So, we’ve been going, this is an odd passage this morning. We’ve been going through uh the book of Genesis, early chapters, the book of Genesis this summer. And uh we’re following the line of Cain. This is the fellow who murdered his own brother Abel due to his jealousy and his anger. And both brothers had made offerings to God. Book of Hebrews tells us that Abel’s had a quality of faith to it that Cain’s didn’t. And despite rejecting Cain’s offering, God did reject his offering. But he he was willing to work with Cain. Told told Cain, “If you do what’s right, you’ll be accepted. Sin is crouching at your door. You can master it.” Warning him against the temptation to sin. But of course, Cain gave in. In his famous uh book, City of God, uh the written in the early uh fifth century, St. Augustine commented that when God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected Cain’s, it should have caused Cain to do some self-reflection. It should have resulted in him being rightly displeased with himself instead of being wrongly displeased with his brother. But Cain didn’t do any of that self-examination. Instead, uh he didn’t battle his temptation. He allowed it to master him. And in that, uh moment of spont well, I don’t know if it was spontaneous. It seems more premeditated. He killed his brother. And then God spoke to Cain, saying, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you’re under a curse. You’re driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You’ll be a restless wanderer in the earth.” Now even then God is taking away his livelihood as a farmer as a man who worked the soil consigning him to be a restless warrior wanderer and even then he doesn’t really display any repentance or any self-reflection. Cain just shows fear self-absorption his primary concern even at that point was self-preservation. He said to the Lord oh this punishment it’s more than I can bear today you’re driving me from the land. I’ll be hidden from your presence. I’ll be a restless wanderer on the earth. Whoever finds me will kill me. Now, a pretty good sign that you and I are not ready to repent of our sin is that instead of softening, we start hardening. Instead of getting humbly on our knees before the Lord, we become depressed. We get angry. We’re in a bad mood. We blame our spouse or someone else for our circumstances. We do everything we can to justify our actions. Cain, he wasn’t thinking about what his violent premeditated act had done to his brother. He wasn’t saying, “Oh, I can’t bear the idea of my brother lying there lifeless on the ground soaked in his own blood.” Cain was just thinking, “Well, what’s going to happen to me now? It isn’t fair. I’m going to have to live with perpetual danger. This punishment is too harsh. I can’t bear it.” the ability to repent of our sin, to genuinely confess it before God is wrong and commit to turning away from it in the future. I mean, that’s a spiritual skill we just can’t allow to atrophy. If we if you and I haven’t repented of anything for a while because we can’t think of anything we’ve done that might uh require it, that’s not a sign of spiritual maturity. It’s a sign of spiritual lethargy. And Christian leaders have always understood this that becoming more mature in Christ doesn’t make us feel less sinful. It makes us even more conscious of the sin that still clings to our lives. So CS Lewis said, “When a man’s getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that’s still left in him.” JC Riyle, “The man whose soul is growing feels his own sinfulness and unworthiness more every year.” Charles Spurgeon, the nearer we get to absolute perfection, the more detestable will sin become in us. Or you flip it around and put a little more positively. Tim Keller says, “The more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you.” So awareness of our sin, regular timely repentance, it’s one of the most life-giving tools you and I can have in our spiritual toolkit. And losing awareness of sin and mismanaging the skill of repentance. It leaves us dull, isolated. Like Cain, we feel like restless wanderers. We see danger maybe on every side and life ahead is more than we can bear. Sin without repentance just produces a sullen attitude and a bitterness that starts rising in our souls. Even then, God is still so supremely gracious to Cain. He says, “No, I won’t allow even the murder of your brother to be compounded by anyone’s retaliation against you.” He decreed if anyone kills Cain, he’ll suffer vengeance seven times over. Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden. And we wonder, okay, so what kind of world was Cain, the murderer, and his descendants going to build? What was the world going to look like with mankind created in God’s image? And now they’re released to utilize their power to create things, but they’re still corrupted by sin. Doesn’t take long to find out what kind of world’s being built. The remainder of chapter 4 really lays out the pattern. Of course, you know, when we read these early chapters of Genesis, we need to realize that a long timeline is being highly condensed. Many of the people we read about, incredible to us, it it seems incredible to us, they live tremendously long lives, many just shy of a thousand years, but not by much. So, when we read about Cain and his wife and his descendants, we need to know that uh the world had a rapidly burgeoning population. There’s no necessity to see Cain and Abel and later Seth as the only or the consecutive offspring of Adam and Eve. All indications are humanity was busy reproducing like rabbits or fruit flies. It’s borne out by the fact that the first thing we read after Cain was banished by God to the east, Cain’s building a city. So, there must have been a pretty good number of people around. And the remainder of chapter 4 shines a spotlight on three things. We see the creation of culture. We catch a glimpse of the corruption of culture. And finally, there’s a very hopeful arrow that points to the correction of culture. So, the creation, the corruption, corre uh correction of culture. Look first at how uh it began to spread. It helps to have some definition of what we mean by culture. Andy Crouch gives a pretty compact definition. He says, “Culture is simply what we make of the world.” And to that, Tim Keller would add that what we make of the world, it’s not value neutral. We don’t just make things. We make things in service of what we value. You know, we can we can harness tiny little amounts of radioactive material. We can use it to diagnose and treat diseases with the goal of making people well. That’s nuclear medicine. We can use massive amounts of radioactive material to decimate or eliminate populations. Nuclear bombs and warfare. So the harnessing of radioactive material that reflects our human creativity, what we do with it reflects our cultural values. So a better, this is a more complete definition of culture. Culture is what human beings make of God’s world. And what we make reveals what we value. Now Cain’s first accomplishment we read about was to build a city. He didn’t name it after any spiritual value. The last name we’d expect Cain to give to his city would be uh Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. That he wasn’t about to go there. Instead of re, you know, there there are cities that have very spiritual meanings. Salem and San Salvador and Trinidad, Sacramento, Providence. The best Cain could do was name it after his son Enoch. So Enoch is uh what we have as the first known city on earth. You know, the first church that uh Tim Keller pastored was in rural Virginia. He’s far better known for all the years he spent in the great metropolis of New York City. Big step from little Virginia to New York City. But it gave him insight into how to think about cities and how inevitable it was that humans would create cities because cities are hot beds of creativity. The Bible’s extremely positive about cities. In fact, the arc of the Bible story is that it begins in Genesis in a garden, winds up in the book of Revelation in the New Jerusalem in a city. Cities in the Bible, they allowed for um stability. They had walls, military safety, rule of law could develop in the cities. People could specialize. Some could uh were better at making tools or food or clothing and supply. Others an economy could develop. Cities are places of great density and diversity, and it forces people to become more creative and experimental. Tim Keller uses the example of a person who’s recognized as the best violinist in her hometown. She wins all the high school awards, performs at all the community functions. Then she decides to move to New York. When she first arrives, she gets off the bus or off the train, walks down uh to the subway platform where she sees another girl playing her violin with her case open and people are putting dollar bills into it. And this new arrival realizes that girl playing in the subway is far better than I am on the violin. And in that way, city full of creative people forces you to dig deep and to practice more and to get better. And cities are full of millions of creative people. They’re blast furnaces of these creative and innovative new ideas. I read about so many jazz musicians in various magazines and articles and every one of them seems to live in Brooklyn. It’s where my oldest son lives. And I get the impression that if I were to stand on the stairs of his brownstone and just throw a rock randomly, I’d hit a tenor saxoponist somewhere. Of course, humans who live outside urban areas, they’re still created in the image of God. They still love to create. But cities are places where that creativity is scaled up to a much higher degree. As a result, cities can they can be exhausting. They can be zones of pretty high anxiety. There’s all these levels of competition also collaboration. There are these enormous incubators of culture and then they export that culture downstream to the towns and the villages surrounding them. Now, following this founding of a city, in the next verse of our passage, we move very quickly through several generations in the line of Cain, the first city builder, to focus specifically on one of his later descendants, a guy named Lamek. Now, we’ll look at Lamek’s life in a little more detail in a moment, but we read first of his sons who are forerunners in areas of ranching and music and the arts and technology. One son is said to be the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. So he’s developing ranching. He’s figuring out how to herd animals, gain the benefits from that. Another son named Jubel. It’s called the father of all who play the harp and the flute. This is history’s first struggling musician. You know, he’s one who he doesn’t just use his creativity for utilitarian purposes, but he creates something artistic and something beautiful, something that reaches deeply into the souls of people. makes him just want to stop and listen. I think Jubel Kane would be an excellent name for any uh any musical group. He has a brother named Tubal Kane and this guy, he’s the engineer of the of the family. He’s a designer. He’s a craftsman. He’s into metallurgy and designing tools of bronze and iron. So, tumbling out of Lamek’s line is this terrific creativity. How can people who’ve been made in the image of God, he’s the ultimate, the great creator, how can they not display some form of family resemblance? But once mankind has tumbled into sin, how can that creativity not be corrupted at the same time? And that brings us back to Lamek. You know, his sons are such paragonss of creativity. Lamek was also a man not afraid to experiment, but his cultural experiments go in the wrong direction. First we read of him inevitably is going to involve sexual experimentation. We read that Lamek married two women. This guy’s the father of polygamy of creative ingenuity when it comes to marriage. You know only two chapters earlier in Genesis we saw marriage instituted by God in all its natural wholeness. A man shall leave his father and mother be united to his wife. They shall become one flesh. It’s a relationship that preserves unity and equality and faithfulness and fidelity and equilibrium. You know, ordinarily without any human manipulation at all, about 105 boys are born in the world for every hundred girls. And boys by nature, especially when they’re young, they’re a little more uh accustomed to risk-taking. They’re generally the first ones uh sent off to war. So, there’s a little more mortality uh greater mortality among young men. So God has given the world quite a naturally equal ratio of males to females when it comes to potential marriages and sometimes human manipulation greatly alters those percentages. The official one child policy uh endured in China for many years and that led to parents giving um gender selection uh preferential treatment to male babies. They just wanted they just wanted boys born. And as a result, it’s estimated that today roughly between 20 and 30 million and in another 15 years it could be up to 40 million young Chinese men will never be expected to be able to find a marriage partner. There simply aren’t enough women to go around. The natural cultural ratio has been tampered with and it leaves millions and millions of men out in the cold. Well, Lamek in Genesis 4, he seems to represent the beginning of that tampering. Polygamy, other forms of sexual and marital tampering with that natural male female ratio. It creates imbalances. And in China, it really favors women who can afford to be very choosy in selecting a marriage partner. He’d better already own a house and a car and have lots of money and have a really good job if he ever wants to go on a date. Now, with polygamy, it’s the opposite. The man is flattered, the women are subjugated, they’re diminished, and marriage is robbed of its design and just its natural mutuality. So in the Bible, we have many cases of polygamy, even among men who are otherwise biblical heroes. Yet those polygamous marriages never seem to do very well. You just read one after another, and it’s heartbreak, and it’s uh it’s it’s exasperating. What we see occurring is exactly what we’d expect if that natural culture of marriage is turned aside. You can’t go against the grain of the universe and not get splinters when it comes to marriage and relationships. So with Lamek, we see the marriage relationship corrupted. And he also comes across as a real bully and a boaster, unrestrained violence. You know, this is this guy is not great marriage material. He comes home. He gathers his wives together. He’s got an exciting story to tell them. Says Lamek said to his wives, “Adahzilla, listen to me. Wives of Lamech, hear my words. I’ve killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech 77 times.” So he gathers his wives. He makes them sit in the living room. He proudly tells them that he he’s killed and and the grammar shows he killed a young man who had apparently only mildly wounded him. His response to a scratch was homicide. And he says it now do it multiple more times if I could. If Cain is uh avenged seven times, Lamek 77 times he’s championing championing endless anger, limitless retaliation, violence as a form of recreation. If no one else, if his buddies don’t want to listen to him, he’ll make sure his wives hear his story. Commentator Legan Duncan says, “We live in an age characterized by technical and technological prowess, but it has not brought with it moral improvement. Just the opposite. Men are skilled in technique and in technology and their utter failures not only in the sphere of human relationships, but in the sphere of relationship with God.” So again, we see sin dehumanizing us. He goes on, “Satan wants us to say, “Sin against God and you’ll become more than human.” But Genesis 4 records us for us the constant result of sin. When you sin, you become less human. You don’t become more human. So often we’ve heard them saying to heir is human. Or you’ll hear people say, “Well, I’m only human in response to their sin.” He goes on, “Humanity is not the root of sin. Moral rebellion in the heart is the root of all external sin. It’s not that we sin because we’re human. We sin because we’re fallen. And so to say that when we sin, we’re only being human is a misnomer. When we sin, we’re fallen. It’s not that we’re being human. Sin dehumanizes us. Let’s go back to our definition of culture. Culture is what human beings make of God’s world. And what we make reveals what we value. With Lamek and his sons, we have tremendous creativity and achievement. And it’s generated alongside corruption and sinfulness. The sons pioneer hurting animals and they create music and arts and technology. All of that can be wonderful and lifegiving. Or it can lean toward a culture of death depending on what kind of people are influencing the development of culture, who’s holding the cultural reigns. Cain’s line then is left hanging. The end of our passage and another alternate line of humanity is developing. We read, “Adam lay with his wife again. She gave birth to a son and named him se named him Seth saying, God has granted me another child in place of Abel since Cain killed him. Seth also had a son and named him Enosh.” At that time, men began to call on the name of the Lord. Now here we see the beginning of a of a hopeful cultural co correction. This line of Seth is moving in a much more Godword direction than the line of Cain and Lamek line of Seth is reaching back to the creator. And when we read at that time, men began to call on the name of the Lord, that’s an indication that it might have been the start of corporate worship of people actually gathering together like we’re doing this morning for no other reason than to worship and to pray and to listen to God’s word. You know, I think we’d all rest easy if uh Seth was at the helm of our culture or the line of Seth, but if it’s Lam and the likes of him, we might have a hard time sleeping at night. You know, we we read many gloom and doom articles and uh and writings about uh the advancement of artificial intelligence. We don’t know. We’re we’re lay people. We don’t know who to believe or what to believe. But I read an opinion column this week in the New York Times that had this ominous title. If you weren’t worried about AI, you should be after the past few weeks. It’s written by a man named Nate Soors. He’s the president of an organization called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. I don’t know if you play around with artificial intelligence. It’s come around the last couple years. It’s amazing. Uh, from what I’ve experienced, I use it primarily for research or summarizing ideas. And Charlene uses it somehow to keep track of this spiderweb of her ideas and her rabbit trails. And I’m glad she has someone who can do that because I’ve never been able to do that in our married life. But but AI fills that gap. Well, like all new technologies, it has the power to offer life or death. Nate Sors writes how OpenAI accidentally created and released this autonomous swarm of AI agents a couple of weeks ago and they broke out of their testing environment on its own initiative and orchestrated this complex cyber attack against other internet targets. And I don’t understand how any of that works, how AI agents can escape their cage and commit cyber crimes and then cover their tracks afterwards. But several weeks ago, 1300 employees from different AI companies, including some of the chief executives, signed a letter calling for an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools necessary to deliberately pace AI development before it rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control and leads to catastrophic outcomes. If the people developing AI are that fearful, how are the rest of us to think about it? Nate source says we’re not yet at the point of no return. Open open AAI’s agent swarm broke onto the internet, but it didn’t replicate itself on hidden computers. As far as we know, it didn’t start self-improving. It didn’t break into an autonomous biology lab and synthesize a new deadly virus, something that AI models are now able to do. He says, “The type of AI that would pose a real extinction threat doesn’t exist yet, which means that we still have time to avoid disaster if we act fast. Leaders around the world must coordinate a global stop to the AI race.” Well, these are the experts who are saying things like that. And we’re all left wondering, is the line of Seth or is the line of Lamont controlling the future of things like the arts and music and technology? Will the ones who call on the name of the Lord guide our culture? Or will those lame-like desecrators and deconstructors take the lead? Now, there are a lot of shades of gray, I’m sure, between those extremes, but what direction progress takes really depends on who’s holding the reigns of the cultural movement. Christian author Glenn Scriber points out particular statue that stands in the garden of the United Nations building in New York. It was unveiled in 1959. It’s entitled, “Let us beat swords into plowshares.” Showing a man he’s hammering a sword, a tool of violence, making it into an agricultural implement. And Scriber says, “This charter perfectly captures how we feel. The past is dark. The future we hope can be better.” That idea is baked into modern western society. He says, ‘You probably heard someone say, ‘Get with the times, or that was the dark ages, or they need to update their thinking, or those people are on the wrong side of history. The progress story is so powerful nowadays that people try to win moral arguments by simply stating the date. How can anyone believe that in 2026? In this way, he says, even the most secular people believe in progress quite religiously. So the stature of the UN is considered the perfect symbol of progress. It’s what the United Nations supposed to be about. Profoundly biblical idea taken straight out of Isaiah chapter 2 which says, “Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways so that we we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations, will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. So in the Bible, you know, we have this golden age of Eden, the garden. Things decline rapidly. Jesus comes along with the key to restoration. Promise is that one day we’re all going to live in the new city of Jerusalem. God’s going to wipe away every tear. All swords will be beaten into plowshares. Now, the people who drafted the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they knew the biblical roots behind what they were attempting. John Humphrey was a Canadian law professor. He first drafted the Declaration of Human Rights and he wrote in his diary that his intention was to create something like Christian morality without all the Christian Tommy rot. He said, and Tommy Roth, his word for boulderdash or nonsense. He thought Christian theology was nonsense, but Christian morality was well worth keeping. So, C Scrivener writes, “That’s why the UN Declaration can speak of humanity with dignity and hope. These are Christian ideas with their biblical roots hidden. But what happens when you do more than hide the biblical roots of progress? What happens when you cut yourself off from them completely?” You know that statue at the UN was sculpted by a a Russian guy named Jenny Vuchevich and it was a gift to the UN from the USSR, the communist dominated union of Soviet soviet socialist republics. It was donated in 1959. USSR championed a world of communist progress and they were doing everything they could to crush Christianity and sever the world from any of its Christian roots. At the time the statue was unveiled, it was the middle of the 20th century. It’s been called the murder century. More people died violently in those hundred years than in every previous century combined. That was the century of Stalin and of Hitler. And Chairman Mao, whose great leap forward wound up killing tens of millions of his own Chinese citizens by being beaten or worked to death or starved to death, all in the name of progress. Glenn Scribner asks says we all believe in progress. The big question is what kind of progress? By what standard can we measure something like the the progress of artificial intelligence? I mean the AI that we experience right now in a very short time it’ll seem as prehistoric as dialup internet or a fax machine. Techn technologically things are going to greatly improve. But are humans going to be better because of it? Will our moral character keep up with the changes? Is Seth or Islamic gonna be holding the reigns? Line of Seth began to call on the name of the Lord recognizing the true and the only trustworthy bringer of progress. So in Isaiah chapter 2, the standard of progress, the bringer of progress is clear. Progress comes. It says through the Lord’s ways, his paths, his law, his word, his light, he is the judge. And on that statue that the USSR donated to the UN, they shifted Isaiah’s language from they to us. Let us beat our plow our our swords into plowshares. We will bring about this brave new world. Scrier says that’s a big shift. In Isaiah, the focus is on the Lord. He’ll teach us his ways. The word of the Lord will flow out from Jerusalem. He’ll judge between the nations. According to Isaiah, the Lord through his word is the agent of progress. So he says, “What’s the biblical way? It’s down and then up.” In Isaiah 2, we see that nonviolence really is at the heart of the Lord’s revolution. Swords turned into plowshares. The world brings progress by force, but the Lord brings progress by his word. What’s it like to lay your weapons down and only use the word of the Lord? It’s costly. But Jesus, the son of God, on the cross, that’s what he embraced. He embraced the vulnerability of nonviolent word-based progress. It cost him his life. But that’s the way down and then up. That’s the way the Lord brings progress. Though Jesus could have called 12 legions of angels to defend him, he refused to pick up the sword. Instead, the weapons of violence were all used against him. And and then he rose up to proclaim victory over sin and death. He rose up to make a way for true and lasting peace between people and God just by his sacrifice for sin in our behalf. And all who now call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by faith in what he’s done will be saved. Scrier concludes that’s the way of his revolution. It leaves all others in the dust. When the swords into plowshares statue was unveiled in 1959, Soviet propaganda was so cutting edge, so modern, but now everyone sees it on the wrong side of history. Progress is real, but it’s biblical. There’s an arc. It does bend, but it bends down and then up. It bends toward death and then towards life. It’s the cross, then it’s resurrection. And in the end, all nations will see that it’s the word of God that brings real progress. It’s the word of God that will prevail. God calls each one of us, you and me, to align ourselves with the line of Seth, who began to call on the name of the Lord. Lameics of the world, they’re all over the place. They’re still on the loose, but we can be assured that the end of the story, Seth and the line of those who call on the Lord will prevail. So Kevin D. Young says that the way we ought to think of church and culture, we think we should think of church as a kind of an outpost or an embassy of God’s kingdom. An embassy is this national outpost, but it dwells or it’s set up in a foreign land. The embassy while it wants to dwell peacefully in that foreign land, it does exist to advance the interests of another country. So the church always sits lightly with our culture. We affirm, we enjoy, we love everything we can about it. We resist all that we are called to and things that we must resist. We represent the interest of God’s kingdom. Looking forward to the day when every sword all over the world is going to be turned into a plowshare. So, let’s uh let’s pray about a few of these thoughts. This is uh your time for the next couple moments, just you and the Lord. But you want might want to pray about uh a greater awareness of sin, a greater desire for repentance. Keep our lives uh keep short accounts between us and God. Thank God for all the things that you can think of that you enjoy in our culture that align with the values of God’s kingdom. You walk out in these fringe grounds for the next few moments and you you just enjoy the creativity and the life and the energy that’s out there. And some of it really does align with the kingdom of God. Some of it doesn’t. Praise God that the world is progressing within the confines of his sovereign plan and that all true progress in the end will glorify Jesus. Just take a few moments, you and the Lord, and I’ll close us off in a moment.