Grace Bible Church
Pastor Teacher
Robert R. McLaughlin
Sunday June 19, 2016
As we noted on Friday evening in GEN 11:1-9, we have 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.
Then 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.
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.
And as we also noted, it's more than likely that the Tower of Babel happened no more than 100 years after the flood.
Verses 1 to 4, man is building up to what he wants.
Now in verse 5, God steps in and verses 6-8, God tears down what man has built up.
So, in verses 1-4, we have the action of man, in verses 5-8, we have the action of God.
Verse 9 is a summary by Moses, the writer of the book of Genesis, who you must remember that although 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. collectively called the Pentateuch or the Torah.
Man showing God who he thinks he is and then God showing man what he really is.
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.
They not only had the same language, but they spoke with the same vocabulary.....that's how unified they were.
But there was a seriously deadly and dark side to this unity because they were sinful and rebellious against God.
And because they were proud and wicked, the unity that they had allowed for a concentration of evil that was unacceptable to God.
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.
They figured that they could work together and accomplish whatever they desired and nothing could stop them.
And 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.
Languages hadn't developed; they were just one people, all descendents of Noah, united around one form of language and one vocabulary.
Now, and here's the point, there was a seriously deadly and dark side to this unity.
And so I want to say to you, here is a passage that teaches that one world unity is a curse.
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.
As the prophets tell us as well as the Book of Revelation, there will be mass slaughter, mass death.
And in order to kind of keep a buffer zone, he divided Poland in half so that Jedwabne was in eastern Poland and was never occupied by any Nazi's, it was never occupied by any Germans, it was occupied by Russians. 3,000 people, 1,600 of them were Jews who had lived in the town for 300 years.
June 22, 1941 Hitler didn't want that truce anymore, he wanted to defeat Russia so he swept through Poland and the truce was broken and he took that town Jedwabne along with Poland all the way to the Russian border.
On July 10, that's a little over two weeks later, the Gentile townspeople massacred all 1,600 Jews in one day, slaughtered them all.
This nagging event couldn't be explained by the sociologists because that town was never under any Nazi propaganda.
Every single one of those Jews was killed by one of his neighbors.
And the question the sociologists asked and they could not really answer, is how in the world can people in a two week period massacre their neighbors in a blood bath?
The Germans simply gave them permission.
And they didn't do it because of race, they did it because they wanted their farms and their farm goods and their furniture and their money and their jewelry and everything they possessed.
Whether it is TLJC and Lucifer; Cain and Abel; Moses and Korah, Dathan and Abiram; David and Absalom; Samson and Delilah; Jesus and Judas;
So, back in Gen 11 and the Tower of Babel, all it would take to create a world in which people massacre each other is to have one government that says, "You can do that."
Jedwabne is a testimony to the wretchedness of the human heart.
When sinners get concentrated under one power in one place, wickedness abounds.
All you have to do is just remember the greatest amount of crime and wickedness in the world occurs where?
In the cities. And the bigger the city, the worse it is.
Man was evil in one package would abound to such a degree that there would be no way to preserve him from self destruction because man by nature, Romans 3, "is swift to shed blood."
God knew the sinfulness of the post-flood people was the same as the sinfulness of the pre-flood people.
And you can see what would happen; the people who could communicate with each other would group together and they would separate from the people with whom they could not communicate with.
Prin- Watch who you communicate with!
Prin- MAR 4:24 "Take care what you listen to."
Prin - LUK 8:18 "Therefore take care how you listen;
Prin - JOH 7:24 "Do not judge according to appearance,"
So, at the Tower of Babel, they didn't even understand what was going on because there had always only been one language and one set of words.
National Review online reported recently that thousands of human languages are heading toward extinction.
The 15 most common languages are now on the lips of over half the world's people.
Ninety percent of humanity speaks 100 languages.
We're down to 6,800 languages today, half of those are spoken by 2,500 people, and as I said 90 percent of the world speaks 100 languages.
"At the current rate," says the National Review, "linguists estimate that by the end of this decade half the present languages will be completely gone."
So God knew the potential power of evil contained in a unilateral structure.