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Guest (Male): Well the last time that we got together, we began chapter 11 and we went all the way through from verses one through verse nine, the Tower of Babel.

Bob Davis: We took a look at what happened there, and the Tower of Babel explains to us how the nations got all separated out and how all the languages were divided and scattered around the planet. And God did it. He confounded their languages and they spoke different languages instantly.

Narrator (Male): Welcome to Apply Within, a verse-by-verse study of the word of God with Pastor Bob Davis of North Country Chapel. We invite you to join with us as we, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, apply the word within our own hearts as we study line upon line, precept upon precept, verse by verse through the Bible. Continuing in Genesis chapter 11, verse 10, following the dispersion at Babel, we trace the descendants of Shem. Here's Pastor Bob.

Bob Davis: What you're going to see starting in verse 10 is we go back to the table of nations, the genealogies once again. These, we're going to see, are the descendants specifically of Shem. Shem, Ham, and Japheth were the three sons of Noah and his wife. So we're going to go back to the table of nations with the genealogy again and the descendants of Shem.

We start with verse 10. Remember, the Tower of Babel is done and they're all scattered. These are the generations of Shem. Shem was 100 years old and he begot Arphaxad two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he begot Arphaxad 500 years and begot sons and daughters. How many sons and daughters? I'll tell you, all of them.

My point is, you say why are you so weird? So that you'll pay attention. That's all. I'm only doing this for you because we do not know how many sons and daughters even Adam and Eve had. We know a few, but we don't know all. You understand they're healthy, their bodies are strong and healthy, and they don't have trouble having children like so many. It's not your fault. It's everything that's happened since the flood. You'll see what I mean coming up.

But they were healthy, so they were having lots of children and God said do that and cover the earth, fill the earth. And they were. So Shem lived, verse 11, after he begot Arphaxad 500 years and he begot sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived 35 years and he begot Shelah. And Arphaxad lived after he begot Shelah 403 years and he begot sons and daughters. How long? 403 years after that little boy he had, and he begot sons and daughters, many.

How many could you have if your bodies are perfectly healthy over a 400 to 500-year period? I know families that have 10 and they've only been married 30 years. And Shelah lived 30 years and begot Eber. And Shelah lived after he begot Eber 403 years and he begot sons and daughters. And verse 16, Eber lived 34 years and he begot Peleg. And Eber lived after he begot Peleg 430 years and he begot sons and daughters.

We'll stop right there because I'm trying to emphasize it, but I want to make sure we see this because it's something different than before the flood. We had a small part of Shem's descendants in chapter 10, and they're recorded in 10 verses 21 through 29. You can go back and read that when you get some time. We were given the names of five of his sons and five of his grandsons. Now we're given some more because there's a special focus here on Shem.

I already gave you the reason why: because that's where the Hebrew children will come from, from the descendants of Shem. Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The Hebrew children, starting with Abram, Abraham, come from Shem and God wants us to know it so you can follow them all the way back to their beginning. So you can read the first part, five sons and five grandsons in chapter 10:21-29.

Here the writer focuses specifically on the descendants of Arphaxad, who was born two years after the flood. He's given us almost enough information with a few more bits here to figure out the distance of the Tower of Babel from the flood. We can come close. Take notice of something here. I brought it up to you, but here's why I was bringing it up.

Take note of this. Before the flood, people died in their 800s, but most of them in their 900s. Adam was 930. Methuselah is going to die at 969. That's the year the flood came. So they lived a long time. People say it can't be, but they did, even according to the Babylonian records if you recall. They did.

After the flood though, what we're reading now is after the flood and some of it after the Tower of Babel. What we're reading here is their ages gradually begin to get lower and lower. Some lived 500-something, some now only 400-something. We're seeing a slow decline in age. Clearly, something was different after the flood.

We talked about what it was in the early chapters, but Dr. Henry Morris just points it out so clearly and he is the expert, so I'll just read it to you. He points this out: the radiation-filtering water canopy that was originally there. Remember the rains came down from above and up from beneath. There was that canopy protecting people against the gamma rays, the radiation from the sun.

The sun wasn't burning them. They didn't get sunburnt. You didn't have to hide from the sun and put sunscreen on. You didn't have to because there was that water vapor. Remember, vapor you can see through. And so the radiation-filtering water canopy around the earth was now gone. That happened at the flood. So in a few years, what's happening? Life expectancy is growing a bit shorter. I don't call 400 years short, but I do call it short compared to 930.

Radiation that wasn't getting through is now flowing through the atmosphere and add that to the curse that God said, "Dying you shall surely die." Remember when they sinned, they died spiritually instantly, but they didn't fall over dead. And the devil said, "You're not going to die." And sure enough, they took a bite of that fruit and they didn't die.

They died spiritually. They knew something happened. They knew that they were bad now and they went and hid from God, but their bodies felt fine. But something began then. And now the flood made it worse because of the deterioration and all the radiation, etc., the rays that are now coming through, the water canopy is not blocking it. Because of the deterioration, the DNA is actually deteriorating now.

Dying you shall surely die. Genetic changes are happening to them. Mutations of DNA, etc., are now going on. So we're getting further from the flood, we're getting shorter lifespans and they're dying from other things besides being murdered by each other. The human body here in chapter 11 is not lasting as long as it did before the flood. Something changed.

Over time, the genetics were being polluted, were being damaged, all because of what? Sin. It got to the point when God gave the law, because remember Cain married a sister or a niece and people are marrying family because everybody's from Adam and Eve. And then with those eight that came off the ark, they're family. So everybody still has children, marrying family.

Well DNA is starting to break down. You've got a little bit of problems here and there. By the time God gave the law, what did he say? You're forbidden. A man or a woman can't marry a brother or a sister, can't marry a nephew or a niece. You can't marry someone too close because DNA is now a lot worse. It's broken down humankind, and today you still see you can't do that.

And verse 18 says this: Peleg lived 30 years and begot Reu. And Peleg lived after he begot Reu 209 years. What a giant dip here after. He lived 400 and he begot sons, Eber did. And now Peleg lived 30 years and begot Reu. And Peleg lived after he begot Reu 209 years. This is a lot shorter than his dad's. That's just a generation off.

And he begat sons and daughters. How many? All of them, a lot in his 200 years, a little over 200 years. And Reu, he lived 32 years and he begat Serug. And Reu lived after he begat Serug 207 years. You notice the big dip coming down quickly now? Begat sons and daughters. Verse 22, Serug lived 30 years and he begot Nahor.

And Serug lived after he begat Nahor 200 years and he begat sons and daughters. And Nahor, he lived 29 years and he begot Terah. And Nahor lived after he begot Terah 119 years and begot sons and daughters. And Terah lived 70 years and he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Notice lives are shortening. Why? Because God promised if you ate of that fruit, dying you would surely die.

When you get to the point where the psalmist is writing, the psalmist would say to us, God speaking, the average age of a man would be 70 and if by strength, 80. If you live to be 80, he says, it will be with pain and suffering. And those that are up near that age tell me everything hurts and I didn't do anything. You're still healthy and you can still get around, but everything just kind of hurts. You sit down it hurts, you get back up it hurts, you lay down that kind of hurts, you try to stand you can't.

We're seeing right here verses 18 through 26 which I read to you. We're seeing here the genealogy now focuses on one family: Shem, yes, but through Shem, through Peleg, etc., we have this family, Shem. And it focuses eventually, coming quickly here, on one man, one individual, and that individual's name is Abram. Abram means exalted father.

And I'll tell you when we meet Abram and he begins to follow the Lord, he's 75 years old. You know how many kids he had so far? None. And they named him exalted father when he was a little baby. That's the name they gave him when he was born. That's just wishful thinking, exalted father. So it focuses on this one man. The Lord will call, I don't want to ruin the story for you, but he's going to call Abram to leave his own country and to follow God, a God he's never known.

Abram worships false gods. So does his dad, so does his dad. They worship false gods. And God says you're going to have to follow me. And God called him to leave his own country and follow the Lord. Abram will become the father of the Hebrew nation, of the Israelites, the children of Israel, God's chosen people. And Abraham, Abram, will be the father of that nation. They call him to this very day, true Jews call him Father Abraham. There were no Jews before Abraham. They were called Semites. There were no Jews.

The term "Hebrew," of course there's a little bit of argument about it. It is actually basically derived from the name Eber, a form of the word Eber, Hebrew. But others suggest that there's another reason and they put these two together. I like it and many agree with this because he comes from the area, Abram and his family come from the area south below the Euphrates River Valley.

They called him, and you'll see the first time that word is ever used in the Bible in chapter 14 coming up soon. But the first time it's ever used they call him Hebrew because Eber and the Euphrates River. What do you mean? Well the word put together, Hebrew can be translated, and I love this and I didn't get it from a movie, I got it from the original word: the man from beyond the Euphrates River. There's the man from Snowy River and the man from beyond Euphrates River.

And that's where the name Hebrew comes from, Eber and being beyond or just beyond the Euphrates River, Hebrews. That's just amazing to me, the man from beyond the River Euphrates. If you wrote a book, somebody would buy it. That sounds cool.

Anyway, verse 27. Now, these are the generations of Terah, that was Abram's dad. Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran, looks like he was the oldest, begat Lot. You remember that name? You're going to see that coming up, Lot. You wonder where he came from. Well, Haran died before his dad, before his father Terah, in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldeans where they all came from, where he was born.

So now Lot doesn't have a dad. He's Abram's nephew. So we get to verse 29. Abram and Nahor, they took them wives. His older brother's dead now. They took them wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai and the name of Nahor's wife was Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren. She had no children.

And Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go to the land of Canaan. And they came to Haran and they dwelt there. And the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran.

It stops there, but there's a lot more written there and you think okay, I read it, we read through it, but there's so much here to learn. We see the three sons of Terah: Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran is the oldest. The reason that Abram's listed first is that's the one God's going to call, right? So Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

And we are told that Haran had a son named Lot and Haran died at a young age, younger age. He didn't live long. We don't know if it was a sickness or if it was an accident. We don't know. It's just he died. That's all the info we're given. So he was young. He didn't live longer than his dad. He died. They lived in Ur of the Chaldees. You and I would say if you look at the old maps Mesopotamia, southern modern-day Iraq towards the area of the Persian Gulf, toward that way in the south, about 600 miles south of that area right there.

We're told that Terah's sons, Abram and Nahor, they also married. And Abraham married Sarai. That name means princess. And Nahor married Milcah, and her name means queen. So their parents thought a lot of these little bitty babies, didn't they? And one very important point here that is put in there not just to make the Bible longer, but for us to catch and pay attention to: Sarai, his wife, Abram's wife, was barren. She is unable to have children. Something that she probably didn't know till after she got married and just didn't have children.

But that's important for me and you to grasp. It wasn't that she didn't want them, it wasn't that they weren't trying to have children, and it wasn't that she just maybe had to change her diet. She physically was unable. She was barren. That makes the miracle a real miracle when it happens. But it's going to be, well she's around 65 we meet her here at 65. She'll have a baby at around 90 years old.

So it's going to be quite a while and that's a long time to be married and crying to have a baby and not having one. Abram's name means exalted father and the woman he's married to can't have children. It's almost, if you were writing it, if you were Shakespeare, it's almost like a tragedy. It's almost like just a shame, a terrible way to write the story. You know who would do that to anybody? Exalted father, and Abraham was not a father at all.

Ur of Chaldees was a very large city down there down south about 600 miles below Nineveh, southern Iraq. It was a large city and it was a city that was full of false gods and idols. False gods. They worshipped false gods, but they did not worship the one true God. That's what Abram grew up in. That's what his family grew up in. That's what they knew. They worshipped any god they wanted, but they didn't worship the one true God.

Now so Terah and his whole family were, well they were perverts. They were, the Bible calls that idolaters. They worshipped false gods, which is an affront to God Almighty. They worshipped false gods. We learn that when God called Abram, we just learned something here. It wasn't because Abram was a man of God. Get it? When God called him to come to a new place that God would show him, he didn't pick him because he was the cream of the crop everybody. He was a false idol worshipper and he didn't care who he worshipped. That's all he knew. That was his religion.

So God chose him for what reason? I'll tell you. The same reason he chose you. No good one. He chose him because he wanted to. If you'd like to use the term: grace. Get it? There was nothing about Abraham that would attract God to him. Yet God loved him. It was completely and totally God's grace and God's grace alone. Now you understand when we say for by grace are you saved through faith. It's not because I'm so special. It's nothing personal to you, but there's nothing special about us. We're sinners lost without a savior. And if he doesn't show mercy, we're lost. There is nothing we can do and nowhere to go except separated from God forever. So it's God's grace and God's grace alone and will always be God's grace alone.

Narrator (Male): Thank you for listening to Apply Within with Pastor Bob Davis. Apply Within is the radio outreach ministry of North Country Chapel. Our Sunday morning Bible studies are at 9:00 and 11:00 AM. We also have a Friday evening Bible study at 7:00 PM and a Monday evening Bible study at 7:00 PM. You can download today's message in its entirety at NorthCountryChapel.com/studies. That's NorthCountryChapel.com/studies.

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