Dale Partridge - Genesis 4_17-24 - Polygamy and the Rise of a Godless Civilization.

00:00:00.000 Well, by God's grace, we are able to continue hearing and understanding the Word of God.

00:00:10.840 Last week, we completed our study of Genesis 4, verse 9 through 16, and we examined where

00:00:18.500 the murder of Abel was essentially the outworking of the war between the seed of the serpent

00:00:25.220 and the seed of the woman.

00:00:27.200 So we connected that point there.

00:00:28.600 We saw that Abel's murder was not just an individual crime, but a covenantal crime,

00:00:34.120 as we saw Jesus apply the blood guilt of Abel's murder all the way to the Pharisees thousands of years later.

00:00:43.440 We also considered Cain's expulsion, and we saw how Cain's lack of repentance was in the face of his judgment.

00:00:52.060 He was sorrowful, but not for his sin.

00:00:54.800 He was sorrowful because of the punishment that the Lord gave him due to his sin.

00:01:00.960 His concerns were not for repentance, but they were for self-preservation.

00:01:06.540 Now, we also saw God's poetic justice.

00:01:09.640 We know that Cain was a tiller of the ground.

00:01:12.820 And we saw how God used that very ground to impute the curse to him.

00:01:17.920 Meaning that as Cain poured the blood of his brother Abel into the ground,

00:01:22.480 it was the ground that God used to actually curse Cain and his inability to have it yield crops for

00:01:29.300 him. And so we saw that continued theme of poetic justice. Now, we saw that Cain was destined to be

00:01:38.820 a wanderer, a wanderer. He was cut off from the harvest. He was cut off from his inheritance. He

00:01:44.980 was cut off from his family. And in many ways, the punishment was worse than death. In a tribal

00:01:50.400 and an agrarian culture, this was a very difficult punishment to deal with. And this served as a

00:01:56.780 warning to us that family, land, inheritance are good and godly things that we should never want

00:02:05.160 to lose. Now, if you remember, I also closed by this reference, this American idiom that we often

00:02:11.680 heard right here called raising cane. We know the restaurant that is kind of playing off of that

00:02:16.100 idiom. Well, the reality is, no, we don't want to be raising Cain, which again is an idiom about

00:02:22.400 a stereotypical raising rebellion or raising chaos or troublemaking. No, we want to be raising

00:02:30.920 Ables that are faithful and just and honoring to the Lord. And so today we turn to Genesis chapter

00:02:42.260 four verses 17 through 24. And the sermon today is titled polygamy and the rise of a godless

00:02:50.880 civilization. And this is going to be tracing the lineage of Cain. Now the passage is broken into

00:02:58.820 really four sections. And so if you want to have somewhat of a framework on how we're going to be

00:03:02.900 discussing this, number one is the rise of a civilization that's built apart from God. That's

00:03:09.640 the first section we're going to be talking about. Point two is God's common grace expressed

00:03:15.840 through human ingenuity. We're going to see and talk about common grace. And number three is the

00:03:21.880 introduction of the perversion of marriage. And number four is the escalation of violence through

00:03:29.200 Cain's offspring, which again is the seed of the serpent. And so this passage, what we're going to

00:03:35.140 sees not only shows us just a genealogy that that there is some descendancy that happens with Cain

00:03:41.720 but the trajectory of a godless civilization that as soon as sin matures it doesn't diminish

00:03:50.560 it escalates and we're going to see that in these verses let's read verse 17 together it says

00:03:56.840 Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name

00:04:05.380 of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. Now, scripture does not give us any details about

00:04:13.500 Cain's wife. I want you to catch a few things, though, in this verse. Very important, actually.

00:04:21.000 uh one Cain takes a wife and two Cain builds a city number one Cain takes a wife and two Cain

00:04:30.660 builds a city both of these are really in a sense an act of defiance against God's judgment

00:04:36.180 against him to be separated one from family and two to be a wanderer not a builder and so there

00:04:42.900 is something unique that's happening here Cain has been banished from his kin he has been banished

00:04:48.740 and pushed away. He has been sentenced to a life of wandering. Yet again, here we see him take a

00:04:54.840 wife, which again, we talked about last week was likely a sister, was likely a niece. We know that

00:05:00.180 the genetic failure of incest, as well as the moral law against it, was not established at this time.

00:05:09.000 The genetic purity of this time overshadowed the ability and the issues and problems with

00:05:16.860 today's understanding of incest. Now, the other thing is he builds this city.

00:05:23.120 He's not a wanderer. Now he is a city dweller. Essentially, Cain demonstrates that his continued

00:05:30.040 rebellion is ongoing because he's chasing a life that aims to escape the very judgments that God

00:05:38.620 put upon him. He's not trying to separate from family. He's trying to build his own. He's not

00:05:45.000 being a wanderer and embracing that judgment, he is establishing a city. Now his son Enoch means

00:05:51.940 dedicated, which is probably the reason why he dedicated the city and called it after his name.

00:05:57.860 But then we hear of Cain's lineage of five generations focusing on Lamech, the first

00:06:05.160 polygamist. And I want to talk about this because we might think, polygamy, is that really an issue

00:06:09.620 today? Well, it is. In fact, we know that the sexual revolution has introduced a variety of

00:06:15.560 hellish perversions, and that went into homosexuality and transgenderism and pedophilia, 0.76

00:06:20.800 but it also went into polyamory or polygamy and multiple wives. It's not something that's just 0.95

00:06:26.620 limited in old Mormon stories. It is actually something that very much alive and well today,

00:06:32.460 and more people, even in the church, are trying to push the idea of polygamy on to us.

00:06:39.620 And so we see in verse 18, it says,

00:06:45.960 To Enoch was born Erad, and Erad fathered Mahujahel, and Mahujahel fathered Methusahel, and Methusahel fathered Lamech, and Lamech took two wives.

00:06:58.980 The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah.

00:07:02.460 okay here polygamy is introduced in Cain's line it's not introduced in Seth's line

00:07:13.280 though it does come later but it is introduced for the first time in Cain's line which breaks

00:07:21.380 away from God's pattern of one man and one woman in 2023 I edited a book called the problem of

00:07:28.120 polygamy. And it was written in the 1920s. It's a very short book, about 12,000 words. And it was

00:07:34.460 very helpful. You can actually buy it on Amazon. But one theme that became really unavoidable as I

00:07:40.040 read this work was that wherever polygamy appeared in the Old Testament, it always was handcuffed to

00:07:45.860 strife, to rivalry, to grief, to disobedience, to household chaos every single time. Abraham and

00:07:55.380 Sarah give us jealousy, contempt, and exile. We saw that Hagar despised Sarah. Sarah oppressed

00:08:02.420 Hagar. Ishmael was cast out. We see Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, and that goes into, again, rivalry,

00:08:09.800 manipulation, bargaining over children, and a household filled with envy and resentment between 0.61

00:08:14.620 two women. We see Elkna, Hannah, and Peniah give us provocation. They give us bitterness in their

00:08:20.740 relationship. Tears up to drive Hannah to the temple in anguish. We see David's many wives

00:08:26.700 and his concubines and all the sexual disorder and the fratricide, which is sibling murder.

00:08:33.500 We see rebellion. We see civil war with his own household. We see Solomon's wives divided into

00:08:40.720 two loyalties, idolatry and a kingdom that's torn into two. Polygamy brings divisiveness 0.86

00:08:48.180 wherever it is. And so multiple wives shatter God's one flesh model for marriage into many

00:08:58.600 pieces. We saw the one flesh structure affirmed in the New Testament by Christ. We also see it 0.66

00:09:08.900 in the picture of the gospel that we have the groom as Jesus Christ and we have the bride

00:09:15.160 as the church. Genesis 2 24 says, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be

00:09:20.660 united to his wife in the singular, his wife, not wives, but to his wife. And so Christ does not 0.83

00:09:31.620 have brides. Christ has a bride. And so polygamy breaks the covenant structure, the order, the 0.71

00:09:39.260 design, the divine intention for marriage. A man with multiple wives is preaching a false gospel 0.99

00:09:46.080 with his own household. Because when you get to see a man and his wife, it truly is a picture 0.99

00:09:52.460 of the gospel, especially if the man is loving his wife as Christ loved the church, and if the

00:09:57.740 woman is obeying and submitting to her husband as she submits to Christ. But when you have multiple

00:10:04.240 wives, it perverts that image. Though it is a physical image of a spiritual reality, God has

00:10:09.960 given us physical images to teach us spiritual truths. And marriage is one of those things. And

00:10:15.920 that is a great reason why so many people are trying to pervert marriage. Because if we can

00:10:20.840 pervert marriage, we can pervert the gospel. And that is also part of what we see in polygamy. 0.67

00:10:27.640 Now, I've seen people use verses 20 through 22 to argue for polygamy, and let's read through it together.

00:10:36.940 Verse 20 says,

00:10:37.820 Adah bore Javah, and he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.

00:10:45.720 His brother's name was Jubal.

00:10:49.480 He was the father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe.

00:10:53.940 Zillah also bore Tubal-Cain.

00:10:56.520 He was the forger of all the instruments of bronze and iron.

00:11:00.840 The sister of Tubalcain was Nema.

00:11:04.780 Now, a supporter of polygamy actually read this quote this week.

00:11:08.560 He says, quote,

00:11:10.140 Undoubtedly, Lamech, feeling disillusioned with monogamy,

00:11:13.780 which he believed wronged husbands of his time,

00:11:16.200 he turned to polygamy as an alternative solution.

00:11:19.600 The exceptional intellectual talents that his children possessed 0.90

00:11:22.940 were gifts from God ought to be interpreted as divine approval of his decision to practice 0.94

00:11:29.480 polygamy, end quote. All right, you see what happened there? This is also from someone who 0.68

00:11:35.920 claims to be a Christian, by the way. And so what this argument does is it's the abuse of the

00:11:43.000 doctrine of what's called common grace, the doctrine of common grace. And it's a very good

00:11:47.440 theological term for each of us to know and understand. I'm going to give it to you right

00:11:50.620 here. Common grace teaches that God restrains evil and distributes gifts, talents, and cultural

00:11:58.120 ability even among the ungodly. Think of God allows the rain to fall on the just and the unjust,

00:12:04.920 right? That's a common grace. But he does this for the preservation of the world, not as an

00:12:10.420 endorsement of their sin. He does so to accomplish his means and his intentions, not as a way to

00:12:17.960 endorse their evil. Now here, the author wrongly assigns the effects of common grace to the

00:12:26.640 practice of polygamy. In other words, he confused cause with permission. And that's a very common

00:12:33.420 tactic of people working to pervert truth. God is not affirming polygamy. He's working

00:12:40.000 through his purpose, or he's working his purpose through these wicked people. And by God's common

00:12:47.880 grace, we see the invention of musical instruments and metal work. And these are good and godly

00:12:54.620 things that are not to be attributed to affirm the practice of polygamy, but because they are

00:13:00.500 results of God's common grace on society. Again, under the logic that this gentleman uses, you

00:13:09.440 could say that because Cain built cities, God approves murder. It's ridiculous. Or because 0.99

00:13:15.700 Pharaoh won wars, God endorses his tyranny. Or because Larry Page invented Google, God affirms

00:13:25.200 his Judaism. No, no, absolutely not. Scripture never reasons that way. God regularly grants 0.70

00:13:33.200 power and skill and prosperity and success to the wicked. There's Proverbs all about it.

00:13:38.600 Why do you allow the wicked to prosper?

00:13:44.260 That's not as approval of their sin, but as evidence of his patience and sovereign rule over a fallen world.

00:13:50.580 He's working his will through the world, not just the righteous, but through the wicked as well.

00:13:57.760 Now, the question that still remains for many people around the issue of polygamy is if Christ and the apostles clearly did establish monogamy as the model of marriage.

00:14:08.100 If that's true, then why does the Old Testament basically appear to be silent on polygamy?

00:14:16.400 And then the second part of the question is, has polygamy ever been explicitly condemned by scripture?

00:14:23.300 Because these are the arguments that you're going to hear out there.

00:14:26.520 These are the growing arguments that people are going to hear.

00:14:29.300 Perverted men love the idea of polygamy and they will push it.

00:14:33.580 now regarding that first question one possible explanation is this

00:14:38.120 the nature of the ancient patriarchal cultures of that time demanded its permissibility and common

00:14:46.980 grace i don't know maybe that's an answer during that period of redemptive history we know that 0.96

00:14:54.060 unmarried women were either going to be extremely vulnerable destitution slavery prostitution

00:15:02.780 very likely are going to die without provision of a husband.

00:15:09.040 Polygamy may have been divinely tolerated within this period,

00:15:13.000 not approved, but tolerated,

00:15:15.780 as God is working out his progressive revelation and redemption in society.

00:15:23.140 Now, the problem with this is that there is no answer.

00:15:26.280 These are all speculative reasons.

00:15:28.720 Theologians have given a variety of positions here,

00:15:31.820 but the scriptures don't say why God has not explicitly condemned polygamy in the Old

00:15:36.480 Testament. Now, the second question, was polygamy ever banned in scripture? This is a very important

00:15:43.620 question. I think of the more important question. Well, we know that polygamy is explicitly prohibited

00:15:48.780 in church elders in 1 Timothy chapter 3. You're not allowed to have multiple wives. That's one

00:15:53.480 of the qualifications for an elder to be in the church. We also know that monogamy is the only

00:16:00.960 marital model that's ever affirmed, instructed, and assumed throughout both the Old Testament and

00:16:06.600 the New Testament. Both the prophets, the scribes, the kings, and the sense of their ability to

00:16:12.320 speaking of marriage in a positive way. Also, the apostles, Jesus Christ himself, God's word

00:16:18.500 through the prophets every single time is affirming monogamy, not just in its prescriptive,

00:16:24.180 but also its descriptive nature. And so there are no standalone prohibition statements in the

00:16:31.680 scriptures that say, thou shall not commit polygamy. But there is also no statements that

00:16:36.020 say, thou shall not be transgender or thou shall not be a pedophile. Is that because God allows 0.95

00:16:43.740 them? No, no. It's because they fall so clearly, so far outside of God's creational design that

00:16:51.780 scripture treats them as self-evidently disordered. It's very strange that today I have to write

00:16:58.980 treatises against transgenderism. I can't even go back to the forefathers of the 1800s or the 1700s

00:17:05.940 because there is no theology on it. No one has ever had to write on these topics because no society

00:17:11.700 has ever allowed such insane chaos to enter into their culture. But here we are having to teach

00:17:19.520 what a man is and having to teach what a woman is basic visible biology and the same is true

00:17:25.880 around issues like polygamy and so in other words the prohibition of polygamy or transgenderism

00:17:34.480 or pedophilia or whatever it may be they're implicit they don't have to be explicit they're

00:17:40.700 implicit and that should be sufficient they're not just slightly implicit they're extremely implicit

00:17:46.080 and that should be sufficient. Lamech said to his wives in verse 23, Adah and Zillah, hear my voice.

00:17:54.280 You wives of Lamech, listen to what I say. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for 0.94

00:18:00.080 striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is 77 fold. Now these verses right here 0.74

00:18:08.200 are actually called the song of the sword in theology circles. It's called the song of the

00:18:12.400 sword. And they contain the longest recorded speech of a human being up to this point in the

00:18:18.660 scriptures. It's the longest amount of words from a human that we see from Genesis chapter one until

00:18:25.760 now. This is it. And Lamech not only boasts of his murder to his wives, but in verse 24,

00:18:32.360 he openly magnifies himself in his own pride about his murder.

00:18:36.080 now what's striking to me about this uh is that Cain's story Cain's story he's a murderer

00:18:46.200 he's been banished from God he's a wanderer it's clearly been passed down from generation

00:18:54.680 to generation yet without repentance this is five generations down and he his third great

00:19:02.560 grandson is essentially saying for five generations I've heard this story if Cain was sevenfold and

00:19:09.220 I'm 77 fold it's not like this was ever talked about as a negative thing it seems like it was

00:19:16.160 talked about as a positive thing through his generations which again is further evidence

00:19:20.980 that the generations of Cain were not repentant

00:19:24.360 instead of the fear of god lamech turns cain's warning from god into a badge of honor

00:19:34.480 escalating violence and self-glorification and what i love is that jesus later quietly

00:19:42.980 overturns lamech's arrogance by reusing that exact same number not for vengeance but for mercy

00:19:49.720 He says to the people, you must forgive them 77 times 7.

00:19:59.120 Now here we see the amplification of Cain's sin and pride.

00:20:02.540 And I want to get, as we kind of close up to this, we see the amplification of Cain's sin and pride.

00:20:08.100 And it shows us that unless God intervenes, unless God intervenes in someone's life, or a people, or a culture, or a nation,

00:20:17.800 they do not morally evolve they morally devolve okay that is the principle that we see here 0.97

00:20:25.080 in other words we should not expect pagan people we should not expect pagan cultures we should not 0.97

00:20:32.420 expect pagan religions to get better over time without the intervention of the gospel but worse 1.00

00:20:38.280 we should expect them to get worse we should not expect homosexuals to be more ordered 1.00

00:20:44.200 but more disordered. We should not expect a generation who is perverted without Christ 1.00

00:20:51.720 intervening to get all of a sudden more ordered. That's not the testimony of the world. It's not

00:20:58.420 the testimony of our own experience. We see that without the intervention of the gospel,

00:21:03.700 things get worse. Now, by God's grace, the intervention of the gospel came through Jesus

00:21:09.020 Christ, and it is continuing to saturate and expand in the world. The Great Commission will

00:21:15.720 be fulfilled because the resurrection of Christ is more powerful than the fall of Adam. In fact,

00:21:21.160 we can be optimistic that the gospel will permeate and go and save all it was intended to save,

00:21:29.900 that all the nations will eventually bow and submit to the Lord Jesus Christ.

00:21:39.020 Now, I don't know if you remember, many years ago, people started warning Christians, started warning the culture that if homosexuality was not made restrained and made illegal or kept illegal, that it would eventually lead to the normalization of pedophilia.

00:21:55.100 That was a very big discussion.

00:21:56.940 No one ever thought, oh, there's no way that it would ever go that far.

00:22:00.800 And had God not mercifully restrained these evils through what I would think is civil authority,

00:22:07.200 we had somewhat of a revival in righteous government over the last years.

00:22:13.140 Had God not intervened, we would already be there.

00:22:16.980 We would already be there. 0.88

00:22:18.580 Had God not allowed a revival of the church in America and a revival of Christian government in America, 0.71

00:22:26.020 we would already be there.

00:22:26.840 In fact, we saw even early stages of this a few years ago when the pedophiles began rebranding themselves as minor attracted individuals.

00:22:36.380 Minor attracted individuals.

00:22:38.260 And they were doing this as a way to make their sin more palatable. 1.00

00:22:41.360 And again, it is not because they are growing in sanctification or that they are becoming more positive, but because they are becoming more negative.

00:22:48.760 and the pattern is consistent in scripture and experience when sin is affirmed instead of

00:22:56.760 restrained when the gospel is absent instead of present it does not stop sin it escalates sin

00:23:02.460 and so if you want to see prescott to be a christian town if you want to see your household

00:23:08.400 to be a christian household if you want to see your children be christian children if you want

00:23:12.640 to see our culture be a christian culture if you want to see america be a christian nation

00:23:16.640 It is dependent upon the Christianization through the message of the gospel.

00:23:23.420 It's the tip of the spear. 0.99

00:23:25.900 It's the first thing we should be doing.

00:23:27.480 It's the front door.

00:23:29.240 We need to be proclaiming the gospel that it might permeate and reverse the effects of the fall.

00:23:35.920 And that's what Jesus is doing in the gospel.

00:23:38.460 He's reversing the effects of the fall.

00:23:40.740 wherever the church arrives it is a light that banishes out the darkness and it is reversing

00:23:50.940 the evil and wickedness that comes from a life without god and this is exactly what we see

00:23:59.940 in Cain's third great-grandson, Lamech.

00:24:06.740 That God has not intervened. 0.80

00:24:12.500 He's allowed them to be evil.

00:24:15.920 Now, let me zoom out for a second to give you some context.

00:24:20.080 This is, why does this passage matter?

00:24:22.280 Why do we want to understand the building up of a godless civilization

00:24:26.700 in the grand scheme of the narrative of Genesis?

00:24:30.980 Well, because this is leading up to the conditions that cause the flood.

00:24:37.180 This is the beginning of those conditions of this civilization

00:24:41.340 that starts to build outside of God's desires and design

00:24:45.400 that leads the conditions to the flood.

00:24:49.780 By the time we reach Genesis 6-5, which is only a few sermons away,

00:24:53.880 Scripture says of the world,

00:24:55.240 quote, the Lord saw that wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of

00:25:01.360 the thought of his heart was only evil continually, end quote. Think about that.

00:25:08.400 From Genesis chapter 1 and the beauty of the garden to Genesis chapter 6, he says that every

00:25:15.640 intention of the thought of man's heart was only evil continuously.

00:25:21.740 In other words, as sin intensifies and spreads through Cain's line, the longing for the serpent crusher is intensified, it grows stronger, but the necessity of divine judgment and redemption becomes unavoidable.

00:25:41.640 There's this longing for redemption.

00:25:44.180 now as we will see that longing is only left to one family and that is Noah and so next week what

00:25:53.440 we're going to talk about is the sorrow of a fallen society we're going to see the introduction

00:26:01.940 of the very first time people pray in Genesis chapter 4 next week in Genesis chapter 5 we're

00:26:09.060 going to see that genealogy of the growth of humanity with the intensification and escalation

00:26:14.780 of sin in chapter 5. And then we're going to see how evil continues to push forward and lay the

00:26:21.960 groundwork for the conditions, for the rationale of the flood in Genesis chapter 6. Amen? Amen.

00:26:30.780 Let's pray. Father, we thank you, Lord, for this passage of scripture, for the narrative, Lord,

00:26:34.880 that we might understand, so that we might put together our systematic theology, that it would

00:26:39.360 be helpful for us and for our children, that we can understand the reasoning and the beauty of

00:26:45.560 progressive redemption. Lord, as you reveal your plan through time, Lord, we ask that you would

00:26:51.100 help us to connect this dot in the mosaic of your plan to save the world. Lord, we ask that you would

00:26:56.820 also bless us with wisdom and understanding as we read the scriptures on our own, and we connect

00:27:02.320 your great story to our own story. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Dale Partridge - January 14, 2026

Genesis 4_17-24 - Polygamy and the Rise of a Godless Civilization.

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