11.3.24

Good morning!

I'm driving back to Michigan today. Prayer's appreciated.

Commercial: Shabbat morning's zoom call: Noah: God's Timeless Restoration Plan for Mankind!

There are biblical cycles that we go through all the time: one minute cycles, one hour cycles, one day cycles, weekly Sabbath cycles, monthly cycles, yearly cycles, 7 year cycles and even 50 year cycles.

In our Torah study, yesterday, we examined the worldwide flood and the man of the earth/ish adamah, Noah/Noach/rest, comfort.

Today, I want to talk to you about Noah's name. The Torah actually talks to us about his name and tells us how it is exactly that he got it. It turns out that Noah's father, Lamech, made a declaration upon the birth of Noach and there's something very, very puzzling, very chilling about that declaration.

and he called the name of his child, Noach, saying, This one shall comfort us from our deeds and from the sadness of our hands from the land that God cursed (Gen. 5:29)

Somehow Lamech senses that this child is going to comfort him, not just comfort him, but comfort all of us, comfort mankind from the curse of the land (Gen. 3:17; 4:11); The consequences to eating from the tree of knowledge and Cain's killing of Abel.

Not only was the ground cursed, but it created alienation from God: Adam and his honey bunny hide from God immediately after eating from the tree (Gen. 3:7-10), Cain senses that he will spend his life continually hiding from God (Gen. 4:7-11) and similarly not just an alienation from God but an alienation from the land. Adam is told, 'by the sweat of your brow, you will work the land,' in sadness and toil will you work on the land all the days. It won't just provide for you, you'll have to work on it, and that curse also intensifies itself in the times of Cain. Cain is told that even if he works the land, it's not going to help, it won't continue to give you its bounty. Yikes! And now generations later, Lamech comes and senses that things could be different now. This one will comfort us from the sadness of our hands, from the land that God has cursed.

So it all sounds very nice, sounds very hopeful but here's the chilling part. If you fast-forward not 8 verses ahead, you get to the verses that describe God's decision to bring the flood (Gen. 6:6), God's decision to destroy the world because Lamech lives in the generation which is right before the flood. Now look at God's decision to destroy the world as described by the Torah. And God regretted that he had created the men in the land and he was saddened to his heart.

And then God said I will wipe out man that I have created from the face of the earth. Now if we pay careful attention to the words here, we will find a very fascinating, but very chilling thing, which is that God's declaration in creating the world exactly echoes Lamech's declaration upon the birth of Noach. Huh?

These are the words to look forward, go back to Lamech's declaration, word number one, comfort or regret/yenachem. It has both meanings.  This one will comfort us from our deeds. Word number two, deeds/m’asah. Word number three, sadness or toil/m’itzvon. Word number four, the earth/min-ha-adamah. Are you still with me? It is early on this 1st day of the week :-)

That this one will comfort us from the sadness of our hands, from the earth that God has created. But if you take those four words—y'nachem, mi-ma'asenu, me-itzvon, adamah—you will find them repeated in the exact same order in God's decision to destroy the world (Gen. 6:6).

And God regretted/nachem, but it's the same word for comfort, that he had made/m’asah man and the land, and he became saddened/m’itzvon. I will wipe out man from the face of the earth/adamah.

It's impossible to resist the conclusion that for some strange reason It looks like God is mimickin
g Lamech's name giving of Noach/Noah. How would Noah comfort mankind from the curse that God had placed upon the land?

Some have inferred, and I would agree, that Lamech saw prophetically that Noah would be the creator of the plow. The plow would be a form of comfort. We wouldn't have to deal with the curse of the land anymore. I want to suggest that that was the straw that broke the camel's back. That comfort, the declaration of the plow, in the world before the flood, for the reasons of comfort…and not just the creation of the plow but the significance that mankind attached to the plow—the plow would comfort us—is the reason to destroy the world. Why? Enquiring minds want to know!

The answer is because the plow can never comfort you.

Another question we need to ask is, 'what were the purposes of the curses'? The curse of the land, the sadness of the land, why was it so sad to toil on the land, such that the language for the curse should be that you will work the land by the sweat of your brow and you will eat in sadness?

What's so sad about work; unless you're a socialist, marxist or communist? The answer is when work is just work, it's not sad but when work is toil, when work could have gone easier, but it goes harder, then it's sad. There's a futility involved and then the sadness is a reminder that things could be different. The curses in the wake of the tree of knowledge, in the wake of the murder of Abel were curses that alienated us from land, and they alienated us from God. We hid from God, and when we worked the land, it would no longer give its power to us. It would be sad and we would toil.

If we go back and look at the opening chapters of Genesis we will find when God said, “let us make man," the 'us' was, not just the Godhead, but He was also speaking to the Land (Gen. 2:4). God said to the land, 'you contribute the body and I will contribute the soul, we together shall make man.' So land and God stand as man's creators but we become alienated from our creators, land and God, in the wake of the tree of knowledge, and that alienation grows after Cain and Abel and it grows and it grows and when will it stop and what was the point of that alienation?

Why make curses that alienate men from God? God doesn't want us to be alienated. The answer is, there is a homing beacon. A homing beacon we all have to come back to our creator. We were once one with our creator. We always want to come back, we never want to be separate, and the more you become alienated, the stronger the homing beacon becomes. The stronger you want to come back and that's the point of the curses. The curses are, as my friend Jim said to me years ago, to understand the consequence of the sins, understand how alienated we have become, and desire to come back, feel the sadness, the toil, and return. The curses are really blessings in disguise!

When would God say that the time has come to give up, to just destroy the world? It comes when you find comfort in all the wrong places. It comes when you find comfort in the plow. The plow is a technological solution to a spiritual problem. It is a way of taking Tylenol so that you don't feel sadness anymore. We can work the land with the plow, we can accommodate ourselves to this uncomfortable reality, we don't have to deal with the alienation anymore, we can indeer ourselves to it. And it's at that moment that God says, 'you say that you will comfort yourselves with the creation of the plow? You are giving up on the relationship, there's no way that you will ever come back.

'I have no choice but to start all over again' and God uses the exact same language that mankind used to comfort themselves with the plow, to start all over again with a watery end to the previous world (Gen. 1:2) and the hope for a better one, in a recreated world with a new slate (Gen. 8-9), and a new relationship with the children of mankind.

Jesus/Yeshua said, as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the coming of the Son of Man (Luke 17:26). Sounds like where we are today, doesn’t it? Let’s make sure that we aren’t looking for ‘comfort’ in all the wrong places. Instead, let’s make sure we run back to His arms...the God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3,4)!

Shalom!