Back to Adam and 'Steve'?

“It’s always been a fascinating thing to me that people get so caught up with the sins of the world,” says Jordan. “One of the great sins of our day among evangelical Christians, and people seem to be just horrified of and afraid of, and throw up their hands at and say, ‘The world’s coming to an end!’ is homosexuals.

“The unnatural activities of homosexuality and the perversion of it is evil. But when God thought about Sodom, and when God described the sins of Sodom, look at what He said!

“Ezekiel 16:48: As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters.
[49] Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
[50] And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

“He’s talking to Jerusalem and Israel. I read that and I say, ‘Whoa! The things that God was more interested in than sodomy were pride, fullness of bread, abundance of idleness, not strengthening the hands of the poor and the needy, and being haughty and having a bunch of religious idols that were abominations; idolatry.

“I read that and say, ‘Hmm, He must have missed the one we get upset about.’ Well, He didn’t miss it because it’s what’s connected with the idolatry. Every time you see sodomy in the Bible it’s connected with religious apostasy. The only time that activity takes over in a culture is when the truth of God’s Word is abated.

“But you see there were a whole bunch of other things that were more in the mind of God. The sins back here in Genesis. There’s some more fundamental things in God’s mind about government that’s an issue.

“Paul says in Romans 13:3, ‘For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same.’

“When he talks about the evil work, he’s talking about there is not some violation of some political economic principle that you hold dear. The evil work there is chaos. It’s violence. It’s disruption. It’s the unruliness that comes from the imaginations of men to do evil; to do whatever they want to do and to be unrestrained.

“Psalm 2 says, ‘Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
[2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.’

“That’s the evil! It’s the evil of violence and chaos. It’s the opposite of the order for which God created the governments; the governmental system.

“God specifically designs nationalism to remedy the product of man’s heart; that devolving effect of sin into violence and chaos. The good works are the opposite; there the works of peace and quietness.

*****

“Genesis 6:5 says, ‘And 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.’

“By verse 12 it’s ‘And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
[13] And God said unto 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.’

“The evil that was in man’s heart, the evil that the imaginations of man’s hearts led them to, is the issue of violence, this upheaval; this chaos, this unruliness, this disruption of the order that God had established in His creation in order to carry out His purposes.

*****

Notice it’s only in Genesis 4 that they’re developing a family; they’re beginning to be fruitful. They’re multiplying. What happens? The kids grow up and one’s a farmer and one’s a sheep rancher. You’re developing a culture of things. Some to grow groceries and some to raise sheep so we can have some clothes.

“Verse 16-17 says, 16] And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
[17] And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
 

“There’s the old question: ‘Where’d Cain get his wife?’ (Pennsylvania preacher) Henry Culp used to have a sermon: ‘Where did Mrs. Cain get her husband?’ I’ve always thought, ‘That’s a good question!’ I mean, who would have married that dodo?!

“By that time, Adam and Eve have had many sons and daughters who had sons and daughters who had sons and daughters. There’s this culture. Look at what Cain does. They’re multiplying and replenishing the earth; filling it up. They’ve got a city going here! You’ve got a whole culture going!

“Read on down through Genesis 4 and you’ll see the development of agriculture (verse 20), the development of the arts and entertainment (verse 21), the development of industrialization and manufacturing (metallurgy verse 22). You see a legal system developing down in verse 23-24.

“You start in chapter 5 with Adam and verse 30 ends with Noah. If you count the lifespan of the people of Adam, and Adam lived 130 years and he begat Seth, and Seth lived 105 years and begat Enos. If you do that all the way down, you’ll discover there’s a time period of 1,056 years between Adam and the birth of Noah.

“Now you add 600 years to that because the Flood comes in the 600^th year of Noah. So between Adam and the Flood is 1,656 years in the text. So you’re talking almost 2,000 years of human history going on here of them being fruitful, multiplying, replenishing the earth and subduing it.

*****

“He gave them the ability to execute capital punishment, not as a personal vengeance kind of a thing, but as a judgment of a court kind of a thing. God’s setting up a legal system, and when you get someone to take a person’s life, you’ve given them the right to take everything up to that. When you take someone’s life you take everything; you take their freedom, you take their time. That’s sort of the thinking behind understanding what’s going on here.

“In chapter 10, he begins to give you the genealogies of all these boys. Verse 32 says, ‘These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.’

“You’ll see it was divided up by families, tongues and by countries. Borders, cultures and languages is what’s used here to define a nation. So you have these national entities established and each one of these governmental units is designed to foster protection against the evil that’s in man’s heart.

“So what God did was He established a governmental system that was specifically designed to remedy the product of man’s heart; the evil that was in man’s heart. We’re talking about the evil Romans 13 is talking about. When He set up nationalism, He did it to counter one specific evil—the evil that was in man’s heart.”

(editor's note: subsequent article tomorrow)