Sunday, June 12, 2016
Dispensation = Government Opening Event = Noah worships God and receives a covenant and responsibility - GEN 8:20-22 Man's
Responsibility = Believe and obey - GEN 9:1-6
Man's failure = Personal disorder, GEN 9:20-23 and then Social disorder; GEN 11:1-4. Man's Tendency = Away from God Closing Event =
Tower of Babel; GEN 11:5-9. Personal Salvation = By Grace through Faith - GEN 9:26; 11:10-32
The dispensation of Human Government introduced capital punishment ordained by God for the first time.
The third dispensation extended from the Noahic Flood to the call of Abram. The Scripture portion which covers this dispensation is Genesis 8:20-11:32.
Inasmuch as man had failed to obey God on the basis of his conscience and the restraint by the Holy Spirit during the second dispensation, once the flood ended God started a new dispensation by instituting a new ruling factor.
”We have tried a dispensation when I allowed man to make his own decisions based upon his personal convictions in his own conscience and provided grace for him to handle all of his problems, and that didn't work.”
”We will try mankind living together under the rules and laws of a human government-----let's see how this one turns out!”
After noting the definition of the dispensation of Government, the opening Event, man's Responsibility and his personal failure, we are now ready for the great judgment of the Tower of Babel.
Here we have here the only true record of the origin of nations and the origin of languages, and nations which came into existence by a single act of God.
Sociologists and anthropologists and language theorists imagine a slow, long evolutionary process socializing man and somehow evolving into different nations and languages......but that was not so.
The point is that nations and languages came into existence as one act of God, namely known as the Tower of Babel.
The first nine verses of chapter 11 are crucial because they give us the event that launched the dispersion and the scattering separation.
When they came out of the ark they were a group of eight and they began to reproduce and reproduce.
In GEN 11:1-9, the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of whole earth and they stopped building the city and therefore its name was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth.
This is a very simple and straightforward explanation of how nations developed all over the world and how languages developed; God did it in one single act.
It is in a way a profound tragedy as humanity is separated and splintered and scattered from each other already having rebelled from God.
The inevitable result is that a negative relationship with God results in a negative relationship toward mankind.
In the flood, it was judgment by destruction. At Babel it is judgment by dispersion.
The world at the time of Babel was not any different than the world at the time of the flood and God would have had every reason to drown this entire civilization with the exception of whatever few were true to Him, but He didn't do that.
When they were scattered, the sons of Japheth went into a certain area and splintered into various people groups.
Verses one to four, man is building up what he wants.
Instead of them spreading out horizontally, they wanted to go vertically and work their way up to heaven.
In verse five, God steps in and verses six through eight God tears down what man has built up.
The action of man is indicated in verse three verse with this statement: "They said to one another 'Come let us.'"
The action of God is described in verse seven, same words only this time God says, "Come let us."
The contrast in this brief text is between what man desires to achieve directed at self-glory, self-fulfillment, and what God does is to show man's impotence and emptiness before Him.
ROM 12:3 For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment,
1CO 3:18 Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become foolish that he may become wise.
1CO 10:12 Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.
GAL 6:3 For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
It is man at his best and his noblest trying to achieve his greatest anti-God act and God steps in and undoes the whole thing.
It is an attitude of wanting to live apart from God driven by personal ambition and personal pride, and interestingly enough the locations are the same.
Shinar, the plain in which they built Babel, was very near to the location of the Garden of Eden. Both of them were in the Mesopotamian valley, the lower Euphrates valley between the Tigres and the Euphrates River.
Once it was just Adam and Eve thrown out of Eden, now it's the whole of the population of the world thrown out of the plain of Shinar.
God has instructed the leader of the family, Noah, in chapter nine verse one, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." Fill the earth.
The command of God was to take people and search the planet, find all of the wonderful things that God had prepared for man and populate the planet.
The same language means language. The same words mean vocabulary.
There were then no barriers to communication, none at all and therefore no barriers to unity.
The literal Hebrew here is they had one lip and one set of words.
The event regarding Babel just occurred, as I said, about 100 years after the flood, the flood is 1656 after creation - this is about 1,756 years after creation.
There was a seriously deadly and dark side to this unity because they were sinful and rebellious against God.
Power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately.
One nation, all speaking the same language, all under the power of the same influence, essentially led by the same man, as we will see relatives of Cain especially.
They lacked the checks and balances against evil that help preserved man in sinful world but this really became a problem when the language barrier came into effect.
Once they couldn’t understand each other immediately they started doubting what the other one was saying, and being evil, they thought the worse.
PSA 19:13, “Keep Yore servant from the great transgression, presumptuous sins, let them not have dominion over me.”
How many times have we presumed things, only to find out our presumption was wrong?
Can you imagine what it was like not to be able to understand what someone was saying, especially when mankind was corrupt?
PRO 28:1 “The wicked flee when no man pursues him.”
Satan wants ONE PERSON (literally-one angel) to be in the ultimate authority and in control of the human race--- and that is himself.