Clough Origin of Civilization Lesson 2

Preston City Bible Church 5-7-2000

In the earlier service we went into some of the origins of our civilization and we want to review some of that material and move on to some of the down side warnings that God gives us about the cosmos, that is the whole social structure, or what we call human civilization. One of the things that we want to learn to do as Christians is to always encompass the topic of what we’re dealing with with the Word of God and I have called this the strategic envelopment, where we take any given topic and we surround that topic with what the Word of God says because any given topic can be viewed, can be interpreted, can be discussed, in terms of unbelief or in terms of belief and it’s up to us as Christians to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. So this is the canon of Scripture that God has given to us by which we can do that work.

The cosmos, this word that is used throughout the Scripture for the world around us, is said to be something that is the object of God’s love in John 3:16, that “God so loved the kosmos, that He gave His only Son.” Yet in the same apostle’s writing, John, in his epistle, he tells us “love not the kosmos,” so in one place we have God loving it and the next place we have us supposed to not love it. So there’s this two-fold nature to the world around us and this morning earlier we had gone to Genesis 8 because Genesis 8 is the starting point of civilization. The topic is civilization and we want to look at it from the standpoint of Scripture and we go back to Noah’s time. We said that in verse 20 we have this point in time under Noah, when Noah did the first act, the official act as representative of this civilization, there’s eight people, all people, all people groups, all racial groups, every cultural group that you can think of, any member of the human race today that lives and breathes has genes and DNA from the family of eight people; Noah, his wife, his sons and their three wives.

So we have eight people that were used to populate this world. And as we always say, all of us got off the same boat. So we have a collection of human beings, all of whom descend from this original pioneer family, and pioneers they were because Noah was the one who began worship in the world in Genesis 8:20; the first religious act in history of civilization was done in verse 20 and at that point Noah shows the degree of knowledge of the Word of God. So at that point the entire human race knew the gospel of Jesus Christ; they knew it because there was blood atonement at that point; that’s what the sacrifices are about; that’s what we celebrate and commemorate in our communion. Noah executed public worship and as a result down through time that knowledge began to be propagated, from father to son and father to son, down through the families. However, in many cases it was lost, and the human race has sort of a collective amnesia about these early periods of time.

And because we’re going to go into some new material in this service on the dangers and the effect of sin in the human race we want to just briefly review some of the things that we mentioned in our early service today and that is that when we talk about Genesis, the early chapters of Genesis, we have to understand that the first events of Genesis, chapters 1-11, were available to the whole human race, so I like to call this the Noahic Bible. If you are a missionary and you were to go into some dark corner of the world to visit some people who had no contact whatsoever with (quote) “the civilized world,” don’t ever imagine that those people, whatever they be, whatever language they speak, whatever their customs, don’t ever imagine that they aren’t descended and at one time in their family trees knew the gospel because they did. And the gospel that you would be bringing to them is not the “whit man,” the European gospel that’s being pushed down the throat of some native in the third world. It is actually overcoming amnesia, the loss of memory of what they one time knew prior to the dispersion from the Mediterranean area where Ararat was.

And then we said that in this period of time, it was an amazing period of human history, I have saved this picture out of Time Magazine because it’s a computer morph image of a woman made up of all the racial characteristics of the human race. And it’s interesting what you can do with computer morphing but we have to start thinking in terms of the fact that our genetic structures all go back to those very few people. We don’t know what they looked like but we can imagine that they combine a lot of the features that we take for granted that’s customary for different people groups.

We also know from Scripture that Genesis 8:22 God sets up the entire physics of the weather, the seasons, the astronomical, the calendars, all of this is set in motion by the Word of God, not Natural Law. Now I know we learn today about Natural Law but one of the things we must understand, that from this point, which was at a time of two or three millennia prior to Christ we have from him down to where we will stop with Abraham, from Noah to Abraham, we’re talking less than six centuries of time. Now during this six century period amazing things happened and these amazing things that did take place totally blow the mind of anyone who has learned classical history today. Classically and traditionally the view is that civilization took millennia to form; that this was a great Pleistocene epic of the Ice Ages and this took hundreds of thousands of years and gradually as it faded away civilization began as we know of it, sort of randomly here and there.

Such is not the case, however; that’s speculation and the truth of Scripture is that what we know of civilization, the founding of Egypt, the founding of the Western hemisphere civilizations, all took place within 600 years, an amazing feat. The reason people don’t like to hear that is because it sounds so incredible that all this work could have been done in 600 years. However, that’s because we don’t really know what went on. We think we know but we really don’t other than the eyewitness observations of the Bible.

The Bible goes on to say in Genesis 9:18-19, he says the three sons of Noah went out and by them was the whole earth populated. So once again, if you could trace your family tree you would go back to two of these eight people, and you may be intermixed with them. In the earlier service I had thrown out some evidences of some of this amazing material; of course we all know the pyramids, we realize that they are very stable structures that were made, apparently for stability because the earth was undergoing all this after effects of the flood. But here’s one of my favorite pieces of evidence to show that we don’t know what we’re talking about most of the time in history. These are a strange set of maps and one of them, the top, is a picture of what the Antarctic continent would look like if you could see the land underneath the ice cap.

Now unfortunately a lot of it’s buried under much ice, a thousand feet of ice in some cases, so underneath this ice there are rivers, former river banks and cuts in the land and so on. Some of that we’ve known but not until recently has it been mapped. But what’s strange is that down in history there’s another map here, but you can see the same features. Now whoever did that map mapped it before the Ice Age. And it was mapped complete with the land surfaces, complete with the river beds, and so on. And the question is, who was it that did the mapping. We believe, on the basis of Genesis 8:19 that it was one or several of the Noahic family that did this; they were to go out and populate the earth, and we mustn’t think of them, because we are so imbedded in our minds that these people are sort of primitives, they just kind of gave up bananas recently and started walking around planting beans. But this is not the situation; these people had a high technology.

Let’s remember, not until the 19^th century have we ever built a boat bigger than the ark. So it’s really not until the last 200 years that we’ve probably gotten back to a technological level equal to that of Noah and his immediate sons. These were brilliant people. Think of the architectural genius; think of what they performed in both the western and eastern hemispheres of the world; they built the pyramidal architecture, they were architects, they were explorers and pioneers. To do this mapping they would have had to have known how to measure latitude; they would have had to have had some way of transits and measuring the angle of the sun. But more interesting to me is that they would have had to have a way of measuring longitude. And the only way you can measure longitude is with a clock and an accurate one at that. So where did they get the clock from? Where did the get the tools from, to do this mapping. They obviously got it from somewhere and they must have brought it over with them from the world that had been destroyed, the technology of the pre-Noahic time.

There were other amazing things that were going on in this six hundred year period, not the least of which if you compared Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 is the ages, the decline in human longevity. And when you plot this out, it’s very easy to do now with excel, stick it on a little spread sheet, click on curve sitting, click on exponential best fit, and this is what you get. Now what’s amazing about this is that for years critics laughed at the Scripture and they said oh, this was a different calendar, that they used a different calendar, there was some other explanation for this. Well, if you changed calendars there wouldn’t be this kind of a curve, it would go… at the point of the calendar change there would be a step function; it’s not a step function, it’s a slowly decaying function, the same one, if you’re interested in electronics, when the capacitor discharges and you get across the plates and it discharges, it goes down like this. You do a little simple experiment in your kitchen with a glass of water, take a thermometer, take a piece of graph paper, measure the temperature of the water, drop an ice cube in and measure the temperature every minute and the curve will come down until it reaches equilibrium. This is a universal kind of phenomenon; when you go from one equilibrium condition to another you usually have an exponential adjustment.

So the human life span, something radical happened; we are not creative enough in our thinking to even imagine what was going on in these 600 years. Really, we have been lulled into a sleepy fog where we haven’t allowed the imagination that God has given us to deduce from the text of Scripture everything that was going on here. Just take this curve for example; think of this, think of the implications of what you’re looking at. You are looking at a curve that tells you that your body today is about 10% of the health and vitality of these people. They lived ten times more than we do. Now why did their body survive for ten times what our bodies survive; obviously there’s something different, something’s radically different. And we don’t understand this. All we know is that the testimony of Scripture is that this thing happened.

Moreover, as we pointed out in the earlier service, something else happened during this time period, something which I only recently discovered after I started looking at the numbers, if you plot the ages of the patriarchs and their life span and you compare them with who was living at the same generation as someone else and you study very carefully…first of all, if you observe this chart you see that the people living right after the flood, Noah, Shem, Arpachsdad, Shelah, Eber, they lived a very long time; that’s that high longevity. Then if you go up to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, look what happens to their lifespan; they start to decline. But if you’re also observant you see something else up here; not only are those lines shortening but there’s a period of time in here, right about here, 350 years after the flood to about 500 years after the flood, 200, maybe 150 years, when ten generations die off simultaneously. And I believe there’s the source of our problem, a sort of collective amnesia descended once these people died off; they were the people that were carrying the memories, they were the people that carried Genesis 1-11. They were people who…

Imagine this, imagine if you were Nahor here, and you lived only that long; when you died Shem, who had been living before you were born, was quite okay. Now what would be the tendency? Wouldn’t you elevate these people? In all the mythologies of the world you have the memory, the faint memory that at one time the gods walked with man, you know, the story of Achilles, the story of the Odyssey and so on, you have these god-like beings. And I believe there’s the source of it right there, that these men who walked off the boat and those born immediately afterwards, living an enormous lifespan must have looked like a semi-divine being to the people who came many generations later. We’re talking many generations; look how many generations happened here. There’s strange things going on. When you model this mathematically the population the growth, all kinds of things happened that normally don’t happen. This was a very strange period in the history of the human race, and actually it’s a fore view of the millennial kingdom because in the millennial kingdom you will have coexisting another strange thing that the human race has never seen; you will have in the millennial kingdom normal human beings walking around, eating, sleeping, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage, and then you’ll have resurrected human beings coexisting with them walking around. What kind of an environment…can you imagine a civilization like that? See, it strains your imagination to think this way but I’m saying that if we believe the Word of God where is our imagination? We’ve got to use it to mine the depths of the treasures of the Word of God and stop being asleep and stop allowing the unbeliever to have all of this glorious and grand reconstruction of history and we don’t even make use of the data that we’ve got here in our Bibles.

So we found out that the man would expand across the face of the earth, gradually working into every continent by a deliberate policy of pioneering. You must think of Noah, not just as a survivor of the flood; that’s how we usually think of him, the guy that built the boat. What did he do afterwards? He lived quite a while, I’m sure he wasn’t retired. Now he didn’t have one of these adult day care centers to entertain himself with for the rest of his life. So what was he doing? He was vibrant, he was active, he was intellectually sharp and he was probably the father, the patriarch that was telling his sons, I want you to colonize here, I want you to move out here, I want you to move out here. What would that have done? Let’s think about some things, maybe you’ve never thought about this. But if you’re in debates with evolutionists they’ll often say you know, one of the proofs for evolution is the marsupials; these are the animals that have this certain structure, typical of the kangaroo in Australia. And they’ll say see, you Christians just don’t have an answer for this, there’s an obvious case where you had evolution in place on a subcontinent all by itself. You didn’t have it elsewhere so see, there’s no other explanation. Wanna bet!

Let’s imagine something. How many animals of each kind were there on the boat? Only two! Now if you’ve bred animals you realize the problem in breeding animals; one of my sons is a veterinarian and one of the things he’s telling me, in fact, he has a Golden Retriever that he paid over a thousand dollars for and found out it’s got a genetic defect, and one of the veterinarian’s concerns right now is that we’ve bred dogs for these special traits and these special characteristics and we’ve got the gene pool so narrow that now the problem is becoming how to you get mongrel genes in without contaminating the good qualities of this breed, and yet to make it viable. We’ve trapped too many bad things in here; Golden Retriever’s have bad hips and they get arthritis, but they’ve got this wonderful docile personality. So how do you structure that; that’s a problem of breeding. And it happens because you have a limited genetic pool.

Now let’s think about something. Let’s suppose you lived in 100, 200, 300, probably by that time the world was adjusting climatically to the flood; we believe the Ice Age, the whole so-called Pleistocene epic in the same time, witnessed by the writer Job and witnessed, by the way, by Abraham; remember when Abraham had his fight with Lot Sodom and Gomorrah? Remember, there was a little real estate discussion and the property values in Sodom and Gomorrah were very high. Well, I dare say if you were to go to Israel today and look at the place where Sodom and Gomorrah…you wouldn’t think the real estate values were very high; it’s nothing but a desert down there below sea level. What happened? In the Bible times it was well-watered; in the Bible times one of the first Pharaoh dynasties they had to build dikes to keep the water out of Egypt, just like the Dutch had to later in history. Because the Sahara Desert that we call desert, underneath had had lakes and rivers, and river beds; now we can see them from satellites. So the earth has undergone a tremendous climactic change and apparently was doing so in this interval of time; that’s why Abraham twice ran into a drought problem, there was no food; in the time of Jacob there was Joseph and the Egyptian famine and so forth, so the climate was readjusting all during that time after the Ice Age.

Well, during this particular time we have the sons of Noah going out and colonizing the planet. Now let’s imagine that you are assigned to populate Australia; you’ve done your preliminary survey, we see there’s a continent out there in this new world, and it looks good so we’re going to go for that. Okay, you take that, so you’d say all right, we’ve got an animal stock that we’re going to take with us. If you happened to say, because if you were going on a boat and marsupials have a great low maintenance characteristic for boat travel, for long term travel, let’s just say well, I know I’m going to go on a long trip and I want a breed of animals that have characteristics of endurance. So you go to father Noah and you say to him, look, I’d like this, this and this. And you just happen, not thinking about the end result of this, you say okay, and so you walk off with the marsupial gene pool. You go to Australia, you settle there and what have you done. You have done what we call… you have introduced anthropogenic introduction to the Australian subcontinent of the marsupial population. It’s not evolution; it was just selection out of the core of the DNA structure of the ark. Now why can’t we think that way? Because we don’t really trust the Scripture; we don’t really believe the Bible has the answers to these things so we don’t dig and use our imagination and think creatively about alternatives here. It’s an east alternative; we know about anthropogenic introduction. I mean, who hasn’t fought the Japanese beetles? They weren’t here before. And the sparrow, put a bird feeder out and get sparrows all over the place. They weren’t here before they came from England. Those are all anthropogenic introductions. Man did that; man moved them from one continent to the next and so why couldn’t it have happened in Noah’s time when you had this colonization going on. So a lot of these biological distribution arguments are not arguments for evolution, they’re simply arguments for anthropogenic introduction by the colonizers of the Noahic family. This is just some of the kind of things that you can do.

But what we want to do in our service today is think about the warning signs that God puts into this era; not only are these people brilliant, not only do they have an unusually high technology, I mean, they had to have a pretty sophisticated math to do the trig for the pyramids, to do the building calculations for the ark and so on. They weren’t stupid people, but yet the Bible carefully argues that the cosmos or the civilization that they created, great though it be, what a testimony it is to God’s design of the potential in the human race, which won’t go away because the human race continues on into eternity, for the saved we’re not going to be just sitting around playing harps. Human creativity goes on; there’s going to be music, think of this, I mean, are the pieces of Bach and Tchaikovsky going to be played in the millennial kingdom? I would imagine so. Did Noah not bring the technology from his world into this one? Why are we not going to bring some of the things of this world into the next one?

So we’re going to see a continuity of the grandeur of the design of the human race. That’s the plus sign, but the negative side is that there’s a downbeat, there’s an off, there’s a discord in this text. And we want to go to Genesis 11. One of the remarkable things about the Scripture is that it has a pattern to it that is so eloquent. Genesis 11 is the story of the tower of Babel, one of the great feats of the first civilization, one of the great architectural projects that the human race worked on, one of the great political schemes of the Noahic family. Now in Genesis 11:6, we’ll back up a few verses but I want to start with 6 because I want you to observe something in the text here, “And the LORD said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language; and this is what they began to do,” note the verb. “This is what they began to do, now nothing which they propose to do will be impossible for them.” But notice, that’s “what they began to do.”

Now turn back to Genesis 10:8, “Now Cush became the father of Nimrod,” and it actually reads, “he began to be a mighty one in the earth.” You go back to Genesis 9:20 and it says, the exact same Hebrew text, “And Noah began to be a farmer.” So there’s three times this “began” thing is used: one in Genesis 9:20; one in Genesis 10:8; one in Genesis 11:6, “began to.” Now it’s no accident the Holy Spirit puts this verb structure in the text because each of these three projects ended in a disaster. Each of these three projects that man going out onto the earth to subdue it, as part of the Noahic family, they had a big problem. In Genesis 9, of course, “Noah began farming and he planted a vineyard. [21] And he drank of the wine and became drunk; and uncovered himself in the tent,” we don’t have time to go into the story of Ham and Shem.

The point I want to show you, in verse 20-21 with this first project, the vineyard project, the Bible doesn’t say that wine can’t be drunk; it was used in the Old Testament. The problem however is the Bible warns about the misuse of the wine, drunkenness, and in particular the kind of misuse, which in our drug infested culture today we now become very cognizant of, it is a God-substitute; it is a frantic search for happiness. People who do not understand how happiness is achieved through fellowship with God seek other alternatives. Drugs is an obvious one, it’s easy, it’s quick, but it’s not real happiness. It gives the illusion of happiness and in the vineyard situation Noah evidently began to drink and we don’t know if he knew it was wrong or he was surprised it was wrong. There’s not a condemnation here and it may truly be this first incident of wine that this is a case where I call the technological traps, that as we go forth without the wisdom of God and we design things they are used in surprising ways that we never wanted to use it that way. Did you ever hear of the Nobel Prize? Do you know where the Nobel Prize came from? Do you know what Nobel was? He was an inventor. Do you know what he invented? Dynamite. And when he realized that dynamite would be used for bombs and blowing up people and killing them he felt so bad about it he set up the Nobel Prize. So there’s a case of a technology that man invented and it has been misused. It may be a case where Noah didn’t understand the dangers of wine.

But what’s important about this vineyard incident is that in all the ancient cultures wine was looked upon as a source of happiness; the Dionysus mythologies where Dionysus was the god of pleasure and he gave us wine, and it’s interesting that when you come to the Hebrews, to Israel, and you look at the Jewish ancient history, to them wine didn’t start out…this is the first time it’s mentioned. And it doesn’t start out happy, it starts out as something that can be used but be careful; there’s a caution that’s involved with it, from the very start. Unlike paganism; paganism doesn’t have this cautionary note to it.

We come to Genesis 10 and we have the Nimrod situation, which we believe is alive in part and parcel of the Genesis 11 incident, but the first time “kingdom” is used it occurs right after verse 8 in Genesis 10, “Cush became the father of Nimrod; he became a mighty one in the earth. [9] He was a mighty hunter, therefore it is said, Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD. [10] And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel,” and so here’s the first time in the Bible the word “kingdom” is used. Ah, kingdom, that’s interesting, do you know the first word “kingdom” isn’t used kingdom of God, it’s used for kingdom of man. So here is man’s attempt to build a structured society and it describes that society.

Now we come to an entire exposition of social structures and political structures in Genesis 11, a very sobering portion of Scripture. This is not just mythology out of an ancient book; we’ve got to get away from that; this is a serious epic in human history. Genesis 11:1, “The whole earth used the same speech and the same words.” You know, we have evidences of that. A while ago I picked up…I showed you this slide and one of the patriarchs name is Eber, and if we believe the earth was of one speech and if we believe that that one speech was probably Semitic in basic structure, that Semitic structured languages go back to the time prior to the flood. What language did Noah speak? And that this language was used in the early days of colonization, before the tower of Babel incident, it would tend to follow that we might, if we look carefully around the earth see perhaps memories of this ancient Semitic tongue. And sure enough; think of the word “Eber.” Think of the word, how it occurs in the word “Hebrew.” Think of how it occurs for the Spanish; for the Spanish the word for the Spanish continent of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula. Think of how it occurs for the ancient name of Ireland, Hibernia. Think of the ancient name of Georgia in Russia. Think of the word Britannica, and you can go on, the Barbados in the Caribbean, Brittany. We see this repetitious stem that seems to show up on almost every continent of the earth and studies have been done of this; it’s not something original. Studies have been done of this and there appears to be evidence of the continental spreading, both hemispheres, of Semitic words. Evidently, and I believe, this is part and parcel of the one language that was on earth, used by these early pioneers and they left evidences of this all over the place.

It says in Genesis 11:2-3 that the people in this area of the Middle East “found a plain in the land of Shinar,” which is right near Babylon. Do you see how Babylon keeps coming up in Scripture, all the way to the book of Revelation, there’s just something inherently evil about that place; it’s not just Saddam Hussein, but that whole area is historically a trouble spot. And it will become a trouble spot in the future; the entire Babel, the mystery of Babylon the harlot, the international trading schemes and that sort of thing. But in Genesis 11:4 I want you to look carefully at the verbs in the text. “And they said, Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the whole earth.”

Now it’s interesting that God, back in Genesis 2, what did He tell Adam to do? Remember He said go out and name. God had told Adam the name of heaven, remember in Genesis 1 it says God called it, and it’s name was heaven, He called the light day, He called the night darkness and so on. So God starts off initializing human language. Then He asks Adam, now you go ahead and you do this, it’s something I’ve given to you as a human being, I’ve created you to go out and name things, but I want you to name things according to what they truly are. And I want you to name them in obedience to me, that when you go out and you investigate something and you name it, you are to name that in consciousness of My design.

In the early service I mentioned the issue of the rainbow; we always forget, we look at it and you know, it rains, we see a rainbow, oh, that’s pretty and walk on. Do you know what you’re looking at? Go to Ezekiel 1, do you know what the rainbow is? All the complex physics of light refraction in the certain diameter of raindrops are engineered to produce the sensation in our brain of what the glory of God looks like. In Ezekiel 1, when Ezekiel sees the throne of God, what does he see around the throne of God? A big bow, just like the one of the rainbow. And what’s the significance? Because in the Noahic Covenant, back in Genesis 9, when God set up the covenant there was an ecological covenant with not just man but with the animals in the land, God said I sign it, I make a contract and I sign it and do you know what My signature looks like? It’s my bow. What is the bow related to God? It’s a picture of His glory. We read about the glory of God, the glory of God, the glory of God and don’t even think about it.

Every time we see a rainbow we’re looking at the glory of God, we just are so stupid and so Scripturally ignorant that we don’t understand what it is we’re looking at. Imagine now, you’re dead, as a Christian you’re absent from the body, to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord, for the first time in your life you’re going to get a chance to look at the great throne of God. When we get a chance to see that throne of God, if Ezekiel 1 reports correctly, and Revelation also reports the same thing, both John and Ezekiel are reporting the same thing, when they were able to look at the throne of God Himself they saw that bow. Now the first time we glimpse God in His glory, we’re going to say you know, I saw that back in my lifetime, I remember seeing those things in the sky, I never knew what they were about. But here it is, common phenomena, and that’s what I mean by looking out there and seeing through the eyes of Scripture what it is we’re looking at. Now duh, that’s the problem we have, largely because we approach everything from the non-Christian point of view and sometimes innocently because that’s how we’re educated. But we’ve got to get back at Scripture; this is how you worship.

I’m a meteorologist and so it turns me on, see tornadoes and everything, I love it, but this kind of thing is a worshipful act. You may be interested in some area of the creation; that’s worship because it’s your Father’s handiwork you’re looking at. So learn to see things that way, it’s just so uplifting and pleasant.

These people in verse 3, look what they’re doing? Are they naming? Yes, but what is the offbeat, the achromatic sound of this verse; what’s wrong with the beat here? It says, “Let us build for ourselves a city.” For God? No, for ourselves; we build for ourselves a city, “and a tower which will reach unto heaven,” and Jewish tradition says one of the reasons they built the tower so high was they dared God to bring another flood; if there is ever another flood we’ll build it so high He’ll never get us again. See the tone of defiance, the tone of autonomy. “Let us make for” who? “For ourselves a name.”

Now if you do a thorough study of this passage it has an interesting structure to it and we don’t have time to go into all the verses but let me show you the structure of this text. This is sort of a chiastic structure in the text; notice what happens. If you look at these verses, verse 1 talks about one language; look at verse 9, the language is confused. Look at verse 2, “they settled there;” verse 8, “they left from there.” Verse 3, “They said one to another,” and this is talking about they confused the language, everyone of his neighbor; here was a social unity, a social unified project, and here it was socially disrupted, people couldn’t communicate any longer with their neighbor. In verse 3, “Come, let us make bricks,” that’s the plan they have. And down in verse 7 God says, “Come, let us confuse.” See how clever the text is written here? It has an inherent structure of man, what man is doing, this is man’s project; this is God’s response to that project. Man says, “Come, let us make bricks,” and God says…Trinity by the way, plural here, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, “Come, let us confuse…” Man says let us make for ourselves a city and a tower and God says a city and a tower, nothing is impossible.

But the center of the text is verse 5 because the Lord comes down. So we want to go to Genesis 11:5 and understand that here is an early warning about the structure of human civilization. “The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of man built.” You know, the Lord inspects things. And we don’t know how He does it or when He does it because only occasionally does the Scripture tell us that He does it, but I’m sure Robby has gone into Revelation with you, did you ever notice in the early chapters of Revelation, what is Jesus doing to the local churches there? He’s walking around and inspecting. Now when I was in the military one of the things that we looked forward to, not necessarily in a good sense was operation readiness inspection. In the Air Force one of the things that we had in Strategic Air Command was that all of a sudden, you’d be sitting there at your base and all of a sudden these planes, unannounced would fly in, out pops a whole series of inspectors, one inspector for the controllers, another inspector for the weather guys, another inspector for maintenance, and they’d say this is an operational readiness inspection, open your books. No notice, whatsoever. And it got rated, and God help the commander who flunked one of these operation readiness inspections; that was the end of your career. So it acted as a motivation to make sure that everything at all times was ready. That is an operational readiness inspection. Well God inspects; the Lord Jesus Christ inspects local churches and He gives us the inspection report, seven of them in Revelation chapters 2 and 3. So we know He does this.

We know, for example, in 1 Kings 22 that the Lord periodically, apparently holds meetings in which He convenes an angelic council made up of the good guys and the bad guys, because there’s minutes of the notes of one of these meetings in 1 Kings 22 where Jehovah calls for a meeting and He asks His angelic powers how they can influence and carry out a certain mission of deception. And they have a discussion, it’s described all there in the text, the angels are discussing this and finally one of them proposes to the Lord, the angels propose to the Lord there, that “I will go and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophet.” By the way, one spirit, and he goes into 400 prophets; that shows you something about language and ideas and spirits and so forth. “I will be a,” singular, “lying spirit in the mouths of all of Ahab’s prophets.” And the Lord says go and do that. And you talk about CNN, wouldn’t it blow your mind to have a CNN picture of one of these angelic meetings, holy mackerel, talk about hot news. These guys come down and they influence history this way, and God’s in control but He does it through these intermediary agencies and we don’t know a lot of what He does.

But in Genesis 11:5 the Lord Himself came down to visit the first massive social worldwide global project. And because man is a sinner, that global project from the very start, verse 4, was conceived in sinful terms, a defiance against God, His Word, and God’s authority, we will do it for ourselves, thank you; we will make for ourselves a name, and we will not be scattered on the earth.” Do you notice the purpose at the end of the verse 4, “lest we be scattered abroad.” Now what had God told Noah; in Genesis 9:1 what did God tell Noah to do? This is revelatory of how our sinful minds think. In Genesis 9:1 God told Noah to be fruitful and multiply and go out and fill the earth, go out and colonize the planet. There’s only eight of you people; now I want you to reproduce, and by the way, they weren’t all of the same gender on the ark, I want you to reproduce and fill the continents. And here we have them whining and bellyaching, we’re going to be spread abroad on the earth.

Why is this fear, why is there a fear? Let’s see if we can think about our own unbelief here a minute, put ourselves in their position. Why do you suppose they would have feared the exploration and settlement? Because it was new, it was challenging, it was unfamiliar stuff. Don’t we all like to keep everything neat, orderly, and we kind of have…unless we have a real adventurous spirit, we kind of like not to have big changes. And there’s a spirit of conservatism here. I just don’t want to break out from the mold, I am comfortable, I’m in my comfort zone here and I don’t want to be disturbed. And God always calls us out of our comfort zone. And we don’t like that because when we get called out of our comfort zone, who do we have to trust? Him! If we’re in our comfort zone we’re kind of used to it and we think we’ve got it all aced so we don’t trust Him. So there’s a little issue of trust here, and I would suggest that verse 4 is one of those insightful passages of Scripture that probes deeply into our sin, and it probes deeply into our fallen hearts of why we don’t want to trust the Lord in these situations. We want to structure it so it’s under our control. Notice the emphasis, “build for ourselves a city.” Can’t you empathize with this? I can, I want order, I want to control, the desire to have everything under our control.

And notice in verse 6, with the assets that they had God said, you start this operation and there’s nothing that you can’t do, and God had in mind the fact that He was going to evangelize the world and had this process of totalitarian rational structure, had it been ever successful in civilization it would have been the end of evangelism; it would totally have destroyed the program of God for salvation.

Now this is a warning; in these early chapters of Genesis you’ve got to read them as a divine commentary on us. This goes back to the fountainhead of civilization, and warns us about vineyards, technologies that we invent and we don’t use wisely, there’s the vineyard and the social and governmental and tyrannical schemes that we see here at the tower of Babel; this is a monument to globalism; this is globalism with a vengeance. This is a one-world culture and it’s wrong, and God smashed it; God divided it, God confused it. You say well, that wasn’t very nice of God to do. Well, He did that for a reason; it keeps and it prevents sin from reinforcing itself across cultural boundaries.

It will be interesting to see, with the rise of the internet, if the internet can be used for good or evil; it’s a technology, it’s like the vineyard. But one of the bad things of the internet, I’m not talking here just about how to build bombs and pornographic websites, I’m talking about something else that I think is more structurally questionable about the internet. As we have the Asian, the Latins, the Europeans, the North Americans, the Chinese and so forth, all using the internet, all talking to one another, aren’t we building a global conscience. Now the question is, are we trying to redo here a setup like the tower of Babel.

Let’s finish off our text. What is God’s answer to this? The next chapter, Genesis 12:1, what God is going to do is He is going to, at this point, call out for a new dispensation and this dispensation will anger people; we still to this day have academia and the intellectuals angry about what happened here at Genesis 12. What do I mean? Genesis 12 is the origin of exclusivism, the idea that one and only one group of people carry the truth and all other people are wrong. That is one of the most offensive things in a democratic society and we as Christian people right now are heading down the road where we’re going to have confrontation over this one. What right do we have as Christians to impose our values and our standards on everyone else? Familiar argument, isn’t it?

It all starts with Genesis 12 because God said I turn my back on all the sons and daughters of Noah, and I will reach down and I will pick out the first Jew, and from this point forward these people will be the custodians of the Word of God, that is the world wants to come to Me they will come to Me through the Jewish Scripture and the Jewish Messiah…from this point on! And notice in Genesis 12 when the command is given, notice what happens here. The Lord said to Abram, Go forth, get out, and what does He say in verse 2, “I make of you a great nation, I will bless you,” and how does your name get great? What was the last time we saw in the text the use of the noun “name?” It was back there at Babel, it was back there at the tower, “we will make a name for ourselves.” And Genesis 12 is God’s answer; I will make the name, that’s My job. So you see this antiphonal interplay going on.

This is the origin of our civilization and this ought to color our whole approach when we think about government programs, we think about education, we think about life as Christians in the cosmos. There’s the grandeur, yes; there’s a grandeur in society. Are we anti-art? No we’re not. Are we anti-technology? No we’re not. Are we anti-science? No we’re not. We believe in facts so much that we know that the full potential of the creativity of the universe hasn’t even started. If these people, eight people, started our present civilization, with all the ideas of technology, the pulleys, the wheel, the architectural structures, plated jewelry in Babylon, they had citric acid batteries, they knew about electricity. So this is the technology; it started with eight people. What do you think the Lord Jesus Christ is going to do when He comes back and sets up the millennial kingdom? When He controls the environment can you believe the creativity that will be unleashed at that time? That’s the positive, we are optimists about the potential of the human race, but we’re also pessimist in the area of sin and we know how seriously this has infected the whole fabric and structure. We look askance at grandiose plans to make for ourselves names and great social projects because we don’t want to again try to build a tower of Babel.

Father, we thank You once again for Scripture…