The World Before the Flood
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
We are jumping into world history, the world before the flood, which is kind of mind-boggling to think about, this entire break in human history, as well as scientific history insofar as we have scientific history. But we do know that there were two different communities developing. How do we know that, Greg?
Greg: Well, it started with good old-fashioned family values, one brother killing another. Denominational differences – You’re going to worship your way, I’m going to worship mine, so I must kill you now. We’re talking about Cain and Abel, the fountainhead of two different worldviews, two different religions, two different philosophies, two different ways of trying to approach God.
When God had banished Adam and Eve from the garden, he had shown them how to do animal sacrifice. He’d instituted this sacrament, and they of course had taught their boys when they came along. Apparently, this is a time where they’re there. There’s no mention of Adam or Eve being present, but Cain and Abel are both bringing their sacrifices. Notice the bringing part, that is to a place, to where God is.
From what little we know of that ancient world and what the text has told us, God was in the garden. It was his sanctuary, his temple, his home, a place where heaven touched earth. It’s where the Tree of Life was and that’s where there were cherubim, these incredible glorious weird-looking angelic creatures that guard His throne, and in this case guarded the way to paradise, and there was this flaming sword kind of associated with them somehow.
Emily: We can also associate every other place that God was said to be in the Old Testament with the garden having been patterned after it – the tabernacle and the temple. They look like the garden directionally and ornamentally and such.
Greg: Yes. Like any good author – Chekhov’s gun – let’s set things up initially and then keep referring back to them, but in such a way that when the real thing happens you’re still caught off-guard. So we’ll touch on the tabernacle and the temple in time, but in theory this time we’re doing history and not biblical theology.
Emily: Right, but if someone was wondering why we think God was at the garden and they were bringing their sacrifices to the gate, that’s why.
Greg: There’s a couple simple reasons. First, God talks, and the last place God talked to anybody was in the garden. Secondly, God shows his favor, and this is a similar argument to yours. Throughout the rest of the Bible when God showed his favor to a sacrifice, he did it by setting it on fire, usually from heaven or from the temple itself.
There was one handy-dandy source of fire right there at the garden gate, and it would be very easy for that flaming sword to swoop down and ignite one sacrifice and totally ignore or totally destroy the other one.
So this is what we’ve got. Abel brings sheep. He’s a shepherd and we’re told he brings from the firstlings of the flock and the fat thereof – three f’s, firstling, flock, fat. This is not something he thought up. No one in his right mind would think, “I want to bring God a very, very special gift, something that his heart longs after, something that will make me look really good. I know, I’ll bring him a dead animal because everyone wants a dead animal. I want a dead animal, you want a dead animal, everybody wants a dead animal.” No, this is something that he’d been told to do.
Emily: Can I play devil’s advocate there for a minute? The flock is, in the ancient world, wealth, so he’s bringing something that costs him greatly to bring and killing it with no intention of eating it himself apparently, which I think some would say is essential to the idea of sacrifice, that it’s not going to do you any good once you give it up. The idea of it’s not giving you any good, but you’re giving up.
Greg: Yeah, that’s kind of a mystical or another word is probably better than that, of the idea of sacrifice, that we get better by giving up stuff. That’s really not how the Bible ever presents sacrifice. Sacrifice means you kill something, and you kill it as substitutionary. You kill it as a substitute for yourself.
We’re big on, “Oh, giving sacrificially means giving until it hurts,” or “Christian school teachers, you’re making such a sacrifice.” No, we’re not. To do what God calls you to do is not a sacrifice except in the true sense that we are living sacrifices to God in Christ in all that we do, because we’re united to him in his sacrifice.
I can see how people would argue that way, and the point that it cost him something is to the point. David later on, in buying the temple mount and the animals and implements to offer sacrifice says, “I will not give unto God that which costs me nothing,” so so far, so good.
Cain, we’re going to see, brings veggies and fruits and things, and there’s nothing wrong with that as a first-fruits offering, as a grain offering, but that has to follow a blood offering because it is by blood that we make atonement. That’s the ongoing message here.
Cain was willing to sacrifice in the modern sense, to give up lots and lots, because he had lots and lots and it was all great, and God should be really pleased with how much he was willing to give up, but God was not impressed because God had specified the proper way of worship. So here at the beginning of the human story we have a fundamental conflict.
Why are we spending time with this? Because this is the beginning of the human story. This is the beginning of history. As we trace history we’re going to see this competition between two different ways of relating to God. One is to say, “I have got nothing, but I will do what God tells me to do, not because it merits anything with him, not because it does anything for God or helps God, but because it represents a message, a promise he’s making me. It is an act of faith to claim a promise that originates in him, not me, because I’ve got nothing.”
The other is, “Well, if there is a God I’m sure he’ll be very impressed with what I’ve got. And by my great wonderful goodness I will satisfy whatever gods there be and life will be good on that basis. My good works are a sufficient foundation for a utopian society.”
And when we find out that doesn’t work, the second set of people look at the first set of people and say, “Well, you’re the problem. You keep disrupting things by this licentious libertarian talk about free grace and forgiveness and the love of God. You’ll tolerate any kind of perversity and wickedness because you can always forgive it. Sorry, we must kill you now.”
So whether we’re talking about Baal worship or the slightly more refined worship of the pagan Greeks, the classical society Greeks and Romans, or Islam or Roman Catholicism at its worst, we’re going to keep running into this. There are going to be those who cling to the promise of God, and those who want to help it out or wholly replace it, because once you start helping it out you have replaced it. The promise is seamless, it is all grace, and the moment we dilute it with something good we’ve done then it’s not the promise anymore.
It begins here and yes, it begins with murder. You could almost think of it as ritual murder. We’re told that Cain and Abel talked in the fields. We’re not told what they said, but we are told I think in Luke’s gospel, our Lord says seemingly in passing that Abel was a prophet.
Emily: From Abel to Zechariah.
Greg: Yeah. We don’t know any other thing he ever said. The only time he’s ever said to say anything is when he’s talking to his brother. I think the conclusion is what he told him was the gospel. It was the message of, “Look, this is what God requires. You know this. I’ll help you. I love you. I don’t know why you didn’t do it the way you’re supposed to, but if you want a lamb I’ll give you a lamb, or you can buy it or I’ll buy all your veggies, but you have to come on God’s terms.”
Whatever he said as a prophet, as a lawyer of God’s covenant, so infuriated Cain that he killed him and buried him. Then when God comes and asks about it – actually, we’re not told. It simply says “And the Lord said unto Cain…”
The only place that God has been talking has been at the garden gate. At first it seems, “No, this would never happen,” but this is the way people are. Once you’ve committed a horrible crime, most people you would think would run as far from God as you can, and sometimes that is the solution, but sometimes people run as close to God as you can get and hide in church. It looks like Cain went back to the garden gate and just kind of kicked around like not doing anything, just being holy and near God and all that.
Emily: He might even have been doubling down saying, “I am going to come on my own terms.”
Greg: Yeah, so God questions him, reproves him. The first sin in the world had been with respect to the sacramental tree. The second was with regard to the sacrament of sacrifice, followed up quickly by murder on religious grounds. And from this, God banishes Cain from his presence.
Back when God came looking for Adam and Eve, we had a reference to the presence of the Lord. The thing associated with it was his voice. Here again God and Cain have been talking, and Cain is banished from the presence of the Lord. In fact, he even complains about it. He says, “from thy face shall I be hid.”
“This is such a stiff penalty. I’ll never be able to see you face-to-face again, Lord.”
“Uh, right.”
So he goes out from the presence of the Lord to dwell in the land of Nod, east of Eden. There was a place where God spoke. There was a place to sacrifice, and Cain leaves it.
Where all this started is we have two communities initially before the flood. One exists close to the garden gate. We don’t know how close close would be, but close enough that at least once a week, and maybe more often, they could tread up the mountain and offer sacrifices there.
The other is some distance removed because they’re not going anywhere near to the garden gate. “Besides, there are monsters on the mountain. Cain has told us about them.” Maybe a few people even crept up a little bit and took a peek and saw the monsters, the gods, the demons that are there, and so the legends linger.
But more and more, Cain’s citizens probably stayed as far away as they could and they concentrated on pleasure, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. They concentrated on technology. They concentrated on having lots of good food, and they really didn’t feel compelled to submit to any of God’s laws with respect to this to get what they wanted, because although they claimed to be good godly religious people, they had none of the Spirit’s power.
Emily: Where are you getting some of this?
Greg: Which part?
Emily: What they were pursuing and the attitude with which they were pursuing it.
Greg: And so we shift to the next several verses that follow.
And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. 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. And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.
And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah.And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
We’re taken rapidly through seven generations. Cain, probably later in life because there would need to be people for this to work, founds a city. God says, “You’re going to wander,” and he says, “No, I’m not. I’m going to found this here city.”
What goes into a city? Well, some ideas about architecture and mathematics and sanitation and carpentry and masonry and trigonometry. You can just think that to have even the most rudimentary city, as opposed to a hamlet or a bunch of hovels, some stuff is going on there, some degree of knowledge and understanding.
At the end of seven generations we run into this man named Lamech who reinvents marriage. Cain had reinvented worship, and he reinvents marriage. He has two wives and somewhere along the line, whether associated with those wives or not is not particularly clear, some young man does him bad and he kills him and feels completely justified and threatens to take on anybody else who dares call him on it, so justice has gone out the window.
There are three boys that come out of this. One is named Jabal. He is the father of all who dwell in tents and of such as have cattle. That’s interesting because cattle can mean sheep and goats or it can be bovines. Abel was a shepherd. This is not what it’s saying. The thing that’s put first is he dwelt in tents. He didn’t stay in the city. He was on the move. He was rootless. He moved from place to place with his cattle. That was new.
His brother Jubal is culturally more productive perhaps, but economically not at all so. He is the father of music. He not only knows about singing, but he invents musical instruments and learns how to play them, and probably invented some way of teaching it, perhaps even musical notation. Now eventually as the population of the world grew, this could be profitable. Anybody who tries to make a living in the music industry today knows it’s difficult.
I have one young man in high school right now who’s a great musician, and his entrepreneur father has basically said, “That’s nice. Become an engineer. You can do your music on the side. You have to feed your family,” and I can feel the tension there. This young guy has great promise. The odds of making it as a musician in this world are not great, especially as a soloist. If you want to be part of a studio or orchestra, maybe. So how is it that Jubal can set himself up to spend all his time creating music? Somebody’s paying for this and possibly not willingly, and that becomes a little clearer in the next one.
We have Tubal-Cain who is an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, so we’re doing full-blown metallurgy. When you’re talking iron, now you have to be digging into the earth. Now you need miners. No one wants to be a miner. The Welsh did not want to be miners. It’s a horrible existence, but somebody’s insisting on it.
As I was saying earlier, they felt free to cheat the system. You can acquire slaves. You can kidnap people and make them your slaves. You can go to war with other groups.
Emily: And by the way, where are all the people coming from? It’s not like there are a lot of other families out in the earth already.
Greg: It’s seven generations, and initially it would not be that much. Now, by the time we play out 7, 8, 10 generations to the flood, the population of the earth is going up exponentially, but at this point maybe not so much.
Emily: It’s the early part of the exponential curve, right? It’s not that rapid.
Greg: Yes. A question I have been asked and I know others have been asked is, “If the godly line is all about pursuing dominion in the name of God and Messiah, why aren’t they doing any of this?” and a lot of the answer has to do with what corners you’re willing to cut to get there. Godly people do things like go to church on Sundays and not work. They do not raid neighboring villages and take slaves. They don’t steal from other people and take their crops or the metals they’ve mined.
Emily: There’s also the ground work of loving your family and your neighbor that kind of precedes any active exploration and things like that.
Greg: Your first priorities are much closer to home. In fact, they may be home, worship at home, and then your calling, but your calling is not going to take you away from home anymore than you can help it.
Now granted, some callings take you away from home, and that’s a point where Christian men have to make some hard decisions. But if you’re not a Christian, this decision is not that hard. “Well, money. That settles everything, doesn’t it? In fact, I can have a wife in two places. Lamech had more than one wife and it seemed to work okay for him.”
I think this brings us back perhaps to the technology of that time, brass and iron. I did a quick look up on brass just before we started, and in terms of real production of it, the articles I was seeing, most of which in fact were put up by bronze-making companies, not by any museum or historical institute, not even by Wikipedia – it was here are these companies that sell brass. They want you to know where it came from. It makes their sites look more interesting, I guess. The last one I clicked on said 30 BC. That’s the Roman empire.
With iron, traditional historians tell us when we passed out of a Bronze Age into an Iron Age, it was somewhere I think after the Trojan War. I forget the exact dates, I should look.
Emily: So we’re talking very developed civilizations already.
Greg: Very, very developed civilizations. What we’re being told about is that within seven generations from Adam the world that then was had, at least as far as metallurgy was concerned, a technology that approximated that of ancient Rome, in fact of medieval Rome, in fact of anything up until the production of steam power and electricity. And at the seventh generation we still have three more generations to go.
These people lived a long time. They could share knowledge. The lives of great scientists could overlap for hundreds of years. We don’t know what all was there, nor has God chosen to tell us beyond these hints here. We know that at the end of this time Noah and his sons, presumably with some help, built a boat that was half the size of the Queen Mary and it survived a world flood. These are not primitive, ignorant slugs. These are men of considerable intelligence.
In passing, when we get to chapter 5:1 we’re told in closing, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” Adam wrote a book. Writing, from our perspective, goes way back to the beginning of humanity but, in terms of evolution’s perspective, human-like creatures are around a long time and are living and interacting for a long time as hunters and gatherers even beyond that, before anyone invents writing. In fact, arguably they would put it within the realm of ancient Egypt, and here we have the first man who ever lived writing a book. That’s kind of huge.
Emily: It might make a difference in how you view humanity as an entity.
Rachel: When we look at these generations and see this development, it reminds us that the image of God is creative, and also humbles us in the modern time because we love to think of ourselves as the first to do these things, the unprecedented time, the unprecedented inventions, and it makes us feel like we’re special in history. Really what we need to see is that history has seen this before and sees it again.
It also helps to decrease our fear, because see wars or we see these things happening and we think, “Oh no, it’s never happened before. It must be the end.” Instead, we can see that God in his image-bearers does things many different ways, but we see a lot of beautiful repetition because we’re not the only ones that can discover what’s out in God’s creation.
One of the other things I was going to add – back a little bit more to the point of the two peoples or the two seeds – in some of my exploration of what we were going to talk about today on the side of the Hebrew language, I was looking at the two sons whose names almost sound the same in English but they’re actually completely different in Hebrew, which is Enoch and Enosh. They’re completely different words.
I went looking because I was curious. In Hebrew it’s more Hanok for Enoch and it has the idea of being dedicated or devoted or trained for a purpose. The word is also used for the temple, so I was thinking of the ways that for Cain he saw his son and his city as the way he’s basically dedicating himself to his own way, to his own work, to establish what he wants. There’s that sense of grasping after power and permanence but by his own means.
The name of Seth’s son Enosh is one of the words that the Bible uses for man, but it’s always used when it wants to denote man’s frailty and smallness. It’s very important because as we then go into chapter 6 and it will speak about man, it uses a different word for man, the word where we get Adam’s name.
I think there’s that sense that in Enoch, Cain is trying to press forward and push forward and do everything by his own power, whereas the godly line knows their weakness and they understand that they can only do so much. They are able to stop and rest because they know it’s not all about them trying to perfectly accomplish whatever they want to do. So I think there’s that sense between the two groups that we see their motivations are very different.
Then also later when we finally get to the name of Enoch in the godly line, we see him after he has his son begin to walk with the Lord, and to name his son basically “judgement will come at his death” – Methuselah – so he is a man that the Bible calls a prophet. He takes that dedication and training and turns it to the Lord, rather than for himself.
There’s a lot of attempts by Cain’s line to do so by their own strength, to think that they really are the only ones that will ever do this, and yet the Lord quickly wipes them out with the flood and in a sense we do it all again, always thinking we’re doing it by our own power, but really our technology is only by God’s grace that we can find anything in his world and understand it.
Emily: It’s so interesting that there are those two similar names – Enoch and Enosh – and Methuselah and Methusael.
Greg: And Lamach and Lamech
Emily: Yes, them too. Did you happen to look into Methuselah as well as Methusael?
Rachel: I did not look into Methusael, no. I was more focused on the contrast of Adamah or Adam and Enosh, and then I went backwards into Enoch. But it is very interesting in the Bible because names have a lot more meaning to them than they do to us. Especially when we see men who are called to be prophets, very often their children are connected into the message that they bring, which has that sense of continuity and it’s coming in this next generation.
Emily: Mehujael is the typical example.
Rachel: Yes, or those who don’t care about the next generation. I was just reading about Hezekiah this morning and kind of went, “Really Hezekiah?” as he gets the message, “Because of what you’ve done, all this bad stuff is coming,” and he says, “This is a good word. I’m going to have peace in my time.” Then the Lord needs to follow with, “Comfort, comfort ye my people” because it’s not in Hezekiah or any of the other men that would try to lead.
Greg: You mentioned Seth and that’s the other line after Abel is dead. Adam and Eve produce another son and they call his name Seth, which means appointed or put or set in place, because according to Eve he is another seed appointed by God instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
She’s beginning to realize some things about the seed. She may have expected that her first-born would be the seed. Now she looks back and says, “Yeah, he’s the seed of the serpent. Abel was godly – oh, but he’s dead. The seed is dead, and yet here’s a new seed who’s alive. Hmm, that’s interesting. So God has another way, and maybe he’s not the end of it either.” And then men began to call upon the name of the Lord.
We’re not told a whole lot else about that other community – Eden or Adnah or however you want to pronounce it – because apparently as the world reckons things, they didn’t do much else except experience a short time of revival, of turning back to God, and perhaps at this point moving beyond the garden and worshiping God directly from wherever they were. That’s where Adam’s book ends.
We open the next book and we get a genealogy. I would prefer not to spend a whole lot of time with this, but I would like to point out a couple real obvious things. If you read it, it sounds not only like a genealogy, it sounds like a chronology. But of course that would mean that we can actually pin down more or less the date of the flood and of creation.
There are people who profess to believe the Bible who can’t handle the idea of a young earth, so they are quick to explain away the apparent chronological factor and say, “No, no, here are other things that can happen, because sometimes genealogies have gaps,” which is true, but they don’t also have years associated when they do. And there’s this guy Canaan who shows up only once here, but twice later on in another version. That’s interesting, but not necessarily problematic.
A couple things. In Jude, Jude speaks of the prophet Enoch being the seventh from Adam, which if you count it out is what it is. “Well, that’s just taking the literary text at face value. I mean you look at it and it is seven, but that doesn’t mean that’s actually really what happened.”
Emily: Jude seems to think it was important that it was; otherwise, he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
Greg: Yeah, why mention it if it’s not significant. “Well, it’s the whole symbolism thing.” Okay, let’s talk symbolism. The apostle Peter, who only has two epistles, in both of them manages to associate the number eight with the flood. One of them is straightforward, that on the ark eight souls were saved. It’s straightforward. Yes, we can count. There were eight, not a problem.
But in the other epistle, the King James renders it, “Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness…” but person has been supplied, in italics, literally “the eighth preacher of righteousness,” at least according to my limited knowledge of Greek. At that point you have to ask, “How? Where are you getting this eighth thing?”
It has puzzled theologians so much that at least a couple translations of the Bible have replaced eighth. Some of have replaced it as “one of eight people.” Some have actually changed it to “Noah with seven others.” The word seven is not there. The word is eight.
Emily: The word that Peter put in the text was eight.
Greg: Because he wants to talk about the eighth-ness of the flood because he’s a good biblical theologian. He knows that eight has to do with resurrection, and he wants us to see that this death of the angel world was a resurrection into a new heavens and a new earth on the other side for Noah and his family. Still the question is how do you get eight?
The easiest way really is to draw a bar graph of the ages of the patriarchs as they’re given here and note a couple odd things. First, Enoch was taken into God’s presence directly when he was relatively young at 365, so his father outlived him. Methuselah, who lived longer on this earth other than any other human being except those that never died, outlived his son so that when you count, leaving out the two people who a normal transfer of office would have skipped, Noah is the eighth patriarch, the eighth preacher of righteousness, the eighth prophet.
It's understandable why Peter would want us to know that, but it only works if the chronology is correct, because if it’s not then we lose that and we’re still left wondering, “What in the world was Peter trying to get at?”
Emily: I don’t want to cut you off too soon here, but we do have to start wrapping up. Before we close, why do you think we spend so much time in this first part of Genesis on a community, a timeline, a time before one of these communities is going to be wiped out, because we know what’s coming – the flood. So why is this important? Why is it here?
Greg: Rachel, what are your thoughts?
Rachel: It seems that it’s our first example of what was given in Genesis 3:15 of the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, and it’s important because, in terms of the extent to which violence and wickedness thrives, it demonstrates how easily sin would overwhelm us without the grace of God intervening.
The only reason all people aren’t wiped out is because Noah finds grace in the eyes of the Lord, but that’s not because Noah is so great. The Lord shows grace. That’s how grace works. So it shows both man’s capability in developing technology, building things, spreading across the whole earth, having tons of people within ten generations, and yet all of those things which he’s supposed to do from what God commanded, they actually are his destruction because he doesn’t do them in faith.
It's an early example for us, a first, of what happens when we set these two people on the earth side-by-side. What will they do? What can they accomplish? But also what are the effects of sin, because coming out of the garden we don’t know. I mean we know now because we look back, but it shows us that sin brings false worship, murder, bigotry, and this general spreading everywhere. Sin is not containable except by the grace of God, and it all deserves the judgment that we see in the flood.
We need to see that set up because if you look to the New Testament, over and over again – I’m thinking of Jude and 2 Peter and other places where it says, “You think everything is fine? You think you can carry on just like you are and God doesn’t see?” He saw in the flood. That’s why the flood came. They went on doing all their things thinking they were fine, and they weren’t.
The Lord loves to give us the past to help us in the present to understand his character in how he treats the wickedness of man, but also how he saves.
Greg: I think that’s a fantastic answer, Rachel. I would like to add just a little bit that I think is in keeping with what you said.
We’re seeing the beginning of human history. That only happens once. If you want to dip into any other part of history there’s always the problem of, “Well, I want to concentrate on the Reformation. I want to concentrate on the ancient Greeks. I want to concentrate on the Industrial Revolution.” Where are you going to start? How far back do you go to get a running start at this?
Let’s pick the Romantic movement in literature and art, which lasted 50 years give or take. How far back do you have to go to get a running start at explaining that, because so many things feed in.
Emily: You’d need to know the Enlightenment. You’d need to know what the Enlightenment came from. You’d need to know all of the things that it’s reacting to.
Rachel: That’s a lot of our previous episodes. Every time we try to talk about the beginning we keep getting pulled forward and backward and such.
Greg: Yes, so here at the beginning of human history, there’s nothing back of this except the decree of God. There’s nothing more that we have to go back to. We don’t look back and say, “What were the social and economic forces that forced men to conceive of this thing called marriage?”
“Um, none, because God instituted it on day 6 and that’s where it started.”
“Well, how about family tensions?”
“Yeah, that was just several years later when Cain and Abel were old enough for one to kill the other.”
You go through the things that we encounter here and they are literally and historically happening for the first time, and we don’t have to trace back through all the things that might be affecting them. We can turn back two pages and see where they’re coming from.
Man was made in the image of God. Man rebelled against God. God intervened with this thing called grace, which is at work within history. That’s pretty much it at this point. As Rachel said, we’re seeing the image of God played out. We’re seeing man’s impulse to dominion played out. We’re seeing the corruption of sin, and we’re seeing it in a very simplified form, and we’re seeing a rush to judgment.
Since the flood it’s been about another 4,000 years and we’re not yet on the edge of oblivion, although a lot of people like to think we are. But shorter lifespans and the presence of the gospel in the world, and other factors you can throw in, have slowed down this hastening toward Ragnarok – I won’t say Armageddon – but as we step into history and try to figure things out, there’s always so much to learn.
Emily: Like Aunt Bea says on the Andy Griffith Show, “These kids have so much history homework. I guess that’s because there’s more of it these days.”
Greg: When I started teaching history, if I got to the 1940s or ‘50s I felt great, because I was born in 1958, my parents in the ‘20s or so. I didn’t consider anything after that really to be history. That was current events. That was, “Go talk to your grandparents.” Now, none of the kids in my class were born before the year 2000, and that’s going to keep going. Eventually 2000 will be a myth. “You lived during the year 2000?”
Emily: Y2K and everything!
Greg: “Yeah, Y2K, tell me about that!” Oh, the legends that will abound.
Emily: There’s hope too in this. We’ve seen the rush to judgement and we’ve seen what God does with it, which is re-creation. We can’t have re-creation if we don’t have the account of the original creation and the disaster that followed.
Greg: It is a cosmic story. The whole earth is wrapped up in this. It’s not some little local event in some obscure corner of the world. It’s huge, but it takes about 656 years. Then after that there’s a couple hundred more years while humanity gets restarted, so about the first 2,000 years of history secular history has forgotten. The ancients by-and-large didn’t record or they turned it into mythology.
Archeology can’t go back past the flood. The book History Begins at Sumer is evidence of this. He has a long list of all the firsts that happened in Sumer well after the flood, because we just can’t go back any further unless we believe the Bible.
We’re taking up a huge amount of human history, nearly the first 2,000 years with this podcast and the next one. That only leaves 4,000. In two episodes we’re doing 1/3 of earth’s history. Isn’t that great?
Emily: Fantastic.
Rachel: We’re so efficient.
Greg: Then we’ll start slowing down. The first 4,000 years are Bible times. “That happened in Bible times.” “You mean the first 4,000 years of human history?”
Rachel: They’re all the same, of course, because we refer to them as a single entity.
Greg: “Everyone dressed alike, spoke alike, ate alike, traveled alike…”
I will leave us with this. Maybe we can get to it next time. Somewhere at the tail end of the Hellenistic Age as it was drifting into the Byzantine Empire, the emperor in Byzantine at Constantinople had a throne room designed with metallic animals and a metallic jungle and forest and garden, where the animals sprung to life, tweeted, bellowed, whatever, with the proper sounds.
He himself was let down as if levitated to make a divine appearance, and then could be snatched up when people were bowing, as if he had vanished, and then let down again. This was all done with air and water pressure, and we have historical documentation of it.
That’s late in the curve. What might have been before that? We’re not as smart as we think we are. Disney was not so great when he invented the Tiki Room. He just had more tools in his wallet, as it were.
Emily: I think that leads up to the recommendation of a poem by W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is a fun little piece of paganism.
Greg: While we’re doing recommendations from Yeats, how about “The Second Coming,” where we “slouch to Bethlehem” to bring forth some rugged beast thing? Yeats was a very talented poet. His worldview? Somewhere between dark magic, spirituality, and modern pessimism, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read him to get a feel for how that age thought. Yeats was ready for the end of the world. He missed, praise God.
Rachel, you got something?
Rachel: Yes. Mine feels much more spiritual than all of those.
Emily: Rather than our favorite occultist poet?
Rachel: Yes. I’m going to go very straight line there. My husband David just finished a book that he really enjoyed, and he had it recommended to him by his dad, so I’m going to recommend it. It’s called Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves.
It goes through essentially the implications of the doctrine of the trinity and how that should encourage us and strength our faith. He particularly enjoyed one section that reminded him of the immensity of God’s love for us, because the Father loves us even as he loves Jesus, and Jesus loves us even as he loves the Father, and we are in the midst of it all.
One day he came home and he was just overwhelmed with the love of God because of reading this book, so I’m going to recommend it to all.
Greg: Excellent.
Emily: That sounds good. Thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
A big thank you to our financial supporters as well. If you’d like to join their number, you can visit our Patreon at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion. And if you’d like to get in touch with us you can always email us at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com.
One thing I’ve been forgetting to say lately is that this is a production of Diecast Media Group. That’s new this season. The podcast predates the media group, but it’s all coming together. If you are financially supporting this podcast, rest assured that those gifts go to this podcast and not to anything else. We don’t take a cut. It goes back into the show so that we can bring you more awesome content, so a big thank you to our financial supporters.
You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, and any other podcast catcher you like. Tell a friend about us. Thanks and good night.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: Genesis 4-5
Recommendations:
Emily: “Sailing to Byzantium” – W.B. Yeats
Greg: “The Second Coming” – W.B. Yeats
Rachel: Delighting in the Trinity - Michael Reeves