Mind the Gap

Well, I will mention one of the other things I've been involved in with the church. From the time I was a college student, I was serving at summer camp. Between my junior and senior year, I had my first time of going to serve on the staff at SEP Scotland, as it was. I understand you had some visitors there recently yourself, but wonderful country. And I continue to serve. I'll be directing Camp Toubic this year. The first time I went over there, a friend and I traveled to Europe a little bit, and in London, they have this enormous, really cool subway system. You can get almost anywhere in the city of London going underground and riding those trains. And the first time I went, there was this new experience. Train pulls into the station, often underground. Doors open, and this voice from above starts saying, Mind the gap! How many of you have experienced that? I don't know how many have traveled. And at first, I said, that's weird. Mind the gap! What in the world is that about? Well, it's referring to the space between the train car and the platform. Because these subway trains go and visit lots of different stations. And sometimes the train will be slightly up here while the platform's there, sometimes here. Sometimes they're so close together, you barely see the gap. Sometimes further. So there's this reminder, be aware that it's there. If it's a bigger one, you don't want to trip and fall.

So you might ask the question, sometimes, why are you telling me to mind the gap? Is that what I came for? Is the gap the most important thing here? No, of course not. You just need to be aware that there is a gap, so that you don't trip on it, or don't get caught up. But you're not, you didn't go there to see that gap. And you're not going to study and look and say, what's down in there? Now, at this time, you're probably thinking, what's up with this guy? He's talking about a subway train in London and a gap. What's that got to do with being a Christian and studying God's Word? Well, I think more than we might think. Because as we study the Bible, there are things that I refer to as gaps. Sometimes things that are left unsaid, and we wonder sometimes what's in the gap. Matter of fact, the most famous one is found right at the beginning of the Bible. You might have heard a phrase called the gap theory. And that's it. Actually, I'm going to spend some time in Genesis. If you want to turn to Genesis chapter 1, if all goes well, I might get as far as chapter 5 in Genesis. Well, I'm going to look at some other scriptures, too. But this gap theory, you probably, like most people, have Genesis 1.1 memorized. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Verse 2 says, And the earth was without form and void. Darkness was on the face of the deep, the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Now, the gap theory says that between verse 1 and verse 2, there's a gap of time that's not explained. One of the reasons we say that is the Hebrew word in verse 2 that's translated was, as in the earth was without form and void, that Hebrew word can be translated into the English word became. And it reads very different if you say, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth became without form and void. And by the way, my purpose today isn't to discuss the difference between what's called the gap theory or the young earth theory. I'm aware there are some strong feelings on both sides of this, but I want to make the point that there are some gaps there. I tend to believe that the gap theory is correct, based on a couple of things. That word, by the way, the Hebrew that I said can be translated became as haiya, often transliterated into English as hayyh. But I always think it's part of a karate demonstration where you go, haiya! Okay, I'm glad you laughed, otherwise that would have looked really silly. That same word is used in chapter 4 of Genesis, verse 2, when we're meeting Cain and Abel. Of course, in verse 1, Adam knew Eve, his wife she conceived. Cain had a son. Verse 2, she bore again and had his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep. Okay, same word, haiya. That could be translated, Abel became a keeper of sheep. And in many ways that makes sense, because I doubt that Abel was born a shepherd with a crook and all that. He was born a little baby. He had to grow and become a keeper of sheep. And so that's part of the reason we'd see that Hebrew word working that way. I'll make a reference also to supporting this gap theory is in Isaiah 45, verse 18. I'm almost there, so I'll read it to you. You can turn there if you like. But Isaiah 45, verse 18 is the strongest evidence, I think, in support of what's called the gap theory. And it'd help if I'm looking at the right verse, yeah.

For thus says the Eternal, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited. That Hebrew word vain is the word tohu. And if you've been in the church many decades, as some of you have, you might remember Genesis 1, verse 2, where it says, the earth was without form and void. Without form and void is a translation from the Hebrew tohu and bohu. Empty and vain, chaos and confusion. But here in Isaiah 45, verse 18, it says, the Lord did not create the earth, tohu. But in Genesis, it says, it became tohu and bohu to boot. So that implies something happened in between. Again, it's not my purpose to spend a lot of time, but our thought of what happened in between is what we commonly call Satan's or Lucifer's Rebellion, which we can find some details in Isaiah chapter 14 and Ezekiel 28, showing that God created a great powerful angel. In Ezekiel 28, he's referred to as the anointed carob who covers, but sin was found in him. He corrupted himself. He tried to ascend on high, as it says in Isaiah 14, and take over the throne of God, but he was thrown down. Our understanding or our thought is some titanic battle seemed to have happened, maybe causing great destruction on the earth and in many places in the universe. And that Satan and the angels who followed him, Revelation 12 and verse 3, indicates that perhaps one-third of the angels were deceived by him, and they were cast down to earth.

I'm referring to Scriptures not from memory. I've got several of them written down, but 2 Peter 2 and verse 4 and Jude 6 refer to angels who are imprisoned. And perhaps that prison means they're stuck here on earth. They're not allowed to go elsewhere without permission. All of this perhaps happening in that gap between Genesis 1 verse 1 and 1 verse 2. I'm pointing this out to show that there's an opportunity for maybe a gap to have a lot in it, but God didn't tell us all that stuff. He gives some hints here and there of things that we know happened and were left to infer when, but he doesn't want us to focus here and now. As we're going through Genesis chapter 1, the emphasis is to get to the things he wants us to know, what he thinks is important.

So, as I said, I don't want to do a big discussion between is the earth really in the whole universe only 6,000 years old or less, or is it perhaps billions of years old? But about 6,000 years ago, God did what we call a re-creation described in Genesis chapter 1 verse 1.

I'm using that as an example because I want to show that later in these early chapters of Genesis, there are some other gaps, places where things are left unsaid and we might have questions, things we want to know. And we don't have to know, but knowing that there's a gap might help us have a better understanding of what we do know.

And sorry, I'm coming. I don't know. Sometimes I say when I'm not explaining myself well, I'm just being an academic, but usually it just means I'm not a good speaker. But we'll try to explain my approach to this.

And part of what might help is if I tell you before I was a minister and before I was an instructor in biblical studies, which is what we call it at ABC, I was a history professor for a time. And that's when I lived in Texas. I studied first at University of Texas in Tyler, then at Texas A&M, where I learned the true meaning of heat and humidity. But I studied history and that was my training, what I wanted to do. And studying the Bible has a number of things in common with studying history. Both of them study people and what they did and why they did it. One of the reasons I was really interested in history, especially focusing in military history, was that it shows some of the best people can be, while also the worst that they can be. Studying history and the Bible both help us to understand how did things get to be the way they are. Why are they this way? Why do people do what they do? With that in mind, there are some principles that we use in studying history and writing it that I think might be useful in looking at the Bible. One of the starts is to realize what history is. I'm tempted. In the seminars this afternoon, I want to be more interactive and get comments and have discussion, but I understand Sabbath services isn't necessarily the time for that.

Often, if I ask people, what is history? It's common, and I used to think this, to say that history is everything that's happened. All information is history. That's not really what the word means. It's a little more focused when we say, what is history?

One way I help to think of it is, if you understand what the French word is. I studied French in college. Not that I could speak it, but I can butcher it. The French word for history is histoire, which looks a lot like history.

But the French word for a story is histoire, the same exact word. Maybe it's not coincidental that our word history has the word story as part of it. And what I'm getting at is, a history is not everything that happened. It's a story. It's one person's story about what happened.

Many histories are stories of people, but I mean a story that a person is giving. It's one person's account.

And we all do things like that. And a history is thus going to have some gaps in it.

If I asked you, what did you do yesterday? Would you tell me everything?

And you think of what everything could include every time you blinked. You know, at 4, 0, 5, and 32 seconds, I blinked. And then a few seconds more, no, every time you swallowed, turned your head, of course not. Instead, if I ask you, what did you do yesterday? You're going to tell me what you think is relevant and relevant to me.

The story, the history you tell of yesterday will vary depending on who asked you.

Mr. Preston asked, what did you do yesterday? Now, you're going to think, what's he interested in? Well, I did some Bible study in the morning in the book of Hebrews.

You might mention another church member that you happened to talk to on the phone. And various other things.

But say you had a doctor's appointment. A doctor asked, what did you do yesterday?

You're liable to mention how long you slept, what exercise you did, and any particular time you felt some pain or ache.

Now, one of your friends, you're talking on the phone, hey, what did you do yesterday? Oh, I watched such and such on television. Oh, I've got a comment for you. I heard from Joe, and we talked about this. So, you've got these very different accounts of the same period of events.

None of them are deceitful. They're just you're picking and choosing what matters, what information you want to choose that might make a difference.

Thinking of Genesis. Okay, who wrote the book of Genesis? As I mentioned, I teach Pentateuch class as one of the classes I teach, which... Pentateuch is a fancy word that means five books. It's the first five books of the Bible.

And whenever I teach, when I start a new book, I cover what I call the five W's. The who, what, why, where, when. I saw Heidi smile. You've heard a lot of W's from me. So, one of those W's is who wrote the book. Well, we believe Moses wrote these books. It's pretty much generally accepted with the understanding that God is the ultimate author. That he's the ultimate author of all the books of the Bible.

But Moses, when he wrote this, Genesis is one book out of the five that none of which could have been written firsthand. It all occurred before Moses was ever born. So he had to get information from somewhere else.

And there's some evidence that perhaps Moses drew on some prior written accounts. There's one word that appears a few places in the Bible, and I didn't write it everywhere. But if you look at chapter 2 and verse 4 of Genesis, it says, This is the history of the heavens and the earth. That word that's here translated history is the Hebrew word, toledot. I've seen it translated various different ways, tol, d-o-t-h, tow-l-d-a, but toledot. History is an accurate translation. If you read this in the Old King James, Genesis 2, verse 4, says, This is the generations. So toledot is sometimes translated generations. Over in chapter 5, verse 1, says, This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. That Hebrew word appears there again. This is the book of the toledot of Adam. So toledot is a word that could well be translated history or story. There's about eight times or eleven times that scholars think Moses, when he uses that word, is indicating he's using something that was written by someone else. This is the history that, just like you might go to an encyclopedia and say, I got this from Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, this volume, and then put it in something you're writing. Moses might have done that in some places. Now, of course, if he did, we would understand it was with God's guidance and God's inspiration of what to use and what not to use. We believe God is the ultimate author. And God, it seems, left some gaps. Some things that he decided, well, this is relevant, you need to know. Some other things maybe not so relevant, you don't so much need to know. Would God do that? Let me give you an example that's not from Genesis, but if you flip over just a few pages to Exodus 12. Exodus 12, verses 1 and 2. This could sound very familiar because I'll bet you spent some time studying it in the Holy Day season recently.

Now, the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. We look at that, but sometimes I like to stop and ask when God tells someone something, what did he not tell them? And one thing God didn't say to Moses is, Moses, I need to explain something to you. There's this thing called a month, and it has so many days and it happens this way. And when he says, it's the beginning of the month, well, here, let me tell you what a year is. Well, God didn't say that. It seems that he assumed Moses knew what a month and a year was. The Bible does this a number of times. Apparently, Moses already knew the elements of a calendar. Well, it's interesting, and again, I don't want to focus on calendar issues. It's funny that term comes up, especially in the home office. Archaeology shows that in Mesopotamia, in ancient Mesopotamia, people were using a lunar calendar with intercalary months that recycled once every 19 years. That might sound familiar if you've done some study of the Hebrew calendar. It works exactly like that. Probably, and I'm saying probably because the Bible doesn't give us the information, it's likely that's the calendar that Moses was already familiar with. And so when God says, Moses, this is going to be the first month, it seems more likely that God isn't saying, Moses, let me introduce the idea of a calendar to you. But he is saying, I want you to renumber the month. Jewish tradition says that what we now call the Feast of Trumpets was the first of the year. And the Jews still use that for their civil year. So God is telling Moses, we're going to make a change, but he's making it in reference to a calendar. There are many places in the Bible. You go through Leviticus chapter 23. The dates are given for each of the holy days. And we see references to dates in other places. Nowhere in the Bible does it describe a calendar. Why not? Well, we would assume God already had given... they had a calendar they were using and God was comfortable with that. And the fact that he doesn't describe it has left us with questions we'd like to know. If you've had a discussion with someone about new moons and postponements and intercalary months, and do you have to see the crescent, or... I don't even want to discuss that. But you know there are questions that you wish God had put into, maybe in Leviticus, this is exactly it.

There are other questions we might have that fall in those gaps. Some can be silly, but inquiring minds want to know. Was Jesus left-handed or right-handed? What was the Apostle Paul's favorite color? I don't know. Again, not very important, but that's something left out. Getting back to Genesis. How many children did Adam and Eve have?

Anybody want to guess? I know how many are named in the book. I'll discuss that later. Jewish tradition says they had 56. Now, they had several hundred years to do that. I remember the first time I brought this up, I was in the Portsmouth congregation. We have a family there that has... how many of these two-makers have eight? Eight or nine? I looked at Forrest and I said, ha! Top that!

Okay. We know for sure that they had more than three because Genesis 5 and verse 4 says, Adam lived 800 years and after Seth were born to him sons and daughters. Maybe 56 in total. We only know the names of three. Cain and Abel and what happened to them have important moral lessons to us. Seth was our ancestor. Noah was descended from Seth. So, we know about him. What about all those other children? We don't know about them, apparently, because we don't need to know.

I say, God was the originator of information on a need-to-know basis. Okay, that leads to another principle of history. I've got to watch the time. I knew I could do this. Or I knew I could get bogged down. There's something especially people use when they're interviewing people, called velocity of narrative.

Now, velocity of narrative might sound like how fast I'm going to talk, because I tend to do that sometimes at college. If I bring my coffee mug, I'll start talking real fast. But velocity of narrative, rather than how fast you talk, it refers to how much information is packed relative to the timeline you're describing. And that's another thing we do all the time without using a fancy term, like velocity of narrative for. Like, if I asked you to tell me about your life, Mr. Barton, we met years ago at camp, he reminded me. If I say, tell me about your life, he might, did you grow up in this area? No. Oh, no, sorry. I don't want to get too interactive here.

I'll tell you about my life. I'm from Columbus, Ohio. I was born and raised there. And then I decided to go to Ambassador College when I was in my 20s. And then I started studying. Now, I zipped over most of the first two decades in a sentence. But when I get to studying college and choosing a career, I slow down and I start packing more information and covering less ground.

And I might then zoom into a career and cover 10 or 12 years in a sentence that all talked about meeting my wife and how we started dating and the velocity will slow way down. We do that. We zip up and slow down. And the Bible does that. And this fits with the idea that a historian will pick and choose what to include. I've already been discussing that. Let's consider again Genesis. And I love the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

Actually, I love all of it. But the first 11 chapters are a different kind of writing. And our best guess is of how much time they cover is about 2,000 years of human history. So it seems that God called Abraham, which we see in Genesis 12, after Adam, about 2,000 years after he created Adam and Eve. I think, okay. Now, if we've been around almost 6,000 years, that puts one-third of all human history in just those 11 chapters. Let's think about the velocity of narrative.

If the gap theory is correct, between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis 1-2, there's perhaps billions of years of history. Let's think about a velocity of narrative. And then, starting in verse 3, for a full chapter, it slows down and discusses one week. Then it might pick up again. I like to point out, as I hope I'll have time to, in chapter 4 of Genesis, verses 1-4, we read over very quickly, but they likely cover decades of time.

My point is, the velocity of narrative speeds up and slows down, because God tells us things He thinks we need to know, leaves out things He figured we didn't need to know, even if we might want to know. Again, I've got that question. I don't know if Adam was right-handed or left-handed. And if he was the first person, that might tell us something.

Not much, that's important, but I laugh at it. My mother was left-handed, and I'm right-handed. So if we sat at the table wrong, you know that bumping elbows. I don't know if you have that in your family. Could this cause us to doubt Genesis? There are people that say Genesis is all myths and folklore.

You know, it's not true. I don't believe that. I firmly believe Genesis is the inspired word of God, including the first 11 chapters. But we do need to realize that this book is what God intended it to be, what he chose for it to be. It's not necessarily what I want it to be. Much of the book of Genesis has narrative, but this first part is a different type. If you're writing history, as I said, historians sometimes will use different styles.

We love it mostly when they do narrative. I like a good story that's fun to read. But there's another style called a chronicle. We've got a book of first and second chronicles in the Bible, where it often lists data. How many of you love reading the first eight chapters of chronicles? Probably been a while since you did.

Some of that is like, ugh. I noticed that when you're talking about the tabernacle being built, there's one point where the leaders of Israel come and make these offerings. One of the longest chapters in the Bible in Numbers describes... Each of them gave the exact same thing, but it describes it in detail 12 times.

Okay, that's more of a chronicle. You've got some histories focused on military activity, some on developments in art or intellectual things. So there's different styles. Now, I'm not giving heresy here, but some people have described this first section of Genesis as the creation myth. I prefer to use the term the creation epic because myth, for some people, implies fiction.

Genesis is not fiction, as I said, the true inspired word of God. But it is written in a special style that's more poetic than narrative history. And sometimes people read, especially, the creation week, and they want it to be a scientific exposition. It's not a scientific exposition. It wasn't written for engineers. Sorry, Mr. Preston. It's also not a legal treatise. Some parts of Exodus have legal stuff. It's not that. It's a creation epic. It's more poetry telling us what God wants us to know and leaving out things he doesn't want us to.

Now, all this was a lot of my first part to get into seeing some of this in action. And I want to see it in action as we look at the first family. By first family, I don't mean Donald Trump and his wife and Barron. We call the First Lady, the President's wife, the First Lady and his family, the First Family.

There is a parallel. Don't journalists want to know every detail about their lives? And the First Family is trying to keep secret and private certain things? It's kind of like that with Adam and Eve and their sons and daughters, whose names we don't know. I want to realize the importance of that Creation Week.

I'm going to skip past it. Boy, I'd love to spend some time talking about how God created Adam and Eve, both in his image, the image of God, male and female. And of course, then we get a different account of God creating man in Chapter 2, which I'm not going to read. I've seen some people say, well, see, God created man and then later he created Adam. No, I think Chapter 2 is just another account, another written account of the same thing.

I think he only created mankind once. But we see the longer version of God putting Adam to sleep, taking the rib, creating Eve, bringing Eve. And of course, what did Adam say? Whoa, man! Okay, that joke doesn't work every time. I don't know why I still try. But, you know, okay, and we see the invention of marriage. In verse 23 of Chapter 2, Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

In the Hebrew, she shall be called Isha because she was taken out of Isha. So they're together. Therefore, a man shall...and this is God speaking now in verse 24... A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and now shall become one flesh. This is sort of a side issue, but one of the things God created then was marriage and family. And he created one man and one woman. He didn't create a harem. He didn't create a man and a man. And, well, you know all that stuff. That's a side subject. They were both naked. The man and his wife, they were not ashamed.

There was nobody else to see them there. Moving on to chapter 3. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he knew the serpent, said to the woman...you always expect to go, "'Ssh, have this God indeed said you shall not eat every tree of the garden.' I'm getting caught up.

What I always like to point out is the description here of when this happened. When did the serpent come and talk to Eve? What does it tell us? Doesn't. You know, I read this for years and years, and this is a sign of my own naivetivity, I believe. I always assumed this was the eighth day. God put Adam and Eve in the garden.

The next day the serpent shows up. It doesn't say it was the eighth day. And I've got reason to believe it probably wasn't. How much time went by? That I don't know. Now, I've heard some people speculate decades. That I have my doubts. But I could have been weeks, could have been months, could have been years or decades.

They're living there in the garden going along, and the velocity of narrative moves ahead. Now, the one thing that tells me it probably wasn't that long is every indication is they're still naked. I don't know how long that would go on, because you'd get calluses in weird places or things like that. But my point is, okay, we don't know what else might have happened.

I want to plant the seed there, because that question could come up and help answer some other questions we have later. We do know, you know, Satan planted the seed. As God said, you should eat every tree of the garden. The woman corrected him. No, we can eat of the trees of the garden, but of the tree which is in the midst of the garden. That one there in the middle, God said, don't eat it or touch it lest you die.

Okay, so Satan said something partly true, but partly wrong, to lead Eve along in the thinking. And then he tells the big lie. You're not gonna die. God knows that you'll be like him. You'll know good and evil and such. And again, he's mixing truth with fiction. My point here isn't so much the deception as to move on to some other things. So we know that Eve was deceived.

Matter of fact, it says later in the New Testament, Eve was deceived, but Adam was not. But they both took of the fruit and they were punished. And God lists the punishment. And of course, they're gonna be sent out of the garden. I'll move to verse 17. God said to Adam, because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree that I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat of it, curse it as the ground for your sake. In toil you'll eat of it all the days of your life.

Both thorns and thistles it shall bring for you and you'll eat of the herb of the field. Cursed it as the ground, thorns and thistles, it's gonna take work to grow crops. I haven't, I've never worked as a farmer. I've planted a garden. Matter of fact, I've got a lawn where I'm constantly pulling crabgrass and other weeds. That's a pain. I wonder, we look at that pre-flood world. Have any of you heard speculations that before Noah's Flood, there might have been advanced technology? Maybe, you know, they had anti-gravity devices and all kinds of wonderful things.

Maybe. I, you know, I've wondered that. But I've also come to think, cursed it as the ground, it's gonna be sweat and hard work to get something to eat. Is there any chance it was the exact opposite, instead of an advanced society? Were they struggling just to stay alive?

And then we know, when we read about Noah's account, that the heart of man was on evil continually and there was violence. Maybe they were just barely surviving. What? And it was a miserable life. Notice I used that word, maybe. In this section, I use maybe and perhaps a number of times. And I don't have the answer to that question, which reminds me, I'm gonna have to speed up.

It's supposed to be done in about 10 minutes. I'm gonna... Yeah, more or less. Sorry about that. I shouldn't have been telling you what the secretary does and doesn't do. Verse 20 of chapter 3. Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. Eve, that's the Hebrew there as Chava, which means life or life giver. We get Eve from the Greek Septuagint, basically a Greek translation of the Old Testament. She was the mother of all living. Dogs, cats, birds... Oh, that's ridiculous. The mother of all living people. Okay, we still wonder about that. Acts 17, 26 says that God made of one blood, or some people say, well, blood isn't in the original, but made of one, I would say one couple, all the different races, all mankind.

How did that happen? People have wondered, and we used to have a booklet in the Worldwide Church of God that said, answers to Genesis, which I've got a copy of. Sometimes I give it to my students and sometimes not. But that question has come, because most of us look a lot like our parents, right? If your parents were white, you're probably white. They're black, you're going to be black, some other shade. My wife is very, very white. That comes from your dad's side or mom's side.

But her mom isn't all that white. Anyways, there's an interesting possibility in this, because Adam and Eve were lacking something that all of you have. There's one thing they did not have that you have, and I don't, I mean besides the belly button. You know what they did not have? Parents. God had to create them and create their genetics, their chromosomes. And that gave them an opportunity with Eve. Because I realized this, and we were studying fertility when we were having trouble getting pregnant. I learned more than I had before. But a woman is born with all of the eggs she'll ever have in her ovaries.

She doesn't produce more eggs as we go along, unlike men who continually produce for Mattasdoa. So that gave God an opportunity. If Eve was created with all the eggs she would ever have, but he had to make them, he could put different genetic structure in different eggs. And I suspect that's what he did. That he had eggs with differing DNA that would mix with Adam's. He gave birth to children that looked different. And that wouldn't have seemed unusual to them because that's all they knew. So maybe these varieties of shade and facial shape and things like that came into existence just then. As a matter of fact, that answers a question. We're going to have to zip through. Of course, in chapter 4 we have the story of Cain and Abel. And we know Cain grew angry and killed his brother. And God punished Cain by sending him out. In verse 13, Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. You've driven me this day from the ground. I'll be hidden from your face. I'll be a fugitive in a vagabond on earth. It'll happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.

Again, when I was young, I'd read through Genesis, and I assumed this is happening, what, a couple weeks after Garden of Eden? Well, that can't be true. Remember I talked about how Cain was probably not born a tiller of the ground. He was born a baby. Abel was not born a keeper of sheep. He was born a baby, and they grew up. Actually, I dropped back at the beginning of that chapter. I mentioned that.

Adam knew even his wife, he conceived and bore Cain. He said, I've acquired a man from the Lord. Well, when God kicked him out of the garden, he said he made that prophecy we think was a prophecy of Jesus Christ about enmity between your seed and the serpent seed. You'll bruise his head. He'll bruise your heel. This seemed to be this understanding that from Eve would descend someone who was going to conquer the serpent. It seems that she thought that was Cain, even though that wasn't the case.

She bore again, bore his brother Abel. He was a keeper of sheep. Cain was the tiller of the ground. Verse 3. In the process of time, it came to pass. Two phrases in a row that indicate time passing. They're born babies. They grow up. They learn. They start planting crops, breeding livestock, doing all these things.

By the time Cain grows angry with Abel and kills him, how old do you suppose they were?

I have no idea. But they're probably not infants. Obviously they're not infants. They might be in their 30s, 40s, 50s. If people live to be 900 years old, maybe they're in their 200s.

One of the reasons I ask this, again, when Cain says, whoever finds me will kill me. People say, how can anyone kill you? There's only three people on the planet. There were four until you killed one. No, but probably when we think we're not minding the gap, but we want to realize gaps are there. Time has passed. Matter of fact, if you look at chapter 5, verse 3, and I'm not going to have time to make as many points as I would have liked, but maybe this will be a spur.

Actually, I wanted to. Yeah, actually, at the end of chapter 4, verse 25, we see more on that.

When it says, Adam knew his wife Eve again. Okay, we know that means they came together as husband and wife. She became pregnant. Do you suppose that's the first time it happened since Abel was born? I have my doubts. Now, again, histories don't tell us everything, and I don't expect God to tell us every time Adam and Eve came together.

We don't need to know. I suspect Seth was probably not their third born child. I'm saying I suspect because I can't prove it, but why would Seth be mentioned and not others? Because just think, we have this time for Cain and Abel to grow up, become adults, get angry, and kill each other. Would Adam and Eve perhaps have had other children in the meantime? Perhaps grandchildren by this time?

Why don't we know their names? Why doesn't it tell us they did that? We don't need to know. We don't have time to include all those details. But again, when Cain says, people will try to kill me, it's not some unusual thing. There might have been dozens or hundreds or thousands of people living on the planet, people whom we don't know much about. And I'm speculating because that's all we can do is speculate to some degree. But it's logical to realize, okay, all this other stuff happened. We do focus in on Seth.

Why do we need to know about Seth? Again, he's our ancestor. If you follow, you go all the way through chapter 5. Distended from Seth would be Noah. So we need to know about Seth. And I tie that in another thing we read in chapter 5 verse 3. When Adam lived 130 years, 130 years, I say. If you know, well, Mr. Greer, one of, was it 14? Your parents probably didn't live to be 130. So Adam and Eve, 130 years, who knows how many kids they might have had.

There it says, he bore a son in his own likeness and after his image. I've wondered if my theory is correct that Eve had these eggs with different DNA in them. And they're having a baby and this one's more brown, this one's more reddish, this one's... I wonder if Seth came along and said, hey, Adam, look! This one looks like you!

That's unusual. You've had these kids that look like all different kinds. Maybe. But that would explain that. Now, the funny thing is, the first several times I thought about that, I assumed, oh, Seth came along and he was finally a white baby. You know why I thought that? Because I'm white. And that's the only reason. I tend to think of Adam looking like me. Bible doesn't say you'd look like me. We don't know what ethnicity Adam would be categorized if he were here today.

He could be a brownish color or yellowish or whatever. However terms we use, I'm not always up with politically correct. And does it matter? I don't think it does. He was the father of us all with all of our different characteristics. And God maybe doesn't tell us because we didn't need to know. Which reminds me, I'm going to move ahead. We could spend a lot of time in Genesis, but it gets uncomfortable.

Sometimes difficult. Matter of fact, if you're in chapter 5, I'll point out one other thing with Enoch. In chapter 5, verse 21, Enoch lived 65 years and begotten Methuselah. After he begotten Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years, had sons and daughters, all of his days were 365 years, walked with God and he was not. Not what? Well, he wasn't there. God took him. And we...where? How? What happened? We don't believe God took him to heaven. That contradicts other things in the Bible. Particularly a statement where Jesus said, no one has gone to heaven.

We just don't know. It can be frustrating studying the Bible and asking questions like, I said, what was Paul's favorite color? What were the names of all of Adam and Eve's sons and daughters? And have to live with, I don't know. Can we live with that? Is it wrong? And I say this because this comes up in my classes. Sometimes I tell this because I'm sorry, I'm telling you I don't know all the time. You might feel like you're not getting your money's worth. But we do know a lot. And before I say any more about what we don't know, I want to realize we're the called out ones.

We are the ecclesia. When Christ said, no one can come to me except the Father draw him, that's everyone in this room was drawn by God the Father, individually and personally. And he opened our minds through the Spirit to understand His Word. We know a lot. We know the answer to the question, why were you born?

What happens after we die? Why do good people suffer? We know the answers. We know what the Bible teaches us. We have the answers about the questions of life. Sometimes as a church, we've made the assumption that since we know the answers to those things, we should know the answers to every other question. And sometimes we've made a speculation and set it in place as a hard doctrine when we didn't need to.

And I don't have any examples in mind right now, but I like to say it's okay to have some things that we understand we don't know. As long as we keep sight of what we do know. If you'll turn to Revelation 10, I love to point this out because I don't know. I might speculate that God put this here just so I can use it, but that's probably not true.

But you know in the book of Revelation, God showed John the Apostle visions of things that would happen at the end. And we study Revelation so we can be prepared and know what's coming. There's a lot we do know.

And so maybe God slipped something in here to tell us, you don't know everything. And I want you to know that you don't know. Revelation 10, I'm looking at verse 2. Speaking of an angel who came down, he had a little book open in his hand. He set his right foot on the sea, left foot on the land. He cried with a loud voice as when a lion roars. And when he cried out, seven thunders uttered their voices.

So these thunders, oh, they said something. Now when the seven thunders uttered their voices, I was about to write. I'm guessing write down what they said. But I heard a voice saying to me, seal up the things the seven thunders uttered, and do not write them. As soon as you hear that, if you're like me, you say, what did they say?

I want to know. I wasn't that interested before, but now I really want to know. It's interesting. It's a prophecy. So John heard it, but it's something that they will say in the future. And the way the state of the world, I wonder, will they, will we hear it? Will it happen in our lifetime? But if seven thunders uttered something, I won't be able to say that was in Revelation because we don't know what they said.

God could have inspired it differently. He could have said, John, don't write anything about the thunders. And then we would never know that it's there. But he let them write that they said something, and he included in the account that he was told to not record what they said. It's like God wanting to tell him, I know something you don't know. And I want you to know that you don't know something that I know.

I find that intriguing. Why don't we know? It's sort of like, when is Christ going to return? We've been wondering that. People have been studying it since Christ left. But what did Christ tell us? I'm going to come at a time that you don't know, that you don't expect. And so we spend all that time trying to figure it out. Why don't we know certain things?

Sometimes it's because we just don't need to know. Maybe some things would be hurtful for us. There is a theory I've heard Aaron Dean say, and one of the blessings of my job is I have an office right next door to Aaron Dean. And as you know, he worked with Mr. Armstrong many years, and he has a lot of wisdom. He said something that I wonder if it might be true, where he said, God doesn't give us some answers, maybe to see what we'll do about it. Will we fight and argue with each other? Will I come up with a theory, and Mr. Preston comes up with a theory, and we've got to call each other names if I can't convince him? I'm going to go start the United Church of Fright-Dunkle-God or whatever. No! We don't have to argue. We should accept that the things we do know, we know and we know that we know. And God has given us the answers that we need to know. We know His law. We know the Ten Commandments. We know what God is doing and why we were born and where we're going. What the Thunder said, I don't need to know that. And I certainly don't need to argue about it. Nor about what was the name of Adam and Eve's fourth son or things like that. It's interesting to speculate. It's fun as long as we keep our attitudes right.

I began talking about, as I said in the London subway, mind the gap. Gaps are sometimes necessary. It's necessary for a train to get through the station without friction or collision. And the Bible gaps are necessary to be able to get tons of information through without bogging down or getting caught. And we don't need to pay too much attention to the gaps.

But it's important to realize they're there and they have their purpose so that we can get on to the thing that's past it. And as I said, while we don't try to peer too hard through the gap, we want to focus instead on what it is that we're doing. What is God doing? God created us to become children in his family. He's bringing many sons to glory. That's us. And so we want to look forward to that time and pray that it'll happen.