“Typical Defiance” – FBC Morning Light (1/4/2024)

Well, a good Thursday morning to you, January 4th, 2024. Have you gotten used to that yet? Have you had to write down the date yet to keep that straight? That can be one of the challenges of the first couple of weeks of a new year, isn't it?

Well, today in our chronologically reading through the Bible plan, we are in Genesis chapter 10, then we're going to jump to 1 Chronicles 5 through 27 to get another genealogy, and then back to Genesis chapter 11.

The Command to Be Fruitful and Multiply

Well, to get the significance of Genesis 10 and 11, this genealogical table, and then what comes in Genesis 11, we need to remind ourselves of the command that God gave to Noah in chapter 9, verse 7, where he said to Noah, as for you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply in it.

So there's this command that God gives to Noah to replenish the earth after the flood and the global destruction, and Noah is obedient to that command. He does his part in terms of that repopulating, and this is evident in chapter 10, because in chapter 10 it says this is the genealogy of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and then it goes on to talk about all the descendants of Noah in chapter 10.

The Tower of Babel and Human Defiance

So okay, the command to be fruitful and multiply, he has obeyed and so has his offspring. But there's another part of that command, they are to multiply in the earth. There's to be a spreading out and a replenishing of the earth, and that's where we run into the problem of chapter 11 with the Tower of Babel, and it says in verse 11, the whole earth had one language and one speech.

So all the people, they spoke one language, and that's understandable, they all came from the same ancestor, from Noah, and it says in verse 2 that it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

So it's kind of like they're migrating en masse, and they come to this land which is now where Babylon is in the Middle East, in Iraq, and so forth, and they said to one another, and here's where the problem's coming in.

They said to one another, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly, and they said in verse 4, 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 earth.

Now being scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth is exactly what God wanted them to do, wanted the people to do, to fill, replenish the earth. He wanted people on all of the continents, if you will, of this globe.

But the people at this time, in Genesis 11, they wanted to just hunker down and stay put in this region of Shinar. So they built this big tower, and everything, the objectives, if you will, of the building of that tower of Babel were a direct violation of God's directives, and they even stand today as typical expressions of defying Him, of defying God.

Things like our self-sufficient cities, thinking that we can control, we can solve all the problems and so forth in these cities with these alabaster cities that gleam in our nation. By the way, the gleam has sure lost its luster, hasn't it?

Well anyway, self-sufficient cities, self-sufficiency of reaching to heaven, building this tower that takes them into heaven. Self-exaltation, we'll make a name for ourselves. A self-made unity, or globalism.

There's a lot of talk about that today, a one-world-ism, and globalism, and a global economy and all the rest of that kind of thing, as if we're going to be able to achieve that. Man has been trying to do that for millennia now, and will continue to try to do that, and have some measure of success in it all, but just as the inhabitants of this city that they wanted to build in Shinar were doing so with their fist raised to God, so does modern man raise his fist to God, and has no use for the directives, the plan, and the glorifying of the God of the Bible.

God Scatters the Nations at Babel

So that is the problem of Genesis chapter 11. And in verses 8 and 9, we discover that what man in his defiance, his arrogant disobedience to God, refuses to do, the Lord is going to compel his compliance by what he does.

And how does he do it? Verses 8 and 9 tell us, the Lord scattered the people abroad, from there over the face of all the earth, they ceased building the city. The name of that city was 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.

A man didn't want to do that. God said, that was what I want you to do, so you're going to go. And he used the confounding of languages to bring that to pass. Well, this gives us a lot of insight and understanding into the nature of the world in which we live, doesn't it?

I hope you can see all that. So our Father and our God, I pray that from this passage of Scripture today, we would have a better understanding of the global problem, and man's ongoing sin problem that seeks to control all things and make a name for himself.

I pray that we would not fall prey to that kind of thinking, we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, well listen, have a good rest of your Thursday, and may the Lord bless you.

In it. Good day.