Studies in Early Genesis
In Adam’s Image
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Pentateuch
Genre: Speech
Lesson: 9 of 11
Track: #54
Dictation Name: RR115E9
Date: 1960-1970’s
[Rushdoony] Genesis 5:1-11, 21-32. In Adam’s Image.
1This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth:
4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:
7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:
8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.
9 And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:
10 And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:
11 And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.
21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:
22 And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:
23 And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:
24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.
25 And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech.
26 And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:
27 And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.
28 And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son:
29 And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.
30 And Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and daughters:
31 And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died.
32 And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
May this reading of scripture be to the glory of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Fredrick Taubes in a very interesting book entitled Abracadabra and Modern Art calls attention to the fact, and the essence of surrealism is the technique of the improbable, to realism tries to make the real world unreal, it takes the everyday aspect of our world and deliberately places them in a focus wherein they become absurd, meaningless, senseless. The essence of surrealism he calls “A deliberate meaninglessness” we live in a surrealistic world. The technique of surrealism aptly describes our politics, our religion, and the world of our time, a deliberate meaninglessness. And the everyday aspect of our life, are made deliberately unreal.
This to characterized the world before the flood. Man then too had of this world, a luxurious world, moreover he had longevity. This aspect has a superficial appeal to modern man. He very often convinces himself that he has a love for time, a longing for more time to begin living, but finds in the words of Isaac Watts: “That time like an ever rolling stream bears all her sons away, they fly forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.” The patriarchs had that more time and according to verse 29 we are told that they longed for relief, it was not more time, but more of the Lord and of His grace that they needed, because it is not more time that makes life livable.
Today we do have longevity, to a degree. And yet we do have a higher suicide rate, the greater prevalence of a world of death a rise of the variety of psychosomatic ailments and on all sides the grim reality that men have life, and they do not want it.
Longevity characterized the world before the flood. One scholar some years ago in charting the ages of the men before the flood, and those immediately after, stated that they gave an exponential curve, the kind of curve we almost always find when dealing with biological phenomena. The period before the flood was one of sixteen hundred and fifty six years, all over the world we have stories of that era, of an unusually different world at the dawn history and of man living to a great age. The Babylonian chronicles stated before the flood there were ten long lived kings who ruled. The Persians, the Egyptians, the Hindu’s, the Greeks, and the American Indians, all people have had stories of man’s original longevity and of the flood. And all these stories, however mythological they have become as a result of many repeating’s teach us two things. First a world of long life with rich circumstances, and second the overthrow of that world by judgment through a flood.
In Genesis five it is the line of Seth that we have given to us, the line of promise, not the line of Cain. This is the redemptive, the chosen one. It begins with a single man and it ends with a single man. The world became depraved. And the curse of God was released finally [audio interruption] of Noah. The return of the [audio interruption] Is a fitting {?}. A fitting underscoring of mans when he attempts to unthrone {?} God; and instead of having a one world paradise apart from God He finds a world where sin and death rule. {?} Death indeed reigned indeed from Adam after. Now each man begat sin not in God’s image as Adam was created according to verse 1. Now each man had to reckon with this reality, and he died. By their sin they had introduced death into the world. All of mans genius cannot set aside this sentence.
The significance of this chapter appears in several passages, first of all let us consider verse two. And he called their name Adam, Adam is the name of the whole human race. All humanity, not merely of Adam and Eve, Adam, dust, topsoil, ergo earth, this is the name of man. Dust thou art and unto dust Thou shalt return apart from God. Man is called Adam by God, he is defined by God. Man, we are told, could name and classify the animals, and this indeed was his task in paradise, to name, that is to classify, the animals. To understand all things, under God, to classify them, to know them and to fulfill his mandate having been created in the image of God to exercise his Kingly, prophetic, and royal calling under God, but only God can name man. The Greeks said “know thyself” this man cannot do of himself; it is God’s naming he must accept. Man as he sought in his rebellion from God to name himself sought to make of himself a God and the temptation was “ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” ‘Rename yourself, reclassify yourself, refuse God’s limitation upon yourself that you are dust, and that apart from Him you return to dust. Rename yourself and become a God.’
And we can only know ourselves as we know God. Socrates, epitomizing the son of man declared: “know thyself” implying further, thereby “know all things”. But the scripture declares in first John 2:22 “Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things” According to John when we know God we know all things in principle, not in detail. Not with respect to their endless factuality, but in principle we understand, we know all things because we know their source. The principle of their interpretation, their significance and their ultimate purpose, in that we know God who made all things. He called their name “Adam”
All of us are born in Adam’s sin, but we can also be recreated in his image and in his humanity, into a new race destined to inherit a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth. We have in Paul’s words Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24, put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, after the image of Him that created us. Now here is the source by comparison to the (feeblest?). That our inheritance is no less and much nearer. And God shall recreate heaven and earth, and God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more things for the former things are passed away. But this inheritance is our here and now also, the promise from the Lord declares “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, I will give unto Him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life, freely.”
Genesis five tells us that the hope of the sons of God and the line of Seth, that their life was not in them. They had hope according to verse 29, hope of rest in a Redeemer, for the name Noah means rest, that is the Sabbath of God, a redemption. For Lamech begot a son, he called his name Noah saying “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.” They looked therefore to a redeemer, and to Noah who was to deliver them from the wickedness of the world of their times. There was to be in Noah a setting forth of the deliverance that was to be theirs in Jesus Christ. The holiness of these was in midst of, and in the face of a world of flagrant evil. Evil that moved confidently in view of long life, we are told for example that Enoch walked continually with God, and Noah also. The phrase “walked with God” is used again in Malachi 2:6 for the expected conduct of priests, the priest. That is, close direct communion and fellowship with God. Enoch walked with God in a world of evil. His holiness was not in a withdrawal from the world, nor in celibacy but in marriage. Enoch walked with God and begat sons and daughters. Marriage is a school of holiness and of character and Enoch’s continual walking with God was a product of his faith tested in this world and in the work, marriage, and ordinary routine of this life. Gods saints are never hot-house products, but veterans of the storms, of the testing, and of the responsibility of life.
The line culminated in Noah, in the rest, the Sabbath of God. And with Noah came the preaching of judgment, culminating in that judgment, the flood; this is significant. Noah, rest, Sabbath, is atype of Christ. He was a preacher of righteousness and a preserver of the world in his one family from the flood, from the judgment in the ark. Jesus Christ is the bringer and instiller of righteousness, and He is the ark of our salvation from the flood of sin and death. In all of scripture we find that rest, or salvation and judgment coincide. They are different sides of the same reality, different faces of one coin. There can be no salvation, no rest, no true Sabbath apart from judgment. In Jesus Christ we are judged when we accept Him as Savior, and we accept His death as our death, for He died for us vicariously. He accepted the judgment of death which is our just due. And when we accept the judgment of God upon us that we deserve to do die for our sins, then we also accept His salvation. Salvation and judgment always coincide in scripture, the flood is the judgment upon the wickedness of the ancient world, and also the deliverance of the people of God.
The deliverance of Israel from Egypt was a judgment and distress unto Egypt. The deliverance of Israel unto Canaan was the judgment and distress of Canaan, and the supreme example of the coincidence of salvation and judgment is the cross of Christ. Noah came as a type of Christ, as one who was to usher in the Sabbath rest. And there cannot be the fulfillment of God’s Sabbath, with our history, without a judgment coincident with it. Therefore if we look to the immediate future and as we hope for deliverance, as we hope for salvation, for a Sabbath rest in this day we must accept, as a necessary concomitant the judgment of God upon the iniquity of our age. Therefore as we pray for rest, even as Lamech prayed for rest, like he named Noah, let us recognize that that rest involves judgment.
Jesus Christ declares unto us as we face the difficulties of our day, and the judgment that is to come, “in the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
In Adam’s image man had a long life that he tried for rest and relief, in Christ, in the reality is that all life is lived even in the midst of trouble, and the promises and realities of life in Him are yea and amen, both now and forevermore. Our world is the surrealistic world, it is a world in which indeed that the real is made unreal, and there is a deliberate meaninglessness, and a deliberate unintelligibility that characterizes mans activities in our age. And this is a product of his willful rebellion against God, of his perversity, whereby he wishes to annul the existent of Evil and thereby make himself good. Thereby a man sets himself up in opposition to God and seeks to become his own God. But in the face of this we, even more than the line of Seth described in Genesis five, can walk with God in hope, for our Redeemer has come. And the time of our deliverance into the Sabbath of God draws nigh. And the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ; when righteousness and justice shall prevail throughout the face of the earth. Our judgment approaches, and salvation also. We have therefore hope in our Noah, Jesus Christ. Therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we worship and adore God’s glorious name, evermore praises we will sing “holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Glory be to Thee oh Lord (this place?) Amen.