Transcript
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Well, welcome to a whole new lesson. We’re gonna continue to unpack the stories of Genesis. We’re really focusing on these first several chapters in detail because there’s so much going on in these chapters. There is so much to actually explain who we are, where we come from, what our purpose in life is, and so forth. So therefore we’re going to be spending a lot of time here. This lecture is going to be called “The Two Cities” and we will primarily be talking about the events of the fall. All the way through the flood, we’ll also take a look at prehistoric man. And as we do that, to kind of give us an idea of what we’re looking at here, we’re going to borrow from Augustine and his “City of God” work, which is an incredible book that dealt with why the Romans were essentially conquered and whether or not it could be blamed on the Christians.
It’s a huge influence on all of Western culture. It’s also quite a read to get through, but something I would encourage you to do sometime in your life. But he does outline this basic contrast between these two cities, which he calls the City of God and the City of Man. Now, to understand this basic contrast is quite simple. For the city of God, he’s simply talking about those people who actually worship the one true God. Those people who actually see it as their primary purpose to worship the one true God. Whereas the city of man would be those who do not. Those who resist, those who rebel, those who suppress the truth to borrow language from Romans 1. So we’re going to see this in Genesis, we’re going to see this throughout biblical history, potentially even see this throughout history itself. But to help us understand this and kind of where we’re going, it’s helpful to recognize that Genesis is a very unique structure in terms of what it is. In fact, pretty much all commentators, when they talk about Genesis and how Genesis is divided up, they point out that it’s divided up into 10 different genealogies. In other words, these genealogies, by the way, are called toledots, an important term to note here at this point. And the toledots just mean these genealogies, this is the record of this people. So for example, it gives us, say, the line of Adam, or the line of Seth, or the line of Noah, or the line of Shem.
In fact, there are 10 of these genealogies that use this formula, and then there’s an 11th genealogy, the genealogy of Cain, which doesn’t use the formula. It almost seems to be kind of like an insult to Cain, but it’s based upon Cain’s character, it’s based upon what he does, based upon the fact that he does not repent, and also that his people are completely wiped out by the flood.
But even so, the point we’re trying to make, I’m trying to make to you right now, is that these genealogies are how Genesis is actually structured and organized, And even though we have these vast stories in Genesis, especially when we get to a character like Abraham, for example, or a character like Jacob or Joseph, even though we get to these incredible stories, it’s the genealogies that kind of punctuate the entire story. In other words, they’re a very curious thing that show us the nature of history and the nature of recording who lived. How old they were when they died. how old they were, when they had their first son, and things like that. This is how people are able to come up with various dates for when they think, say, the flood was, or when they think creation may have been.
We’ll actually talk about biblical chronology in a future lecture as well. It’s something that we’re going to find out. There’s a whole lot of work to be done in still. There’s a whole lot of unknown still, so I’ll try to share some of those views with you, and we’ll try to approach that carefully. It’s also curious that these toledots, which can start out with, in English, with phrases like, “This is the account of,” or “This is the book of,” or “These are the generations of,” or “The records of the generations of,” those are kind of like the formula typically used. Well, it’s always been accepted, for the most part at least, that Moses is the author of Genesis. He’s the author of the first five books of the Bible. But with the toledots and with Genesis in general, he’s writing a history that occurred before he lived. In fact, in many cases, occurred long before he lived, probably thousands of years before he lived, assuming that Moses is writing these in the 15th century BC, which is when we would place the Exodus, at least in most chronologies.
But it’s curious that the word used here to describe the record that he writes down, It’s a Hebrew word called “sefer.” It’s a word that Nehum Sarna, who I’ve already quoted multiple times and will continue to do so as we study Genesis, it’s a word that he points out refers to a written document, not something that was orally passed on. In other words, it’s quite possible that Moses himself, when he wrote Genesis, was actually referring back to documents, some kind of written record that the Hebrew people actually had and he used that to inform his history.
At the bottom line, we don’t really know exactly where he got all this information from. It’s quite possible someone was orally passed on as well, but we do have this very precise genealogies with very precise dates of patriarchs showing us how old they were when they died, as I already mentioned or how old they were when their child was, when their first son was born.
And they’re always very specific numbers, like 969 for example. In other words, they’re not these rounded numbers like you see in the rest of Mesopotamia, like the Sumerian king list, which will have guys reigning for say 10,000 years or sometimes more, but it’s always a very round number. So it seems to imply there’s some kind of, some kind of movement towards exact historical record-keeping going on in the genealogies. And to quote Nathan Sarno once again, I will say this, I’ll quote him, he says about the genealogies, he says, “Here we have a deliberate, symmetrical schematization of history, featuring neatly balanced significant segments of time as a way of expressing the fundamental biblical teaching, and here’s really what I want you to write down, that history is meaningful. In other words, he says, “The genealogies show us that history has meaning, that the history here is meant to be accurate to show the nature of God’s people throughout time.” He goes on, he says, “These genealogies show it’s not a series of haphazard incidents, but it’s the unfolding of a divinely ordained,” meaning God oversaw this, “a meaningful design,” it has purpose, and the corollary being that human activity lies under the perpetual scrutiny of God. In other words, all of these things are actually happening in real time, in history that is, and they’re all actually showing that these things are superintended by God. Leland Rykin, a modern scholar, has this to say about the genealogies. He says they express the continuity of generations, that we have this demonstration of who man has been going back to the beginning. He says they show the importance that God places on individuals. One of the really interesting things about them is they don’t just tell us about people groups or about nations, they tell us about individual people. He says they root biblical faith in in space-time history, showing it happened at a certain time, and they embody theological meaning, as for example, in that the genealogies trace the messianic line.
You’ll see this in the book of Luke, who in his genealogy of Jesus goes all the way back to Adam. In other words, the genealogies, the toledots, which divide Genesis, show us that there is an importance placed upon historical record-keeping in the Hebrew mind at least as early as Moses, and if he was indeed using former records, much earlier than that.
Anyway, that’s the main idea for this whole week’s lesson and for the principle that I want you to be thinking about. Now, we’re gonna be taking a look at the fall in tomorrow’s lecture, but before we talk about the fall, we have a huge topic to talk about, something I can only introduce to you, like some of the things that we do.
Now as we unpack the story, we actually have an enormous task to look at something here before we move into our story of the fall.
And that is a problem that has plagued theologians and philosophers probably since the beginning of the world, and that is the problem of evil.
my job today is simply to try to introduce it to you, give some of the ways that it’s been handled and so forth. But the problem of evil, which has been addressed many times and has been brought up many times, it might be helpful to look at it from David Hume’s perspective, the Enlightenment philosopher from Scotland of many years ago, the 18th century, actually. It was Hume who pointed out that if God is truly all-powerful and he’s truly good, then that seems inconsistent with the fact that there is evil, with the fact that there is suffering in the world. The way that Tim Keller summarized this in his book, The Reason for God, where he deals with this, at least in brief, he said it’s summarized like this. If God is truly God, if he’s truly all-powerful, and there’s evil, then there can’t be goodness. And if God is good, if he’s truly good, and there’s evil, then he can’t be God, he can’t be all-powerful, you can’t have it both ways. This is the problem of evil in a nutshell. Now, before we try to, as a way of unpacking this, really, let’s start out with trying to define what evil actually is, and this is where, once again, Augustine is very helpful in framing the terms for us, and it was Augustine and others who have taken this idea as well, that it’s very important to understand that evil is not in itself a created thing. Evil is not in itself a created force. It’s not an entity. It’s not a being of any kind. Whereas when you look at all the other myths, myths from ancient Greece, myths from ancient Mesopotamia, for example, there seems to be this presence of evil, or even these evil forces, or these evil beings from the get-go, from the very beginning.
You just don’t have that in Genesis. You have simply God, and then you have Him creating everything ex nihilo. So his first point is this, is that evil should not be seen as a thing. He defined evil essentially as the absence of good. Very much like cold is the absence of heat, or dark is the absence of light itself. In other words, this helps us understand that when we pursue evil, we are pursuing something that is not what we are actually made to be.
We’re pursuing kind of this non-being of sorts. The way the Westminster Confession of Faith discusses what evil, or specifically what sin is, is it says that sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.
In other words, it’s not being who we were made to be. It is not conforming unto the law of God. It’s not actually being like him as we are actually called to be. Guston’s also helpful too because he further impacts how evil actually happened. I mean, that’s the question. So I mean, how do we actually have the fall? How is that even possible? And the way that Guston dealt with it, and I think it’s intriguing, I think it’s helpful for us our understanding of this problem is he said that essentially man has or has had or will have four different states that he’s in. The first state he used to describe Adam and Eve before they actually sinned and he said that they were able to sin and also able not to sin.
In other words, they had perfect free will. They could choose to sin or they could choose not to sin. But then of course he goes on to say that once they did choose sin, he said they entered into a second state which was they were not able not to sin.
And yes, I do realize that’s a double negative, but the Latin that he uses actually uses the double negative as well. What that means essentially is that mankind cannot be righteous on his own. He is, we, that is, are inclined to sin. The third state that he gives is the state of the redeemed Christian, and he says in that state we are able not to sin.
We’re still fallen, we’re still living in a fallen world, we still have fallen minds and fallen hearts and fallen bodies, but we are able not to sin by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now, of course, we have to very carefully define this. It doesn’t mean you can be perfect, because you can’t, although some Christians throughout time have argued you can. But I’m not suggesting that. Anyway, the fourth state that Augustine gives is the state that we would have in heaven where we are no longer able to sin. It no longer is something that we want. It’s no longer something that we desire. It’s something that is completely other than us, so to speak. Now, that may muddy the waters further. I don’t know, but I’ve always found that to be helpful for understanding kind of how sin could actually enter the world through Adam and Eve. In other words, we see that Adam and Eve chose out of their free will to not be what God had actually made them to be.
In fact, the way that Francis Schaeffer describes this when he talks about the Fall, he says–actually, when he’s talking about the need to obey God’s command to them to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Schaeffer like this. He says, “Here, with this command to not eat from this one tree, is the idea that obedience to this law is the purpose of man. It’s the only way that man can be fully man.” Francis Schaeffer is very helpful here because he’s able to comment on how this law that God gave to man, you should not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
He says, “Here is the idea that obedience to this law, that command, that’s the purpose of man. The only way that man can be fully man. In other words, this helps us understand the problem of evil as well, is that when we pursue evil, evil is kind of like this non-being.
It’s pursuing the opposite of what we are actually meant to be. Now it’s also helpful to understand, and this is where some Christians do disagree, but from kind of reformed tradition, it’s helpful to understand that even though we see a free will with Adam and Eve in choosing sin prior to the fall or creating the fall, actually, it’s helpful to understand that this is also superintended by God, meaning that nothing happens without His permission. Nothing happens apart from His will. Scott Olyphant says like this, he says it is possible that God’s covenantal providence, which is carried out in the world that God actualizes, includes the compatibility of the eternal decree of God and the free response of Adam to bring it about that there is evil.
Meaning it’s possible that there is a compatibility because God is God. He can actually be sovereign at the same time that we have a man with a free will actually choosing evil, but it’s all happening according to God’s will. Now, why would God actually allow it? That’s not really a question we can answer. I mean, His will is mysterious, but this is a question people ask all the time. It’s really, you know, how can God actually allow evil to exist? It’s the issue of the Odyssey. And this term here, it’s helpful to take a look at a verse like Romans 9, verses 22 to 24, which says that, “What if God,” this is Paul asking the question about kind of the problem of evil, “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, what if he has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory even us whom he has called not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles in other words what if God has actually allowed this to actually demonstrate his glory this would seem to match what you get in the book of Job who goes through incredible suffering who has friends who poorly comfort him they’re theologically correct but they they poorly comfort him Job is asking questions, he’s receiving human answers from them, and he’s not comforted, and then God appears out of the whirlwind. And rather than answering Job’s questions, God asks his own questions. He asks questions that demonstrate that he alone is God, that he alone can do whatever he wants to without justifying himself, because it comes out of his character.
And even though that might actually seem like a like an unsatisfactory answer the reality is and this from GK Chesterton that by the end of Job Job is comforted he’s comforted by God’s questions rather than by man’s answers one last point I will make as we take a look at the problem of evil it’s incredibly helpful to remember that God actually subjects himself to suffering. You see this with the crucifixion. You actually see this with the entire human life of Jesus. This is why Scott Oliphant can say that God is not a spectator when it comes to evil. My favorite quote about this is from Dorothy Sayers from her essay “The Dogma is the Drama.” After giving the whole outline of the story of Jesus, she says this, “That is the outline of the official story, the tale of the time when God was the underdog and he got beaten. When he submitted to the conditions, he had laid down and he became a man like the men he had made. And the men he had made, they broke him. And they killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull. This terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. Now we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating, we may call it revelation, we may call it rubbish, but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.
That God should play the tyrant over man, that he should just do whatever he wants to, that’s the, she says, that’s the dismal story of unrelieved oppression. That’s the story of history. We’re gonna see that especially in antiquity. She says that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual jury record of human futility. Actually, that’s really the story of antiquity. But here’s your last point. She says, but that man should play the tyrant over God, and and find of a better man than himself is an astonishing drama. It’s an astonishing drama, and it’s an astonishing thing to consider when we consider the problem of evil, why there is evil and there’s a good God, and we realize that he himself submitted himself, took on a human body, and actually suffered pain and humiliation unto death for us.
I think this is a huge thing to consider as we just wrestle with the problem of evil.