Post-Flood & Patriarchal Cultures
Vern Peterman · Sep 19, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 12
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262312543087

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Post-Flood and Patriarchal Culture. Remember, we started last week a series just kind of stepping through the Bible. Initially, we kind of, we did a phasing through different cultures, excuse me, through histories, different segments of Old Testament history and the New Testament history. Now, starting last week, we're stepping into different cultures. And this second one here is the time from the Flood up until, when we say Patriarchal cultures, that's up through about the time of Jacob. considered among the patriarchs.

The timeline, and you have this I believe on your handout, front page there, covers the period from the Flood until just after the time of Abraham. One of the things to note is there remains up until about the time of Abraham quite a divergence between conventional historical studies, historical anthropology, historical geology, early human history, there's quite a divergence between what is in your secular history books and what's in the Bible. There's a reason for that, and we'll cover that shortly. So it's this period of time, up until the time of Abraham, where there's divergence between what's in your secular books and what's in the Bible.

The root of the conflict is not a conflict in fact the root of the conflict is a conflict in assumptions Okay And we'll talk about that in a minute. It's how do I look at the world? What it amounts to is this the Bible assumes? God's intervention this secular scientific viewpoint assumes that there that if there is a God there is no intervention and So it is an assumption, not the facts, that creates the difference.

Very important to note. A couple Fridays ago I did a presentation for the Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, and that was one of the things I ran into. I first started in college majoring in geology, and it was the difference in those assumptions that I had to get basically aligned up with before I could really understand what was at the source of the conflict between science and the Bible.

And the early history of the human race has those same kinds of assumptions and conflict. Now, the evolutionary view says that here's this ape-like creature that evolves into a man, and there is both a continuing of a low level, that's this lower arrow, a low level of civilization, And for example, you can find tribal people who live at a very low level of civilization, almost Stone Age still. And by the way, Stone Age I use with quotes because I don't believe there is such a thing. And you also see a development of civilization. That's the evolutionary view.

It excludes the fall and it excludes the flood. Why? Why would those be excluded? God intervenes, yeah. Those are both God's intervention, and they exclude that. So it's the assumptions and not the scientific facts that demand the conclusion. If you assume that God does not intervene, then your conclusions will draw from the assumption that God doesn't intervene. That's the difference.

So in the biblical view, you have the fall And you have the flood. And what this shows is there is a development of civilization as well as people at a lower level of civilized development. The flood brought across Noah and his family. And there's enough technology there, by the way, to build an ark that's a time and a half the length of a football field. So we're talking about a higher level of civilization. And from the flood you see both degradation down to a Stone Age level, as well as development of civilization.

See the difference? So that's the difference. It's the fall and the flood that are the big, significant factors that are the reason why you'll see things in the secular history books about the early history of man, and things in the Bible in conflict.

It's the assumptions, not the facts. Okay. We have, you have in your appendix, and I apologize Yours may not be caught up with this, but we'll get you caught up. You have in your appendix the accumulation of the different generations that are told about in the book of Genesis.

And so it extends from the time of Adam all the way into the time of Moses and Joshua. We're looking particularly here from the time of the flood into the time of Jacob. Jacob is considered the last of the classical patriarchs here. Also in your appendix, we're looking at the last half, post-flood, the last half of that chart. One of the things you'll notice there is from the time of Shem, and of course Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and those sons lived a long period of time compared to us, almost ten times what we live, but still much shorter than those who lived prior to the flood, typically. And you see a gradual decline during that period of time. Notice it's not an instant decline, but a gradual decline over centuries.

Imagine the world right after the flood. Can you just kind of envision it? Here you are with Noah and his family. You step off this ark. Things is different. Things are different. One of the things you're going to have is a different world climate. Before that, there was apparently not any climatic conditions such that you would have a rainbow. Now you've got one. That's different, isn't it?

Remember what happened right after the flood. Something Noah wasn't expecting. He got what? Drunk. He was not expecting that. Noah, it says Noah is a righteous man. So this wasn't Noah's habit. There was a change in the ecology of things such that that took place now, and it didn't happen before.

Isn't that interesting? We don't have a record of that prior to the flood. Very interesting. Now, the different range of foods allowed. What was the difference? What was the situation before the flood? Only vegetables. That's right. A vegetarian diet post-flood, after the flood, The Lord specifically told Noah, you may eat of the animal, just not of the blood. Different geography.

When Noah stepped out of the ark, along with his wife, his three sons, and their wives, a different world out there. Things had been shuffled around. The flood made a huge difference in the world's geography. Things had shifted all over the place. It wasn't the same place. Varying adjustments to post-flood conditions. One of the things, yeah, difference in climate, things are going to start changing, aren't they? Shifting and changing, and matter of fact, going to be in the process of changing. One of the things that's interesting is the Dead Sea was, right after the flood, still connected to the ocean.

The middle of Nevada and of Utah were all lakes, large lakes. The historic name is Lake Lahontan in Nevada and Lake Bonneville in Utah. large lakes. Can you imagine that? Nevada and Utah, you don't think of big lakes now. But they had very large, extensive lakes post-flood. Okay?

And the establishment of new ecological conditions. Once you change the climate, you start changing the geography, you've got a whole different ecology there. And the interactions between the animals and the plants are now becoming different. So lots of changes. Not only a big change before and after, but the process of change from the time of the flood was still in motion, rapidly changing.

And that's part of what we see in that decline of ages. Go ahead and grab a hand out there, okay? So imagine, here's the world, the human culture that Noah carried on the ark Whatever he carried on the ark, that was what got passed on, right? Because culture is something we pass on.

One of the ways we've defined culture is culture narrows our understanding and our view of things and our habits. Any human being, when they're born, is capable of any culture, right? What happens is our culture narrows us. Our culture narrows us. If we were to come in this morning and act like some people act in some other cultures, the rest of us would look a little bit shocked because of the things they do and don't do and the way they behave and those kinds of things. Our culture narrows us. We get used to a limited number of languages even though we are born with the capability to speak all.

So culture narrows us down. but narrow culture on the Ark from their cultures diversified. But let's take a look at that. Any other culture had to have been developed apart from that culture preserved on the Ark. So there was development of culture by diversifying. We'll see how that came about here. Here's the initial paths of population. This is what anthropologists have found in terms of where people migrated in the very earliest of human migrations that they can record.

And you've got that on your handout as well, so you can take a look at that. It's this area in here, this oval, that is largely what the Bible focuses on. It will talk about things like the whole earth was flooded. Every animal. So it'll say things like that. When you read about the Bible, most of what it talks about, you'll find, is in that little oval. And you'll find Mount Ararat, where everything is spread out from, is also in that oval.

Then there was, in the Tower of Babel time. Remember there was one language upon the earth and God confused the languages. Very interesting. But today's advanced linguists, many of them are concluding that the earth at one point in time had one language. Isn't that interesting? Very interesting. One of them who is at MIT is Noam Chomsky. Not a Christian, doesn't believe in the Bible, but he says there was the basis from the evidence we have. that there was one language upon the earth. Very interesting. This is a ziggurat. The ziggurat is not some special kind of rat. The ziggurat is a tower. Of course, this one here is somewhat degraded at the top. But this is one from about the time of Abraham.

And what we find is throughout the Middle East, there are a number of these ziggurats all over the place. I have one article in which the archaeologists feel that they found the original Tower of Babel. But there are a number of these, so it makes it difficult to identify which was the one. It seems like after the Tower of Babel, they continued to build these towers. And this is of course the one where the high part is broken down. These initial paths, you notice Mount Ararat's the spreading point. The Tower of Babel would have been just south of that area and so would have been part of the whole spreading phenomenon.

It was after that that we come with this language diversity and now all of a sudden these people can't talk to each other and they start heading different directions and now you have cultural diversity. Cultural diversity begins to come into play. It's only as we come into Genesis 12 at the time of Abraham and the post-flood cultural backgrounds begin to take focus, we start to see the specific culture because instead of Prior to that it was a culture that was sort of around the world. Now he is focusing on a particular culture and so can we. Prior to that he had one language up until the time of the Tower of Babel. There was a lot of uniformity of culture with diversity in languages and much more diversity in culture.

Now think about that. If I am a part of a group that heads off in some direction and I am heading for new land, Now part of the difference is not only going to be the difference in language that keeps me from talking to the people next to me, but it also means that I'm going to be in a different area, and being in a different area and having isolated cultural development is going to develop that culture separately.

This is an interesting presentation. I'm going to click through it and I'm going to go through it twice, I think. Here's the way it's going to work. Step through it, and then I'll go through it again so you can have a second look. It's sort of a phase.

At 3000 BC, and I'll take that date as a little bit approximate. See the areas of culture? Little tiny areas, and they even have to use arrows and a question mark to let you know where that culture is. That's the record of culture. Now look at the next step.

There's 2000, by the time of Abraham. See the areas of culture that are developing? You have the area around Egypt and the Middle East where Abraham is. Then you've got farther east over where Pakistan is and then over into China. Here's the next one, 1000 BC. See where it's starting to develop? And the same area, but spreading now. Next, by the time of Christ. Now we see culture going this far. By 1000, see where it's spread. By culture, I mean civilization. And now, our era. These are the areas where civilization has substantially developed. You've got urban areas, suburban areas that are in these areas.

Now, let's step backwards. I'm going to go through this once more just so you get the plot now that you have a chance to see it. Let's step through it a little faster. See that? You see this civilization started out as a small area, and what we're looking at here with the time of the patriarchs, and I'll step back once more, it's this time here that we're looking at a small area of civilization.

What does Abraham do? He starts at Ur of the Chaldees, which is at the Persian Gulf, right near the Persian Gulf, and he first goes up to the north end of where there's civilization, and then he travels down towards Egypt where there's the other civilization. The area in between, what do you see? Things aren't very civilized yet during Abraham's time. And it's that uncivilized land where the Lord says to Abraham, the land that I will show you, that land is the one I'm promising to you. Okay? Alright, now I'll step ahead again.

And if you want to find out more, there's a website where I got this. This fellow's a Christian historian and has put together a lot of neat stuff. So if you want to take a look at that, that would be great. Anyway, here's Abraham starting at Ur of the Chaldees.

This is on page two of your handout. And it's a place that when our troops went in last year, they went in shortly after arriving, and they went to Ur to secure it. Basically, they want to make sure it doesn't get taken out or damaged or destroyed. And we'll see pictures of our troops that are looking around Ur in a moment.

Anyway, here's Abraham. The Lord says, there's a place I'm going to show you. So what does he first do? He heads up to Haran. And by the way, that's an ancestral name. So it probably is a city founded by one of his near ancestors. Then as he heads up there, he then heads down from there along the coast into the area we now call Israel, and then takes a detour into Egypt for a little bit, as we'll see.

This is, all these cities have been excavated, so there's lots of history. This is Ebla that you see in the picture down below. So there's some civilization, things are beginning to get established in that area. From Ur, we mustn't think of Ur as some stone age village, a highly developed civilization. These artifacts are from several centuries before the time of Abraham, so we mustn't One mustn't think of Abraham as, I mean, he's at the point where they're just coming out of the Stone Age.

Look at this stuff. At the left you see a harp with a gold bull's head, and they had various kinds of precious stones attached to the bull's head. There is a metal soldier's helmet. And on the right appears to be some sort of a little symbolic artifact.

Leonard Woolley, the archaeologist who pulled that out, we'll see more about this in a minute, called this a ram in the thicket. Now, look at this particularly, this harp with the bull's head and the ram and the thicket. This is the way that ram and the thicket was looking when they first dug it out back in 1922 to 1934 when Wooley first started discovering these things. That's the way it first looked before he dug it out and got that. So imagine when you're first digging this stuff up. And here's some additional artifacts. Here's the story.

When Wooley went in and started digging up earth, He found over 1,800 graves. There was one particular area that was an area where they buried royalty. It's funny, the cemetery wasn't outside of town. It was inside the walls. And they did it this way. This particular queen, Queen Puabi, had died. And so what they did is they had a place all ready for her and her royal court, six soldiers with the headdress that you saw, that helmet, six soldiers and sixty-eight of her handmaidens walked down into this kind of funeral hall in a kind of funeral procession with all sorts of fancy things on them and things that they were carrying, including a cart full of things. And they all drank poison. And that was the way it was done in those days.

So that's why Wooley was able to find some phenomenal things. He found 14 royal burial sites like that out of the 1,800 grave sites that he found. Here is a drawing that he found there. It's kind of laid in with mosaic. And notice, look at this. Here's the bull's head. See what they do? There's the harp with the bull's head in the drawing. And see the guy with the cup? There they found the cup. And the bottom, you can't see it very well, has a little six-pointed flower on the underside, very fine engraving on the underside of the gold cup.

They put an immense amount of effort and goldsmithing into putting this thing together. Phenomenal. Here is our soldiers when they first came there and kind of secured the site, and they're taking a tour. But you can see those people had walls, they had streets, they had drainage systems. It was really quite a deal.

Here's a kind of a map of it. And what they did is they went alongside the Euphrates River. They took a place where the Euphrates kind of curved. They built the city along that and put part of the canal around there with two harbors that went into the city. And so now you've got for protection and transportation this moat along the outside. And it also had an outside wall inside the water. So you had a moat with moving water. And you had this protective wall on the outside. This was not a Stone Age civilization.

This is amazing stuff. Here's the Royal Mausoleum where those artifacts were found. We could go on for weeks and weeks. The things they found were phenomenal. Tablets. We find in all this area that you see in that map where Abraham starts off at Ur. They have masses of tablets. I have a couple examples here. Here's a place where they found them intact. You just see tablets after tablet after tablet. Most of the tablets in this era, I would say about 95% last statistic I heard, have never been translated. So the content of most of those is still unknown because it's a massive job. Think about an ancient civilization.

Is the food preserved well? No. If you've got cloth, is it preserved well? No. If you've got clay tablets, does it get preserved? Yes. Because most of the tablets, after they would write on them, you see examples of the writing there, they would bake them. So they would be preserved very well. It would be like our kiln-baked pottery.

Now, here's another example of more piles of tablets as they go into these places. These tablets are all over, everywhere. Just like we would use like post-it notes or take, you know, notes on different things. Just like we've got notes now. They would find tablets everywhere. A little heavier in our paper. Imagine carrying a binder full of those tablets to school. Anyway. Oh, one thing I forgot.

See that circular one? The circular ones they find, that's for school kids. That's their practice tablet. And they make it circular because it's easy to hold in one hand because they're going to keep using it all the time. The ones that they're going to keep for a longer period of time and keep in a library are the ones that are rectangular or square, because then they fit on a shelf. So when they find the round ones, they know that's for school kids, and the rectangular or square ones are for the adults and people who are keeping records. Here, believe it or not, here is a library bookshelf.

Can you imagine a bunch of clay shelves? So the problem is, if that ever breaks down, what do you have? Just a big pile of clay to try to dig the tablets out of. The clay shelves are not baked. The tablets, however, are. So the tablets hold together pretty well, even if the shelf collapses.

This one here is just 20 miles southwest of Baghdad. Little tiny ones. And I made this little joke here, an ancient post-it note. Little ones. And look at the detail in this thing. And by the way, I don't know, is anybody interested? I could get you the whole alphabet in what they had here, and it's surprisingly fairly easy to see what they were writing. But anyway, you can see a lot of detail in there, in this little ancient post-it note, as I call it. Just for grins, there's a website if you're interested, and you can put your initials in, and it'll put out your initials in cuneiform, so you'll get your initials in ancient writing, Sumerian writing.

And so it's kind of fun. University of Pennsylvania has that little feature. This is a bunch of tablets like that where they've taken them and put them on modern wooden shelves. And what they'll do is they'll take them, they'll record where they were found. You'll see a little piece of paper. It looks like a white spot there. They'll put a little labeling item on each tablet so they know where it was and keep track of it and keep it in their catalog. And this allows them to keep track of them.

And of course, translating was a huge job. The vast majority of them, as I said before, have never been translated. I'm sure there's fascinating stuff on them, because what we see on a lot of them not only are things that are extraordinary and amazing, but also just everyday stuff. Shopping lists, letters to friends. Can you imagine delivering a three-pound letter to your friend?

Anyway, it would be things like that. Here's another example of a tablet. I got permission from Dr. Wood to use this and some other pictures here. But this is an example of a tablet. This would be something where you just kind of take hand-sized notes on. Typical patterns from the culture of the tablets. One common pattern we see in the tablets that fits the pattern of Genesis is multiple wives. It's commonly called polygamy. It's really polygyny because it's not... Polygamy doesn't refer to... it just means multiple spouses. Polygyny is multiple wives.

So that's the pattern you see. You see it in Genesis, who had multiple wives? Abraham, okay, and who else? Jacob had two wives, so you see that pattern here. Leah and Rachel, which is fine in the tablet, same thing. Something else, another pattern was the taking of a slave girl for bearing children if the wife was unable to bear it herself. Where do we see that in the book of Genesis? Hagar, right. Sarah says, I can't have any kids apparently, so here, take Hagar and you have a child through her.

That was apparently real common. The high priority in the mindset in that era was, I must have an heir. I must have an heir. To them that was a very high priority. They would have multiple wives. They would take a wife's slave girl and have an heir through there. Somehow I got to have an heir. That was the thought. Other insights.

It was common for a man who did not have an heir to have his slave born in his house as an heir. So Eliezer was going to be the heir if Abraham didn't have some kind of an offspring. The word for trained servants in Genesis 14, 14 soon fell out of use in the tablets after the time of Abraham. That particular word is only used there.

And then what we find is a couple times later similar phrases show up. But that particular one was an early one that even by the time of Isaac and the time of Jacob had dropped out. It shows how early the book is. It isn't just a book written way after the fact to kind of fill in an early history and made up.

They chose an early word and it dropped down so fast that even by the time of the next two generations That early word was no longer in use Here's Sodom and Gomorrah, okay now Sodom and Gomorrah written of in Genesis 13 18 and 19 What's interesting is you look at the picture, what do you see almost no vegetation place is just really barren But what do you see in Genesis 13 10?

It almost sounds like a fantasy if you look at it now. It was well watered everywhere. Wow! This is a real difference. This is a radical difference. As a matter of fact, what's interesting is as desert-like as it is now, and it really is desert-like, what they find when they look at the ancient evidence of what was there, there was full crops of barley and wheat and different things of that sort. Lots of different crops that were present.

Right now, you can't imagine growing anything on that. A huge change, and we'll see why here in a minute. Dr. Brian Wood, I mentioned his name earlier, I got his permission to reproduce this. He's made these identifications for Sodom, Gomorrah, and Zoar, and I think you have this map in your handout. Numera is a common modern name, which he identifies as Gomorrah. Here in 1977 was the excavation.

So they went down, and of course archaeologists, they go and carefully sample. They sift through the dirt, make sure they aren't missing anything. They use brushes, carefully move things out of the way. They don't just start digging with a spade. Look at this picture here. It's black and white, so look carefully. Skeletons, see those? Burn material. See the darker spots? There's also a large darker spot to the lower right there. Burn material. Very interesting.

And then that's what you see is the skeletons inside. That's what they found at Numera, which is Dr. Wood's identification of Gomorrah. Here is that same place, and what you see here in the dark areas on this lower drawing, which is a section of this this building, 51 foot by 26 foot building, the dark areas in the lower portion of the sketch are ash and bones mixed together. Real interesting. So that's the identification that Dr. Woods made.

The other thing that's interesting is what has been excavated there is consistent with when the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. That's what they find is massive burned-in roofs. Collapsed and then skeletons underneath just like we saw in that one site Fire brimstone from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground ah And we tell you by the way that looks you can tell nothing's growing anymore It was completely wrecked people in that area find lots of salt deposits and sulfur balls millions of sulfur balls all over the place And it's from the sky rain down these flaming sulfur balls. And that's the fire and brimstone that you see described there. And you find them all over the place, just all over the ground, by the millions. Here's the geology.

There's a big fault zone right underneath these cities, and several fault zones across the other side of the valley there. Some have theorized that this raining of fire and brimstone was a breaking of this fault zone with materials coming out. And if you look from the sky, here's the fault line that runs right through the Death Valley area and then out into the Mediterranean. But a breaking of that fault line would be one way of explaining.

Now, does this mean it's not miraculous? The miraculous part, even if this is the explanation physically, is the timing and where. because it didn't just, you know, break up everywhere. It was specifically on those places and on those people where there was this wickedness. And you see the wickedness described back in chapter 13. Okay. More on the tablets here.

From the time of the fall of Adam into the period of patriarchs, incestuous relationships appeared to have been much more common, as revealed in the scripture in clay tablets. Think of it, right after Adam and Eve, In order to have offspring there has to have been some incestuous relationship. The same is true right after the flood because you basically got Noah and his family and the three wives and their family. Initially incestuous relationships were necessary in order to reproduce and you find that true also in the tablets.

Abraham was actually half sibling. Sarah was Abraham's half-sister. So that was more commonly accepted there. Lot, through incest with his daughters, had the sons Moab and Ammon. That's the land that is now Jordan. Add to that, Esau's descendants are in the southern part of Jordan. I add this little note here, and I typically put it in green italics when I add a note that's not in your handout.

This was over the line. The idea of having incest have reproduction was accepted. The idea of having this with the daughters and their father was over the line. The daughters, again, what do you see the priority as? We have to have offspring. And the daughters are thinking, well, all the possible husbands for us have been killed and weren't very good candidates. But here are the daughters. You can see the priority fixed in their mind. We must have heirs. My dad, my father must have an heir. So that's their mindset as they go through it. And yes, they did have sons. Moab and Ammon. It was over the line. How do we know? The daughter's scheme. They said, let's get our father drunk. Lot apparently would not have gone along with this. He was worried in his right mind.

Then there's the geography. One of the things we find in the early part of Genesis is vague geography. They would make references to the North Country, the South Country. Let me give you an example. Genesis 20 verse 1 and 24, 62 refer to the South Country. Later on, and even into the very next generation, by the next generation, these places were starting to have specific names. Cities were beginning to develop. Things had something other than some vague reference to the North Country, the South Country.

So that proves it's ancient. By the way, we're not done here. Genesis 25-6 refers to the North Country. After Abraham, these expressions faded away or changed form. Isn't that interesting? Another evidence of the ancient character of the book of Genesis. Ancient in origin, not invented later, not rewritten after some time.

The making of a covenant is a pattern we see throughout the time, from the time of the flood, and Noah's interaction with God on it, all the way through the patriarchs. There are three common elements to all the covenants. There is an oath, point one. Point two, swearing by a deity. And the third thing, a physical gesture or sign. Those three elements were in every covenant, and you see them There are variations between one covenant, from one covenant to the next, but always those elements.

This is seen multiple times in Genesis, and of course the first example, Genesis 9, 9-17, God swears by himself. I myself will make this covenant. I'm the one that everybody swears by, but I'm the one who's going to make the covenant this time. And we see the same pattern in Genesis 21, 24, 26, and 31. And that's not all, but those are some examples that you're certainly welcome to look up and check me on. By the way, don't believe anything I tell you. Check all this stuff out. Okay? Don't do anything else. Just check me. All right? Okay.

Then there are explanatory notes. Now, this is interesting, too. It proves, again, the ancient character of the writing. And what they would do is they say, you know, this city, which was called this, Now it's called this. So what's happening is you see explanatory notes saying, this is what we call it now, but that's what it was called then. And the difference between what it's called then and now demonstrates the ancient character of the book. The book is old, not made up later by people who didn't know what it was called originally. So there are unusual phrases here. Bella, that is Zoar. So it has to put a subsequent name on it.

These occur in all these references in Genesis. Lots of use of this describing a phrase. That kind of description doesn't stop when you get into the rest of the Old Testament, but substantially decreases. In Genesis we find it dense, sometimes multiple times in a chapter. See that five times in Genesis 14? Notice something else. Do you see it in the early chapters of Genesis?

No. And why? is because before the flood there wasn't anything left to identify from the flood, right? So you wouldn't describe something before the flood and then say this is what it's called now because it's gone. So you only see this description pattern here show up after the flood when things have a chance to remain but the name to change. Okay?

Now, The record of the time of the patriarchs in Genesis isn't just an after-the-fact history that Moses wrote down. He says, hey, you know, I remember some old stories. Let's kind of write these things down. What you see is multiple evidence of ancient, ancient names, word patterns, practices, things that died out. So it is indeed, what we have in our Bibles is indeed a very ancient and special book. Very special book.

Instead, it records what took place without any shading. What do I mean by shading? Is Abraham described in the book of Genesis as this perfect, unbelievable saint? No. You find Abraham... Remember, faith was accounted to him as righteousness, not his own. And what do you do? You find Abraham going to the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and lying about his wife. That's my sister. What's that? Yeah. Yeah. That's my sister. Yeah. It was, but he didn't say, it's my wife too. He didn't disclose that.

You find Abraham being at times still a son of Adam in terms of demonstrating the sinful nature and expressing that. You also find that Jacob was a real squirrely guy, with all kinds of tricks and things like that. So you don't find these guys colored and shaded as if they're made out to be somebody phenomenal, without error, and somehow very saintly. You see, these guys describe warts and all. Every flaw and error is described as well as God's faithfulness.

And that's really important to take a look at. It's further evidence that this is a genuine book. So when we look at the book of Genesis, which records the time from the post-flood period into the time of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we're looking at a book that is revealing the culture of the time. It's important to understand that.

We'll see things in there that you'll look at and scratch your head and say, heaven's sake, these people are doing awful things. One thing is it was a different time, it was a different culture, and it was a different priority, and the Lord had not revealed things as we have them revealed now. We have an awful lot revealed for us now that simply wasn't in their mindset. They didn't have it at the time. So God would hold them responsible to what they knew and what was revealed. We have much more to be responsible for. Much more, because we have much more revealed to us. We have much more insight.

What's amazing, and I'll close with this, if you look at Job, who was a contemporary of Abraham. We don't know that they knew each other, but he was a fellow who lived about the same time as Abraham. He writes there, early in Biblical history, he says, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I shall see Him. Really neat. Let's pray, okay?

Lord, thank you that as we look at your word we see the unfaithfulness of man sometimes just rank wretched sinfulness, Lord. And yet your faithfulness and your holiness and your keeping to your promise and your love and your mercy and your grace in spite of the character of man. Lord, what a marvelous Lord we are.