Through the Bible with Les Feldick
LESSON 3* PART 1 * BOOK 2
Noah The Ark of Security
Genesis 6:1 – 7:10
We will pick right up where we left off in our last class. If you will, turn with me to Genesis chapter 6. Those who watch us on television, we would ask you to take your Bible and a notepad and follow right along with us and be part and parcel of our class time. Last week we were discussing chapter 5. Notice that we came to the man called Seth. If you want to go back for a moment of review, Genesis chapter 5 verse 5.
Genesis 5:5
“And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.”
But before Adam died, Seth came on the scene as a replacement for Abel who had been murdered earlier by Cain. Then we come to verse 6 and we pick up the genealogy of this man Seth, the replacement for Abel, or the beginning of what we would call the “spiritual” line.
Remember, that we pointed out earlier that all though Scripture the process is first the natural or the unbelieving end of it then the Spiritual or the believer. Cain, the unbeliever, followed by Abel the spiritual man. Abel was then replaced by Seth. Then as we come up through the Scriptures you have first Esau and then Jacob. First King Saul and then King David. As we approach the end time, we will have first the appearance of the anti-Christ and then the appearance of the real Christ.
This follows all the way through Scripture. So Cain was the beginning of the natural or the non-spiritual aspect of the human race. But, now Seth comes on the scene to become the head of the spiritual line. We pick it up in verse 6 where it says:
Genesis 5:6a
And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos;…”
And so on down the line. We aren’t going to take all of these names. But, finally we get closer and closer to the flood and I think in the closing remarks of the last lesson, we talked about Enoch, who walked with God, and then Enoch was translated, he did not see death. And I think that’s probably a perfect picture, in type, of the out calling of the Church or the believers before the coming judgment of the Tribulation. Enoch was translated shortly before the flood, as the judgement of that day came upon the scene.
Then as you come through the genealogy you next run across Methuselah, the man who lived the longest of any one in Biblical history. Nine hundred and sixty nine years as against Adam’s 930 years.
After Methuselah, we have Lamech in verse 28 and finally we get down to Noah. Noah of course, is going to bring us to the flood of chapter 6. But before we go to chapter 6, I’d like to explain these two family lines.
First the natural posterity of Cain. And even though Cain was out from the presence of God, he turned his back on God, yet, he was not without a motivating power. Remember, I pointed out that when Cain pushed God out of his life the very power of Satan enters in.
You can’t create a vacuum. There is no such thing as having absolutely no spiritual influence. If we push God out, Satan is going to come in. I pointed out that just because we speak of Satan of being evil and he is that which represents wickedness, Satan doesn’t always do awful things.
Satan is very well qualified to promote good things. Beautiful things. Things that even we as believers enjoy day by day. Paul says in II Corinthians he can transform himself into an angel of light. He is the master counterfeiter. I like to use that word. He is a counterfeit of God at every opportunity. If he can make a sham or if he can make something look like an original ( I said look like), he will do it!
I always like to remind my classes that I read sometime ago, that when the United States government brings in young people to work in the Treasury Department, especially to work on counterfeit, they don’t sit down and show them a lot of counterfeit bills. But for six months all those people study are legitimate American currencies. That is all they study. The idea is that if they know meticulously how the original looks, when they see something that is a counterfeit, they will recognize it immediately.
This is what I beg people to do with the Scripture. Be so profound in your knowledge of the Scripture that when the cults come along, and when people come to your door with something less than the truth, that you will recognize it immediately as a counterfeit.
The master counterfeiter is so capable of making it look like the original. Satan is the master counterfeiter. So as he comes in to the experience of Cain, we saw that this becomes a tremendous civilization with technology.
With technology, I use the word, explodes! The reason for it is that Adam was a perfect person. Adam and Eve were both perfect. They had tremendous intelligence. I don’t think that we can even use a percentage of what Adam and Eve and those early members of the human race were capable of doing. Always remember that. Adam was created perfect.
Now as these people began to multiply they didn’t become cave dwellers or savages. That’s man on his way down. I’ve had that question come up so many times over the years, especially from college age young people. Well, what about the cave man. Where did he come in? Well, he is not man on his way in his ascendancy. That’s what evolution likes to show us, that man gradually crawled up until finally he reached where we are today. But it’s not Biblical.
We know that Adam and Eve started as perfect human beings. They had a tremendous civilization that just erupted from their offspring. Then, as years and centuries and yes, millennia go by, what happened to the human race? Well, they degenerated. So in that process of degeneration, sure we have had cave people. There is enough evidence of that, but always remember, it’s man on his way down not on his way up.
So the Cainitic Civilization, the natural aspect, begins to explode in technology as well as in population. It is very easy to comprehend that by the time we get to Genesis chapter 6, by the time of the flood, probably about 1,600 years after Adam’s creation, it is very easy to believe that there were probably four billion people on the earth.
About equal to the population that the earth had at the turn of the 70’s. I think we reached about four billion people somewhere in the 70’s. Now in just the last 15-20 years, we have come all the way up to six billion. The latest figures I have read is that we will probably approach something like eight billion people by the year 2000. Then, if the thing were to keep going, that would double again by about the year 2020 or 2025.
It’s just like that old story. Remember when the king offered a job to somebody for a penny a day but he would double it every day of his life. And a penny a day doesn’t seem like much. Two cents a day doesn’t seem like much. But, as you well know, if you keep doubling it isn’t very long until it becomes explosive. So that’s the way it is with the population here and we are seeing the same thing in our own time.
The civilization of Cain went out from the presence of God, precipitated a society and economy that was tremendous but was without God. It was motivated by the powers of Satan. But remember, that doesn’t mean it was all bad.
So over on the other side, we have the line of Seth and again we come down through the genealogy until we finally get down to Noah. And, Noah has his three sons: Ham, Shem and Japheth. We will be covering them later.
Now I think we have the setting so that we can come into Genesis chapter 6 and verse 1. We are about 1,600 years after the creation of Adam, which puts us about 2,400 BC.
Genesis 6:1
“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, (I have already alluded to that. You are going to have a doubling. And every time it doubles, it’s just going to be that much shorter period of time until it will double again. So men were beginning to multiply.) and daughters were born unto them,”
Then verse 2. Now these are points of controversy among the best of theologian and Bible scholars, and I don’t claim to have a corner on it. But I prefer to agree with the consensus of opinion that the Sons of God here, are simply the Godly line of Seth.
We have the ungodly line of Cain and they have been going on in their materialism and in their technology. But over against that, probably quite well separated, was this Godly line of Seth who had not become too involved with what we today would call this worldly community. They have maintained a relationship with Jehovah God. In fact it says in there that then began man to call upon the name of Jehovah.
So as this godly line of Seth comes down through the centuries of years building up to the flood. Let’s look at it.
Genesis 6:2
“That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took wives of all which they chose.”
There is that controversy where some feel that the Sons of God were angelic beings, who took on sexuality and actually cohabited then with human women. That offspring became the giants of verse 4. There are a lot of good men that adhere to this. And I mean good men. But, there are also as many or more, and this is the one that I will stay with, who feel that the Sons of God here were the Godly line of Seth. They had kept themselves pretty much from the ungodly line of Cain and their children had intermarried within this family and had totally kept themselves separated from the line of Cain.
Until, as you come down through the years of time, and I think we have seen it even in this the Church Age. Up until about 1900 the Christian community was pretty well separated from the world. Christian people had their testimony and the world knew it.
But since about 1900, we have seen the same thing happen, where more and more the Christian community has just overlapped with, and has joined with the world, or where the world has come into the church. And the church goes out into the world.
Consequently I am one of those who just can’t get too enthusiastic about Christian Rock. Because in my line of thinking that is just another amalgamation of the church and the world. The world coming into the church.
So, I think what we can see here then in verse 2, is that the Godly people in that line of Seth finally came to the place where they lost that separated character and they began to intermarry with the line of Cain.
We know from genetics, any kind of genetics, in animals or in plants and it also comes into the human elements, that when you have a long line of bloodlines totally separated from this blood line and you begin to cross them then the word we use for that today is hybrid.
What do you get? You get a species that is stronger, more virile. Everything is just expanded. Size, energy. And, I think that all that we can see here is, that after hundreds of years, the line of Seth began to intermarry with the line of Cain. As a result, those children were probably six, eight or ten inches taller than their forefathers. They had greater physical stamina. So the world called them giants. Now, all I have to say is if you think we are not living in much the same kind of a situation today with our increase of nutrition and technology, look at our pro football players. Look at our pro athletes now approaching seven feet tall and 350 pounds. I’ve had one or two of these pro football players in our class and it is just unbelievable the size of these guys. We would call them giants.
So, I don’t think that you have to look at this verse 4 and think they must have had men ten or eleven feet tall. Not at all. I think that probably the average size of men at the time of Adam was about 5’7″ or 5’8″. But, then all of a sudden they began to get people well over six feet and maybe even as much as seven. And so the Scripture refers to them then in verse 4 as giants.
Before we go on any further. Let’s come back up to verse 3.
Genesis 6:3
“And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: (in other words, God hasn’t lost sight of the fact that man is still man. He may have accomplished a lot of things in his technology over here on the Cainitic side. They may have even accomplished an increase in the size of their offspring when they began to intermarry. But, they are still men. And now look at what God says:) yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.”
Here is another portion of Scripture, I think, that has been maligned and has been taken out of context and all it refers to is that from the point of time here that God says ‘Now I’m not always going to put up with this. I’m going to give man 120 years and then judgement is going to fall.’
The New Testament refers to Noah as that Preacher of Righteousness. From that I think that we can take that from the time that God commissions Noah to build an Ark until the flood would come is 120 years.
That’s a long time in our way of thinking, but you want to remember that people lived 900 years back here. And so, Noah has 120 years to build the Ark but every blow that goes into the building of that Ark, every piece of energy that went into it was also a sermon to the surrounding people of the coming judgment.
Now I think we are finding ourselves in much the same situation today. We are right on the threshold of another tremendous judgment of God, which the Bible calls the Tribulation. But, oh, look what God is doing to get people’s attention. I’ve been amazed these last few months in the awful increase in interest in prophecy. We were listening to a gentleman Sunday down at McAlester, Ok., and we enjoyed him tremendously. He alluded to the fact that a really good friend of his, and I am assuming that it must have been Dr. John Walvoord, he didn’t name him, who had written a book back in the early 1970’s and it had only sold a few hundred thousand copies. It was a book on prophecy.
After the invasion of Kuwait, I think it was Zondervan who published it, they put it back into publication, and renamed it, if I am not mistaken, “Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis” by John Walvoord. I read it a few weeks ago. I’m sure some of you have read it. But since they have now come out with a new printing, they have sold a million copies just in these last few months.
I read in one of the news magazines, either Insight or Time are the two I subscribe to, and they were giving a full page article on the same thing, that Christian books stores have just been deluged with requests for Hal Lindsay’s book “Late Great Planet Earth” and some of the other books on prophecy.
Well, I think it is as it should be, because suddenly, at least the Western world, is realizing that we who have been teaching prophecy for the last many, many years and have literally been screaming at people that the center of everything is going to be Israel. The center of all end time events is going to be the Middle East and now when they suddenly realize this is where it is all at, then they remember.
In fact I had a young man call me just the other day that I had taught in Sunday School years and years ago. Taught these same things then. Now he is a practicing professional man and he said “Les, I was just suddenly remembering the things that you tried to put into our heads when we were kids. And I had to give you a call. Is this what you were talking about?”
Well, it’s the beginning of it. Now certainly this war that just ended was not Armageddon, not by any stretch of the imagination but it is showing the world that the Bible knows what it is talking about when it speaks about all these end time things as culminating there in the Middle East.
So anyway, before judgment would fall, God is going to warn that generation of people for 120 years while Noah is building the Ark, of a coming judgment. But for the most part I’m afraid people just didn’t listen and probably for the most part most won’t listen today. Then we go to verse 4.
Genesis 6:4
“There were giants in the earth (as a result of this intermarriage) in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
Well I don’t think there is anything special to pick out of that except that this generation of people that came out of the intermarriage of these two lines, became better at everything. They were probably more ambitious. They were more energetic and they just simply capitalized on everything that they possible could.
Then we get into verse 5. Now, along with this tremendous increase in technology, and I will be bringing that out more in detail in the next lesson, but along with this tremendous increase in technology, look what also comes. Again we are seeing it in our own time. We have tremendous technology. We have tremendous intellect. But what has happened to our moral fiber? It is rotting away right before our very eyes.
Murder is on the increase. Crime is on the increase. Immorality is on the increase. Drug use, drunkenness. Everything is increasing in spite of our tremendous level of standard of living. Look at it here. Verse 5:
Genesis 6:5
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every (what?) imagination (those people couldn’t think a thought but that it had to be evil in one sort or another) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil (not just now and then but) continually.”
If they woke up in the middle of the night the only thing they could think was something evil that they could perpetuate when they got up in the morning.
When I would hear a dirty story – I haven’t heard one now in years and years and years but I was just like anybody else, I heard my share when I was in sports and service and what have you. And, I used to wonder, who thinks this stuff up?
And I read one time. Do you know where most of it comes from? From our prisons! Where you have that mentality of just thinking evil continually. Not all of them, but most of them. That is all they have to think about, so they can just spew this stuff out.
Well it was the same way back here. This society of people couldn’t think good thoughts. It just constantly enveloped their thinking to come up with something evil, something wicked, something less than honorable.
Now, how did that affect God? Well, verse 6. Here’s a word that a lot of people have come and asked me about. You mean God had to “repent”. No that isn’t what it means here. It says:
Genesis 6:6
‘And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”
God didn’t repent of the fact that He made man but, when God saw what man was doing, He had an act of sorrow. Oh, He was sorry to see what His created beings had now become.
In fact I have often had to think of this. Adam lived within just a few hundred years of the demise of that human race. So, he must have seen the beginning of all this. How do you suppose the man must have felt? I can’t help but wonder. What must Adam have thought when he realized that he had precipitated all of this rebellion against the Creator. The Bible says nothing about it but I am sure that he must have had some thoughts on the matter. Well lets go on down to verse 7. So then God was sorry that He had brought mankind into the picture:
Genesis 6:7
“And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; (everything that He had created had been affected by this terrible degeneration of the human race to the place that He couldn’t just destroy man. He had to take everything with him, except the things that were living in the sea.) for it repenteth me that I have made them.”
As you read your newspapers and you watch television, and you watch some of the “stuff” that comes into our living rooms, do you ever stop and ask yourself, what must God think of this? I’m sure you do. Aren’t you amazed that God puts up with it? He doesn’t have to. He’s Sovereign.
But, there is coming a day when He is going to say “I’ve had enough.” Even as He did back here. It finally got to the place where as God looked upon that human race, maybe some four billion or more. I think probably more rather than less. And steeped in wickedness. How could God help but say I’ve had enough.