Exploring Genesis: From Curses to Covenants

SPEAKER 01 : 0:03

The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:18

It must have been terrifying, you know, being on Noah’s Ark for all those days of rain and storm, closed up inside, unable to see the sky. hearing the sound of rain on the roof, not rain, pouring torrential rain, and feeling the whole ship rock to and fro with the waves. Must have been terrifying for the animals, too, terrifying for Noah and his family. Can you imagine the smell in that place? Eight persons, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives. But you know, for them, the most terrifying thing about this experience must have been the realization that outside the ark, everyone and everything was dying. Make no mistake about it. The people who had been cooped up in that boat came off it totally changed, even traumatized by the experience. You know, it’s no wonder that the tradition of the flood is found in nearly every tribe of people on earth. Everybody, from the Eskimos to the Indians to the Africans, have a tradition that somewhere back in history there was a flood that killed off all the people. And they have different names for the survivors, but they all have the tradition. After all, every one of us is descended from these eight people. We are all one family. And it sort of makes racism a little stupid, doesn’t it? But it was a fresh start for everyone. All and any pre-flood curses were gone. And God put a rainbow in the sky as a token of his promise to never again curse the ground for man’s sake. No matter how bad we get. It’s a relief involved in that because we’ve sure gone down some awfully rough roads since that time. But he promised, no, I’m not going to do this to you again. And every time you see the rainbow in the sky, you can know that. You know, I expect the rainbow was, as much as anything, a ray of hope for the survivors. You can imagine, I can imagine myself, if I had been there at the time, I would have broken out into a cold sweat every time I heard thunder in the distance. So they needed reassurance, and they needed it in the worst possible way. So Noah and his family went forth, his sons, his wife, his sons’ wives, with him out of the ark. Genesis 8, 19. Every beast, every creeping thing, every fowl, and whatever creeps on the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark. And Noah built an altar to the Lord. And he took of every clean beast and every clean fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savor. And the Lord said in his heart, I’m not going to curse the ground anymore for man’s sake. For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. And I’m not going to do this again to smite everything living as I have done. In a way, it’s almost as though he said, No, the ground and the land and the animals don’t deserve this. Even though, man, from the start, his heart is evil. While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day, shall not cease. And, of course, they haven’t ceased until this day. But there’s an interesting sidelight here. Noah makes a sacrificial offering. I think the last time we heard about sacrificial offerings, we were all the way back in the beginning of Genesis with Cain and Abel. And the funny thing about it is there are still no instructions from God about doing it, at least none recorded, none that we know of. God doesn’t say, well, you shall on certain days and certain times and places offer an offering made by fire to me. None of those instructions are there. And yet, Noah not only offered the offering, but he doesn’t offer an offering of just any animal. It is only of the clean animals. So somehow, sometime, the distinction got made that some animals were clean and some were not. Some could be offered and some could not. But, you know, even so, all this leads me to wonder if animal sacrifice was God’s idea or man’s. And that the law in the Bible relative to animal sacrifices is regulatory, not initiating. In other words, God didn’t initiate these laws. He said, okay, man is going to worship me by offering blood sacrifices. I can’t let him do it just anyway. We’ve got to regulate it. But there seems to be no way we can know for sure because the story simply isn’t told. And the sons of Noah that went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread. So it would seem, for better or for worse, we are all related. brother. It’s strange to say, but there you are, and here I am, and we can both trace our lineage back to one of these three boys, sons of Noah. Well, Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard, and when he had made wine out of the grapes, he drank of the wine and got drunk. In fact, he got so drunk that he passed out naked in in his tent. There’s a really tragic element about this story. I don’t doubt for a moment that Noah was deeply traumatized by the events of the flood. He had been frightened by it. As you read through this, he’s a tower of strength. He’s the leader of his family. All that is true enough. But he was also a man. And he very likely heard the screams of drowning people outside the ark. If he didn’t hear them, he probably imagined them. And he surely dreamed about them. You know, it’s really hard to fault him for getting drunk on his first batch of wine. It seems very unlikely that a man like Noah was an alcoholic. But on this occasion, he had a few too many. And what follows is rather puzzling. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and they laid it upon both their shoulders, and they backed into his tent and carefully covered the nakedness of their father. And they kept their faces averted the whole time and never saw their father’s nakedness. Now, plainly, their conduct shows great respect for their father and great love. It was not a mortal sin to see their father naked, but it surely would have been humiliating for Noah to know he’d gotten drunk and been lying around naked and people been wandering in and staring at him. Well, that would have been a bit much. And so his boys covered him up. And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done to him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants, shall he be unto his brethren. Now, wait a minute. If you go back and read the story, it was Ham who saw his father naked. Now, you understand the generations. You have Noah. Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And his grandson, the son of Ham, is named Canaan. Now, if it was Ham who saw his father naked, and probably entirely by accident, why then is Canaan, the son of Ham, being cursed? Because Ham had a lot more children than Canaan, and that curse is not pronounced on them. Well, it’s easy to overlook, but the passage says that Noah awoke and realized, not that his youngest son had seen him naked, but realized what his youngest son had done to him while he was naked. Now, we don’t have a clue what he did, but we should know that the expression youngest son is probably a reference to Canaan, his grandson, not to Ham. Grandsons appear to be numbered among the sons in this culture. Whatever had happened, Canaan was the perpetrator. And he said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant. So a curse was passed, not on Ham and his children, the curse was upon Canaan. In the process of time, the descendants of Ham migrated east and on south into Africa. The sons of Canaan stopped in the area we call Palestine, what the Bible calls the land of Canaan. And by the time of the conquest of Canaan by Israel, that land had been corrupted beyond measure. It had been corrupted to such an extent that God demanded that the Canaanites be driven out or destroyed. The curse, apart from anything God did to them, had ultimately led to a depraved and decadent people. More about Noah when I come back after these words.

SPEAKER 01 : 10:26

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SPEAKER 02 : 10:53

And Noah lived after the flood 350 years. And all the days of Noah were 950 years. And he died. 950 years. You know, at the pace we live today, even if the body would last that long, I don’t know what kind of shape our minds would be in. I think long before that, we would run out of things to do. Someone would come and say, let’s go do this. And we’d say, no, been there, done that. Now there’s a curious anomaly in Genesis. Using Archbishop Usher’s chronology, which is almost certainly wrong, Adam lived a little less than 6,000 years ago. Now of that 6,000 years, a little over 2,000 years, a third of all recorded history, is covered by a mere nine chapters out of the book of Genesis. Think about it. One-third of all the time man’s been on this planet, and all it gets is nine chapters. I don’t know how you feel, but there are a lot of questions about that time I’d like to ask. But no, sorry, all that background is given quickly to get us to the point of the story. Because a mere two years after the death of Noah… a man named Abraham is born, and the story of Genesis suddenly slows down and begins to take in all the details of this one man’s life. In fact, I think you could fairly say that the book of Genesis is the story of one man’s family. Noah and everyone before Abraham are dismissed with a wave of the hand. because it is Abraham who will become the central figure in the history to follow. If you’re a serious student of the Bible, you’ll do yourself a favor by doing two things. First, when you read the Bible, keep a notebook at hand and make a note of every chronological reference you encounter. Later on, you can take the notebook and make yourself a chart so you can get a feel for the passage of time. Somehow a visual representation of it really helps. And while you’re doing it, secondly, you can make a note of the relationships between people. You can put together a family tree of all the people who are listed in the Bible and have a much clearer idea of who is who. I’ve sometimes wondered if some of the new computer programs that are designed for family trees might be really useful when it comes to the Bible and laying out a family tree of the people of the Bible. If you’re pressed for time, you can always check a reference book and find this information, but it’s not the same as doing it yourself. It doesn’t get burned into your mind or implanted as it does when you do it. In any case, it’s a very good idea to keep a notebook at hand when you read the Bible so you can put down your own thoughts and your own conclusions as you go. Lots of times you have good ideas and important thoughts, and then later you can’t dig them back up out of your mind no matter how hard you try. If you take notes from time to time, they’ll be right there at your fingertips. What follows in Genesis is a family tree. It makes dull reading, but it forms the basis of a who’s who in the Bible. One of these descendants of Ham, for example, was a man named Cush. In Genesis 10, verse 8, Cush begat Nimrod. And Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Achad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. You know, a lot of these ancient cities have been found and excavated. The earliest example of a calendar known to man was found at Erech. You can probably locate these cities in the maps toward the back of your Bible. But Nimrod is a major player here. He’s a real historical character, but he forms the basis of an awful lot of legends that have been passed down through Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Rome, Greece, and all the pantheon of the gods. Nimrod, in one form or another, is represented there. So in Genesis 10, verse 32, these are the families of Noah after their generations in their nations, and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood. And the whole earth, Genesis 11, verse 1, and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. I guess that figures, really. You’ve got eight people come off the ark. They’re all speaking to one another. And the process of time, their language, because they are close to all their descendants, basically stays much the same. So the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, they migrated around with the weather, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. And they said to themselves, Go to, let’s make brick, and let’s burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, slime for mortar, and they said, Go to now, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach into heaven, and let’s make us a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. Now this is a kind of curious event. What’s going on here? In truth, a lot of ancient towers have been discovered in this plain. It seems that there’s one, in fact, that people call the Tower of Babel, but there’s no real evidence that that particular one is the one. Why were these people building these towers throughout this plain? Well, students who’ve looked at this in the time past have noticed that the towers that are built there have curious alignments with the heavens. Now, in England, on the Salisbury Plain, there’s another interesting phenomenon that’s aligned with the heavens. It’s called Stonehenge, and you’ve probably heard of it. For a long time, Stonehenge was associated with the Druids, but Stonehenge is much older than that. In fact, it may even be as old as Abraham. Think about it. Stonehenge is a circle of stones, but it’s more than that. There are inside this circle of stones, originally there were pits dug. There was a circle of 30 and inside that a circle of 29. Now, you don’t have to think about this very long if you know much about astronomy to know that 29 and 30 are the two lengths of a lunar month. Because a lunar month is 21 and a half approximately days long. So some months will have 30 days, some months will have 29. Also, with a little research they learned… that the alignment of this great circle shows them where the vernal equinox is, where the summer solstice is, where the winter solstice is. Now, why did they care about that? The presumption is that they were idolaters and had something to do with their religion. But I will tell you this. It’s very important, if you’re a farmer, to know when the summer solstice is and when the winter solstice is. It’s important to know when to plant. It’s important to know when to harvest. There are just a whole lot of very important things that come about to know the calendar, that is, the flow of the seasons through time. Even if you’re a hunting society, you need to know when to expect the animals down from the high country. All these things were extremely important in the ancient world. And it’s very clear that Stonehenge was simply a very permanent calendar. Now, it’s not any great trick, and you certainly didn’t need those great stones up there in order to make this calendar. But the problem is if you went out there and you put a stick in the ground every morning as you made your observations and you decided to use the sticks, it’s easy for an animal to knock a stick over. It’s easy for an enemy to come along and steal a stick or to move it for you and confuse you about your planning. But if you put up a 60-ton block of sarsen sandstone, it’s going to be awfully hard for any vandal to come around there and move the thing on you. It was a permanent part of their society. Now let’s go back to the plain of Shinar and the Tower of Babel. These towers were built in this area as permanent observatories. In other words, people could actually climb up on top of them and look across at the next one and plan and know exactly when the summer solstice is coming and when the winter solstice is coming and in between them, midway, the equinox. Well, why a tower? Well, they didn’t have great sandstones down in this play. They had to build these things up with bricks. And someone pointed out to me, I hadn’t thought about it, that there are frequent ground fogs in this area. And so if you’re going to be able to make your observations and meet your calendar obligations, you’ve got to be able to get above the ground fog to know what day it is. I really think the Tower of Babel in its basis was more mundane than many people think. It says, I know, let’s go build a tower that may reach into heaven. No, they didn’t think they were going to heaven on their tower. They just wanted to get the thing up into the sky. Part of it was for observation. And as they said, let’s make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. They wanted to put down some permanence. Well, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. What do you suppose God thought about the whole thing?

SPEAKER 01 : 20:55

We’ll talk about that when I come back. If you would like to share this program with friends and others, write or call this week only and request your free copy of What Is God Doing? Number 8. Write to Born to Win, P.O. Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And please tell us the call letters of this radio station.

SPEAKER 02 : 21:26

So the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built. And I think it’s fair to say that the Lord was not amused. He said, Look at this. The people are one. They have all one language. And this they begin to do. And I can see that nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Now, this isn’t hard to figure out. What God is seeing here is that the centralization of power, the centralization of government, the communication that people had, the technological developments that were coming on the scene was going way too fast. And man was nowhere near able to handle it. In fact, there’s no reason to believe we are either. So God looked at it, and He said, I’ll tell you what let’s do. Let’s go down there and confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence on the face of the earth, and naturally they quit building the city. Therefore the name of it is called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth. And from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of the earth. Which, when you understand that you can’t understand a word this guy is saying that’s talking to you, you really have no special reason to hang around him. If you’ve never seen the movie The Bible, you probably should. It’s got some really fascinating scenes, both with Noah and the development and building of the ark, all the way through the Tower of Babel, and the incredible thing that happens when people speak to one another and just don’t understand a word the other person is saying. The story of Genesis from here continues with genealogies and the movements of peoples as they pass along through the world. And finally, it takes us to a man named Abraham who was born in Ur of the Chaldees. Actually, his name originally was Abram. God changed it later to Abraham. In a play on words, he said, because I have made you a father of many nations. Now, when Abram was a relatively young man, I say relatively, the Lord said to Abraham, get out of your country and from your kindred and out of your father’s house into a land that I will show you. Sometimes one of the best things that can happen to a young man is to get uprooted. It is so easy to stay close to home. It’s so easy to depend on parents. It’s so easy to carry on in your old environment. And getting plucked up and moved to another part of the country and to go to work there can sometimes be the best thing that happens to us. Well, it happened to Abraham. He said, get out of here and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you. I’ll make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless them that bless you, I will curse him that curses you, and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And beginning here come echoes that ring all the way down to the first century of our own era in the ministry of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul, who saw all families of the earth being blessed in one Jesus Christ, who was the seed of Abraham. So Abraham departed as the Lord had said to him, and Lot, his nephew, went with him. Abraham, I said he was young, relatively. He was 75 years old when he departed out of Haran. And Abraham took Sarah, his wife, Lot, his brother’s son, all their substance they had gathered, and all the souls that were with them in Haran, and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came. This was the land that was inhabited by that grandson of Noah, the son of Ham, who had received the curse for whatever it was he did to Noah. So Abram passed through the land into the place of Sychem, into the plain of Morah, and the Canaanite was then in the land. That’s where they had settled. That’s where they lived. And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, To your seed will I give this land. And so Abram built an altar to the Lord who appeared to him. And he moved from there to a mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west and Hai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. One little sidelight here. Most of you, you have a Bible in your house. The chances are pretty good you have got some maps in the back of those Bibles. And it’s really when you find these place names, it’s a good idea to page back there. Sometimes there’s an index. And you can look these places up and get just a little bit of a feeling for where they are, the distances between them. It makes the whole thing a little more real to you. And if you have a little bit of money to invest, you might like to pick up a Bible atlas. I’m a map person myself. I love to have pictures and maps laid out before me so that I can measure the distances and make an estimate of the walking time between them because these people did walk wherever it was that they went. It makes the whole thing seem much more real. Abraham is a real person, a real man of God. And the relationship that developed over time between this man and God is really worth our time. I’m afraid I’m running out of time right now. Next time, we’ll talk more about this man, Abraham, whom the Bible tells us was a friend of God. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart.

SPEAKER 01 : 27:28

And don’t forget… We’re all related. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.