trying to reestablish the seed of the serpent in preparation for the end times.

Charles: I think that there is a lot going on here. Genesis 6 unfortunately only has two verses that describe this. But something messy is going on there. Obviously, this point—if he could contaminate the human race, what would happen to the promise to Eve? He could shut down that whole thing. The idea that Eve … There is going to be a girl, a woman, out there turns out to be Mary and it’s just amazing to think what went through Mary’s mind when she was told that she’s going to be pregnant with no sexual intercourse. What’s going on? You know she’s going get flak like crazy from the village; and she’s put in a position where she has to endure all the criticisms and the flak and the snide remarks. It wasn’t her fault. This was all God in His sovereignty.

So, it is just one of the things and one other thing to think about psychologically. If you and I were Adam or Eve, how would we feel if every single one of our children in fact the first two we have, we get a homicide. Then we talk about disappointed parents. You put your life into your kids and then you know how it is. You get frustrated. You question yourself. Was I a good parent? Did I fail? What happened?

Think of Eve and Adam having to live 900 years and every member of the human race was marked by their sin. How would we cope with that? I think the only way Adam and Eve can cope with that is to be so encouraged by God’s grace that it was God that promised them a coating and God was going to save them. I’m sure they must’ve walked with the Lord. Seth went on. He was godly. So, there was a godly line.

But if we feel the tension as moms and dads about the behavior lifestyle of our children, be encouraged by—you’re not like Adam and Eve and have to live nine centuries through it all.

???: This kind of goes along with what Jim asked, but I assume you believe from what you said that the days of creation were literal days like we would have today. Obviously, God was very busy on the sixth day because He created all the animals. Then He created Adam. Then Adam named all the animals and He created Eve. So, my question is …. talk to other human beings. I assume it’s your understanding that God downloaded a heck of a lot of knowledge into Adam because he didn’t have the time to learn by experience. He was created a mature man. Right away he’s communicating with God. … It must have been basically a lifetime worth of experience downloaded just like that.

Charles: We don’t know how long it was that Adam was alive before even Eve. We know, well we do, because of the sixth day; but God apparently talked with them regularly because remember when they sinned, they heard what? The sound of God walking in the Garden, and they took off. So, God must’ve been meeting in a theophanic form maybe as the Angel of the Lord or something. But there was a conversation going on. It’s so neat to see in Genesis 1, God creates and then He names it. He creates and then He names it. He creates and names it. He creates it and then He names it. And then what does He say in Genesis 2? “Okay you go out and you name now.” So obviously something like that that he must’ve downloaded or he had rapid learning.

???: With Genesis 2 you take the sequential sequence literally it says Adam was created. He named the animals and then after that Eve was created. But we know from Genesis 1 Eve was created on Day 6. So, all that had to happen in one day. There’s no way he could’ve learned all that in a matter of hours.

Charlie: It’s just what Genesis reports.

Mike: Well, thank you so much Charles and I know that a lot of you guys still have other questions or whatever, maybe will look for some opportunities. One of the things that we’re going to be planning on doing is Charles has some incredible insights on the Tower of Babel, which we’ll kind of move into, and I know that’s burning on his heart. So, we’re going to create an opportunity for that. Then maybe we’ll have some more questions. We can kind of follow up on all that.

But I guess, too, it just makes me so realize the interdependency we have upon one another, right, and the gifts that we are to each other. I’ve always said about Charlie, “You know you’ve thought about things I’ve never thought about and he’s forgotten more than I know.” And so, as I sit here and listen to him, I’m reminded of so many things that maybe I had forgotten. But Charlie, again, thanks to God for you and for these last weeks again. I can’t tell you how blessed we really are you guys. I guess as we go away today just with that thought, you know, just that God has so blessed us with an individual that can just express these things to us in such a clear way and with the implications in the day that we live in, to me, is just absolutely incredible.