Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

the Oregonian. I guess today George Schuben told me the Oregonians started a series on persecuted Christians across the world that they’ll be carrying on throughout this week. And we read today in Genesis 4:16-26 of the origins of this kind of warfare. Please stand for the sermon scripture reading. Genesis 4:16-26 is the sermon text.

Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad. And Irad begot Mahujael. And Mahujael begat Methuselah. And Methuselah begat Lamech. Then Lamech took for himself two wives, the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the second was Zilla. And Adah bore Jabal. He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.

His brother’s name was Jubal. He was the father of all those who played the harp and flute. And as for Zilla, she also bore Tubalcain, an instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. And the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah. And then Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zilla, hear my voice. Wives of Lamech, listen to my speech. For I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me.

If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” And Adam knew his wife again, she bore a son and named him Seth. For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel, whom Cain killed. And as for Seth, to him also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. Then men began to call on the name of the Lord. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures and we pray that your Holy Spirit would illuminate this text for understanding. I pray, Lord God, you give me clarity of thought and speech. Keep me, Father, from presumptuous sin. Keep me, Lord God, from inadvertent sin as well. Keep us, Lord God, in the truth of your word by your Holy Spirit. We thank you for the gift of the Spirit given to us in the basis of our Savior’s work to teach us things of him. May we attend to him then as your spirit ministers this word to us. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

You remember we’ve been studying Genesis 2 and 3 and the truths relative to Christian marriage that we took from those chapters. We then proceeded and have talked about the offspring of Adam and Eve somewhat. And today we returned more centrally to the topic of marriage although in a broad context. We have in the text before us the institution of bigamy, or polygamy technically—bigamy is two wives; there might have been more, we don’t know—but certainly polygamy. And so I thought it important to preach on this text now and what I’ve done is I’ve prepared an outline that sort of gives the broad dimensions of the text and its context as well.

You remember I said last week that there are many parallels between Genesis 2 and 3 and then what goes on in Genesis 4. There’s a real sense in which Adam being driven from the garden—we now see the progression of the one seed, the ungodly seed, even further out. Cain, you’ll remember, is driven from the land that surrounds the garden. So he goes way off away from the direct presence of God. So there’s this progression. And really, if we took the time, we could look at the literary structure of Genesis 4 and see many correlations between the way the Cain story is written and the way the Adam and Eve account went as well. We talked about that a little last week, and this day we’re going to take it further up to the history of Lamech.

Now, by way of introduction, it’s a little confusing here because there are two prominent Lamechs in the Bible and both are somewhat prominent. The other Lamech is the father of Noah. Okay? And this Lamech we’re talking about today is not Noah’s daddy. This Lamech is the son of Methusael, and the other Lamech—Noah’s father—is the son of Methuselah. So the fathers of Lamech have similar sounding names, at least to us, not as much so in the Hebrew. Lamech has the same name as Noah’s father. But the Lamech we’re going to talk about today is the Lamech who is the wicked Lamech, not the father of Noah.

Now, this Lamech is the seventh generation from Adam. And this sevenfold occurrence is a significant number, of course, beginning with the creation week itself. And seven is an important cycle in biblical truth. And so the seventh generation is Lamech. And then we see in this particular Lamech the full-blown implications of the sin of the garden manifested through the ungodly line and the enmity between the two seeds.

Now it’s also a little confusing because there’s more than one Enoch in the Bible as well. We’re going to talk today a little bit about Enoch who was Cain’s son. But the seventh generation from Adam on the godly line—there are two lines portrayed for us coming from Cain and then Seth. The seventh generation down from Adam on the Seth’s side is Enoch. And Enoch in that case is the one who was faithful to God, walked with God and was seen no more. In other words, he didn’t die. He was translated somehow. He was taken to heaven the way Elijah was. And so that’s a different Enoch than Enoch who is the son of Cain, and they’re differentiated by their fathers. The good Enoch, or the godly seed, is Ben Jared. He was born to Jared, and the ungodly Enoch is born to Cain.

So by way of introduction, the important thing here is to first of all make sure you don’t get confused by the names, but then secondly to see the sevenfold generations coming out from Adam as what’s portrayed for us in these chapters four and five of Genesis. Next week I will go past chapter 5, which are the genealogies. We’ll not deal with that. Instead we’ll deal in Genesis 6 where the sons of God take for themselves daughters of men. Obviously having to do with marriage, or at least union. And so because of our marriage theme going through the Old Testament, I’ll continue that next week with that portion of Genesis 6.

But today we want to talk about Lamech, his two wives, and polygamy and their context—their literary context for us being power and an evil abuse of power.

All right. And the text tells us first of all that we read about Cain that he went off and he lived in Nod, and the name Nod means wanderer. Remember that we read last week that Cain was to be a wandering vagabond, and he’s going to live in wandering Nod. Nad, nade, and nod—they’re all very linked Hebrew words with a tremendous threefold emphasis of Cain’s nomadic existence. So Cain’s going to go out, but when Cain goes out, he decides to build a city and he has a son.

And by the way, there’s another piece of repetition here. We read that Cain went out from the presence of the Lord. Remember, Adam went out from the garden. And the next thing, Cain knew his wife. Remember, Adam knew his wife. And she conceived and bore Enoch the way that Eve conceived a son and had Cain. So we see this repetition, this further model of going further and further away from God, but in a way that draws us back to the original sin of Adam.

So Cain knows his wife. She conceives and bears Enoch and he built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. Okay. So we have first of all what James B. Jordan refers to as the Enoch factor—the cultural predominance of the ungodly line.

First under that part of your outline is urbanization. We have here the first establishment of a city, a walled fortified structure of some type, a city. And this urbanization occurs not in the context of the godly line, but rather in the ungodly line. It’s interesting in scripture—the ungodly lines, their genealogies are always given first in the book of Genesis. A part of the reason for that may be, you know, the whole idea of first Adam, second Adam, second son replacing first son, the way that Jesus replaces Adam as the new humanity. But in any event, this ungodly line engages itself in the building of a city or an urbanization.

There’s a sense in which this is a counterfeit Sabbath rest. The way the Sabbath week flows as you go through these six days, and you lead to Sabbath rest. Adam and Eve are supposed to go through that, face the test successfully on day six, and enter fully into seven’s rest. But Sabbath rest for them is not Sabbath rest. They’re kicked out of the garden. Remember, on the day when God comes to evaluate his people. So for them, Sabbath rest happens outside of the Garden of Eden. Well, here they’re driven again from the land itself now. So they’re kicked out of garden. They’re kicked out of land. They’re kicked way off into the wandering city of Nod. And there’s like a false Sabbath going on here because Cain seeks to establish himself in stability the way that we’re supposed to be established in the stability of God’s presence by establishing a city for himself, and in this city he actually is, of course, as I say here, outside of the context of garden and land, the direct judgment of God, the wandering vagrant—that’s what Cain was going to be, a wandering vagrant. Double repetition of the term. He now plants himself in Nod, or wandering. He seeks to overturn the judicial pronouncements of God by establishing himself in a city.

The fearful one—Cain defends himself. Cain is afraid. Remember, when God pronounces the sentence upon him, he’s going to wander and everything. Cain says, “I’m going to be killed by people.” His response to God is not one of contrition for his sin, but rather fear for the effects of sin on his life. Men are going to take my life. And I reference here Job 15:20-22. Turn there if you would, in your scriptures.

Job 15:20-22—we read in verse 20 of Job chapter 15: “The wicked man writhes with pain all his days. Now this is the bad counsel to Job, implying that he’s wicked. He’s not. But the advice is sound in terms of the wicked really do wise in pain. The number of years is hidden from the oppressor. Dreadful sounds are in his ears. In prosperity, the destroyer comes upon him. You see, he’s fearful. He’s in dread terror all the time. He does not believe that he will return from darkness for a sword is waiting for him.”

He knows the judgment of God. Cain does. And Cain fits this description of the wicked. He will not—he does not believe he’ll return from darkness, for a sword is waiting for him. He wanders about for bread, saying, “Where is it?” See the wanderer, the vagrant one here. He knows that a day of darkness is ready at his hand. Trouble and anguish make him afraid. They overpower him like a king ready for battle. For he stretches out his hand against God and acts defiantly against the Almighty.

All those who act in this kind of conscious rebellion against God the way Cain did, killing his brother and then not coming to contrition for that event, are those who God fills with a sense of judgment or terror. I believe that’s why most science fiction written is about horrific things to happen in the future, not about wonderful things. Men know, men feel the judgment of God. They have a sense of fear and dread of the future because they know what they deserve. And they know that what they’re getting is far better than they deserve.

So Cain is the fearful one. And in that fearfulness, he attempts to defend himself—not the way we should defend ourselves, by calling upon the name of the Lord the way that Seth’s line will do. Rather, he seeks to defend himself by creating a walled city.

So we have the fearful one creating this attempt at stability for himself. The protological city of Enoch and the eschatological city are contrasted in scriptures. What I mean by that is it’s not bad. Cities are not bad things. But for Cain to build a city attempting to defend himself and end his wandering, that’s what’s bad—for him to grasp at it as opposed to waiting for the full development of the city. The scriptures say will come in time. The end of the Bible, the new Jerusalem, is not a campground. It’s the city. Now, people are camped there, but it’s a city. Okay? There’s this movement from the garden to the city. We don’t ultimately posit a return to the garden in its absolute sense. We posit an advance in Christ to the development of city and culture. So cultural advance is a good thing. But cultural advance occurs here in terms of urbanization in the context of the ungodly line, which, as I said, James B. Jordan refers to this whole phenomena—that it occurs in the ungodly line—as the Enoch factor, because Enoch is the one who has the first city named after him.

Protological—the first city is founded on blood. Why does Cain build that city? He builds it because the blood of Abel is cried out from the ground to God and God’s judgment has come upon him. And he now is filled with dread. And he creates the protological, the first city. But the last city will be founded not on the blood of Abel, but on the blood that speaks better things than that of Abel, on the blood of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The first city is named after the descendant of Cain, Enoch. The last city is referred to as the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of peace. And Jesus is the king of that city. And so essentially, it’s named after him. He is the peace for people. So Jesus replaces here this city. This city is developed not in the cycle of maturation. Enoch’s city is built in the cycle of impatience, a striving and a grasping after things. And that’s why Mr. Jordan refers to this as the Enoch factor—that the ungodly get there first frequently in terms of technological development.

Enoch develops his city with Cain in discontinuity with the garden as opposed to continuity with the garden, the new Jerusalem that is founded upon Christ. I don’t know whose quote this is. I got it out of Kuyper’s commentary on your outline under a. It might be Martin Luther. I could not tell from the way it was cited in Kuyper’s commentary on this text. But the quote is that the first foundation stone of the kingdom of this world in which the spirit of the beast bears sway. That’s what the development of this first city by Cain and his son Enoch is—the first foundation stone of the kingdom of this world in which the spirit of the beast bears sway.

This is Augustine’s classical development of the city of God and the city of man. What Rushdoony calls in world history notes the society of Satan being developed here as opposed to the society of man. And so Genesis 4 gives us two great pictures of two lines of development. In one line grasps after technology, urbanization, and then we’ll see that Lamech’s sons take that further. And the other line grasp after the corporate worship of God that we’ll see at the end of our text. Okay.

This Enoch factor is repeated in his descendants—in Cain’s descendants—which notably are Lamech. We read then that Enoch has a son and his son has a son and his son has a son. And then we finally end up with Methuselah beginning Lamech in verse 19. Lamech is the one who takes for himself two wives. Name of one was Adah and the name of the other was Zilla. And Adah bore Jabal, which means produce. He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.

Now when it says have livestock here, this is not the same word that was used of Abel who raised cattle—or actually not cattle but smaller animals than cattle, sheep, goats. This is a more comprehensive term for animal husbandry. So the idea is that this first son of Lamech, Jabal, is the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. He’s the father, as it were, of the development of animal husbandry. Okay.

Now he has a brother. His brother’s name is Jubal, which some think it’s kind of hard to know for sure, but it seems like that name probably means sound, or it may be—it’s similar in Hebrew to the name of the ram’s horn that called the congregation together for the day of atonement. But in any event, this brother of Jabal, the father of animal husbandry, is Jubal. And he’s the father of musicology—the father of all those who play the harp, you know, a stringed instrument you would pluck, and the flute, which was probably like a panspipe. And it’s interesting that the mythology of Pan is that he is both a herdsman as well as a piper—kind of a mythological or cartoon development of these two sons placed together.

But this second son is the one who invents or develops musicology, musical instruments in their development. And then finally, there’s a third son. And as for Zilla, she also bore Tubalcain, an instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. And what that means in the Hebrew is metallurgy, and specifically development of pointed instruments by which to accomplish working in metals—okay, chisels, etc.

And so you have metallurgy. And then finally there’s the mention of a sister. The sister of Tubalcain is Naamah. So what we see here is that the ungodly line begins the development of urbanization—the first city—and they continue in that seventh generation the fullness of it being seen in the cultural progression relative to animal husbandry, music, and metallurgy. And so the ungodly line gets to all of these things first. They develop these things like the city, metallurgy, animal husbandry, and music are good things. Metal will find itself in the temple of God. Music will find itself in the temple of God. And animal skins will find themselves in the temple of God relative to the sacrificial system and some of the coverings. So these things aren’t bad.

It would be wrong to think that because the ungodly founded them, they’re bad things. In logic, that’s known as the genetic fallacy, the fallacy of origins. It is not proper to argue against something simply on the basis of its origin. Who started it up? That doesn’t answer the question. Here the ungodly start these things up, but they’re clearly proper and good. Cities, animal husbandry, metallurgy, and music are developments that God wants to have in a culture. But here in the context of the Enoch factor, it’s the ungodly line that develops these things first.

As I said, their genealogies are listed first. And some of the reasons why this may be true—we’re not told explicitly in the text—but some of the reasons are that remember that these ungodly men have no problem enslaving other men. I mean, they’re started by a guy Cain who kills his brother out of a murderous heart. They have Lamech who brags about his murdering people for doing very little damage to him or to his reputation. So the ungodly line gets slaves and they can use those slaves for the purpose of exercising progress in the technological arts.

Secondly, they’re workaholics. This didn’t used to be the case in this country, but as this country continues to move further away from God, in the workplace, more and more of us see there are people that are lazy and slothful. But there are more and more people in the context of a non-Christian culture who find their sole identity in their work and they do not obey the sabbatical period of seven day—or six days of labor and then one day of rest. We’re required to take time off to rest. Now, that increases our production the other six days. But workaholics who are working 12, 14, 16 hour days, six and seven days a week can produce a lot of technological advancement.

And certainly in the in the area of technological advancement of computer technology, it’s legendary how Bill Gates, for instance, doesn’t really like married people working for him at Microsoft. At least he didn’t used to. He’s married now himself. But the idea is they want a heavy commitment toward the workplace on the part of their programmers, and as a result they get a lot of stuff done. So they’re workaholics. They believe in domination as opposed to biblical dominion—enslavement of others.

There’s an impatience to the ungodly line. As I said, Cain doesn’t wait for the manifestation of the garden to grow into the city. Rather, he grasps after it. He goes for it quickly. Remember we said that one of the first cases of sin, the first case of sin at Adam, is an impatience to take what God would have given to him. Eventually all the trees, the fruit of the trees was given for food. But there was a period of probation and Adam took it before he was allowed by God to take it. He stole from God impatiently. Impatience is a mark of the ungodly line.

But in that impatience, they grab things and they do get certain kinds of knowledge the way that Adam attained some kind of knowledge through eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And then finally, sin cooperation. The ungodly do not struggle against their sin. You know, they—their consciences grow completely, nearly completely scabbed over as it were, calloused to the voice of the spirit working through the conscience of men to bring them conviction. You and I struggle with sin. We’re aware of the difficulties of our sin. We’re trying to submit ourselves in patience to God. And so that retards us from going quickly after the sorts of things that these sort of men will do.

The ungodly line believes—at one of the first things we must learn as Christians, that we must teach our children, is patience, patience, patience—because that’s where Adam sinned. Our Adamic nature tends to impatience. A humility before God characterizes the godly line. And there’s a degree to which we do not want to reach out then in that humility and submission to God for things that we may not be able to handle. And so we don’t—in our humility restrain ourselves from reaching out, grasping out the way the ungodly does.

Now, there should be cultural involvement, however, since these things that Enoch and Cain and that ungodly line develop are good and proper. God desires Christians to know these things. One man has said that after the flood, the animals taught men. The animals would go out and find the water ponds because they had better senses of smell. And so Noah and his children could go follow the animals and find out where the different ponds of water were. Probably there was not much difficulty after the flood finding water, but in any event there’s a sense in which man has is under tutelage in the old testament that includes the tutelage of animals. Bill Gothard has developed a long series of that looking at animals and learning from them. Well, the same thing’s true of us. We can look at what Bill Gates or other men do in terms of computer technology and learn from them. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it would be wrong for Christians to in a false pietism not engage themselves in cultural innovation or technology.

God fully expected the godly line with patience and humility to take up metal working using the techniques that have been developed by the ungodly line. He fully expects us to move in terms of hope that indeed as the proverbs tell us that the riches of the unrighteous are stored up for the righteous. So God has them do these things. He uses sin sinlessly to provide cultural advance for the godly line as well.

How do we go about doing that though? How do we go about using the technology today, for instance, that the ungodly develop and grasp after in a godly fashion? Well, the church is the last point here of the series of statements about the godly line, because the body of Christ, the corporate body of Christ, keeps us in union and communion with Christ and with his people. Keeps us from a radical individualism that would go out now, go not out after technology to reform it and to bring it into the glorification and worship of God, but rather to use it for some ungodly purposes.

In other words, you must go after and understand the technology of the pagan, but you must be very careful in doing so. And one way to provide a restraint upon yourself in using that technology is to be a consistent devoted member of a local church. And that local group of men and women provides the mechanism to keep you square on what you’re doing.

I was on the radio this last week with George Rice and KPDQ talking about the voters guide. Tim Nashiff and I were on, and we were talking about people in all the Christian failures in the last 15 years who have tried to attain political office, sometimes attain it, and then blow up on us. I mean, we—I could rattle off a string of, you know, probably 10 names of men and women who had prominent Christian professions, got involved in political action, and blew up—married their secretaries, divorced their wives, whatever it was, homosexuality, even in case of some of them.

Well, one reason that happens is that when you send people to Salem or Washington DC, you really—at least for 6 months—they’re pretty much removed from the context of the local church. There are several Christians who have maintained a good faithful witness to Christ in their full-fledged offices as legislators in Salem. And they’re the ones who have had good support systems in terms of the local church. They’re the ones who, for instance, would arrange weekly times when elders from their church would drive down to Salem and meet with them for lunch and not talk to them about public policy so much, but ask them about their walk with the Lord, their prayer life, their reading of the scriptures, and maybe even challenge them on public policy matters as they diverge from the scriptures or from the word of God.

You see, it’s so necessary to maintain that connection with the church as we move in the context of cultural advance, at least in our day and age, and in the day and age of Lamech, was predominantly the result of the advancement of the ungodly line. Remember, we’re talking here in the context of the two seeds warring against one another. So the Enoch factor, which basically says that because of these different manifestations of the ungodly, they get there first.

But those technological advances that they accomplish are really used by God to enrich the community of God because they’re going to use that technology for the glory of God.

Now, I want to relate this then to Lamech’s polygamy, and I want to relate this to the polygamous actions of Lamech. So outline point two: the Enoch factor and the origins of polygamy.

We have here, after the citation of Enoch’s three children—and by the way, it’s interesting that when you get around to Noah, you have the same threefold pattern of three dominant sons who carry different aspects of cultural advance. And we see the same thing with Abraham’s father as well. There is this pattern that God seems to have built into the structure of human civilization of this triad pattern of a development of these lines. I just throw that out there for your consideration.

But after that is portrayed for us in the story of Lamech, this full-blown seventh generation son of the ungodly sign, the bad seed of Adam. We have then his telling his wives something very interesting. Verse 23 of Genesis 4: “Then Lamech said to his wives, Adah and Zilla, hear my voice. Wives of Lamech, listen to my speech. For I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

I call this on the outline the first example of gangster rap. What we have today in terms of gangster rap, the advocating of violence, horrific hatred exhibited in some moments of the music industry today—this is seen early on in the history of men. Nothing new under the sun. Here we have Lamech speaking a poem, a very well-developed poem, I might add. It has parallelism. That’s obvious, is it not? Each line is parallel to itself. We have “wives of Lamech, hear my voice,” or rather “Adah and Zilla, hear my voice. Wives of Lamech, listen to my speech.” There’s a parallelism of poetry there. “I’ve killed a young man for wounding me, even I’ve killed rather a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me.” The parallelism goes on. “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

It has—it has—it has parallelism, which is a Hebrew poetic device. It has a metrical rhythm to it as well, which is poetry. And also, which is not typical for a lot of Hebrew poetry, there’s a great deal of rhyming in the ending of these lines. And interestingly enough, the rhyming is around the sound of the Hebrew vowel that means me, or myself, or I. So we have this self-centered, egotistic bravado, this brute of a man. This is where the quote from Luther or Kuyper talks about the beast holding sway. Here is Lamech at the end result of this development of urbanization, culture, and civilization. And he uses these things to exert his physical prowess and his killing people for merely bruising him or wounding him. A horrific poem, but a poem nonetheless. And we have this on the lips of the man who is recorded as a polygamist.

And interestingly enough, the song is dedicated to the ones he loves. It’s dedicated to himself and his reflection of himself in the two wives that he has gotten for his purposes. So we see polygamy in the context of the origins of the line that seeks to grasp after power and authority and technology impatiently. And Lamech grasps after multiple wives with that same sense of power and desire and tries to use those wives for his establishment.

In—we know that this—there was an amazing commentary I read this week on this made me laugh out loud. Shouldn’t—I should have cried. It was an evangelical commentator who writing on this says, “Well, what we have here with Lamech is the beginning of law code. The way that we’ve got the development of cities and metallurgy and animal husbandry and music, with Lamech, it’s law code.” And this is not necessarily a bad thing. He’s establishing a law code of Lex Talionis, an eye for an eye. And he’s, you know, it’s crude. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s beginning a good process of lawmaking.

To read this kind of poem or song in any way other than the brute beast that it represents is really sad on the part of an evangelical. However, there is a sense in which he’s accurate, and that is that Lamech here does indeed institute for himself and his family—he’s telling his wives to—that this is what he’s going to do. The wives are important in the context of marriage in terms of being administrative assistants to the men in charge. We can assume that these wives were no blushing violets. They were probably strong, overt, grasping women like he was, and they were used by him to promulgate this law code of his own as an exceedingly godless law code.

Lamech—we know that this is the case because Exodus 21:25 uses these same two terms that Lamech uses for being wounded and bruised. And in its establishment of the godly law code, it says that the godly requirement of eye for an eye is just that. And it says specifically in verse 25, “burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Those last two repetitions are these same two words that Lamech used. So Lamech is completely rebelling against God’s law code, which is eye for an eye. If someone wounds you, then they should be punished by wounding or by some other means that is appropriate to the crime. And instead, he’s going to kill anybody that crosses his path or that wounds him in any way or that bruises him in any way.

It’s the sheer exertion of brute force and physical violence here that is pictured in Lamech’s song. Now, I say on the outline, this demonstrates our need for law. Left to themselves, fallen man, as seen in this seventh generation development, will kill anybody who crosses his path. Now, that’s the kind of city that Cain and Enoch built as it developed in the context of Lamech. And that’s the kind of city that we find in a culture that rejects God’s law.

We see eventually the rule of the jungle. There are songs today in the popular medium, “Welcome to the Jungle,” a description of the city. And as our cities move further and further away from the Lord Jesus Christ and his law word, they move more and more to become jungles for certain elements of the city. You’re absolutely unlivable unless you have a gun, a knife, or some other method of protection. So we have in Lamech the first polygamist, this maturation of evil, the use of brute force to maintain some degree of unity.

Attempts of sinful men to unity always bring with them coercion and murder. We have in Lamech’s song hatred, beastiality, and vengeance. To quote from R.J. Rushdoony on heaven and hell and fallen man. Rushdoony says this: “The fall of man meant not only that man was now his own god, but also his own heaven and hell, his own universe. As his own universe, man could not therefore tolerate another man. And it’s not surprising then that Cain killed Adam. And Lamech early in history celebrated his autonomy from all men by boasting of his freedom and power to kill other men at will. God’s heaven and hell being denied, it becomes necessary for man to create his own heaven and hell. But because man cannot, being a sinner, create a heaven, but only a hell which is the projection of his own nature, fallen man aiming at paradise creates ever proliferating hell on earth.”

And so it is with Lamech. Lamech seeking to establish his law order, all he establishes is hell on earth and the extension of violence and domination of his wives and also of all other men. We have violence developed here in the context of civilization. It’s important to see this because modern man thinks that through education and the resulting civilization of men, violence will be eliminated. Just educate them all, make them civilized, and they won’t do bad things. The great lie to that was Lamech, and a smaller example of the lie of that is Hitler. Because in the middle of Nazi Germany you had tremendous education and civilization. The Nazis would go to these wonderful Wagnerian operas and these classical events they would attend of music and other art forms, and they would go out then and kill people in very violent, destructive, hateful, beastial sort of ways. So we see violence developing in the context of the civilization of the ungodly line—the seed of the serpent, as it were.

We see Lamech’s institutional consolidation of sin via law code. As I said, he’s instituting a policy here and he’s telling his wives, and it was significant enough for God to have it recorded in holy writ in the context of this development of the ungodly line—that their law systems reflect coercion at every point. And they build a law system upon brute force and coercion. And ultimately that is the gentile way, is it not? Our Savior told us that the gentile rulers lorded over men, and Lamech is certainly the example of that ungodly line and the consolidation of sin.

And as I said, attempts by sinful men to bring unity actually end up in disorder. So we see here the development of the urbanization finding its flow into the polygamous Lamech and the violent culture that he produces.

Habakkuk 1:11 speaks of “he whose might is his god.” And that’s the full-blown maturation of the sin of Adam on the ungodly line. Lamech is he whose might is his god, to quote from Habakkuk 1:11. Now that’s the context of polygamy. His two wives are named ornament and either tinkling or shadow. And it’s interesting that in the Song of Solomon we read that indeed the love of the person is has a good voice and her face is lovely. Your voice is sweet. Your face is lovely.

I don’t know why Lamech married these two women. I don’t know if it was this giving way to sensual desire that would lead him to polygamy, but there are other forms of polygamy as well, which I note on your outline. There’s administrative polygamy. And what this means is that when you have a culture that’s built upon the extension of the family and not the faith of Christ, the closest assistant you have in the context of rule and authority is your wife. We’ve said before that you can see some correlations in the scriptures between the elders of the church and the deacons of the church, sort of assistants to the elders in their performance of their tasks, and the wife was given to help her husband in the performance of his God-given task as well. So in the context of many cultures where wives are very important as administrative assistants to men, you’ll have polygamous relationships because men need—as their control gets broader—to broaden their control. They’ll have multiple wives as administrative assistants to carry out their different forms of control and authority.

A further advancement of this kind of polygamy is political polygamy that Solomon engaged in, where he would marry a number of wives to form political alliances with the countries roundabout Israel. There’s economic polygamy. There’s tribes in Africa or other countries where agriculture is very important—where wives and the children they produce are important for economic assets. If you’ve got a culture that is polygamous and you have men who produce a number of servants for themselves that way, it’s pretty tough to be monogamous.

I was up on our roof this last week putting on shingles and all the kids are up there, my wife is up there. We’re all working together as a family. Nice, wonderful thing to do. Beautiful weather. And I thought about this—that, you know, one advantage or seeming advantage to men that grasp after what they shouldn’t have—for polygamy—is you have more assistants, more kids, more wives up on that roof to make it go a lot quicker. Economic polygamy.

There’s also forms in history of disaster polygamy. R.J. Rushdoony notes that after the Thirty Years War, the government for a time allowed polygamy because so many men were killed, there were so many women left that to reestablish the culture, the proper balance of men and women, and to have a bunch of kids, they for a period of time permitted polygamy. Now, these are all things that the ungodly will reach after impatiently, making use of the Enoch factor of trying to grab at things. And in this case, they’re grabbing at things that are improper in and of themselves.

When they grab at cities or metallurgy, that’s okay because we know the scriptures tell us they’re okay. But when they grab at the advancement of these technologies or their governments by means of multiple wives, the scriptures clearly and definitively outlaw those efforts. No matter what rationalization, no matter what justification, this is sin. It’s important for us to know this.

It may seem pretty innocuous to us today. The only people that are in polygamous relationships are the Mormons. But why are multiple marriages not permitted today? Is there any reason? I mean, when men can live together with in groups or in multiple numbers of relationships, which they can—there’s nobody going to enforce a law against that. Why isn’t marriage amongst people sanctioned?

Now, my contention here is that it will be—that unless God chooses to reverse the cultural slide we’re involved with, the church of Jesus Christ will find itself in a position of having to work through whether polygamy is okay or not. And that’s where we’re at today. We put out this voters guide, and the purpose of the voters guide is not particularly to see if a measure gets voted in or not. That’s that’s a side benefit, but from my perspective, the purpose of the voters guide is to speak the word of God to public policy issues, to nudge people back into a more biblical perspective on these things, because we tend to follow that ungodly line if we’re not self-conscious. We tend just to go in lockstep with them, although usually 10 or 15 years behind.

And so the purpose of the voters guide is to kind of nudge the Christian community and say, “Don’t follow these guys. Think it out a little bit and get distinctively biblical in our position.” Well, the same thing’s true of polygamy. We need to be able to nudge our culture in terms of the word of God that this is absolutely forbidden.

And so in your outline point number three, I provide you with various scriptural bases for the prohibition of polygamy. It’s a little confusing for Christians because we know that Jacob had multiple wives. Abram had a couple of wives, so to speak, a concubine and a wife. David had multiple wives. Solomon did. Now, the norm was monogamy. But there are these significant exceptions in the patriarchal period. Now that should also be a warning to us, because if such men fell into this kind of sin, then we want to be very careful as our culture continues to regress from biblical norms that our children don’t think in these kind of ways.

Okay. So very quickly let’s do a survey of the biblical prohibitions against polygamy. First, in Genesis 2:23 and 24, we read, of course, that Adam said—or the commentary rather, the song—is that a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife singular. They shall become one flesh. So the very creation ordinance of marriage itself, the becoming one flesh, the cleaving to one wife, makes it impossible really to cleave in the proper sense to two wives. So by implication, Genesis 2:23 and 24 prohibit polygamy.

Secondly, Leviticus 18:18 says: “You shall not take a woman as a rival to her sister, to uncover her nakedness while the other is alive.” So in other words, you can’t engage in this. Specifically it prohibits a bigamy relationship with one’s with your wife’s sister. But by way of extension, if the sisters—there’s a sense in which we’re all sister, all the women are sisters in Christ, and to take another wife would be indeed to have a rival to her sisters. You create rivals out of the two sisters in the Lord. So by implication, at least, Leviticus 18:18 prohibits polygamy.