Life Before The Flood

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hello, my name is Paul, and I'm the voice for a new ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ's teaching of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting scripture, but scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today's focus discussion will be on understanding humanity's life before the flood. In Genesis 4, 1726, we come to a theme: the origin of society. The origin of society. If you want a subcategory to that, secular and sacred society, this is the origin of society here, and while on the surface the text may appear to be rather isolated, rather anecdotal, and somewhat pedantic, that is, strictly informational, and it may appear at first reading to be sort of minor details about the first family, it is in fact much more than that. It is broad, it is sweeping information on the story of civilization, the story of society, the story of culture, the story of man in his development in a very unique era of human history. And that unique era of human history is pre-flood. Scholars call it the Antidiluvian, the Anti, in the sense of ANTE, meaning before, the Antidiluvian society, or civilization. That is, the civilization on the world before the flood. Now you remember, God sent a flood which covered the entire earth, and it drowned all humanity with the exception of eight people. The only ones who survived the flood were Noah and his wife, his three sons, and their three wives, a total of eight people. The universal flood destroyed all humanity, with the exception of those eight people. If you turn over to chapter six for a moment, you have there an explanation of why God sent the flood. Verse 5. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. And the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals, to creeping things, and to birds of the sky, for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found favour, or grace, in the eyes of the Lord. Then it goes on to mention Noah as a righteous man, blameless in his time, he walked with God, became the father of three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God. The earth was filled with violence, and God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. And of course, as you know, the Lord sent the flood. Go over to verse 21 of chapter 7. All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle, and beasts, and every swarming thing that swarms on the earth, and all mankind, and of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the Spirit of Life, died. Thus he blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals, to creeping things, to birds of the sky, they were blotted out from the earth, and only Noah was left, together with those who were with him in the Ark. So what you have then is you have a pre-flood society, the cataclysmic flood that covered the whole earth and drowned all of humanity and every other living creature outside the ark that moved on the earth. That flood not only drowned all of humanity, but, listen carefully, it reshaped the planet, and we'll get to that when we get to the flood itself. It created, very likely, the current continents. It literally readjusted land and water and reshaped the Earth. As a result of that, it totally destroyed the first world civilization. Now, because of that, archaeologists essentially, in all their digs and all their enterprises, are finding things that relate to the post-flood world. There are no doubt fossils, of course, and there are occasional times when they are found, fossils of the pre-flood society, buried deep in fossil, foriferous rock strata in the Earth's crust. Very few artifacts of the pre-flood era have been found. Most of what archaeologists work with is what has come and gone in society after the flood, starting with Noah and his family. Therefore, essentially, the only history we have of the Earth pre-flood is Genesis chapter four. It is, therefore, a very monumental portion of Scripture. If we want to understand this part of human history, this element of the saga of man, then we have to understand Genesis chapter 4 because it is the only record of the Antidiluvian society. It is the only record of the pre-flood civilization. Here then is God's word, the only account in existence of the first civilization. Now prior to the flood, the world was different, as we know. There was essentially no weather. There was essentially no wind, no rain, no snow. The terrain may well have been more gentle. There may have been greater flatland surfaces. The climate was mild and warm, there were abundant plants and abundant animals covering the earth, and it was a very congenial environment, not at all like the current environment with all of its tendency toward natural disasters. It starts with Adam in verse 1 and goes all the way down to Noah and his sons in verse 32. That is the genealogy of the line of Seth, pre-flood. We learn from that genealogy that people lived for hundreds of years, for half a century, Adam himself living 930 years, a man named Methuselah living 969 years, people lived very long lives. Any good guess would take into the lifespan, say, of Cain, who lived eight hundred years. In that eight hundred years of the life of Cain, one can imagine that the earth was populated with hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. And conservative estimates are, and I say conservative estimates, that by the time you go another 800 years, which is 1600 years, to the flood, eight hundred years after Cain, by the time you get to the flood, sixteen hundred years later, you could be having between seven and ten billion people on the earth. And remember, they live a long time. They have many children, the climate is mild, the earth is a congenial environment, it was a different world. In that early generation, all marriages, at first, were brother-sister marriages. But there were no mutant genes in the genetic system in any of those children. There was a pristine element in humanity at that time. It hadn't degenerated. So that even with that sort of intrafamily marriage, there was no genetic harm that could have resulted. It wasn't until many, many, many generations after the flood that Moses laid down the law of God, forbidding marriage within a family because those marriages had become genetically very dangerous. And thus, incest was prohibited in the law of Moses. But there was before the flood a pristine purity in the human genetic system and its bloodstream, with so very, very few accumulated mutant genes, together also with a primeval absence of disease-producing organisms, which only gradually developed through the outworking of the curse, so that's one of the reasons they lived so long. The original created microorganisms were no doubt beneficial and served to assist life in that first great age span. But the fact of the matter is, we only have one record of it, just one little window, and that comes in Genesis chapter 4, and then in Genesis chapter 5, the genealogy. That's all we have, that's all we know about that golden age. But it is very instructive and wonderfully helpful for us to learn what God has revealed for us. Now this is, again, the wonderful mind of God instructing us, because if you want to know the truth, there are only two families in the world today, just two. There's the secular family, and there's the sacred family. And that's the way it's always been. There are only two families from the divine perspective on the planet, and Cain and Seth model for us the secular family and the sacred family. Cain and secular culture, Seth and Sacred Culture. Cain and material society, Seth and Spiritual Society. Cain and those who rebel against God, Seth and those who worship God. And those are the only two families there are, right? That's you're either in one or the other. You're either a Cainite or a Sethite. You're either involved in the secular culture or the sacred culture, the material society or the spiritual society. You're either a rebel against God or a worshiper of God. And so what we learn here is about Cain, first of all, and secular culture, and then about Seth and sacred culture. The line of murderous Cain is evil, and that line is illustrated by Lamech, as we will see. The line of righteous Seth is good, and that line is illustrated by both Enosh in this fourth chapter and Enoch in the fifth chapter. And so we are simply seeing God divide for us all of humanity, pre-flood, the way all of humanity, post-flood, is divided. There is the secular, the material, the rebellious, and the evil culture, and there is the sacred, spiritual, worshipping and righteous culture. And those two coexist on the planet until the end of history. In Genesis 3.15, it says, And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. So Satan knew that God would produce from the woman a seed that would defeat him. It was at this point that Satan brought two hundred fallen angels to earth to take the daughters of man and corrupt the bloodline to try to prevent Christ from being born. This corruption and the corruption of Cain's bloodline made the earth a wicked place for humanity. They set at center stage a two-bloodline system of all humanity, one godly and one satanic. This is where it started, and today is where it continues. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of humanity's life before the flood. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way.