Gooding, David: 5 - The Book of Genesis

We begin to read this evening from the book of Genesis and chapter five. Book of Genesis and chapter five. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him, male and female created he them and blessed them and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years and begat a son in his own likeness after his image and called his name Seth. In the days of Adam after he begat Seth were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters, and all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. With these words, Scripture introduces the third account of creation. Going back now from the point which chapter four had reached, right back to the beginning, once more to the creation of man. As we have seen, each creation story approaches its top subject from a different point of view. Therefore, our first task this evening is patiently to collect the evidence for the interpretation of this third creation story. We want to find out what in particular is this third story concerned with. Obviously, with the story of creation and what flowed therefrom, but then from what particular angle. So you'll have to grit your teeth, uh, and look stern and pluck up your courage while now for some many minutes we collect the evidence. And first of all, let's take the first verse. This is the book of the generations of Adam. Generally speaking, the Holy Spirit very sensibly tells you what he's going to speak about in the very first remark of any particular chapter. And here we have it. He's going to talk to us about Adam and what came from Adam. Only here you should know two, uh, small details. The name Adam is both a personal name and a generic name. That is to say, Adam was the name of the first man to be created, just like your name, sir, may be George or Tom or Fred, so the name of the first man, his personal name, was Adam. And incidentally, his wife's name was Eve. But then Adam, as well as being the personal name of the first man that ever was, is also the generic name of the whole race. Adam was the first of a new race. There had been angels before Adam. There had been animals before Adam. But now with the creation of this, uh, creature, there began a new race, and if you want to know what to call it, then in Hebrew you call this strange new creature Adam, man. In that sense, we read that God created Adam. He created man, male and female, and he called their name, not Adam and Eve, they were their personal names, but he called their name, whether male or female, he called their name man, or if you like, human being. So that this section of Genesis is going to tell us of the creation of this new race, human beings, man, if you like, as also of the first representative of that race, the man called Adam. I want us to get hold of that if we can, because later on it's going to affect our exposition, uh, substantially. So will you care now to look with me into chapter six and a number of verses there? Scan down your, your translation, whichever it is you have, and allow me, please, to give you a literal translation of certain words in this passage. Chapter six and verse one: It came to pass when men began to multiply. Your translation could possibly have the plural, men began to multiply, but actually in the Hebrew it is the singular. It is talking about man. It is talking about this new creature, the like of which had not been before. It came to pass when man began to multiply. Monkeys had multiplied earlier, and so had giraffes, but now this was man, and it came to pass when man began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God, obviously very different from sons of man, aren't they? Sons of God saw the daughters of man. Please not. It is not a question of seeing certain daughters born to certain men. The Hebrew is singular still. It came to pass when this new creature man began to multiply, that the sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they were fair. And they took them wives of all that they chose, and the Lord said, my spirit shall not always abide with man forever, for that he also is flesh. Yet shall his days be an hundred and twenty years. And the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them. The same were mighty men which were of old, the men of renown. And the Lord 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. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the ground, both man and beast and creeping things and fowl of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. I have trouble to read that section with you to point out that not only in chapter five but also in chapter six, what the Holy Spirit is interested in telling us is about man, not just the first representative, the first male of the race, but the whole race, man. And what happened to man when man began to multiply? Then what happened to man when mankind began to go wrong and became horribly pervert as a creature? And how at length this new creature, man, so perverted himself upon the earth that God determined to destroy man, wipe out this creature completely from the face of the world. But then, this part of Genesis is about something else as well. It is about the destruction of man as first constituted in Adam, but it is also the story of a new beginning with another man. The first man had to be utterly destroyed, but then God made a new beginning, for he saved Noah in the ark and brought him through the flood and out to a new world that was a new start. And so you will see in chapter nine of of uh uh verse nine of chapter six, this little phrase recur again. These are the generations of Noah. So once more, I'm going to ask you to turn aside and to do some hard study for a moment. I want now to point out to you how this book of Genesis organizes itself. That perhaps may guide you in your studies, uh, and help you to check upon my interpretation. Anyone that has read Genesis carefully will have noticed that this little phrase, these are the generations of, or something similar, occurs very, very times in Genesis. You will find, if you check, that it follows a pattern. When a new section of Genesis begins, you will get these are the generations of, and something or someone will be named. It will proceed for a comparatively short while, and then you'll find a phrase again, these are the generations of, and this time it'll be someone else, and that someone else will last for comparatively a long while, and when he's done, you'll find the phrase, these are the generations of, this time it will be a third person, and he'll last for a little time, soon to be followed by these are the generations of, it'll now be a fourth person, and he'll last for a long time. It is as though, as you come through Genesis, you begin to go down a road, and there's a fork to the right, and you go down a little way, and you find it's a dead end. So you start again, and you find there's a fork to the left, and you say, ah, this is the road, here it is, a beautiful M one, here we go, and you go on for a lot of miles. And then you come to a fork. It's like going from Ballymena to Belfast, isn't it? Then you come to a fork again. Ah, and you say the right hand fork will be the one, and you go down there, oh, but it peters out after a few yards. So you come back again, and you find there's a fork to the left, and down the fork to the left you go for many a mile. That's how Genesis is. Let me demonstrate that to you. Chapter two, if we may go back a moment, and verse four. These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth. So the second story is going to be about heaven, and it's going to be about earth. But having told us that, it goes on to say, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven, and that's the last you'll read of heaven in all that section, and the rest of the section is all about earth and the ground which Adam was made to till, which was cursed for his sake, and about Cain, who was cursed from the ground. So while the f- the chapter was going to be about heaven and earth, heaven is dismissed very briefly, and the rest concentrates on earth. So here in chapter five, this is the book of the generations of Adam, and Adam is told you in a few verses down to, um, verse eight of chapter six, He comes to utter disaster. This new creature, man, has to be destroyed. But then Holy Scripture takes up a new fork in the road. These are the generations of Noah, and Noah fills the rest of six and seven and eight and nine, right to the end of nine and a bit of ten, and perhaps also onto eleven. But, uh, ten now begins, if you look at it, ten verse one. Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah. There were three sons of Noah. We read about the sons of Japheth, verse two, and the sons of Ham, verse six, and the sons of Shem, uh verse twenty one. A little bit about the Tower of Babel in chapter eleven. and then the other two boys are dismissed. We don't follow them any further, and we start up again. These are the generations of Shem, and in particular, verse twenty seven, these are the generations of Terah, one of the sons of Shem. And now, leaving all the other sons aside, Ham and Japheth, and all the other sons of Shem aside, very briefly dismissed, the Bible spends the following chapters all about the son of Terah, namely Abraham. The rest of eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four, and on into twenty five. and at long last, Abraham dies, and Isaac, the dutiful laddie, buries Abraham in the tomb. What do you think Genesis says next? Well, look at it, if you care, chapter twenty five and verse twelve. With Abraham finished now, after all those many, many, many chapters, now look what happens next. These are the generations of Ishmael, Abram's son. So now we've a new section, and it's all going to be about Ishmael. I wonder how long he'll last. Well, he lasts down to verse eighteen, and that's him finished. So that fork in the road didn't go very far. But with verse nineteen, we come back and we find the other fork. These are the generations of Isaac, Abram's son. And Isaac? Well, he'll fill the rest of twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty, thirty one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five. And right at the end of thirty five, Isaac dies, and Jacob and Esau bury him. That was a long bit of road, wasn't it? But now Isaac's dead. That bit of road is at an end. I wonder how thirty six will start. Well, what do you think? Now, these are the generations of Esau. The same is Edom. Oh, I wonder how long he'll last. Well, he lasts, he manages to last out a chapter. Look, chapter thirty seven is all about Esau. And then, uh, I'm sorry, chapter thirty six is all about Esau. Chapter thirty seven, these are the generations of Jacob, thirty seven verse two. and the generations of Jacob fill all the remaining chapters to the end of the book. So there is then a very deliberate pattern observed, observable in the record of Genesis, and it is not there for the sake of being tidy and orderly in the manner of a good civil servant. It has its own message. In recording history, God is not interested so much in the things that man might be interested in. God is interested in his purposes that are going to emerge in the course of history, and we shall watch those purposes develop. And whereas according to the flesh some are born, the road of the historian's interest in them finishes very quickly and takes the other fork and goes another way, and then the road divides again, and the road of the flesh, no, not very much. And the historian takes the other fork and goes to record the line of God's promise, the line of his spirit, the line of his election. And I point that out because it has relevance to our study now that we're now beginning. These are the generations of man, oh yes, the first man, the first time mankind was made, and it lasted comparatively many hundred years, but God isn't, uh, going to give you endless chapters about that. Just a brief chapter and a bit will suffice to tell you that man as first made horribly ruined himself and had to be obliterated, root, stalk, and branch, and God had to make a new start and a fresh beginning. And it is with that new start and that fresh beginning that God is particularly interested in, as we shall see there by hands of parables, because not only that first race before the flood was ruined, but the whole of the human race has been ruined. And as in Adam, that first man, as belonging to mankind, as originally created, we tonight sit here absolutely ruined. The divine sentence has gone out to the end of all flesh, he has come before me. But as in the days of Genesis, when man ruined himself and God destroyed him, God began again, and a salvation was provided so that the man who deserved to be destroyed and in figure was destroyed, emerged from under the waters of judgment out into a clean new world and made a new start. So the glorious message is that the human race being ruined from the start and eventually obliterated, God has found a way of bringing men through the judgment and out to the other side to make a new beginning, a new man in Christ. Now you won't be so unkind, will you? And you won't be so inexact in your thinking as to accuse me at this stage of allegorizing, please, I knew not doing any such thing just yet at any way. Whatever I do later on is another business. All I'm observing for you is this, that because God is both the author of history and the author of this book, you will find that very on, early on in the history of the human race, things happened that though they were valid in themselves and were reported as real incidents in the newspapers of the day, yet they were, so to speak, prototypes of coming events. They weren't allegories, they were real things. They actually happened. But because of the wisdom of God, who was behind history and guiding and controlling it, those actual events become prototypes of what is yet to come. I wonder if I might use an analogy with this. In the old days of printing, perhaps they do it still, I don't know, but in the old days of printing, if you wanted to make a nice color print of something or other, you couldn't do it all at once. Suppose it was a picture of your Aunt Sally standing outside her bungalow with all the nice roses in the summer and her pet dog. Well, now, uh, first of all, they put the thing through the machine in one color, maybe it was yellow. Ooh, it went through. And when you got it out, well, what's that, you would have said? Oh, yeah, rather faint, but you could make something out that looked like Aunt Sally, but pooh, didn't flatter her face at all. Yeah, and there's just about the dog, but whether they were roses or geraniums or what they were, you couldn't see because it was just yellow. And having put it through the first time and got a bare sort of outline in yellow, the printer then put it through the machine again. And this time, perhaps they added the blue. And oh, when it got it out, well, now yes. Oh yes, that very definitely Aunt Sally, but what's happened to her curls? Uh, mm, bit funny. But that's Aunt Sally, and there's the dog. Oh, that's as clear as you could like. That's the, that's the bungalow she lives in. The flowers look a bit clear. Ah, but that still wasn't the end. Having gone through twice, then the printer would put the whole thing through again, this time under another color. And when it came through the third time with the third color on, there was the complete picture standing out for all to see. Of course, it was a picture the first time, but then the details got filled in with each go. Allow me the analogy for what God has done in human history. God has had his purposes, and he put them through, so to speak, the first time in the first color, and you got man made Adam the first and developing down history, but he destroyed himself, and eventually God had to obliterate him. So God began again, and through the flood he brought Noah in an ark and saved him and brought him out the other side and started him off in a new world. Ah yes, that all really happened. That was the first time through, but the next time through was on a bigger scale. This time it's the whole human race. God's judgment passed upon them, the judgment executed in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord. And all the waves and billows of God's wrath went over him, and he was forsaken of God. Yet he came through on the other side to a fair new world wherein there is no sin, to be the beginning of another human race. If any man be in Christ Jesus, there is a new creation. Old things have passed away, the whole all things have become new. So even the literary pattern of Genesis will help us observe what is eventually the lesson of these historical events is going to be. To sum it up, we shall read of the development of man and the judgment that, uh, fell upon him. Then we shall read of the way of salvation that was made for him. I scarce need remind you, had I, that the New Testament describes this at length, so you may check upon my exposition of it. The New Testament concentrates on the judgment that came in the time of Noah. Our Lord mentioned it to drive home the suddenness of the judgment that will come upon the whole of the world, just at his coming in power and great glory. How that the world was preoccupied, not necessarily with vicious things, but with their building and their marrying and their selling and their buying, all unbelieving and unex- unexpected. The judgment suddenly came and destroyed them all. That message will warn us through these ancient histories to be prepared for the coming of Christ. The Apostle Peter, in his second letter in chapter three, takes up the story of the flood. He uses it to illustrate what shall happen, not at the coming of the Lord Jesus, but at the end of the world. He observes that at the flood, God used the very constituent parts of this world to destroy it with. There was a world standing in and out of water, and God used that very water, which was a constituent part of the earth, to destroy it. Thus will it be at the very end of things. On that occasion, God shall not destroy the earth with water, he shall destroy it with fire. But he shall use the very constituent parts of the earth to destroy it with. Its basic atoms shall undergo fission, and with a colossal noise and a colossal heat that atomic fission produces, the whole earth shall melt, as God uses its basic atoms to destroy it with. But then, uh, Peter in his second epistle, chapter two, also observes things about the flood, and this time to make a very interesting point. He observes that God intervened when the human race became exceedingly wicked. God intervened in judgment and did two things. He saved godly Noah and delivered him from temptation, and he removed the ungodly, keep- keeping them under chains in darkness until the coming of the great day of judgment. And Peter observed that to do that, God intervened within history. The flood was an action within history, and when it was over, the world still went on. You say, what is the relevance of that? Oh, very, very, very important. There are some people te- who tell us that the second coming of Christ cannot possibly be an event within history. They say there is to be no millennium, no restoration of the Jew. No, all that we may expect now is the coming of Christ and immediately the end of the world, because, so they say, the coming of Christ cannot be an event within history. The coming of Christ will bring history to a stop, the complete destruction of the present heaven and earth, and the final judgment. Now, with due respect, that isn't the view of Saint Peter. He's leading us to see that the coming of Christ can, will be an event within history. Christ shall come. There shall be catastrophic judgments, cosmic judgments, as there was in the flood. But at the second coming of Christ, uh, in spite of those judgments, the world will go on. At the coming of Christ, there shall happen what happened, uh, in Noah's flood. The wicked, the impenitent, they who have had a chance to know the truth and refuse to receive the love of the truth shall be overwhelmed with God's judgment. It won't mean the end of the world, but God knows, you see, how to keep the wicked in prison, so to speak, under chains of darkness until the coming of the final judgment. He knows also how to deliver the godly out of temptation. It stands, therefore, as a very potent warning, this story of the flood. A warning, yes, of a distant judgment at the end of all things, when heaven and earth shall be destroyed. A warning of the far nearer judgment when Christ shall come. He shall come to take the pressure off his people of that day, sorely tried by the wicked. He shall deliver them, and they shall go on and into the millennium. He shall come to destroy the wicked and put them in their prison house and keep them until the day of judgment. But then the New Testament also tells us that this passage of Genesis is an illustration of the way God saves those who trust Christ, and it is Peter again that tells us that, isn't it? In one Peter chapter three, we are told that baptism answers to Noah, his ark, and his life. And finally, the New Testament tells us in the Epistle to the Hebrews that these ancient stories of the flood not only illustrate to us the manner and nature of God's judgment, and illustrate to us theologically how God's salvation works, but Hebrews chapter eleven says, and look, you should take a practical exhortation from Noah. When God told Noah that there was a flood coming with its judgment, Noah didn't say, how very interesting, and is that so? But he so believed the message that he did something about it. He had himself to save. He had his family to save. And because he believed this message of coming judgment, he didn't just sit there and twiddle his thumbs. He, he did something about it. He made an ark to the saving of his house. These chapters, as we read them, will not only tell us of the terrible judgment from which we have been saved, not only tell us of the way God's salvation works for us, it will challenge us to do something about our loved ones, our friends who are not saved. But now let's, after those preliminaries, come back once more and look at chapter five. Chapter five, that is, of Genesis. It's going to tell us about man, first of all. Man as he was first in Adam. What's it going to tell us about him? Well, I'm going to submit to you, it's going to tell us about man's constitution. Man's constitution. First of all, it tells us of his constitution originally. Chapter five and verse one: um In the day that God created man, as distinct from what he subsequently became, in the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him. In the likeness of God, in the first place, it means that man was God's viceroy. No animal was made in the likeness of God. And just as you can look at a picture that is, as the old people used to say, a likeness, and then get some idea of what the reality is like, though from a photograph, even from the very best of photographs, you wouldn't get a complete idea of what the reality was like, would you? Get some idea. Photographs only some ink on a bit of paper. I have a photograph of Mr. Wallace here. It may be a very good photograph, but when all is said and done, it's only a bit of lifeless bit of paper you've seen some ink on. A vastly different thing from Mr. Wallace. So when you looked at man, because he was made in the image of God, you would get some idea of what God was like. High office indeed for man, to be God's representative in the world. That would then involve, of course, as the New Testament implies, that man had to be made in God's likeness, morally in God's likeness. Now, when man fell, man still remained in the likeness of God in some senses. The reason why you mustn't kill a man, or if you kill him, says a subsequent chapter, you must pay the death penalty, is that man is made in the image of God, and if you kill a man, you insult the God in whose image he was made. That is still true, even a fallen man. But then the image has got sadly defaced, hasn't it? And Colossians tells us that those of us who trust Christ are going through a process of being renewed after the image of him that created us. The moral and spiritual image is being restored. But another interesting thing is told us about this man as originally made. It won't strike you as anything remarkable, but then, of course, you've seen thousands of representatives of mankind, haven't you? You just can't imagine the fun it was and the interest it stirred when for the first time there walked this new creature upon earth. Well, the book of Job tells us that the angels were all gone to hear the news and see the new sight. What on earth is this? What was this new creature? There had been animals before. There had been angels before. But what was this? It was part animal, wasn't it? You could see that. Got legs, arms, it ate things, and the animals did that. It was then part animal. Mark, I didn't say it was an animal, I said it was part animal. He got things in common with an animal. His physiology worked more or less that way, rather. And yet, it wasn't just an animal. We'll come to that in a minute. So one of the remarkable things it notices is that this new creature was so much an animal that it could reproduce. Angels apparently don't reproduce. For the angels of God, says Christ, they neither marry nor are given in marriage. Though I ask you to notice on the quiet that it doesn't say they cannot marry, it says they don't. But it's an important thing to get hold of this, that this new creature was made so that it could reproduce, and it did just that. Adam begat a son, and when he begot the son, it was in his own image. So what father is like, son will be like. Marvelous so long as the first man kept on the straight and narrow. Disastrous when the first couple went and sinned. When an angel sins, as far as we know, it stops just there. The angel sins, the angel is cast down and judged or put in chains or whatever, but because the each angel is an individual creation, it stops just there. But man isn't like that, is he? Man is a kind of a creature that reproduces, and Adam therefore begot in his own image. With the consequence that when Adam fell, all who descended from him came of an impaired image, a fallen creature, and inherited the trouble. Then another new thing he said. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. Well, again, you've seen thousands of funerals, I suppose, so they don't altogether surprise you or shock you, but it must have been a very curious thing, a perplexing thing when the first man died, wasn't it? The first man to die, of course, was not Adam, but, uh, Abel, wasn't it? But just you watch the locals gathering around the body as it lay on the ground. What has happened? For now, we speak of physical death. What is physical death? I can imagine them going up and poking them, telling them to wake up, and nope, get up. But he's still there. Yet he is. I say, this is a curious creature. Um, you don't read of angels dying, do you? That this creature could die physically. What does it mean? What's happened to his constitution? Well, this happened very many times with a dreary monotony, and he died, and he died, and he died. Even over those that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, they still died. They died not merely for their personal sin, they died because they were involved in this race, physically involved in the race. And they all died until on one day there was another excitement. One of them. He didn't die. He went off. They hunted for him, apparently, but he was not. Where was he? Well, God had taken him. Taken him, you say, where to? Well, apparently taken him outside of this world into another world, taken him bodily there. I say wonders will never cease. What's happened now then? Uh, can man live in another world as well as this one? A- a- is he constitutionally fitted to live in another world? Or if you have to perform some adaptations on him to make it possible for him to live in another world, could you still call him human? And was this an afterthought? You know, you bought a Morris Cowley van, and then you decided to make it your family car, so you put some windows in it. Um, God made man to live on this earth, and they had another idea, oh, let's, let's alter him and make him fit for another world. Or say, was it always in God's good intention so to make man that he could, uh, eventually live in another world. Well, if God ever intended man to be, uh, eternal, it is obvious, isn't it, because this Earth isn't eternal. Why, even when the sun shone over Eden's garden and no sin had entered, our sun was putting out his billions and billions and billions of tons of energy every day and beginning to wear himself out. And they've been at it for multi myriads of years too, and the universe was already unwinding and going down even when man first appeared. It looks, doesn't it, as if when God made man, he only made him to be temporary upon this little planet, but made him with vast intentions in view that one day he could rise to another world. And if your faith stumbles a little bit at that ancient record that Enoch was translated that he should not see death, then listen to this mass- much vaster miracle. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, the voice of the archangel and the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise. Then we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord will be called out together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. So shall we ever be with the Lord. Now we're given to know a little bit of the mechanics, are we not? And we wait for our Lord from heaven, who shall change the body of this humiliation and fashion it like unto the body of his glory. We are learning then things about this new creature, man. Now we come to chapter six, and I'm afraid there's more puzzles to be solved. If we manage not to lose heart, uh, persevere, and I'll, uh, we'll let ourselves out of school early tonight, shall we, because it's a hard night. Skeletons tonight, meat on the bones next week. Uh, chapter six. Would you look now, please, in verse three? And the revised version follows it. That, I'm afraid, is a most unlikely meaning. The translation that the apostles use, and what is probably the right translation of the Hebrew, reads, my spirit shall not always abide in or remain with man. And I'm going to follow that translation in my exposition. My spirit shall not always abide with man or abide in man. Secondly, what does it mean, my spirit? As sometimes evangelists use it, the verse is taken to mean that God's Holy Spirit pleads with unconverted men and women, strives with them in the gospel message, convicting them of sin, striving with them to lead them to the Savior, and the warning, therefore, is that if they persist in rejecting the strivings of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit will not forever continue to strive with them. My spirit shall not always strive with men, say many. Well, whether this verse teaches it or not, that is the fact, so you needn't be worried. If that's a view you've held of this verse, I say you needn't be worried because it is what scripture teaches. A man can reject the gospel like Paul did, but if he has not been illuminated by God's Holy Spirit, then because he has rejected it in ignorance, there is a chance that he find mercy. As Paul says, I obtained mercy because I did it in ignorance. Oh, he did it with his intelligence. He was a very intelligent and accomplished man. If you'd have asked Saul of Tarsus when he was a chasing up the Damascus road, hi, Saul, old chap, what are you doing? He wouldn't have said, I don't know. He said, I'm persecuting Christians, that's what I'm doing, the lot of rats. And yet, because he had never been illuminated by God's Holy Spirit, he could honestly thereafter say, I did it in ignorance, and uh, I obtained mercy because I did it in ignorance. But let the Holy Spirit illuminate a man so that that man can no longer claim ignorance. Then there will come a point. It's none, it is for none to say when. There comes a point if that man continues and finally rejects. There comes a point where he feels his own doom. So I'm not taking the fact away from you, but, uh, now what I'm going to say is that this verse in Genesis does not mean that. It is talking about something completely different. Completely different. You say, how can you prove that? Well, simply, isn't it? Look at the reason that is given. Let's take it as the gospel preacher frequently takes it. My spirit shall not always strive with man. Why not, Mr. Gospel preacher? Why does God say my spirit shall not always strive with man, according to you? Oh, says the preacher, because he rejects the gospel. Oh, but that isn't what Genesis says, is it? No, Genesis says, my spirit shall not always abide in man because he is flesh. What does that mean? Well, whatever it means, this much is obvious, isn't it? The statement because he is flesh is a statement about man's constitution. He is flesh. It's not saying because he has rejected the gospel, but because he is flesh. It is a statement about man's constitution. So let me put the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle in. What do you mean when it, uh, when the verse says, my spirit shall not always abide in man because he is flesh? Well, let us look and solve the problem. Let's look at Psalm one hundred and four and verse thirty. Psalm one hundred and four verse thirty, and that will tell us exactly what the phrase my spirit means. One hundred and four verse thirty. The Psalm is talking about all the creatures upon the earth. There's the lion and the beast, there's man going forth unto his work till the evening, and the other beasts that are in the sea, innumerable. And it says in verse thirty, one hundred and four thirty, thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created. As distinct from cha- verse twenty nine and the second half, thou takest away their breath, they die. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, and they are created. That isn't a description of a gospel meeting, that is a description of what these things are made of. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, and they are. You take away their breath, and they die. When man fell, when this new creature called man fell, God pronounced his judgment. My spirit shall not always abide in man. It shall be removed. What will happen when that is removed? Well, the man will die, of course. My spirit shall not always abide in man because he is, that is, is basically flesh. Let's gather it up. Key to our understanding of this part of Genesis is to observe that this part of Genesis is talking about the constitution of this creature man. He is part flesh, he is part spirit. What happened to Adam when he died? There was his flesh on the ground, wasn't there? Oh, but you see, you say he's there. Well, there's parts of him there, not all the parts. For man is flesh, but he's not only flesh, he's spirit. Ah, but what is true physically of man is true at a higher sense, isn't it? For the word of God frequently does that. It will begin our thinking with things material, then it will proceed to deeper and higher things. Man is not only flesh and what we call breath, but man is flesh, and in the highest sense of all, he is spirit. Made in spirit to have spiritual fellowship with God. Made in the sense now the animals weren't to have spirit, uh, fellowship with the very father of spirits. Man is not just a lump of flesh, not even to his constitution. Man is spirit and flesh, but alas, when man sinned, as we saw in the previous section, man died at that higher level, moral and spiritual fellowship with God, and dying at that higher level, he became what the New Testament calls carnal, fleshly, not having the spirit, so that having fallen, man now becomes a kind of a freak. He was meant to be flesh and spirit in fellowship with God, who is spirit, but he died spiritually, and because his spirit got out of touch with God's spirit, and the great barrier of sin came in between, then man's spirit died as far as fellowship with God wrote, and man's spirit loses control of the other bit of man, and man became predominantly fleshly or carnal. And what happened then? Why, so long as man was in happy fellowship with God at the level of his spirit, then the animal part of him behaved as it should behave, and all was in perfect control and order and happy and holy. But when man died spiritually in the sense of his spirit being cut off from the father of spirits, then the old flesh, the animal side of him, began to rise up and rebel. Look at him in the days preceding the flood. What a terrible, sad freak of a perversion he became. The world filled with violence and with lust and with evil, as man destroyed himself. And notice man destroyed himself long before God destroyed him. God destroyed man because first man destroyed himself. My final observation tonight is to ask you to notice that when man destroyed himself and became fleshly, became a freak of a thing, God not only wiped him out, but God chose a judgment that would vividly illustrate at the physical level what had gone wrong at the deeper level. You see, at the flood, God didn't burn men up. That would have burned bones, breath, hair, and everything, wouldn't it? And left but ashes. God didn't burn them up. He burned the Sodom ice up and the Gomorrah ice up. He didn't burn these men. He drowned them. And as Genesis seven observes, if you get a human being and you put it underwater and keep it underwater for more than three minutes, what happens? Well, when the water subsides, the human being still there, isn't it? How you say, yeah, but uh, yeah, but you know, yeah, um, the breath of the spirit of life's gone out of him. Ah, yeah. And does that matter? Matter, you say? Will you come back in six months and see what's happened then? For if the breath of the spirit of life is taken away, then the flesh bit of man cannot survive. It starts to go rotten and eventually stinks before it disappears. You say, what a ghastly thing to be reminded of in Wellington Street Hall. It is ghastly, but it isn't anywhere near so ghastly as how God sees a man of Adam's race, unsaved, man made in the image of God, at the higher level now spirit in touch with the Father of spirits, therefore perfectly able to control the flesh, so that that twin thing, spirit and flesh, lived as a true human being, glorious in the image of God. Man died spiritually, and therefore he lacked the spiritual power to control his flesh, and he went rotten. The mind of the flesh is enmity with God. It's not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. It went rotten. It does still. Whether it's the refined kind of rottenness, of selfishness and spite, jealousy, or whether it's the nasty kind of rottenness, of drunkenness and debauchery. Apart from Christ, the human race is carnal and under God's sentence to perish. God is not prepared forever to maintain a freak. I'm sorry tonight has had to be such a grim session, hard work and thought and collecting evidence. God willing, next week we shall have a better story to tell, the wonderful story of God's salvation for a human race that destroyed itself. But it could be, couldn't it, that even tonight's message will do some good. For unless we see that in Adam we are on our way to perish, and there is no hope for us in Adam, we shan't perhaps be so eager to find out and apply for the glorious salvation there is for ruined man in Christ. Now we pray. Now, Lord, these are deep and detailed things, and therefore now we ask special help of thee tonight. Will thou give us strength in our minds, retention in our memories, and give us as thy son such a deep interest in thy word as we shall be prepared to work at these things. That we may be at all times thy intelligent as well as thy loving sons, coming to understand clearly what the sad trouble with man is, and ourselves included. We may not be carried away with light remedies and superficial cures, but seeing our desperate plights may always and only apply ourselves to thy great salvation that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. O God, help us to lay hold of him as he of us, that we might not only be delivered from judgment, but learn to live as spiritual men and women, controlled of thy Holy Spirit, learning thy ways ourselves. O God, make us a powerful message, warning and beacon-like, to those who are around us, freaks of humanity, as thou dost see them, waiting for the coming of that terrible judgment at the coming of Christ. O God, grant that our voice shall prevail and be heard in this world, and that men might be moved by thy gospel through us to flee for refuge to that glorious ark that thou hast prepared in Christ Jesus our Lord. To this end, grant us thine evening blessing in his holy name.