Grace Bible Church
Pastor~Teacher
Robert R. McLaughlin
Friday, June 17, 2016
In GEN 11:1-9, 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.
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.
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.
Verses 1 to 4, man is building up to what he wants.
In verse 5, God steps in and verses 6-8, God tears down what man has built up.
In verses 1-4, we have the action of man, in verses 5-8, we have the action of God.
We are not yet in the dispensation of Israel as a nation or the Jews as a race, Moses is still speaking to the Jewish people in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy = Pentateuch & Torah.
The action of man is indicated in verse three verse with this statement: "They said to one another "Come let us."
That was sort of the statement indicating that they were going to launch their great ambitious act of rebellion.
Notice, 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.
Man showing God who he thinks he is and then God showing man what he really is.
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;
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.
Frankly the attitude of the people at Babel is essentially as the same as the attitude of Adam and the woman in the garden. It is an attitude of rebellion.
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 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."
It was a reiteration of exactly what he had said to Adam. "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth," GEN 1:28.
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.
Languages hadn't developed; they were just one people, all descendents of Noah, united around one form of language and one vocabulary.
They all had the same freedom of communication, nothing at all like the world in which we live where everybody's got a different history and every nation's got a different tale to tell and people speak so many different languages.
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."
That is what Satan wants to have happen ---- he wants one person to be in the ultimate authority and in control of the human race--- and that is himself.
There was a seriously deadly and dark side to this unity.
Because they were sinful and because they were rebellious against God and because they were proud and wicked, that unity allowed for a concentration of evil that was unacceptable to God.
Here is a passage that teaches that one world unity is a curse.
One people only escalates the unified force of evil and God knows that and so does Satan and Satan is moving this world back to a one world, one religion with one ruler who is identified in the Bible as Anti-Christ.
Satan wants to produce one world, one government under one ruler, the Beast of Revelation and someday his kingdom will bring the entire world under unilateral unlimited power and evil.
The new agers are simply Satan's advanced publicity team and Satan would want a one world government and then he would select the one world leader and he himself would rule the world through his puppet, the Anti-Christ.
Human history has revealed that once human government takes off the restraint that it has on the people that it's not the enemies that really take advantage of it but it's the very same people who lived together in peace, who take advantage of it.
©® 1996-2016 Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries. All rights reserved. | site