Wednesday, June 15, 2016 The dispensation of Human Government introduced capital punishment ordained by God for the first time. Once the flood ended God started a new dispensation by instituting a new ruling factor. He brought in human government which would now serve as a guideline for man to follow and obey or else lose his freedom and pay the consequences for his personal sin and rebellion. Human government with its ultimate authority to administer capital punishment, was now the NEW ruling factor by which God instituted for the third dispensation. This means that nations and languages were established by God by one divine 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. In the last 150 years, through the advance of technology, archeologists have discovered more truth than ever before when it comes to the ancient world as DAN 12:4 states. The first nine verses of chapter 11 are crucial because they give us the event that launched the dispersion and the scattering separation. They were still together as a family and the question is what scattered them everywhere? 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 The name Babel means a confused noise, typically made by a number of voices speaking at the same time, babbling, shouting, yelling, screaming, but most of all confusion. 1CO 14:33 for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. Gen 11 = 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. The inevitable result is that a negative relationship with God results in a negative relationship toward mankind. The Tower of Babel happened no more than 100 years after the flood. In the flood, it was judgment by destruction. At Babel it is judgment by separation and dispersion. 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. Man was no better than in Noah’s day, a common grace prevailed and God was patient with man as far as world destruction was concerned. When they were scattered, the sons of Japheth went into a certain area and splintered into various people groups. Then the sons of Ham went into other areas and splintered into people groups. Then the sons of Shem did the same. Verses one to four, man is building up to 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. So, in verses one to four, we have the action of man, in verses five to eight, we have the action of God. Vs 9 = Moses is still speaking to the Jewish people in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. collectively called the 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 father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 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 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 Tigris 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.” 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. That was not what man wanted to do so there was a defiant, rebellious disobedience at this point. 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 before we used the B.C. calendar. 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 men, as we will see who were 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 the people 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 Your 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.” “This is what they began to do and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them because nobody’s going to stop them.” Nobody is going to stop them. Satan wants one person to be in the ultimate authority and in control of the human race— and that is himself. | |
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