Lesson 76
Outline of History – 32:1-14
Chapter 32 is known as the Song of Moses; it’s one of the most famous
sections of the Old Testament. I don’t
think there’s a course in the literature of the Bible, as horrible as they are,
that doesn’t deal in some way with the Song of Moses. The Song of Moses is one of the great hymns
and psalms; this is actually a psalm. If
you have a King James Version it is not translated as a psalm; if you have an
RSV I think it is; that’s one of the advantages of a more modern translation that
you’ll see that it is a psalm. Psalms
are not all in the book of Psalms, many of the psalms are contained
elsewhere. This psalm is a special one,
it had to be memorized, and as far as we can tell down through history was used
again and again by the prophets. All of
the prophetic writings, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, all of these men
evidently were well acquainted with this Song of Moses.
When we work into the Qumran scrolls, one of the scrolls that I had to
translate as an assignment in seminary was a fragment of Deut. 32. It was interesting because this fragment that
was found in one of the caves at Qumran was a fragment which was disconnected
from the rest of the book of Deuteronomy meaning that this chapter was
separated out from the rest of the book of Deuteronomy and used independently
by the people at Qumran. The reason for
this is, as Moses said, this Psalm was to be sung to the children, to the
fathers and to the sons and to the fathers and to the sons from generation to
generation, that they might remember and recall that God always would deal with
the nation on the basis of His Law.
Chapter 32 describes then what we call a rib or a lawsuit proceeding.
This same form, as we studied last time, occurs several other places in
the Old Testament; it is the beginning of the prophetic literature.
This chapter begins the prophetic literature of the Word of God and by
prophetic literature I don’t mean the first time it’s prophesied but the first
time of this prophetic form, where the prophet is calling the nation back to a
standard. Please do not fall for what
liberals will tell you, that the prophets of the Old Testament are their
forbearers. The prophets of the Old
Testament did address themselves to social problems, that is true, but it is
incorrect to say that the prophets therefore were the early forms of the
liberal social reformers of our generation.
The prophets of the Old Testament were not radicals; the prophets of the
Old Testament were reactionaries to the extreme for the prophets of the Old
Testament never went forward, the prophets of the Old Testament always went
backward, not forward, backward. And in that sense they were very, very
strongly antiradical. They were
reactionaries; they were as different from the liberals as the American
Revolution was different from the French Revolution. The American Revolution should never be
compared in any way with the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution as is
done in certain history courses. The
American Revolution was going back to principles that George III had
violated. The American colonists were
not overthrowing the establishment; the American colonists were establishing
the establishment; they went back to the laws of Englishmen and the American
Revolution, therefore, was not a radical revolution as is said today.
So these prophets go back in time.
This is interesting to notice because this whole chapter is written from
a futuristic standpoint. And this is why
it’s so important, the liberals, every time they encounter a prophecy, every
time they would encounter a writing, say Moses is writing here in the 14th
century, and time goes on, here’s 1400 BC, this is when Moses is writing, and
he’s writing as though he’s standing about 1000 BC and the whole viewpoint of
this song is backwards. It is as though
Moses projected himself forward to 1000 BC, the time of David and Solomon, got
up there and then turned and looked back. And so this song is like he took a
time machine, like Moses took a time machine, went forward in time and then
turned around and looked backward at the history that intervened between him
and Solomon, this whole area of history.
Every time the liberals encounter something like this immediately
because of their basic presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, they always
interpret the Scripture as though it were written after the event. So, chapter 32 must have been written after
all of these things happened, therefore it must have been written sometime 1000
BC or later in history. In other words,
the liberal cannot allow one word of prophecy in his system for the moment he
allows prophecy in his system he ruins his whole presuppositions. Therefore the
liberal is always one who would negate prophecy. We see this most startlingly when you sit in
a classroom or when on the radio you hear somebody preach on Daniel and they
say well Daniel prophesied but we know prophecy can’t be so Daniel wrote his
book after the prophecy. Of course, this
is encountering two difficulties; number one, if you interpret Daniel is
writing after the fact it still doesn’t fit because Daniel wrote about things
that happened after Jesus Christ. So how
could the book be written after the things happened? Furthermore, the Dead Sea Scrolls have copies
of Daniel written before the time it was supposed to be written according to
the liberals so with the complete open mind, which is characteristic of
liberalism, they challenge the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we have things here that show every time
we encounter prophecy the liberals have to negate it; they have to, they can’t
be sloppy and tolerate it for to allow one word of prophecy means to shatter
their system. Therefore, chapter 32 and
all liberal writings is always late, it is not Mosaic, it is written after the
fact.
Now to understand that it was written before the fact you just have to
glance up to Deut. 31:29, when Moses looked forward, “For I know that after my
death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I
have commanded you, and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye
will do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke Him to anger through the work
of your hands.” In other words, Moses
looks forward, in the context you have signals that there is a prophecy coming
up because Moses says this is what’s going to happen in the latter days. The word “latter days” is used as a technical
word in Scripture in many ways; one way means a latter day is the time just
before a judgment of God. There is “the
latter days” and then there is just the expression “latter days” that is always
that period of grace before the storm, the quiet before the storm when God is
patiently working with His people to bring them around before the whole house
comes crashing in.
Now this, we said, was a rib. We said it had certain parallels with lawsuit
proceedings in the Ancient East. We have
outlined this so it is parallel to these law forms. The first section of chapter 32 deals with a
court proceeding; this lasts from verse 1-14.
In verses 1-3 we said there was a call for the witnesses in which the
witnesses would be brought into the courtroom, in this case he addressed the
heavens and the earth as those that bore record of what happened in
history. In verses 4-6 was the
presentation of the case, introduction of the parties to the case. So in verse 4 God is introduced. He’s introduced as “the Rock.” There’s no “he is the Rock,” the Hebrew says
“the Rock,” as though you were standing there and a man points to him and says
see, “the Rock,” “the Rock, His way is perfect.” So God is introduced as the first party to
the lawsuit in verse 4.
In verse 5 the second party to the lawsuit is introduced, that is
Israel. And in verse 6 is the anguish of
the prophet as he looks upon the trial and he can’t help but participate in his
mind in the trial because here he sees the faithfulness of God contrasted with
the unfaithfulness of Israel.
And then in verses 7-14 is a picture of God’s faithfulness. Here we have God pictured as the one who
throughout history has always lived up to the letter of the contract. This is the background now for this lawsuit
that the prophet witnesses that God is laying against His people. But the prelude to the lawsuit proper is
verses 7-14 in which you have an exposition of the faithfulness of God. God has been loyal to the terms of the
contract.
In verse 7 we read, “Remember the days of old, consider the years of
many generations. Ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they
will tell thee.” In verse 7 you have a peculiar feature which you must remember
again and again in Scripture, and I keep repeating this to you because I know
that no matter how many times I repeat there will always be somebody that just
gets it the last time. I have repeated
how we know Christianity to be true; I have gone through the logical test and
the empirical test 20 or 25 times in connection with Deuteronomy. So the lesson is try it 26 times. So in verse 7 we’re going to go back to a fundamental
point about the Word of God that history is important; evidence in history is
absolutely crucial to the case. No
amount of reasoning, no amount of theoretical writing will ever solve the
problem that proof hangs on what happened in history.
Verse 7 is an appeal to the fact that between 1400 BC and 1000 BC Moses
says when you come down to that time when God lays the lawsuit down and you’re
wondering whether God is faithful, then you go back and ask the fathers what
happened in history; was God faithful or was He not. He’s not asking world opinion and he’s not
asking people whether they feel God was faithful to them; he’s not asking
people whether they have a high opinion of God’s faithfulness, he’s after the
facts: did God or did He not live up to His promises in history physically so
if you were there you could see it going on.
Now this is why you cannot throw out the historicity of sections of the
Word of God. God’s integrity depends on
it. Throw out history and you throw out
verse 7 and you throw out verse 7 and the lawsuit that you are looking at here
has no basis.
Do you see the importance; the lawsuit has no basis, the lawsuit has
absolutely no basis unless history is valid, unless the historical sections of
the Old Testament are accurate and true.
That, by the way, goes for Genesis 1 as it goes for any other part of
the Word of God. If you start to pick
away at the Scripture and you are starting to efface the character of God.
That’s the logical corollary when you look at the Word of God. Don’t go for cheap solutions. There are problems in the Bible but please
don’t go for cheap solutions that say well, we can’t be sure of this incident,
like we have a lot of neo-evangelicals in certain Christian magazines who are
now saying we can tolerate certain errors of perspective on the part of the
authors. Those authors may have had
errors of perspective but when they enscripturated God’s revelation there
weren’t any errors and there aren’t any errors in here. If there are errors in here then we don’t
know God’s character. And if we don’t
know God’s character we cannot believe, you are believing a lie. So the historicity of the Bible must be held
in the face of all the difficulties it entails it must be held and if it isn’t
held then God’s character goes; one or the other but you can’t hold onto
both. Certain denominations that have
taught the Word of God for generation after generation have gone on public
record as saying we now no longer accept the need for an inerrant history; all
we now need is an inerrant revelation. Very
clever wording, we don’t need an inerrant history; all we need is an inerrant
revelation. Analyze the words a minute:
how can you separate the two? You can’t
separate the two.
Look at verse 7 again, this is a revelation of the character of God;
they both go together and the data on which he is going to build his case, on
which God’s faithfulness, which is the issue in the lawsuit, is God faithful or
is He not faithful; the evidence presented to the court is history. “Remember the days of old,” and the “days of
old” in this case are going to go back even before the time of Moses. The “days of old” begins, say around 1000 BC
from the perspective of this song, and it goes all the way back to Genesis
10. Here we are going back into the
prehistory of the Bible; we’re getting back into that area where there are
tremendous problems and yet in Genesis 10, where you have a fantastic problem,
this author is saying God’s character in this lawsuit hangs on whether Genesis
10 is historically valid or not; the whole thing hangs here.
Now we come to verse 8. Verse 8
is the outline of history. Verse 8 is
probably in the concise term one of the greatest verses that gives you the
outline of all of human history, and in verse 8 you have the structure that
underlies every historical movement. If
you’ve taken a course in history before you were a Christian it probably bored
you, and history never turned you on because it was just a lot of disconnected
facts, and I sympathize with you because I held exactly the same idea, that
history was boring, geography was boring, all these things were boring because
it seemed like all the teacher did was saddle you up with notes, notes, notes,
notes of dates, who did this, who did that, and it’s all a pile of material
with no structure to it, that is, until you come back to the Word of God. And when you begin to study the Word of God
all of a sudden history becomes very important and you become very historically
centered and issues of history are crucial to you because that’s where God is
playing out His program, and if history is not observed you can’t see the
program of God.
We call this the “now” generation.
This means that we are entering a very trial and error period where our
generation says we live for now. In
other words, the past no longer counts and the future no longer counts, there’s
no continuity, and that’s a very clever satanic attack on our culture
today. Can you recognize why, when they
say the “now generation” that that represents a satanic attack that is greater
than a lot of this other stuff that fundamentalists always regurgitate on,
every time they come to some nudie picture or something, oh, Satan’s
there. Listen, Satan is far more present
in this kind of thing than he is in some of these immorality things. It’s very interesting, our movie code, always
an X film because a something wrong in it sexually but why is it that films
that are totally anti-Christian to the core get a G rating; it’s obvious,
because the films are rated by people who are only interested in sexual
morality and nothing else. Don’t be
fooled by ratings, they do not represent the divine viewpoint. You have to be careful what you see, and you
have to study and analyze it.
This is one of those things, if we are truly the “now generation” in
which only the present counts, do you see what happens? Now you’ve erased the character of God
because you can no longer know God any more, you’ve erased the past, God is
only knowable through past actions in history.
You’ve erased the cross, you’ve erased the resurrection, you’ve erased
the Exodus, the fall of Israel, you’ve erased tons and tons of historical
material that have gone down the drain for the “now generation,” we don’t care
what history says. Many of our young
people have had this experience when they’ve been taught how to stand up for
Jesus Christ in the classroom, they’ve had the very disappointing experience of
getting up and presenting their argument to the people that are in the class
and then the argument doesn’t count because people no longer think
logically. The Christians get up and
they argue on a logical tight basis and nobody listens to them because even
that’s gone.
How do you argue with someone who doesn’t think logically? You can’t.
So even in our times, a generation ago we were the ones that were
accused of being irrational; we were the ones that were accused of putting our
brains in the closet, locking the door and throwing away the key. Now it is the Christians who are fighting for
logical thinking. We are the ones who are fighting for it because unless people
think logically, unless they have a historical perspective, we cannot present
the gospel. The gospel presentation
presumes that people think historically.
You go to the primitive tribes in the jungle and they have a
history. Yet you come to 20th century
America and it’s far harder in a theoretical sense of presenting the gospel to
a history-less person than it is a native savage out in the jungle; he knows he
has a history, he knows he has a genealogy, you can go to Arabia and talk to
the Arabs and as a man reported back those Arabs, many of them, can trace their
generations back to 80 generations, they have memorized their family tree, 80
generations; it is all oral tradition.
This shows you that the Scriptural genealogies being in the Semitic area
are no fabrication, it’s completely logical.
The Bedouins still do their genealogies today.
What I’m saying is that in our culture we are facing a fantastic
onslaught and it is time as Christians we began to grasp the issues where they
are and we began to get the concept of this divine viewpoint framework and
realize that God must be at the center, we must have Bible doctrine around Him,
we must have science, history, philosophy, art, music around Him, and don’t
knock a young person who wants to give his life in the area of the arts, or
music, or science and say well he’s not in fulltime Christian service. Listen, if he’s in that field and he’s
fighting for divine viewpoint he is in fulltime service and he’s in an area
where we have very few believers today.
We have very few believers… this is why we are so weak, we don’t have
any men that are holding the line in these areas because we’ve shoved and
pushed every Christian that’s worth anything into the pastorate or the mission
field. Those are fine but where is the
line being held in the field? If you
don’t think it’s significant, who is it that’s teaching your children? It comes right back to home.
So what have the Christian fundamentalists done? Pour all their time and effort into evangelization;
evangelization yes, but to evangelize the next generation requires these people
in this generation to set the tone so you can evangelize in the next
generation. You can’t play the immediate
because the Christians are trapped in the same thing the world is trapped in,
the “now generation,” got to have it now, no planning, nothing thinking about
the next generation, always now, got to have it now, now, now, now, now, now,
and in methodology we duplicate the world.
In methodology we duplicate! Now
I’m not knocking evangelism; I emphasize evangelism, we need more evangelism
but in addition to that we need people that are going into these fields to
influence and fight in these areas of academic intrigue, because it’s only
there that we soften up the ground so the people that are raised in that
environment… this is why it’s so hard to raise young people in this environment
because the last generation of Christians did nothing, absolutely nothing! From 1920 to 1950 you name five Christians
that did anything in these fields; I dare you, you couldn’t name on your hand
Christians that were outstanding in these fields. Then we wonder why? Well, Satan’s taken over, last days. Of course he’s taken over, it doesn’t mean
the last days, it just means that Christians from 1920-1950 didn’t do anything
in this area. That’s what it means, it’s
no sign of the last days at all, it just means Christians shirked their duty
and didn’t get in there.
So we have a tremendous need and this is why verse 8 is crucially
important for us now. Verse 8 shows you
why history is so fantastically important to God and why it is that the Word of
God gives you the intellectual framework in which to study. A statement is made in verse 8 that is
fantastic. “When the Most High divided
to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, He set
the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.” Do you know what that implies? That God had a blueprint for history and when
He divided and separated the nations… when did he divide and separate the
nations? We’ll see that in a little bit,
but there was a time in history when the human race was unified, you had one
race, one language, one culture. And God divided that and when he divided the
human race up, His categories of division corresponded to the number of the
sons of Jacob, 70. God had a pattern for
history.
Now too often when you study in history courses, and I know because I’ve
gone through this thing, you sit there and get all this mass of material thrown
at you and it seems like you can’t even keep up with the teacher because you’re
taking notes so fast, and you get all this piles and piles of data and you
finally get the image that history is completely hopeless, it’s chaotic,
there’s so many facts there that you couldn’t possibly find any order, it’s
just a chaotic pile that sits there and one man has this outline of history and
another man has this outline of history but there’s no inherent structure to
history. One of the revolutionary
statements that the Bible makes is that there is set structure in history,
there are racial structures on history that have implications on down through
history. They are an inherent structure
to history and verse 8 testifies that it was not…, God didn’t say okay, Babel
scatter and He kind of collapsed the tower and everybody took off in 360
degrees. That’s the picture of you often
get of Gen. 10 but that’s not the picture in the divine viewpoint.
When God scattered the nations we don’t know what mechanism it was. Think of a mechanism that must have been
used; just think through this thing. If
there was only one language, only one language and after the scattering there
were many languages, in some mysterious yet unknown way God erased the unity of
the human race linguistically. Probably
the only part of that unified language that remains to us today is mathematics
and music; probably that’s the only area of our activity that probably reflects
unity because mathematics is the same for all cultures; music is basically the
same, though not truly, for all cultures.
But probably there is the only thing left we have that was not
shattered. But language was shattered and if men could discover the key by
which God shattered the language; think of what a tremendous thing it would be
for Wycliffe, for the various missionaries that are involved in this
translation problem, trying desperately to translate before Christ comes to get
the Word of God in these languages.
By the way, there’s a scientific field that was begun by
Christians. The great linguists of our
generation were all Bible-believing Christians.
And it was the Christians that did all of the early linguistic work, a
technology that was developed solely by the Christians because of the Word of
God. Now think what it would mean to
these men if they could find the mechanism that God used and maybe if they
could discover the process that God used to divert the languages then they
could reverse the process to get translations. But we don’t know what it
was. Somehow in some way, whether it was
suddenly or not I don’t know; there’s evidence from the genealogies to believe
that whatever the catastrophe was at the tower of Babel it happened within a 50
year period. It happened this way
because if you take a piece of graph paper and you graph the death, the age of
death of the people in Gen. 10-11 you get a decay curve that looks something
like this. The curve starts to come
down, this is the time of the flood, you get another curve that comes like this
and what we call [can’t understand word] out at 70 years which is roughly our
longevity period. But here there’s a
break and the break is between Peleg and Eber and that break is the tower of
Babel because it says in Gen. 10:25, in the days of Peleg the earth was
divided, so it’s strange that the mathematics shows it up and it’s not
inherently related, there are two independent pieces of material here that
correlate perfectly.
So we have Peleg and Eber and somewhere in that generation something
happened to either knock down the longevity within one… see, it started to
decay from Noah and was following this curve and then suddenly, within one
generation, something catastrophically happened in history and we don’t have
any records apart from the Word of God what was it that happened in Gen.
10. Something happened and from that
point on in history the human race has never been the same again. It was at that point where racial differences
became acute. Now there’s evidence to
believe that racial differences began after Noah, in Noah’s sons, but these
racial differences became very acute at the time of this linguistic fracture at
the tower of Babel. There is where we
explain our culture.
We’re given a phenomenal amount of information in the Word of God and
we’re going to go through some of that material in a moment but first let us
look at the word for “God” here in verse 8, “Most High.” The word “Most High” was used by the Gentiles
before Abraham for their God. Gen. 14-18
is where Melchizedek who was the priest of Jerusalem, it was when he worshiped
who? El Elyon, the Most High. El Elyon
means the God Most High, the Most High God.
And that was the title by which God was known in the ancient world. It’s interesting when you study Ugaritic for
example, in the Ugaritic pantheon we have many deities, it was a polytheism,
you have Baal, you have Ashtar, you have all of these great deities and it’s
kind of lively to read about their lives, the lives and loves of the gods,
etc. Actually some people don’t think
they were gods, they were actually deified patriarchs, but anyway you have
these people, always it goes back to the old man called El, and that’s the word
for God. And El is used for God in many,
many different Ancient Near Eastern languages.
So evidently the primitive name for God was El.
And here is another name which is a very ancient name, El Elyon, the
Most High. And it says He “divided to
the nations their inheritance,” this would mean He parceled out their
boundaries in history. It means that at
this point He set in motion the machinery that would forever move along with
history, ascertaining the boundaries of each national entity in time and space. When He did this, and incidentally, the word
“divide” is the same word used in Gen. 10, the same verb, it’s referring to the
same event as Gen. 10, and there are two criteria that I would suggest. One is not in verse 8, the other is in verse
8 and it’s the second one I want to major on tonight, but before we go to this
criterion I want to go to the first one.
The first criteria is in Acts 17:26 where we have the statement by Paul,
and in this statement it’s a little statement you read right over it quickly if
you don’t look, but it’s one of the keys to history. Paul says that the boundaries in space and
time of a culture are determined on the basis of that culture’s positive
volition. He says that God “has determined
the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, [27] that,”
purpose, “they might seek after God,” so that God arranges history in one view,
Acts 17, so that there will be a maximum amount of impact on the culture to
shake it to consider the question of God.
In other words God sets up history to keep the quest for Himself
going. Now when the quest dies out, if
you have a culture that goes very strongly negative volition, it rejects
strongly what God has done for it, at that point God says I adjust the
boundaries in time and space, that this positive volition keeps up. And this is why we fear for our country, for
it’s not just a little superstition but it is true that when a large culture
such as the United States turns its back upon the knowledge of the Word of God
that it once had, it’s asking for doom.
And God’s principle of Acts 17 is true today, that His boundaries of
people in time and space are determined that His children might seek Him,
“children” meaning the human race here.
So we have one principle but we have the second principle from Deut.
32:8 and in 32:8 we have the principle that there are basic divisions in the
human race. Basic divisions exist. These basic divisions are said to be
according to the number of the children of Israel. What does that expression mean, “according to
the number of the children of Israel?”
Some would say all it means is that God just structured the history so
that there would be a place for Israel in history.
But is that all that it means?
Turn to Joshua 4, again looking in the concordance we look up this
phrase and see how it is used in other portions of Scripture and in Joshua 4:5
and 8 you have the exact phrase used and there is no doubt as to what it
means. “And Joshua said unto them,
Passover before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of the Jordan, and
take ye up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number
of the tribes of the children of Israel.”
Verse 8, “And the children of Israel did so, as Joshua commanded, and
took up twelve stones out of the midst of the Jordan, according to the number
of the tribes of the children of Israel,” now is there a doubt what the author
means when he uses this expression. When
God divided, back in Deut. 32, the nations and gave their inheritance, He divided
them according to the number of the children of Israel.
Now we find out what is the number of the children of Israel, let this
be n; n is the number of the children
of Israel. This tells you immediately
something about history. Whatever n turns out to be, there is a definite
structure to history; that’s irradicable, you can’t erase it, no matter what
you do in history, no matter how much pollution, no matter how bad the
environment gets, no matter how much intermarriage there is, these divisions
will always stands. God divided the nations
this way. What is n equal to? Turn to Gen.
46:26, the sons of Israel, Israel is Jacob.
Why go back to Jacob? This family
of Jacob is where the nation Israel began.
The 12 tribes are taken from Jacob’s son. Jacob’s other name was Israel; don’t forget,
Israel is not just the name of a nation, Israel is the name of a man and the
man is Jacob. So Jacob’s sons, in Gen.
46:26, “And all the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, who came out of his
loins, besides Jacob’s sons’ wives, all the souls were threescore and
six.” And here you have 66, plus 27,
“And the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt, were two souls: all the
souls of the house of Jacob, who came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.” Seventy!
So verse 27 teaches that Jacob, on that house of Jacob that moved into
Egypt, remember at this moment in history, probably dates about 1800 BC, at
that time in history when this house moved down into Egypt apparently in God’s
sight attained its status as an infantile nation at that point. And there were 70 people in that nation. And this is the number 70.
Now, if you go to Genesis 10, which is the account of the story of the
tower of Babel, and the division of Gen. 10.
Gen. 10 gives you the divisions of the human race; Gen. 11 deals with
the division, the actual historical division.
“Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and
Japheth; and unto them were sons born after the flood.” Then it says in verse 2, “The sons of
Japheth,” and it goes on and describes all the sons of Japheth. Then in verse 6 it says “And the sons of
Ham,” and then you have a whole list of the sons of Ham. Then in verse 21, “Unto Shem also, the father
of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth, the elder, even to him
were children born,” and then it describes the Shemites. Then verse 32, “These are the families of the
sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations; and by these were the
nations divided,” there’s the verb, same one used in Deut. 32, “by these were
the nations divided in the earth after the flood.”
And if you count the number of names in Genesis 10, guess what the
number is? Seventy! So now we have a correspondence, we have the
correspondence between the sons of Jacob, seventy, and we have the number of
the nations in Gen. 10, seventy. So now
we have a strange number, 70, so the next logical question to ask is why 70,
why not 69 or 71. Why settle on 70, why
have this even number, 70? Again, it’s
time to pick up our concordance and look up the word 70 and find out how is 70
used for we know there are many numbers in Scripture. If you’ve never done this before, it’d be a
good exercise, take a concordance and look up numbers and how they are used and
you’ll find strange things.
You’ll find the number 3 always used to indicate the minimum amount of
personality; there always has to be three persons to have fellowship. This is why Jesus says where there are two,
yea, even three gathered together in My name I am there in their midst. To have fellowship there has to be a minimum
of three personalities. This is why God
is three in personality. Three is a very
inherent number in the universe. We have
other numbers that are used and I don’t mean to attach magic values out of
these; a lot of people would go to Biblical numerology and they’d develop
superstitious values for numbers. That’s not what my point here is. All you have to do is take a concordance and
check out the numbers and you’ll find that the universe has an inherent
mathematical structure to it. We have
six; six is the number of man. And it’s
very interesting, in the book of Revelation what is the beast known as? Six, six, six, three sixes, perfect
fellowship. And you have this tied
together; six is the number of man. We
have seven; seven is always used of completeness in God’s word.
But if you look at 70 and perform a study on this number you come out
with some interesting things. Here are
some things you discover. First,
obviously, there were seventy nations at the beginning of Babel. The second thing you discover is there were
seventy children that came into Egypt.
The third thing you discover is that there were seventy elders on Moses’
board, when Moses asked for, and God actually asked Moses, things got going
tough for Moses and God said all right Moses, I’m going to have a board of men
for you and these men are going to be endued with the Holy Spirit just as you
are; God picked out, Moses didn’t, God did, God directed that he pick out
seventy men. You have this account in
Num. 11:16. Then when Israel is in
captivity Jeremiah predicts in chapter 25 that when Israel goes into captivity
she will go into captivity seventy years.
In Dan. 9:24 we find when it comes to the times of the Gentiles there will
be seventy sevens decreed in history for the times of the rules of the
Gentiles. We find in Matt. 18:22, when Jesus Christ speaks of forgiveness and
they say how many times shall we give a person, seven times Lord, He says no,
seven times seventy. The last incident
of seventy in the Bible is also interesting.
How many disciples did Jesus sent out throughout all the tribes of
Israel? He sent out seventy, two by two.
Why is it that seventy always comes back? A lot of people would explain the occurrence
of these numbers as just round numbers that indicate an approximate size of the
group. I don’t think you can do this; I
think if you look at these things carefully and study Daniel, for example, it’s
very clear that Daniel means these numbers literally, that the seventy means
seventy; it’s not an approximate number.
And I think the reason people want this to be approximate is because
their mind is in kind of a mess; they can’t believe that there can be that clear
structure to things because in our modern world we have all this data and it
seems like we never can get clear structure.
And God says there is clear structure there and it’s seventy.
How can we summarize seventy and how it’s used in the Bible? We would
summarize the meaning of the word “seventy” this way. Seventy is the number of completeness in an
administration of God. In other words,
it seems to be associated with an administration. For example when Jesus goes
out He organizes His disciples into a unit and He has seventy of them performing
a job. When Moses has his board to
perform the ruling over Israel he has seventy.
So seventy seems to be tied in the Bible to an administration in
history, an historical administration.
All right, we said that this number of the sons of Jacob is seventy, we
said there are seventy nations, we said that the number seventy means
administration, what else can we say? We
say that Deut. 32:8 teaches there was a correspondence between the number of
Gentile nations and the children of Jacob.
Israel is a key to the design of history. In other words, what Deuteronomy 32:8 is
saying is that when God decreed history from the tower of Babel onward He
structured it with a structure that is parallel to the structure of
Israel. Israel is God’s select nation
and because Israel is God’s select nation, Israel has an inherent design to her
and the design that Israel has is deliberately patterned after the structure of
history itself, so that in this little nation of Israel it is like you have a
microcosm of the world, and there’s a correspondence now between the world at
large and this chosen nation of God that has this similar structure. We don’t know what it all means but there is
some correspondence here in Deut. 32:8.
Calvin said, when he commented on this verse, “In the whole arrangement
of the world, God had kept this before Him as the end, to consult the interests
of His chosen people.” That’s
fantastic. Calvin saw very clearly; what
he said was this: Think of the heart of God, when God designed history and had
a fantastic design job ahead of Him, what was on His mind? Israel; Israel was on God’s mind and when He
structured the Gentile… and remember, Israel didn’t even come on the scene
until Abraham’s day, and yet back at the tower of Babel God had pre-structured
history, knowing full well what Israel would be like down in the future. He prepared the stage in designing history
for His chosen nation. So that when
Israel comes onto the scene the stage is set; the structure is built into
history and Israel takes her position.
See, God never does things haphazardly; when God elects the nation
Israel, for generations before that election God has already in advance
provided for her. That’s when God chose
you in Christ. He prepared for you in
eternity past. God designed a plan of
God for you, God designed a plan of salvation for you with God’s grace, He
designed a plan that would incorporate everything that you’d ever need, and He
knew all your sins, He knew all mine and He designed a plan in advance.
Remember when God designed the plan: when did He do it, after we sinned
or before we sinned? He designed his
plan before we sinned. His plan, then,
was in advance and it never had to be adjusted.
God didn’t have to say whoops, I didn’t take this little factor into
account, I’d better go back and adjust My blueprint. God never has to do that. He always had it in account, and so when we
say that we are “complete in Christ” as the elect ones, like Israel was elect
in history, and has a complete place in history, we are elect in Christ. And it means that God’s plan of salvation is
so fantastic that there is never going to be a problem comes into your life
that God hasn’t made total provision for: application to you as a
Christian. And every time some Christian
comes crying around and belly-aching God doesn’t do this and God doesn’t do
that, and all the rest, listen, God has known in advance what your problems are
and God has made ample solution for them and it’s just that you’re so
fat-headed you won’t take His grace.
That’s the problem; why you have a problem is because you have thrown
out His grace but His grace was designed in advance for your problem that
you’re having right now. Whatever your
problems are, God’s grace was set up in advance, and it’s the same thing for
history. God’s plan was set up in
advance.
Now let’s come back to the beginning of Gen. 10 and look at some of the
fine structure of Gen. 10. We can’t do
justice to Gen. 10 but we can show you some of the structure of it and show perhaps
how this applies to us today. This is
called, just like Deut. 32 has a title, the Song of Moses; this is called in
scholarship circles the Table of the Nations.
That’s the title of Gen. 10.
Professor W. F. Albright, one of the world’s leading archeologists, says
in Young’s Analytical Concordance, page 25, “The Table of Nations remains as an
astonishingly accurate document.” In Old
Testament Commentary, page 138, Albright says: (quote) “It shows such a remarkably
modern understanding of the ethic and linguistic situation in the ancient
world, in spite of all its complexity, that scholars never fail to be impressed
with the author’s knowledge of the subject.”
There is always the question, where did this guy get all of his
information, because we moderns are supposedly the only people that got smart,
and nobody before us ever knew anything.
It took the 20th century to come along and tell every body
what to believe. These people knew a
lot; in fact I’m convinced, from my study of the Bible, these people knew a
whale of a lot more about history than we come close to knowing today. We have lost data in history; we haven’t
gained it, and modern research hasn’t recovered it. We have lost tons and tons
of valuable data on what went on in past history, just gone by the board
completely.
The introduction to chapter 10 is in chapter 9:25-27, an incident
happened, some say involving homosexuality in Noah’s life with his sons, but
whatever the event was, and he “knew what his younger son had done unto him,”
in verse 24. Verses 25-27 is a prophecy;
it must be looked at as a prophecy, not as a decree. God is not here saying that Ham and Cain have
to be servants; He is saying they will be; this is a prophecy. Why does Noah
say this? Because under the supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, Noah,
in looking at his sons, sees that in his family there is such a disjunction of
characters that he didn’t see in the antediluvian age. You see the fathers and
the sons that married, back here before the flood, had unity in their family,
but after the flood when Noah got to this point and this incident happened, and
we’re not given the details of what happened, but something happened so that
Noah saw something that no father ever saw in his sons before. Up to this point, evidently the sons, there
was unity between them. But there was
something in the way Noah’s three sons behaved in this incident that led Noah
to the realization that my sons have somehow got fractured characters.
In other words, in the three sons of Noah you being to have polarization
occurring, you begin to have certain characteristics grouping themselves around
Ham; you have other characteristics grouping themselves around Shem, and
certain other characteristics grouping themselves around Japheth. So this man notices in his sons and he knows
that these are the only three sons that are going to populate the world. This is not a partial flood, this is a
universal flood; all the human race is destroyed here. And out of all of these three sons the genes
of these three sons are going to be used to generate the entire human
race. And Noah says as I study my sons I
know what’s going to happen in history.
So he gives the great outline of history in verses 25-27, “And he said,
Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. [26] And
he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. [27]
God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem;; and Canaan
shall be his servant.” Now catch this because
the word “Canaan” here is tricky. There
are actually three sons, Japheth, Ham and Shem.
One of Ham’s sons, and only one of his sons, is Canaan. Canaan is the
object of controversy because Canaan was the son who generated the race that
the Jews had the trouble with. So
therefore he becomes emphasized in the narrative, because of the future
incidents of Israel. But remember there
are three sons here. The blessing is
given to one son. Which of the three
sons got Noah’s blessing; three sons in verses 225-27 but only one got the
blessing and that one that got the blessing was not Shem; the one that got the
blessing was Japheth, for the word “enlarge” his tents means to make him
prosperous. Japheth got the blessing. This means that materially and historically
Japheth will exceed the other two sons in his accomplishments down through
history. He will be a leader in the
world and the people who have Japhetic genes are going to behave in a certain
way and have certain inherent tendencies in their character.
Then the cursed one, Canaan, and by and large Ham too, he is going to be
a servant of servants, the lowest servants.
Canaan is the lowest of servants but the absence of Ham indicates that
he doesn’t have any blessing in this. So
the curse applies to Canaan but Ham is minus blessing. Japheth is plus blessing, but then a
statement is made about Japheth in verse 27, “God shall enlarge Japheth,”
meaning He makes him numerous; He makes him prosperous. “He shall dwell in the tents of Shem’ and
Canaan shall be his servant.” This
dwelling in the tents of Shem connects Japheth with the third son Shem. Now we look at Shem, a certain statement is
made, “Blessed b e the LORD God of Shem;” now this means that down through
history the Shemite people will be those people who are acting as channels for
God’s revelation in history. The other
two depend on Japheth for their revelation.
Now let’s look at some of the sons and study where they come from. Gen. 10; please remember these are not exact
correspondences because it is very difficult to take these names and figure out
where they come from. Scholars have tried, there is a variety opinion. Right
now I’m going to provide you with kind of an average view that people have that
have studied the problem of Gen.
10. Let’s start with the sons of
Japheth, verse 2. From verse 2-5 you
have 15 names; this is 15 out of the 70, the Japhetic line. Now they have a certain character, the
Japhetic people, Noah has prophesied that God is going to make them almost into
an aggressive, He’s going to enlarge them, he’s going to dwell in the tents of
Shem which apparently indicates, from the best we know, that this means he’s
going to conquer the Shemites and yet he is going to in the end be dependent
upon them.
These Japhetic people, who are they: the first one is Gomer, and out of
Gomer, Gomer has many sons; verse 3 gives you some of the sons of Gomer and
scholars have traced the sons to the progenitors of the Russian race, the
Celtic race and the German race. If you
come from any of these backgrounds you have the genes of Gomer. Gomer was the forbearer of the Germans, the
Celts, that became the early Britons, and some of the Russians. Remember Russia represents an amalgam, there
is no such thing as a Russian in the race, it’s a mixing. Russia is about as
mixed racially as the United States.
They have a tremendous mix so when I say Russians, don’t think of a
monolithic thing. These various peoples
went across the Caucasian mountains, over north of the Black Sea in history,
they were thrown out of the Mesopotamian Valley in various stages of advance
and retreat and went over and spilled over into the Black Sea area and we don’t
know how they intermingled. But we have
this of Gomer, the forbearer of the Britons, the Celts, the Germans and some of
the Russians.
Magog: Magog is also a forbearer of the Russians and the Scythians, for
it is under the term Magog that Ezekiel brings up his prophecy. And that is another thing; don’t think that
Genesis 10 is just some sweet little document in Genesis because lo and behold,
when you begin to study the later prophecies, guess how the nations are
identified in prophecy? By the names of
Genesis 10. When Ezekiel begins to prophecy about the Russians he doesn’t say
the Russians are coming, he says Magog comes.
Now that to me implies two things.
It implies number one that this Table is meant to be serious and was
used as a serious document by the prophets of the Old Testament. It tells me something else too, that no
matter how chaotic history looks, in the end time when these prophecies are
fulfilled, those divisions are still there.
They may be statistically blurred out along the fringes but by and large
they are there, even down to the end times, and they’re there in such distinct
and clear form that the prophecies of Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel can be
addressed to those [can’t understand word].
The human race, although it’s hard for us when we study anthropology to
pick out these divisions because we’re not really sure what they are looking at
back here; whatever these divisions are they are conservative with time, they
stay there and they give character to various peoples.
Then we have the next one, Madai; Madai is the early forerunner of the
Medes and plays a crucial role in the prophecy of Daniel. The fourth name is Javan, a very interesting
one; apparently the Ionians come from this man as well as the Romans. Tubal, which is also a word the prophecies
refer to Russia, evidently the Russians; Meshech, also a Russian forbearer, and
Tiras, the Thracian. We have a group of
Japhetic peoples now in history. The
people probably are forbearers of a lot of other people but I’m trying to give
you the weight and the consensus of the different commentators in this
point. But that’s the Japhetic
line. Remember its characteristics.
Now we come to the Shemitic line, I’m going to skip the Hamites, leave
them till last. Verse 21ff, Shem and his
sons. There are 14 names in the Shemitic
line, so together with the Japhetic line we now have 29 names out of our
70. The Shemitic line is significant for
revelation. Elam, the Elam are people
that settled… the Elamites are people that settled in the upper Mesopotamian
area. Asshur, this are the forerunners
of the Assyrians. Arpachshad, out of him
came both the Arabs and the Jews. Lud, out of him came the Lydians. And Aram, out of him came the Arimeans whose
language in the times of Daniel was the international lingua franca of the world, the language of money, the commercial
language. So out of the Shemitic line
we have these peoples come and these peoples are said, evidently to be
connected with God.
Now let’s test this, the Bible always invites a critical evaluation and
testing. Think back in history and think
of all the world religions that you can think of. Think of the Asiatic religion, think of
Taoism, think of Confucianism, think of Buddhism, Hinduism, think of all of
those; think of the African religions, think of the European religions, think
of Islam, think of Judaism and Christianity.
Out of all of the world’s religions what three religions stress God
talking to man and revealing Himself verbally to man. There are only three and all of the world’s
religions, out of all these different areas, there are only three religions
that stress God revealing Himself to man, that stress man’s sin and the need
for a sacrifice, and also there is only three religions in the world that are
genuinely theistic. All the rest of them
are pantheistic. By pantheistic I mean
that they confuse God with creation, and so that God becomes the principle
behind creation; evolution is a pantheistic type thing, it came out of the
early Greeks, so that is a pantheism, where your God is a principle of
creation. By the theistic religions I
mean this: a religion that separates Creator from creature. There are only three that do that: Islam, Old
Testament Judaism, Christianity. Who
gave us those three religions? You look
at your list here and they all came out of the Shemites.
So therefore Noah’s prophecy is true, that in history these people would
be the ones that would act as the medium of revelation. It doesn’t mean that Islam is right but it
does mean that it was intimately connected with the Old Testament; see, it
builds off the Old Testament. So we have
these three religions that come out of the Shemitic line and the Arabs and the
Jews basically were the ones that gave the world these religions. Also it’s significant that all of the
doctrines of the Old Testament are in the language of the Shemites. If you study Daniel, what language is
that? It’s Aramaic; where did it come
from? Shemites. If you study the rest of
the Old Testament it’s Hebraic; where did that come from? The Jews?
Where did he come from? Shemites.
So you have this prophecy fulfilled.
Now we come to Ham, verse 6; this is the Hamitic line, here we have
many, many names, I’m only going to take 4 of the key names in this Hamitic
line. Again, it is very difficult to picture what these names mean but we’ll try,
based on a consensus of scholarship in the area. The sons of Ham, four of his immediate sons
are in verse 6, “Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. The first one, Cush; Cush later became the
name of Ethiopia and the word means dark skinned. Whether that refers to the Negroid race we
have no idea because the Ethiopian peoples in the ancient world were
dark-skinned but they were not Negroid, they were Caucasian. All it means is, and I don’t pretend to
understand it, it’s a word which just means dark-skinned. We can trace it down
through history, the people of Cush spread out into Ethiopia, Africa and all
over Asia. So evidently out of these
people we have the Orientals.
It is also deeply significant that out of Cush you have the greatest
apostasy the world has ever known, for it’s out of Cush that the tower of Babel
was built, it was connected with Nimrod, etc.
Out of Cush you have the woman-child cult. This is called the woman-child cult and this
is found in every apostate religion that’s going. It’s always characterized by a virgin and
her son. You can find it in the Baalism of the Caanites; you can find it in
various religions of Asia Minor, you can find it in the times of Pergamos when
the book of Revelation was written, and John said you people, you are right
there and you’re sitting in the synagogue of Satan. Satan’s very seat is right there with
you. We have the same mother-child cult
in early Roman mythology and religion.
We sometimes suspect that this is what has influenced a certain segment
of Christianity. So we have this area,
this mother-child cult, the sign of apostasy that is culminated in the book of
Revelation in the great harlot; she comes from Babylon, Babylon, oh mother of
harlots. So we have a line that is
preserved from the tower of Babel down through history; it comes out of the
Hamitic line, a apostate religion.
Mizraim, this is the Hebrew word for Egypt, and out of Mizraim came the
Egyptians, the Moors, the Libyans, the Philistines and the Cretans. By the way, this is Hamitic peoples; do you
recall one epistle that I taught; we went through the epistle of Titus. Do you remember what I said about Titus,
saying it’s the most debauched people in the whole Mediterranean area were two,
the Corinthians and the Cretans because they had the highest debauchery; they
went into the lowest forms of religion and morality, and these people come out
of Mizraim. We have Put, and this again
means dark skinned and we don’t know anything more about him. Canaan, we have a lot of detail about Canaan
and Canaan came to be the one who was the occupier of the land when the Jews
went in.
So what are we to say then about this?
We have an interplay that we have noticed through history. We have the Japhetics; the Hamitics, the
Shemitics. Is it true that God has
enlarged Japheth’s tent? If Japheth
represents the Arian and Indo-European group of people, then it means that
[can’t understand word] led civilization and by and large you’d have to say so. By and large you’d have to say that the great
technological advances have been made in the west; by and large you’d have to
say that the great area of advance in our modern history since Christ have been
in this area. Is it true that Japheth
dwells in the tents of Shem? Yes,
because out of Shem has come the gospel and where has the gospel been preached
in the most concentrated form? In the
western world; in the eastern world you didn’t have the gospel, as such, in
concentrated form until Hudson Taylor and other missionaries. So you have Japheth, evidently blessed of
Noah and on down through history the Japhetic line seems to win out.
But we have the Hamites; please remember the racial characteristics, and
this is an important conclusion or else you’re going to misread the whole
thing, this does not condemn one race over another. What it says is that certain races have
certain characteristics that are really there and are not to be shrugged off
and say all men are equal; that’s true, all men are equal, I’m going to make
that point in just a minute, but you can’t cover up the fact that there are
certain races with certain distinct things in their character that distinguish
them. That’s what the Bible teaches here
in Gen. 10; there are racial distinctions that are really there and not the
figment of some racist imagination.
They’re really there; to deny these is liberal sentimentalism.
But on the other hand, let’s balance it by saying this: there is nothing
in Genesis 10 to say that one race is inferior to another; that is an incorrect
deduction, for what Genesis 10 is saying is that they have potentials in these
areas and those potentials can be used in negative or positive ways. Take the Hamitic people for example, take the
Orientals; if he is won to Jesus Christ, one of the great characteristics of
Oriental Christians is their deep contemplation of the truth of the Word of
God, the Lord’s servants. You can read
Watchman Nee’s books and you get this out of it. You can read a lot of the meditations of the
Chinese Christians and you sense a deep servitude to Jesus Christ. So that characteristic of race when “in
Christ” becomes a fantastic attribute; the man is now the servant of servants
to the Lord Jesus Christ. Take the
Japhetics, they are the aggressive, they are the conquerors. When transformed by the power of Jesus Christ
that characteristic is used in evangelism for out of what race has come most of
the evangelists? The Japhetics, the Indo-Europeans, so you have your aggressive
missions, moving out from a center located in the Japhetic line, and so
transformed by the grace of God this racial characteristic can be used. Then we have the Shemites and you know what a
Hebrew Christian is like, fantastic, absolutely fantastic.
And you know on the other hand how each one of these racial characteristics,
when used in a negative way can be obnoxious.
I’ve just shown you how the Hamites, when they go on negative volition,
a very frequent corollary to negative volition in the Hamitic population is
apostate religion, horrible apostate religion. That’s something that God judges completely.
When the Japhetics go on negative volition you have slaughter and conquest,
like the Assyrians, you have terrific things, like the Romans and the Greeks. And when the Shemites go on negative you have
the horrible holy wars that are waged today between the Arabs and the
Jews.
So every one of these racial characteristics is positive and it’s
negative, but you have no right to say one race is better than another; you
just have the right to say there are racial differences and in our day the
tendency is to gloss these things over because of the various civil rights
things, etc. don’t gloss them over, there are racial differences. This is not a council about intermarriage; there
is nothing in the Word of God that says that two races can’t intermarry; what
it says is that you’d better know what you’re doing when you do it but there’s
no law against it. The law against intermarriage
in the Bible is the law that says a believer cannot marry an unbeliever. Yet it’s strange in our culture that people
are more concerned whether a white girl marries a black than whether a white
Christian girl marries a white non-Christian boy. Why is it that people fuss more over racial
intermarriage when they’ll accept a Christian marrying a non-Christian? Do you know why? Because you’ve been infiltrated by the human
viewpoint of the culture instead of the divine viewpoint of the Word of God.
That’s why. So these things that the
cultures erect become greater in your conscious mind than the things that the
Word of God erects, and it’s tragic, but this is the problem we face today.
What can we say about this in history?
Let’s cite several more examples of how these mechanics work out. We have had startling examples of this
prophecy verified. You can go back to
the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians in the Mediterranean Sea; the Phoenicians
were on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, they sent naval forces all the
way through the Mediterranean and established colonies on the north coast of
Africa. The Carthaginians, Hannibal and
his great conquest, Hannibal came from Carthage. Who was it that finally conquered the Carthaginians? It was the Romans; the Carthaginians were
Hamitic people; the Romans were Japhetic people.
The American Indian is another example, the American Indian is a Hamitic
people; who conquered the American Indian in history? It was the white man, the Japhetic line. We have another example in the Egyptians; we
have the Egyptians being conquered by many people in history and subjugated,
finally, after the Pharaoh’s had their dominion and in all cases who was it
that came down into Egypt? The
Assyrians. So we find this rule that the
Hamitic people, evidently when gone on negative volition, often times in
history God uses a Japhetic people to move against them. Now this is why it’s so exciting to see
prophecy verified in our time; why it’s interesting to see how prophecy works
out of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ in certain power spheres and why
Russia, for example, as she moves down into the Mediterranean is such a crucial
thing in our consideration from Bible prophecy.
It is not insignificant that the Russian navy now has dominion over the
Mediterranean. The Russians are a mix
and it’s hard to tell whether the Japhetic or the Shemitic or the Hamitic
dominates in Russia today because they are so mixed up. It’s very difficult to see and the whole
thing in the Middle East will hang on this great outline of history in Gen. 10. If we knew more about the makeup and we could
trace this it would be wonderful, it would help us in prophecy but we do not
know. Scholars have not yet traced these lines out but I am convinced that if
they would devote the time and effort they could find a gold mine of
information studying history.
Let’s summarize what we’ve said by three principles: the first principle
is to have a balanced view about race from the Word of God. The biblical concept in the balance of race
is that there are such things as racial characteristics. You can’t be a liberal and say they’re
nonexistent, they are existent. And it
means that certain races may have to be educated in certain different ways; it
may be that certain races may have to be trained in different ways; it may be
that certain races are adapted to do different tasks differently; that may be,
that’s a job for the sociologist and the anthropologist to find out. Those differences may be there but in the
end, in the end all of those races contribute to the church of Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ’s church is open to
all. This is why in the book of
Revelation it says there shall come from many tongues and many races and many
nations, and that’s a quote from Gen. 10 so it shows that God’s program of
evangelism encompasses all these areas.
There’s no such thing, in other words, as a superior or an inferior
race; there are only different races.
The second principle from Deut. 32 that’s very comforting to me is that
God is sovereign in history and never confused.
He knows the form that history has, He knows those seventy divisions, I
don’t, anthropology doesn’t, but they’re there, and it may be as we study the
Word of God and someone gets interested in the field they might discover these
in some way.
The third principle that has to do more with us has to do with us
individual believers. In Deut. 32:8 we
have the principle that God prepares for His elect ones in advance, totally and
completely. It means therefore that at the time we receive Jesus Christ and
enter the plan of God through faith in Him, God has totally provided for your
every need. Just as when