Paganism and Promise
Genesis 11:10-32
Well, let's open our Bibles to Genesis, chapter 11, in our ongoing study of origins, the Book of Genesis. I've entitled our look at this particular section, starting in chapter 11, verse 10, and going to the end of the chapter, "Paganism and Promise." Paganism and promise.
While there is a tremendous amount of speculation about the history of man, it is, frankly, unnecessary. We have an accurate account of the history of man in the Book of Genesis. And the historical record of man in Genesis is complete, all the way back to the first man, Adam.
In chapters 1 through 9 of Genesis, you go from Adam to Noah, with a very carefully laid out genealogy. Then, in chapters 10 and 11, you go from Noah to Abram, who became Abraham. So 1 to 9 takes you from Adam to Noah, and then 10 and 11 from Noah to Abraham.
From Abraham, you then move through the patriarchs, to Isaac, to Jacob, who then is renamed Israel, to Joseph, through the 12 tribes. God's covenant people are established as His witness nation, and that takes Genesis 12 to the end, chapter 50.
Exodus begins with the death of Joseph, about 1800 B.C. Israel is in Egypt by then. Chapter 2 is the birth of Moses, who then leads Israel out. Forty years of wandering, and they finally arrive in the land of Canaan, established in the land of promise.
The rest of the Old Testament is the story of Israel. It's a story of blessing and a story of cursing. The Old Testament closes about 400 years before the birth of Christ. There are 400 years between the end of the Old Testament historical record and the beginning of the New, called, for obvious reasons, the silent era.
The silence is broken by the birth of Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, just about two thousand years ago. The whole story of man, then, up to now, is something over six thousand years. Now, this is not an evangelical conclusion as opposed to a scientific conclusion or a traditional conclusion. This is simply what the Bible says. And you don't even have to be an evangelical to figure this out. Anybody who reads the book of Genesis can know this.
To demonstrate that, Talmudic scholars assembled themselves into a number of different schools in ancient Israel. And there was one such school called the school of Elijah. The school of Elijah was a group of scholars who were producing literature that interpreted the Old Testament and made it applicable to the life of Jewish people.
Writing centuries before Christ, they wrote what is known as Midrash Rabbah, and in Midrash Rabbah this is what is stated. Now, remember, this is before the coming of Christ. I'm quoting from Midrash Rabbah, Talmudic scholars. "The world is to be for 6,000 years, 2,000 empty without the Torah," the law, "2,000 years with the Torah, then 2,000 years of Messianic times."
How did they ever come to that conclusion? Because if you follow the genealogical record of Genesis, it is approximately 2,000 years until God's law arrives, something a little more than that, actually. It is about 2,000 years from the arrival of the law and Moses until the coming of Messiah, and Messiah did come. And we are in Messianic times and have been for about 2,000 years.
Those Jewish Talmudic scholars could read Genesis just the way we can read it. They could go through the genealogy just the way we go through it. They could add up the numbers. They could draw the conclusions. And they came, essentially, to the same conclusion that anyone who takes the Bible at face value comes.
Of course, they were guessing at the length of the Messianic times, weren't they? But their literal interpretation of the first 4,000 years shows a very careful understanding of the genealogies in Genesis, and is essentially what we have been saying all along. They interpreted the Bible literally, bless them.
And, by the way, the Messiah did come at the 4,000-year point. Isn't that interesting? They said He would, and He did. And we have had 2,000 years of His spiritual kingdom ruling over the souls of all those who are His subjects, all those who believe the gospel. However, His earthly kingdom awaits the judgment of the ungodly, the salvation of Israel and the nations and His return. Were He to return right now, there would still be another thousand years of Messianic times, the glorious kingdom of Christ, which brings human history in this universe to its end.
I only take you there, to those Talmudic scholars, to emphasize the fact that anyone who is straightforward with an interpretation of Genesis comes to the same conclusion. Man was created something over 6,000 years ago. We take the Bible at face value because it is the only record we have. It's the only record of primeval history that we have.
Now, what I've just given you is essentially an overview of what the Scripture records, as the time of this universe is coming into existence and man's life in it. In these early chapters, then, we have been given the record of primeval ancient history. We even have a genealogy to flow through that period. From Adam to Noah, the genealogy is in chapter 5. From Noah to Abram, the genealogy is in chapter 10 and chapter 11.
Now, just reaching back and reviewing a minute, chapter 10 gave the record of the spread of Noah's family all over the earth, the sons of Japheth, the sons of Ham and the sons of Shem, the sons of Shem being nations that primarily are identified in the Middle East Semitic people. And of course it's from Shem that Abram comes, and through Abram comes the Messiah.
So we noted in chapter 10 that the nations are scattered all over the world. And in chapter 10, verse 32, the chapter ends, "These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, by their nations; and out of these the nations were separated on the earth after the flood." And they scattered everywhere.
He started in chapter 11, the first nine verses tell how they were scattered. They were scattered by a divine miracle of judgment, twofold miracle. God altered their language so they couldn't understand each other. Therefore, they collected in groups of people who could understand each other. And God not only altered their language, but God miraculously scattered them over the face of the earth. This was accomplished by the miracle at Babel. And away they went.
Now, in chapter 10, you have, as I said, the genealogy of all three of Noah's sons given. If you glance back at the chapter, it begins with the generations, the toledoth of Shem, Ham and Japheth, and then it goes on in verse 2, the sons of Japheth, and it goes on to list them. Verse 6, the sons of Ham, and it goes on to list them. The sons of Shem, down in verse 21. So you have this general listing of the genealogies that flow from the sons of Noah.
As we come, however, to chapter 11 and verse 10, the focus is again on Shem, but not in a broad sense, as it is in chapter 10. The focus on Shem in chapter 10 just shows all the various people groups that came from him, whereas in chapter 11, it narrows down the focus on one line, the line of election, we could call it, the line of Shem that goes directly to Abram, who is the father of Israel, and, next to Jesus, the most important man in the history of redemption.
As we see throughout the Genesis record, and we'll see it here, the story is an ongoing continuum of paganism versus promise. We saw that at the very outset. We saw that in the conflict between Cain and Abel. We saw that in the society that was built in the time of Lamech. We saw that in the society that was developed before the flood, where paganism dominated, and there were only a few who accepted God at His Word and believed His promise, one family of eight people who survived that horrifying holocaust.
Even after the flood, it is still that ongoing contrast of paganism and promise, the people of paganism and the people of promise. The Scripture from Genesis to Revelation diagnoses man and sort of drops him into those categories. Since the fall, which is recorded in the third chapter of Genesis, all men are sinful, wicked and in constant rebellion against God. Man is a rebel. He is opposed to God. He is dead in sin, bound in the grip of paganism deep within his nature.
Romans 3 is probably the most concise description of the sinfulness of man. And I know you're familiar with Romans 3. I just want to call one thing to your attention. As you notice Romans 3:10-18, "There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; none who does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they keep deceiving, the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction and misery are in their paths, the path of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes."
You notice, if you have that kind of Bible that does that, that that is all in quotes and caps, because every one of those statements is taken from the Old Testament. That is not a New Testament diagnosis. That is an Old Testament diagnosis. Better yet, that is a universal diagnosis of the wretchedness of man. Man is defined as wicked and sinful and rebellious and opposed to God. Every way you can define him, that's how it comes out.
So the story of man is a story of paganism. It's a story of rebellion. But it is also a story of promise. We found that back in chapter 3, you can look at it for just a moment, brief review, in chapter 3 and verse 15, right in the middle of cursing the serpent and cursing the man and the woman, cursing the ground and cursing the environment around them, right in the middle of all those curses, verse 15 produces a promise.
"I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel." Right in the middle of this section in which everything is cursed is the first revelation of God's promise to crush the serpent, the first promise that God is going to deliver sinners from the power of their great adversary.
It is true, man chose Satan's word over God's, Satan's world view over God's, Satan's leadership over God's, Satan's will over God's, Satan's friendship over God's. And man became the enemy of God who hid from God, who distrusted God, who rebelled against God, who rejected God.
But it is also true that man was not fixed irretrievably and forever in that disastrous condition. Unlike the angels who fell and could never be redeemed, man is granted a promise that One will come and will crush the head of Satan. Satan may well have thought that if he could bring about the fall of man, man would be as irredeemable as his demons. He was wrong.
God had said, back in chapter 2, verse 16, "If you eat from the tree, you can certainly eat freely from any tree of the garden, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. In the day that you eat from it you'll die." Reality was, spiritual death did set in, but certainly not physical death and not necessarily eternal death. Instead, they did eat, and life was produced.
The woman is told here, "You're going to have a seed. Not only are you going to have a seed, which means you're going to live, and out of your body is going to come a life, but out of your body is going to come a life that will crush the serpent." In fact, Adam was so confident that they were going to live, that he called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. He believed in the promise that she was going to produce life, and she did.
Chapter 4, he had relations with his wife and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. And again, in verse 2, she gave birth to his brother, Abel, and so it was. God even covered their shame. Chapter 3, verse 21, God killed an animal, made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them, in a magnificent picture of substitutionary death to provide a covering for sinners. God heard the cry of sinners. The end of verse 26, the last verse in chapter 4, "Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord."
So in the midst of the curse, in the midst of the disaster and the rebellion and the sin and the fallenness, there was promise. Paganism flourished and developed. Really it was launched, I suppose we could say, by Cain. It was subsequently developed fully into a world in which God was so displeased that He had to drown it. But, at the same time, there was also the promise. The seed of a woman, the virgin-born Son, would someday come and crush Satan's head.
That's the first prophesy in the Bible. It is the first time that the great reality that "where sin abounds, grace much more abounds" can be applied. So even before God banished Adam and Eve, even before He sent them out of the garden for their paganism, He gave them a promise, that paradise could be regained forever. And when the whole world plunged into unrestrained evil and God had to drown the whole world, there were eight who received the promise. And from those eight, a new world began.
Chapter 9, verse 1, "And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.'" And so it would be through Noah, now, that the seed would come to bruise the serpent's head. And of Noah's sons, it would be through Shem. And of Shem's progeny, it would be through Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, or Judah, that the Messiah would come. And so the record moves inexorably toward the arrival of Messiah.
So, as we come to this genealogy, I want us to see here, and I think you'll see it, this continual contrast between paganism and promise. I think formal pagan religion was sort of launched at Babel. Then the religion that was formalized at Babel in the ziggurat, which was a form of pagan worship probably identified with astrology, when the people were scattered all over the world, they took their religion with them.
It was a hybrid of some of the truth of the true and living God twisted and perverted by whatever form of paganism had developed at Babel that flowed out across the whole world. But God had a plan to bring about a nation who would be a witness nation to go to the world and tell them about the true and living God, whom they had forgotten.
So when you come in to chapter 11, it's really important to see the genealogy. You go from Shem, in verse 11, verse 10, all the way down to Abram, who appears toward the end of this genealogy for the first time in verse 26.
Now, let me give you a little bit of background. We're going to see this as we go. Abram's family were pagans. They were idolaters. They probably worshipped the gods of astrology that had been invented at Babel. And they seemed to have been especially involved in the cult of worshiping the moon god. That, by the way, the worship of the moon god, was a cult that flourished in ancient Mesopotamia.
To understand something about the family of Abram, turn over to Joshua, chapter 24, for a moment. And I'm just going to give you a little bit of a preview so you kind of know where we're going here, and to show you that even after the flood, the development of all these families and nations after Babel, was pagan. In spite of the fact that the flood had happened and they had eyewitness testimony that it had happened, because the survivors of the flood were still around, and I'll point that out in a little bit, nonetheless, they descended into paganism.
"And Joshua said to all the people," gathering the tribes to Shechem there in verse 1, "'Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, "From ancient times your fathers lived beyond the River,"'" Euphrates River, "'"namely, Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods."'" Abraham's father was an idolater. He served other gods. He was a pagan, in every sense.
And he is simply an illustration of the way the world went. It plunged down the same identical path that it had before the flood. And that is because the heart of man is so wretched innately that that's the way he goes.
The world didn't go upward religiously. It didn't develop a higher and higher kind of religion. It went from knowing the truth down, down from the truth of God, down from the reality of faith in the true and living God who was creator, down from salvation by grace, repentance, faith, down from worshipping and loving the true God, down into idolatry. The path is outlined very clearly in Romans, chapter 1, from the heights of worshipping the true God to the muck of idolatry and demon worship.
And by Abram's time, the whole world was idolatrous. Well, they had been before they were scattered, and they were no less idolatrous after the scattering. And, by the way, they still are today. But there was at least one true worshipper. Turn to the seventh chapter of Acts. And this is the great sermon of Stephen, which is a historical recitation of the history of God's work with Israel.
And he says, in verse 2, "'Hear me, brethren and fathers. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, "Depart from your country and your relatives, and come into the land that I will show you." Then he departed from the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran, and from there, after his father died, God removed him into this country in which you are now living.'"
The God of glory appeared to our father, Abraham. That is indicative of the fact that here was a man not unlike Noah who was a true believer, and through that man, God would shape a nation to tell the world of idolaters about Him. So Abram becomes critical as the father of this people. In the midst of a sea of paganism, even the pagan family in which he lived, he had come to believe in the true God. So it was Abram that would be the father of the nation and the ancestor of the Messiah.
So the Babel event was judgment, but it was followed, again, by hope. Now, this genealogy that we're going to look at, verse 10, begins two years after the 40-day flood. And, interestingly enough, you're not going to find anything about death in this genealogy. You go back to the genealogy of chapter 5, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died. It's a genealogy of death. And it's all moving inexorably toward this terrible massacre in the flood.
But this is a genealogy of life. It says, "He lived these many years, he lived this many years, he lived this many years, he lived, he lived, he lived, he lived, he lived." And it really points out the different mode. Prior to the flood, everything was moving toward this disastrous death. After the flood, God said He would never do that again. Everything was marked out by life. It indicates that what was prevailing before the flood was death, judgment. What was prevailing after the flood was promise, promise, promise.
So we come to this genealogy, which goes from Shem right on down to Abram. The genealogy in chapter 10 follows one son of Eber by the name of Joktan. But the genealogy in chapter 11 follows a different son of Eber, Eber's son, Peleg, because he's the line to Abram. This is the elect line, the covenant line. And it reminds us again that God is sovereignly controlling, moving history, people, events to fulfill His will. So here is the line of the promised seed.
And we could get a lot...I don't want to get you too convoluted in your thinking, but these are overlapping lives. It isn't that one person dies and another one starts, then another one dies and another one starts. They're overlapping. I mean, Terah, for example, Abram's father, if you put the numbers together, was 128 years old when Noah died. So Noah was alive for 128 years of Terah's life. He had a firsthand eyewitness who survived the flood. In fact, Noah died probably two years before Abram was born.
All these records, then, could be easily kept and easily passed down, because the lives were overlapping. Messiah's line, then, went like this: Adam to Noah to Shem to Peleg to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Judah to Jesse to David to Solomon to Hezekiah, Josiah, Joseph, Jesus. And the genealogies can be traced in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke.
But here is this section of those records. Verse 10, "These are the records of the generations of Shem. Shem was one hundred years old, and became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood; and Shem lived five hundred years after he became the father of Arpachshad, and he had other sons and daughters." Now, Shem is the elect line. He lived a hundred years, and he had a son. That's interesting, because Abraham was a hundred years old when he had a son.
Now, let me give you little numbers to think about. Noah was 500 when his first son was born. Chapter 5, verse 32, he was 500 years old when he had his first son. His first son, by the way, was Japheth. Shem was likely born two years later, because in ancient times, mothers generally nursed their babies for about 24 months, or up to 24 months, so they wouldn't be able to conceive for that amount of time that they were nursing their children. So it would be maybe she nursed for a year, a year and a half, and sometime in that era she became pregnant again and Shem was born, two-plus years, let's say, after Japheth.
So Shem would've been 100 years old two years after the 40-day flood, and that's wha