The Age of the Gentiles, No. 2

DS2A

We have found thus far that in the dispensation of the gentiles, there are three distinct phases to this dispensation. Phase number one is the stage of innocence. This is the stage of positive volition, and it goes from the creation of man until the time that he was expelled from the Garden of Eden because of the fall into sin. The second phase of the dispensation of the gentiles we call the phase of conscience. This is the stage of negative volition. This is when every man is doing what is right in his own eyes, and man's conscience is his guide. In this phase of the dispensation, man gradually degenerates as two great lines of humanity descend from Adam. One is a godly line, and the other is an ungodly line. Humanity so degenerates that God brings this phase to an end with the flood.

Then after man comes off of the ark, the third phase begins. This is the phase of human government. This begins when Noah came back onto the earth after the flood, and it continues until the Tower of Babel which was the first attempt by mankind at world government which God rejected. This is the stage of nationalism. We will yet be looking at that.

We have also found that along with these dispensations there is overlaid four great civilizations. These four civilizations are, first of all, the antediluvian civilization. Secondly is the postdiluvian civilization which is the one in which we live today. The third one is the kingdom civilization. Finally, the fourth one will be the eternal civilization. The antediluvian civilization went from Adam until the flood. The postdiluvian, which means after the flood, goes from the flood until the beginning of the millennium. The kingdom civilization is coterminous with the millennium--the dispensation of the kingdom. The eternal begins after the end of the 1,000 years of Christ's reign on Earth.

Every civilization begins with everybody born again. It is important that we remember this progression of the dispensations because this is how God looks at human history. What God has done is when he was dealing with the gentiles, He gave certain revelation. This revelation is recorded in the Scripture. As a matter of fact, in this dispensation some of the revelation only applies to phase 1. Some of the revelation applies to phase two in the conscience period, and some to phase three in the period of human government. If you take Scripture which applies to one phase and try to apply it to another phase, you are going to be twisting the Word of God. If you try to apply Scripture that belongs to one dispensation to another dispensation, you will be distorting the Word of God. This is the key to rightly dividing the Word of Truth. This is why it is necessary that you understand how God looks at human history in order that you do not distort Scriptures by trying to apply them to the wrong place.

There is another thing that has evolved in the progress of our seeing how God has unraveled His plan of the ages. That is that there are certain divine institutions. A divine institution is something that God has established to apply to all of humanity whether you are a believer or believer. The purpose of the divine institution is to preserve the human race. The first divine institution was volition. God has established that every person should have free will and free choice in all that he does. Any government or any agency or any segment of humanity that tries to deny freedom of choice in any respect to a human being within the confines of law is violating the plan of God. It is God's will that you have freedom of personal choice.

The second divine institution is marriage. Marriage is monogamous. That means that you have one husband or one wife at a time. Secondly, it is established between males and females. Males do not marry males and females do not marry females. The third divine institution is family which is designed for the rearing of children--training children under the authority of the parents. Finally, the fourth divine institution, which we will look at now, is nationalism. This is society divided up into nations. It is not the will of God that humanity be organized on a one-world basis. It is not the will of God that humanity come together under the sort of thing that the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) ultimately has in mind of proposing a world government. This is exactly what Satan is promoting, and what he is going to try to imitate in the tribulation. He's going to try to bring a millennium during the tribulation.

The Antediluvian Civilization

The question always comes up, of course, where did he get a wife? Well, the wife was, of course, one of his sisters. Marriage within the family was not forbidden by God until the dispensation of the Jews--the second dispensation. It was not against the laws of God to marry within close family relationships within the dispensation of the gentiles. It was later forbidden. So at this time, Cain was provided with a wife which was one of his sisters. You can read about the forbidding of this kind of marriage relationship in Leviticus 18:6 and following.

Cain

Cain built a city and he named it after his son Enoch--the city of Enoch. Cain in this way wanted to build fame for himself. He wanted to, in this city, start putting together a society and a way of life that was acceptable to people with old sin natures who wanted nothing to do with the living God. Enoch had a son whose name was Irad. The word "Irad" means townsmen. The word connotes a certain worldly, wise, sophisticated, wheeler-dealer type. Into the line of Cain came this kind of an operator. Irad had a son named Mehujael. This means "smitten of God." Notice that Mehujael" has this "el" on the end of his name. In Hebrew, that stands for God. "El" is the name of God. But this should not deceive you. This again was not a reference to the true God. This was a reference again to a form of religion which had been produced by Satan and substituted for the true worship of God. It's the 2 Timothy 3:5 principle.

Mehujael had a son whose name was Methusael. This means "man of God." Notice how these people are constantly trying to bring religion and acceptability with deity into their civilization. They'd have been outright fools at this point in human history to have denied that there was a god out there. They were too close themselves to the experiences, and Cain certainly had heard the voice of this God directly in his condemnation and his dealing with him over his brother's murder. They knew that God was out there. You must understand that many people today say, "Well all I've got is the Bible. I read the Bible. The Bible tells about a God who's out there. I don't know whether He's out there. How do I know that God is out there? Prove Him to me."

Well that condition did not exist here. These people were well aware that God was out there, and they were rejecting the God that they knew was out there. That's why they were so obsessed with these names. Names are very important in the Bible. They're given because a child is named in these ancient times in order to convey a message. So here again and again there is reference to God. Therefore, it should not surprise you that in our apostate society today, religion is a big thing. There is a great and constant reference to God. People are absorbed with talking about God and including religion in their way of life. This is the way Satan wants it. Satan was training the people of the first civilization to do that very thing.

Alright, Methusael is not a man of God in the sense of accepting Christ as Savior and entering the family of God. It was anything but that. Methusael had a son whose name was Lamech. Lamech means "powerful energetic one." Lamech had four children. The first one was called Jabal. "Jabal" meant "wealth production." The next one was Jubal. "Jubal" means "sound." These two children were born by the first wife of Lamech, Adah (Genesis 4:20-21). Then he had a son named Tubalcain. "Tubalcain" means "metalsmith." Then they had a sister, a girl named Naamah which means "graceful, beauty, pleasure." These two children came by another wife whose name was Zillah. Naamah was undoubtedly just what her name suggested--a real beauty. These women in this civilization were fantastically beautiful. Part of the beauty was because the climactic conditions were different. Remember that there were no seasons. Climate was always the same. This seems in some way to have affected the length of life.

Immediately that the flood takes place, people no longer lived for hundreds of years. Something apparently happened in connection with the climactic change of the flood. Perhaps there was a covering--a canopy of water--over the earth which was filtering out certain outer space radiation and forms of radioactive materials and light rays which were destructive to the human body into longevity. In any case, Naamah's name, reflecting her beauty, is very informative in what we shall see brought the end of this civilization, because the evil demonic angels looking at this civilization with its fantastically beautiful women, became attracted to these women, and this is part of what propelled the demon angels to violate a principle of God and enter into marriage and into sexual relationships with these human women. This produced the off-breed mongrel race half-angel and half-men which God wiped out in the flood.

So this was the line of descent through Cain. It was this line that was devoted to advancing a civilization without God.

Seth

This godly line then moves parallel to the ungodly line. Seth had a son whose name was Enosh. Enosh means "moral" or "weakness." His name stressed the fact that these people, because they were godly people, recognized their dependence upon God. In other words, they were grace-oriented. They knew that anything they had and anything they were was the result of the grace of God. Enosh had a son whose name was Kenan. Sometimes he's called Cainean. His name means "deplorable." This again was a reminder in the godly line of man's true condition before God. Man's condition before God was deplorable. Keenan had a son whose name was Mahalaleel. Mahalaleel means "praise of God." This expressed the true purpose of life as reflecting the glory of God (Ephesians 1:12). Mahalaleel had a son whose name was Jared. Jared means simply "descent."

Jared had a son named Enoch. This is the Enoch, the seventh from Adam, that we studied in the book of Jude, and which is one that God took alive to heaven without dying. Enoch lived to be 365 years old before God took him to heaven. He went to heaven when he was a young man, because they lived to a 1,000 years in those days. Let's say he went to heaven as maybe a 35-year-old man in the prime of his life. But he was on the comparatively young side in the range of 100 years that we think of today. He went to heaven without dying. He is the type of the saints who will go up in the rapture without dying.

It was this man who gave birth to the oldest man that ever lived, Methuselah. This was a strategic child. This child's name was very significant to this generation. Methuselah means "when he is dead, it shall be sent." Of course, what this represented was simply the fact that when this child dies, the flood would come. Methuselah lived until, tradition tells us, the week before the flood, and figuring by his age and so on. The week before the flood began, Methuselah died. When he died, that signaled that the grace of God--that hundred and twenty years of waiting--was at an end. Methuselah had a son named Lamech, and Lamech had a son named Noah. Noah had three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These two lines of humanity existed side-by-side in this first civilization--the antediluvian civilization. You can see that it was made up of very many impressive and outstanding personalities who were the patriarchs of this era of history.

From the human viewpoint, this was a very impressive civilization and it had a very impressive record. We find that in Genesis 4:17 we're told that cities had been founded. Men were no longer running around living out in the open field or perhaps living in caves. They had now gathered themselves together in organized social groups in cities. We're told that man had prospered in material possessions and he was very advanced in his culture. People now lived in tents and houses. They had herds of livestock. They had developed, no doubt, agriculture as a stable food base for men and animals. We don't have any record that they were eating these animals. They apparently were animals on the one hand that would provide milk and other things. However it is not beyond the Cain line to have also proceeded to violate God's rule that they should only eat fruits and vegetables. It is not beyond the Cain line that we may suspect that they probably began slaughtering these animals and eating them.

Genesis 4:21 tells us that the fine arts flourished, and entertainment became a big thing. There were schools of instruction that guided people in learning manufacturing arts and skills. All-in-all, with just a little bit of information we have in Genesis 4, we see that this civilization was fantastically advanced and fantastically developed. However, the moral condition steadily deteriorated. Man's inventions and discoveries of the workings of nature only led in the line of Cain to pride and to a self-sufficient attitude. Consequently, he had less and less concern about God. Under the guise of enlightenment, the old sin nature was increasingly indulged in the things that it wanted to do. So, morals became increasingly corrupt.

Right now you can think of all the things that you know go on in our society today. This includes all the things that can be seen pornographically; all the things of a vile nature that you can hear; and, all the things that the human mind invents to do of a degenerate animal-like quality. If you can just project and expand that fantastically, you will have an idea of what things were like in this first civilization. It didn't begin like that, but gradually as they moved down farther away from Adam, the Society of mankind and this civilization degenerated into a more animal-like structure day-by-day. The moral condition was degenerate under the guise of enlightenment. This is the same thing you hear today. The enlightenment of our day should enable us to be able to act like what are called adults. If you are a person who is an adult, you won't mind wallowing in filth of any kind. That's the implication. So more and more, whatever God had to say did not occupy the interests of the sophisticated thinking of the Cain civilization.

It was at this time that the divine institution of marriage, you may be sure, came under attack. We have this described in Genesis 4:19 where this man Lamech, the son of Methusael, took to himself two wives, and he became a bigamist. No doubt this was a common practice in that society of enlightenment. However, we have only the record of this man, but probably a record which reflects to us what was generally the practice.

We also have recorded in Genesis 4:23-24 about this civilization, we have the second murder recorded in Scripture. Again, it was done by the bigamist Lamech who bragged to his wives about having gone out and murdered a man. Because he was a man of some intellect and capacities, he even explained it to them in a poem. In the Hebrew, it's in a poetic verse. He describes to them how he went out, and this man wounded him with a scratch, and he killed him for it. Furthermore, he bragged to them that he was a young man. He was proud of the fact that he had whipped and taken the life of somebody apparently much younger than himself. Then he said that he claimed God's protection for what he did. That's how perverted the thinking had become. He said if God's vengeance would be sevenfold, then his should be tenfold for what this man did to him, and for the offense that Lamech believe he had experienced.

This kind of thinking finally led to where Genesis 6:11 tells us that under the first civilization the whole earth was filled with violence. It came to the place where people were afraid to walk out of their tents. They were afraid to leave their apartment structures. They were afraid to go out to the country. They were afraid to walk in the city parks alone after dark. Does that sound familiar? That' civilization. The earth was filled with violence. The reason the earth was filled with violence, Genesis 6:5 tells us, is because man's mind had now become continually evil. This is almost hard to believe. All over the face of the earth, every thought that these thousands of human beings had was the thought of evil. They continually sat and devised evil.

We have recently gone over the seven sins that God says that he hates the worst. One of the sins that was listed there that God despises the worst is a mind which devises evil; a mind which is inventing something corrupt to do; and, a mind which is daydreaming. You can feed your mind to prepare it to do that. A lot of the pornographic literature that is so available to high school and college students as well as yourself, this is the kind of substance that leads to the kind of sin that God says is one of the seven he hates the most. You can't read things of that nature without it destroying your soul. It will start building up the callouses which will cause you to go spiritually berserk so that you cannot understand right from wrong, and you will justify evil.

Remember that these people in this civilization were sophisticated; they were cultured; they were refined; they held concerts; they had the finest culinary arts; they knew how to handle food; and, they had made great advancement in the comforts of life, the pleasures of life, and in recreation. These people looked upon themselves as people of some culture and refinement. They didn't look upon themselves as something debased. Yet, their minds were continually thinking some evil that they could perform, and the lives of people were continually at stake, and you may be sure that there were plenty of murders and plenty of vileness of every kind that you've ever heard of.

So God finally gave an estimate of this civilization. While they looked upon themselves as very sophisticated, very advanced, and very enlightened, Genesis 6:12 tells us, "God looked upon the earth and, behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted His ways upon the earth." Then Jude 11 says, "Woe unto them for they have gone the way of Cain." The way of Cain was a civilization that God placed under fantastic condemnation.

It's rather interesting when you count down through the generations here. The seventh from Adam through the Cain side is Lamech, the bigamist and the murder. The seventh from Adam through the Seth side is the tremendous wonderful man named Enoch--this brilliant star upon the horizon in this dark and demented civilization. It's a stark contrast between this advanced cultured society of this civilization and the positive simple godly believer. Now who was really smart? Who is the person that was really with it between these two men? Lamech or Enoch? Lamech found, to his sadness, how far he was out of it. Enoch realizes how far he was in and on the right track.

Civilization is filled with the wreckage of sophisticated, intelligent, cultured, refined, money people who think that they have a touch with God; that they are under the approval of God; and that they are such that God must certainly view them with favor. They look out at this simple person, the godly believer, who will not enter with them into their evil and who will not run with them to evil. That's another one of the sins that Proverbs says that God hates the worst. They scoff at this person, "You poor goody good. You don't know what it is to have fun in life. You're so unenlightened." Well who is the smart one? Was it Lamech, or was it Enoch? I think it was without a doubt that it was Enoch.

Now as you run your eyes through this list here of these names of these two lines of descendants from Adam, you will notice something else that's very interesting. In the line of Cain, death is never mentioned except for the murder here that Lamech performed. Whereas, regularly in the Seth line, the death of each one of them is specifically declared. I think the reason for this is that the Cain line is spiritually dead. Consequently, they are under the divine condemnation of God as John 3:6 points out. Consequently, the lives of the Cain descendants were filled with all kinds of works which they considered of value but which God considered of no value. They were producing their human good. God condemned that, and he condemned them, and Revelation 20:12-15 tells us how he will condemn all these human good works of theirs.

So this line of Cain, all the while that it was on earth, was simply marking time. It was going exactly nowhere. As far as God was concerned, when they died, they were going straight to hell, and they were as good as there in the decisions that they had made. Consequently, when they died, it was of no importance. Nothing had been lost. They were of no value upon the earth. They had no future in eternity. They were not in the family of God. They were completely out from beyond the care of God by their own choice.

However, on the other side, when you come to Seth and his line, you find that these people had been redeeming the time. Remember that you redeem time, which means that you buy up time. If you go out and you pawn something and you get so much money for it, in order to get that thing back for you to use, you have to go back and you have to redeem the object by paying a certain amount. Then you can take that radio or that musical instrument or that television set, and you can use it. You have redeemed it. This is what the Bible means when it says to redeem the time, because literally what it says is to buy up time. You buy up time by using the technique of the confession of sin so that you are in a position to be able to absorb doctrine so that you are able to have God's perspective upon the day that He gives you to live one day at a time. You are able to take that day and invest it in such a way that there are eternal returns of blessing to you.

When you wake up tomorrow morning, if you are in a status quo of fellowship with God, remember that He is giving you a day, and that day you may invest for Him in such a way that it has been redeemed unto you. In the status of fellowship you have bought it, and you can take that day and invest it for eternal reward. That's what these people in the Seth line had been doing. Therefore, their death, Psalm 116:15 tells us, was precious in the eyes of the Lord. When they died, they went into His presence, and they brought with them a vast cargo of divine good production for which God rewarded and blessed them. In other words, they were going someplace. They weren't just marking time. When they died, it was an advancement into something better. However, when these jokers over here in Cain's line died, it was no promotion you may be sure. It was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

As a matter of fact, you may be an unbeliever. You may have mental reservations. You may be some young person that's been around here a long time, and you've said, "Yeah that's nice," and you've heard about this gospel, and you've even given lip service to it, and you even go along with it because you like the people at church and you like the place. You may have never really entered the family of God by faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you're bucking your husband or your wife relative to the spiritual things that you both should be sharing and that have been open to. So, maybe you are not a believer. Well, I want to tell you one thing, and this is the same thing that could have been told to the Cain line. Just don't die. The moment you die, that's when it all comes crashing in on your head and there is no return. Now is the day of salvation. Now is the day of opportunity. For you as believers, now is the time when you can buy up time--you can redeem time--and you can invest it for your eternal blessing.

So how stands your death this night in the eyes of God? Precious? Or were you like an animal? Everybody in the Cain line was an animal. He only had a body and a soul. In other words, he could feel things; he could make decisions; and, he could think--an animal can do that. These were all animals in this line. When they died, they went out into eternity as animals. God didn't even note their deaths in Scripture. But the people in Seth's line had a living human spirit which is what happens when you receive Christ as Savior. Therefore, they were complete human beings. Therefore, they were precious in their death in the sight of God because it was going somewhere.

So the dispensation of the gentiles moved along with this overlay of civilization gradually from the very first, and we now want to look at the third phase--the human government phase--and the consequences as we come to the end of the gentile dispensation. As time went along, I'm sorry to say that the line of Seth became caught up in the good life of the civilization of that day. Consequently, as children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were born into the line of Seth, they began drifting away from the knowledge of their spiritual heritage and from their relationship to the Lord that their parents and that their forebears had had.

So the antediluvian civilization, while containing both believers and unbelievers, gradually found that the line of unbelievers began to increase precipitously, and the line of believers began to drop off fantastically on the other end. As children were born, they drifted off and, in effect, joined the Cain line and the Cain society. As believers became fewer in number, society began increasingly to come apart at the seams with some of these things we've been describing. This was in the way of immorality, vileness and wickedness of thinking where all overt evil begins. Outwardly, the civilization was at its peak. It was impressive in its appearance. It was vigorous in health. It was sophisticated in its concepts including that of government and of religion. However, inwardly this civilization was utterly selfish; it was morally corrupt; and, it was operating on spiritual delusion.

Satan looked upon this civilization that had degenerated to that condition. He saw that the line of Cain was prospering under his care, and that the line of Seth under his bombardment was deteriorating. Satan put in motion into this splendid civilization a very fantastic plan. Remember that he was still bugged about Genesis 3:15. He still had to stop this Savior to come as pure humanity. So he orders a group of his demons, evil angels, who fell with him from heaven to come to earth. They were quite happy to do this because they had these beauties here like Naamah and these other women. They came in human male form, and they intermarried with human society. They took themselves wives of these women. We know that these were angels and not the godly line of Seth because the term which describes this is "sons of God." In the Hebrew, the sons of God always refers in the Old Testament to angel beings or spirit beings--never to human beings.

If you're interested in pursuing this in considerable detail, you may get the recordings that cover that in our study on the Book of Jude which goes to that in complete detail, and I think you will be well satisfied, if you are open to the truth, that these were demon beings who came to earth. They were violating one of God's laws which was against sexual relations between beings of different categories. That is, God has categories of angels, humans, and animals, and they are not to be interrelated. Well, the children that were born from these angel-human life marriages were half angel and half human. They were giants in size and fantastic in strength, and undoubtedly are the background of the Greek and Roman mythology stories of gods who married human women and produced fantastic offspring.

Satan's plan was to get everybody in the world where he was half-angel and half-human. Once he accomplished that, it would be impossible for Jesus Christ to come into the world as the God man because there wouldn't be any pure humanity through which He could be born. That would frustrate Genesis 3:15 and keep him from facing the final doom that God had pronounced upon him. It was a brilliant plan, and he almost pulled it off because humanity was just captivated by this. These women just flocked to these splendid male angels. They took up with them, and soon the earth seemed like it was populated only by these mongrel half-breeds, and that it was not possible for Jesus Christ to come and qualify as our mediator--one between God and pure humanity as we read of in 1 Timothy 2:5 and Philippians 2:5, 8.

The Flood

Noah was told to build an ark. God said, "I'm going to give you 120 years. I want you and your sons to build this ark. I'll tell you how to do it, and you will preach and give a testimony in the meantime. So no ridicule could divert Noah, and no logic would dissuade him from this task. He turned to it, and in 120 years, he built the ark. He maintained a testimony warning of what was coming. Everybody rejected him. He batted exactly zero. In time, God provided the animals. He provided the supplies. They were loaded aboard. God closed the ark, and the rains began. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights. This was the first time it ever rained. Up to now, vegetation had been watered by the dew coming up from the earth. At this time, all of the underground sources of water broke forth. They burst forth from all directions from under the earth. The earth had a cataclysmic shock. It was just torn to shreds. The flood is probably the time that all the fossils were created. Probably, it was the result of the floods and the fantastic pressures of the water, because the waters gradually rose, and they rose all over the earth.

We are told that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. It happens to be 29,141 feet high. We are told that the water came up to the top of Mount Everest and then went up for another 859 feet. So the level of water was 859 above the peak of Mount Everest, and this amounted to something like 30,000 feet above sea level. It's almost impossible to grasp that. People who fly are aware that Denver, Colorado can be a touchy place to come in with an airplane for the simple reason that it's one mile up in the air above sea level. Therefore, it is a thin altitude, and in the hot summer it takes a long runway to get off. You have to be aware of the fact that if you've been flying around here in our beautiful 500-foot altitude of Dallas, and you fly up to Denver, that you better be aware that you have risen exactly one mile up into the air, and that's going to affect your landing, and it's going to affect your takeoff. If you can imagine water piled up six times as high as the city of Denver is, that's what happened over the earth.

So I want you to understand that the whole earth became a watery grave (Genesis 7:21-23). All of life was destroyed except for Noah and his family who were safe in the ark. This is just as you and I are safe in Christ who is our ark as we will ride out the sea of God's divine judgment against our sins. Five months later, the waters began to recede on the earth (Genesis 8:1). In a year's time, all of the flood waters had been removed from the earth; the earth was dry again; and, it was ready for man to disembark. Noah disembarked onto a world that was an awesome sight.

In the next session, we're going to take up the beginning of this next civilization, and also the conclusion of the dispensation of the gentiles. Beware that you do not apply one portion of Scripture that belongs to one phase of the dispensation of the gentiles to another phase because it will not fit.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1971

Back to the Dispensations index