Intellectually Fulfilled Heathens

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture, and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist, I'm Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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As most of our listeners know, along with being the host of this program, I am also the pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church of Jacksonville, Florida.
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On today's program, I'm going to feature a portion of a recent sermon from SGFC.
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If this portion of the sermon is of interest to you and you decide you'd like to hear the full message or others like it, please go to our website and you will find a library of over 1,000 sermons on a variety of topics.
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These include messages from me, our other elders, and from special guests who have visited our church over the years.
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Now, without further delay, here is a clip from a recent message.
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I hope you enjoy.
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Now we have, beginning at verse 18, the descendants of Cain.
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And from verses 18 to 22, we have the line and the exploits of the line.
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Several generations are listed before much history is given.
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There's really nothing to say about the sons of Cain, the first few generations, with exception to say that the names in this line are very close to the names that are the line of Seth.
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When we get to chapter 5, we're going to see, like, Methuselah, Methuselah.
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You know, there are some very similar things, and I think there is some significance to that, which we're going to talk about next week.
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But what really happens is when we get down to Lamech, the attention begins to get more intense, because in Lamech, we have the first case of polygamy.
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Actually, in this case, it would be more specifically bigamy, because it's two wives.
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Polygamy usually means more than two wives.
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But in any case, this is a rebuffing of God's plan for marriage.
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What's God's plan for marriage, by the way? For this very reason, the man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh, right? That's the goal of marriage, that a man leaves his father and mother.
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He cleaves unto his wife, and the two become one.
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And there's not multiple, right? It's not Adam and Eve and Lilith, or Adam and Eve and Sarah, or anybody else.
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It's Adam and Eve.
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And when Jesus is asked about marriage in Matthew 19, Jesus doesn't cite the prophets.
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He doesn't cite the teachings of Israel, the extra-biblical teachings of Israel.
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He cites Genesis.
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He says, as it was from the beginning, one man, one woman for life.
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But then we get to Genesis 4, and what do we have? We have Lamech, the first bigamist, the first one to have a second wife.
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And from Lamech, we have two lines.
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We have the line through Ada and Zillah.
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Both of those names have meaning.
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Ada actually means beauty and beautiful, and it refers to the fact that she was probably very beautiful.
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The word Zillah actually means shade, and could still refer to her beauty.
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And so, he chooses these two women, both of them who are able to give him descendants, and he fathers four named individuals.
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The first is Jabal.
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This is the one who is the...
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It says the father, and the word father there simply means the founder.
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The founder of advancements in agriculture.
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Essentially, the father...
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It says that he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.
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That would have been advanced agricultural living.
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And then Jubal was the father of advancements in music.
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Now this is an interesting little side note here, because if you later in the Bible you see the word Jubilee, and Jubilee has reference to celebration.
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And often times celebration is accompanied by music, and so there is a possibility that the word Jubilee is connected to Jubal, who is the father of instruments.
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Also this is a place where people who want to attack the Bible will attack the Bible right here.
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Because they will say, this was far too advanced a civilization for such a primitive time in human history.
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You ever heard people say that? They'll say, I heard people say, well the Bible can't be true because it talks about Abraham having camels, and we know that camels weren't domesticated during the time of Abraham, so the Bible is wrong.
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And then they find out later, oh wait, they were domesticated, they were wrong.
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You see often the antagonists against scripture try to find something upon which to hang their attacks, and one of the attacks is, well, the use of instruments, especially the instruments mentioned here, which are lyres and pipes, these are way too advanced for such a primitive part of human history.
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And you know what the Greek word for that is, right? Baloney.
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That's right, it's just baloney.
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They're making it up.
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They're saying it couldn't be.
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The Bible says it is.
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It says they had an advanced civilization.
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They had an advanced civilization in regard to agriculture.
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They had an advanced civilization in regard to music.
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And I would say that would extend to the arts.
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Tubal Cain, by the way, named after his great-great-grandfather, who was a killer, interestingly enough.
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Lamech names his son after his murderous great-great-grandfather.
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Tubal Cain is a forger of instruments.
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Now it doesn't tell us what kind of instruments, but I'd like to propose an idea for you to consider.
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I believe that the instruments here would have included weapons.
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You say, why? Because we're later going to see that Lamech's line was a line of bloodshed.
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Lamech himself celebrates his own willingness to be vicious and vengeful.
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So when it says that they were forger of instruments, of bronze and steel, there's a very good chance that this is weapons that are being referred to.
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So, as we consider this line of Cain, what we see here is we see people who are very advanced in technology, very advanced in art, very advanced in science, very advanced in culture.
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A lot of you guys are homeschoolers.
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Some of you aren't, though.
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Has everybody in here heard of STEAM? STEAM is getting more popular recently, especially among homeschoolers, and it's Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.
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It's like the five-fold foundation of what you need to be teaching your child, right? So it's called STEAM.
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Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, right? And I was thinking about that as I was thinking about...
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Because they have little, they have contests.
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Like your children can, sort of like science fairs, your children can enter STEAM contests, and they can become, you know, celebrated for how good they are at science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics.
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And I got to thinking about it.
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You know who would have been the best? It would have been the descendants of Cain.
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They're good at all that stuff.
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They're good at science, they're good at technology, they're good at engineering, they're good at art, music.
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They're good at, apparently, at math because they're figuring all this stuff out.
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But I want to tell you something.
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As important as those things are, if you are spending your time with your children, concerning yourself with ensuring that they know science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics, but not God's Word, then all you are doing is creating a generation of intellectually fulfilled heathens.
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I hope you enjoyed that short sermon clip from Sovereign Grace Family Church.
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Again, if you're interested in hearing more, or you would like more information about SGFC, please go to our website at sgfcjax.org.
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That's Sovereign Grace Family Church of Jacksonville.
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And if you're in the Jacksonville area, please come visit us on an upcoming Lord's Day.
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Thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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I'm Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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As you go about your day, remember this.
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Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.