Rebellion at Babel
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2019 · 7 July 2019
We turn now to Genesis 11 which has to do with the Tower of Babel. God gave us through Moses a critical revelation of the origin of all things. Here is the universe in its origin of time, action, space and matter. There is the origin of the solar system; there is the origin of the atmosphere and the origin of the hydrosphere. There is the origin of all life; there is the origin of mankind.
There is the origin of marriage. There is the origin of the family. There is the origin of sin and the origin of guilt and the origin of redemption and the origin of forgiveness. There is the origin of culture and civilization and animal husbandry and metallurgy and other enterprises. The origin of poetry, the origin of music. And there is also the origin of nations and the origin of languages.
All of that runs up through Genesis 11 so that when you arrive in Genesis 12 you have the origin of the chosen people through whom the Word of God and the Savior of the world would come. From Genesis 12 on the entire Old Testament focuses on Israel, the chosen people of God. Everything happens in and through and around that nation and is given to us to learn from.
In the New Testament, Israel failed to fulfill its responsibility to God because they were called to be the witness to the world. Their purpose is temporarily set aside and in its place of God establishes a new chosen people. They were made up of Jews and Gentiles and called the Church. And everything that happens in the New Testament then begins to focus on and through the Church.
So from Genesis 12 on God's redemptive work in the world is through Israel and through the church. Now in Genesis 11 we have the only true record of the origin of nations and the origin of languages by a single act of God. The Bible teaches that the universe and nations and languages are all created by God. Our world did not change and evolve by itself over a long period of time.
The Bible is the only accurate record of all of this. The only record for creation, the only record for the flood that is accurate. Now it's not an exhaustive history. It is brief and it is selective, but all is true and enough to make sense of the general flow and the monumental events that punctuated the life of early man from Adam to Abraham. So Noah and his family come out of the ark in Genesis 9 and they start to reproduce.
Genesis 10 then describes the development of the families. Noah had three sons and out of those sons came various sons and grandsons and then families and clans and people and nations. We traced in Genesis 10 the line of Japheth, the line of Ham and the line of Shem into the nations of the earth. Now we'll focus on the line of Shem that went straight to Abram as he was God's chosen man.
Genesis 11:1-9, “Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. 3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city.”
“and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.”
“7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
Now this is a 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 scattered from each other already having rebelled against God. And it is most likely that the Tower of Babel incident happened no more than 100 years after the flood.
We can identify the time, by the identification of a particular child that was born. That child was named for this great act of separation. Genesis 10: 25, "Two sons were born to Eber", who gives us the name Hebrew, "the name of the one was Peleg for in his days the earth was divided." And we know that Peleg was born about 100 years after the flood. In 100 years the population was totally into rebellion and sin.
And so they are in need of judgment. In the flood we see judgment by destruction. But at Babel it is judgment by dispersion. God had every reason to drown this entire civilization with the exception of the few that were true, but He didn't do that. God instead scatters them over the whole earth and changes their language. God was very patient with man as far as world destruction was concerned.
Now when they were scattered, the sons of Japheth went into a certain area and divided into various people groups. The sons of Ham went into other areas and divided into other people groups and the sons of Shem did the same. Remember the sons of Japheth became the Indo-European nations from Western Europe across Russia, actually across the Baring Straight into North America and South America.
The sons of Japheth ultimately possessed most of the territory on the earth, but lost their souls. The sons of Ham who were noted in Genesis 10:6-20, to inhabit Africa, Asia into the Far East and some of them remained in the area around Canaan. The sons of Shem settled north and east of Canaan and it's from the sons of Shem, that Abram came and from Abram came the Jews and the nation Israel.
They were the people to whom God gave the law, the prophets, the covenants, the promises, the adoptions, the Scripture and the Messiah. God has chosen them to be the proclaimers of all of that truth to the rest of the world. They were chosen as a missionary nation and Shem's great grandson Eber, as we saw before, gave the name Hebrew to those chosen people.
In Genesis 11:1-4 man is building up what he wants. Verse 5, God steps in and verses 6-8 God tears down what man has built up. And verse 9 is a summary by Moses. The contrast is between what man desires to achieve self-glory and self-fulfillment, and what God does to show man's impotence and emptiness without Him. It is an attitude of rebelling against God driven by personal ambition and pride.
And interestingly the locations are almost 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 Tigress River and the Euphrates River. So that man then is twice thrown out of what was the most beautiful place on earth.
Once it was just Adam and Eve thrown out of Eden, now it's the whole population of the world thrown out of the plain of Shinar. Now remember that the ark landed on the mountains of Ararat, to the very north of the Mesopotamian valley. And they migrated south and east to that fertile area in the land of Shinar and they settled there. But the command of God was to populate the whole world.
But that was not what man wanted to do. Verse 1 says, "The whole earth used the same language and the same words." They all spoke the same language that was spoken by Noah. Now this is about 1,756 years after creation marked by the birth of Peleg. But because they were sinful and rebellious, that unity allowed for a concentration of evil that was unacceptable to God.
In verse 6 God says, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” The checks and balances system in the world is part of a common grace that God has given to restrain evil. So people gave their lives to stop these efforts of Hitler, Stalin and others.
And Satan is moving this world back to a one world, one religion with one ruler who is identified in the Bible as the Anti-Christ. And when that happens, the Book of Revelations will tell you that there will be mass slaughter and mass death. Sociologists and anthropologists have the opinion that man is basically good and when man massacres six million Jews, it is because they were severely brainwashed.
There was this town in Poland called Jedwabne where Jews and Gentiles had lived together peacefully for 300 years. Well in June 22, 1941 Hitler wanted to defeat Russia so he swept through Poland and he took that town Jedwabne. And on July 10, the Gentile townspeople massacred all 1,600 Jews there in one day. The ones they couldn't kill they herded into a barn, poured gasoline over them and incinerated all.
This event couldn't be explained by the sociologists. History records indicate not one of those people was killed by a German soldier nor by a Nazi soldier. Every single one of those Jews was killed by one of his neighbors. And the question the sociologist asks is how can people in a two week period massacre their neighbors they had lived with peacefully for 300 years in such a blood bath?
The Germans simply gave them permission. The Polish people did it because they wanted their farms, their farm equipment, their furniture, their money, their jewelry and all they possessed. That is the heart of man and that is their sin nature. No brainwashing is necessary. Romans 3:15 says, "Their feet are swift to shed blood." This Jedwabne incident is a testimony to the wretchedness of the human heart.
That's exactly what's going to be repeated across the face of the earth during the reign of the Anti-Christ. All he has to say is, "You can do it." When sinners get concentrated under one power in one place, wickedness abounds. God knows men’s heart. Romans 3:15 says, "man is swift to shed blood." Just give him permission. God knew the sinfulness of the post-flood people was the same as the sinfulness of the pre-flood people.
And so God scattered these people everywhere and as they left a common language they began to develop the different languages that God had assigned them because He confused their speech. And they would separate from the people with whom they couldn't communicate. They didn't even understand what was going on because before there had always only been one language and one set of words.
And as we move toward the Anti-Christ's kingdom, languages are disappearing. Half the world's people speak one of 15 languages, or more than one of the 15 languages. Ninety percent of humanity speaks 100 languages. We now have approximately 6,800 languages, and half of those are spoken by 2,500 people or less. Linguists estimate that by the end of this century half of the present languages will be gone.
"Now Cush," who was a son of Ham, "became the father of a man named Nimrod (Gen 10:8)." Nimrod’s name means rebel. "He became a mighty one on the earth." Now here's your leader. Out of all of those in the record there in Genesis 10, he's the only one that's given that title, the mighty one in the earth. He stands out because of the importance that he plays in the developing nations.
So Nimrod rises to lead these thousands of people who've come from the line of Noah and his family. He has this great kingdom that's centered in this place called Babel which is the capital city of his empire in the Mesopotamian valley. He builds a kingdom of evil, a kingdom of rebellion, idolatry and pride, very much like the later king of Babylon by the name of Nebuchadnezzar.
So later on the Babylonian empire, Nebuchadnezzar, the great king in Daniel's time, is still located in Shinar and Babylon is just a later version of Babel, this world empire established by Nimrod in the very same area where the Garden of Eden was created by God himself. In Genesis 11:3-4 we see their sinfulness, their human action. They are proud and rebellious, but they are also ingenious.
Verse four, "And they said 'Come let us build for ourselves a city and a tower who's top will reach into heaven and let us make for ourselves a name lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.'" Their plan was a three phased plan: a city, a tower and a name. First they said, "Let's build a city," their social goal. The tower was their religious goal, and the name was their psychological goal.
This is the first city of man, after the flood. The city by man, of man and for man without God. We'll have one people and one ruler. Evil power is greater when it's unhindered and unrestrained without checks and balances. Secondly they wanted to build a tower. What's the tower about? This was their connection to their gods, which indicates that they had already begun to worship false gods.
Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, and his ministers are also disguised as angels of light. False religion is his business to take the place of the worship of the true God. You may have heard this word, ziggurat, found in ancient cities. It was a building like a ladder by which the gods could descend and ascend and make connection with men. In fact, Revelation 17:5 traces all false religions back to Babylon.
Even the form of religion that characterizes the Anti-Christ at the end of the age in Revelation 18, is called Babylon. The gods of Rome, the gods and goddesses of Greece, India, Egypt, the original Pantheon of the Babylonians, all come from Babel. They built the tower not to reach heaven but to worship their gods. The third element, was psychological, they wanted to make a name, pride. Let us pray.