It’s good to have you here. We have a number of visitors here this morning. It’s really good to see you. Welcome to our church. We’ve uh just to bring you up to speed, we’ve spent the summer looking at the opening pivotal chapters in our Bible in the book of Genesis. And Genesis, if you want to subdivide Genesis, it neatly Oh, we’re getting we’re pulling it up here. It neatly subdivides into eight divisions or eight sections. We have four very immensely important events followed by the life stories of four foundational individuals. And the great events are creation, pretty big thing, the fall of mankind into sin, judgment of the flood, and today we’re looking at the dispersal of people into nations at the Tower of Babel. And following that are the four individuals, the four great patriarchs of uh of God’s chosen people. You have Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. So, Genesis, this book of beginning, it really sets up the story and the conflict, the plotline for the rest of the Bible. The truest and greatest story ever told of how God took fallen people and redeemed and restored sinful people like us and creation to himself. So this morning we’re looking at the last of those four great events, the dispersal of people into nations at the Tower of Babel. I want to look really at three things in this story that stand out. One is the problem of Babel. How did they end up in such a mess at Babel? And two, then the punishment of Babel that God brought resulting in the separating of humanity into nations. And three, the grace that restores and reathers and reunites those nations. So the problem, the punishment, the grace that reathers. So chapter 11, it’s a post flood world. We’ve been looking at the flood the last couple weeks. Noah and his three sons and their wives, they had been the forerunners of a of a burgeoning new world population, likely numbered only in the thousands at the time. And the mandate that God had given to Noah and his offspring, was just like he gave to Adam and Eve in the garden. be fruitful, increase in number, and fill this earth, fill this planet. But humanity had something very different in mind. We read, “They moved eastward together as a clump, as a family, as a tribe unit, uh where they plan to settle together. They didn’t want to separate and and drift apart.” And we read in the first verse of 11 of chapter 11 that naturally, as we’d expect, they had a common language. They had a common speech. They decided to build a city together. And that’s not not a bad thing in itself. The plot of the Bible has mankind going from a garden in the early uh chapters of Genesis to a city in the last chapters of uh uh the New Jerusalem, the last chapters of Revelation. Wouldn’t be wrong for us to look at scripture and conclude that cities really are God’s idea. They’re God’s invention. When we first first moved from Edmonton to rural community in BC, we were at a party. We’re getting to know some people. And one guy learning that we just left Edmonton made the comment to me that towns and rural communities were where spiritual people lived. And he seriously believed that cities were highly unspiritual in character. Only unspiritual people would live there. Harvey Khan was a seminary professor and he taught urban ministry. He loved the cities. After one of his lectures, a student came up to him who disagreed with everything he had just said. And the student said, “God made the country, man made the suburbs, but the devil made the city.” Well, hopefully none of that’s true. Are we the spiritual losers and leftovers just because we happen to live in a city? Does a city rob us of our spirit and and leave us just clumped together in a debris of materialism, demonic materialism? I don’t think any of us believe that. You know, a little over 200 years ago in 1800, less than 2% of people in the world lived in a in a city with a population of 100,000 or more. And today, it’s closer to about 58% of humanity that lives in large cities or dense urban communities. Cities are not where spirituality goes to die. At their best, they’re they’re amazing places because there’s people and power and technology and creativity and it’s merging together and it’s all flourishing. And the newly formed city at Babel, that was the place where construction technology made a bit of a breakthrough. They said to each other, “Hey, let’s make bricks and let’s bake them thoroughly.” They figured this thing out. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. and that new technology would have allowed them to build things faster and larger than ever before. Cities in themselves, they’re not the problems. The strength or the weakness though of a city, its glory or its dishonor, depends on what’s at the center of a city. In the book of Revelation chapters 21 and 22, we read that the new Jerusalem where the throne of God is. From that throne, there’s going to be crystal clearar river of water that’ll flow down the middle of the main street. And the tree of life will straddle that river. It’ll bear fruit every month. And the leaves of that tree, it says, are for the healing of the nations. just an incredibly beautiful stable description of the best of cities where we’ll we hope to live in one day. And none of the our our cities of our of our cities currently are like that new Jerusalem. But over many centuries, the the architecture in a city generally represents the spiritual values of the people. All throughout Europe, we find massive cathedrals built over the course of many decades and even lifetimes to represent the glory of God. What’s made central in a city, whether it’s ancient or modern, says something about the character and the spiritual nature of the place. And we have a lot of evidence, particularly in the region of Mesopotamia, where Babel sat of what are called ziggurates. These are square rectangular stairstep structures built for religious purposes. Archaeologists have discovered about 30 of them in that general region. All the important cities in Babylon had one of them and they carried names like temple of the foundation of heaven and earth and temple which links heaven and earth and very led zeppelinish temple of the stairway to pure heaven. You know, ziggures were they were viewed as forming a connection between God or the gods and humanity. And typically the pinnacle would it would house a temple of sorts, serve as a residence for the gods. It was a place where gods and humanity could meet. So a ziggurat was very likely the structure that the people of Babel had in mind and set about to build. And judging by the footprint, the geographical footprint of other zigures in that area, what we call the Tower of Babel may have been intended to be something about 300 ft high, 30 stories, which would be quite modest by our standards, but breathtaking in the ancient world. The problem at Babel was twofold. One, the people were not inclined to heed God’s call to spread out and fill the earth. They wanted to stay clumped together. And two, the central concern in building the structure, they said, was to make a name for ourselves. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” You know, back in the 70s and 1980s, there was a guy named Gordon Hall, and he had held some pretty modest jobs. He’d been a night clerk in a liquor store. Then he got into the new burgeoning field of of health and fitness clubs that were just starting to spring up. And he rose very quickly from staff to management to ownership. Ended up purchasing a good number of the 24-hour Nautilus health clubs and membership fees of customers who were flocking to join those those clubs. Very lucrative and made him into a very wealthy man. From there he catapulted in the world of commercial real estate. He was worth something in the neighborhood of a hund00 million by the time he was 32 years old. And his plan was to be a billionaire by age 38. Along the way, Hall converted to the Mormon faith seemed to line up well with his ambitions. One really unfortunate phrase in official Mormon doctrine says, “As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be.” and he swallowed that doctrine wholly. And in various interviews, uh, Gordon Hall said, “We’ve always existed as intelligences. Human beings are just on earth to acquire bodies. My genetic makeup is to be a god. I believe I can do anything.” He spoke of expecting to live to age 120. His religious destiny meant that he could. There was nothing that was beyond him that he wanted to do. So in 1983, he bought one of the largest homes in America, 55,000 square ft edifice perched above Phoenix, Arizona. And Hall was unusually candid about what motivated him. When the Washington Post asked why why anyone would need a house that big, his answer said, “Ego, self-gratification.” And on top of that flat roof in black lettering, a sign stretched 44 feet long that said Gordon Hall Mansion. And when asked why he would do that, he said, “I want people to know who lives here.” He’s unusually candid about wanting to make a name for himself. Hardly anyone would recognize his name today through real estate crashes and and financial decisions that were later deemed criminal. Hall lost everything, not only the house, but also his freedom. He has spent 22 of the last 27 years in federal prison where apparently he remains today at about age 73. Like the people of Babel who were obsessed with making a name for themselves, Gordon Hall wound up losing everything he had. Of course, God wasn’t caught off guard by what was unfolding on Earth below. His covenant with Noah had been that he would never again destroy life on Earth through a flood. So he devised a very creative form of punishment for these ego-driven tower builders. Their tower or their ziggurat was never a threat to God. It was no rival to his power or authority or glory. But we read, “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.” The wording is like the Lord is squinting to see what that little pimple is out in the desert. The Lord must bend down to make out what’s there. Says, “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language, they’ve begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Now, what does that mean? This is not God concerned about what the tower is going to do to him. It’s God concerned about what the tower is going to do to them, to the people building it. This is not the words of a threatened competitor. These really are the words of a tender and loving heavenly father who created mankind. So commentator David Fetis writes, “When the Lord saw the tower, he wasn’t worried about losing his own supreme position, but he saw trouble brewing. God saw that there’d be no limit to the people’s sinful rebellion against God, no limit to the damage done to humanity if the people of Babel kept playing God. If they were allowed to continue with their attitude of the sky’s is the limit and went ahead with their plans for one world government and one man-made religion and one centralized system of information and technology, they’d be capable of anything no matter how terrible. So what would what would have come if those people had been allowed to continue? The people who they loved themselves, they loved their technology, they were all speaking the same language, they saw themselves as masters of their own destiny. What would a single city society have looked like if it were allowed to continue? Maybe it would have become similar to what society was uh was said to be before the flood, dominated by evil, neverending violence. Would that city have moved further and further away from God and his purposes, refusing to fill the earth? Would they have been vulnerable to one great dictator rising up and ruling over all of them if they had stayed in one place? God saw problems ahead for the people and gave them a really a truly gracious form of discipline and punishment. God said to his council of heavenly beings, the sons of God, the angels, ones we’ve talked about throughout the first 11 chapters of the books of Genesis, God said, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” And I’d really have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the construction trailer the next morning as people showed up with their hard hats and their Tim Horton’s double doubles and foreman starts giving instructions to the crews, you know, the brick layers and the guys who have to mix the mortar and the scaffolders and the engineers and everyone’s giving one another blank looks, you know, some they can’t help but speak Japanese and others are Hindi and Mandarin and and Cree and Spanish. would have looked like one big foreign film without subtitles as they’re trying to figure out how to do the work. I can imagine fists pounded on tables and blueprints ripped to shreds and and in great frustration the project ground to a halt. Think of how deeply humbling it must have been for them as they as they drifted away into language groups. The Lord was forcing geographic diversity on people who’d been unwilling to separate. Says, “So the Lord scattered them over all the earth. They stopped building the city. That’s why it’s called Babel. Because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. And from there, the Lord scattered them over the face of the earth. Often the most gracious thing God can do for any of us is to thwart our plans. What seems to come wrapped up as a punishment is really a gracious gift. You know, Hebrews 12, if you read Hebrews 12, it’s brilliant on this. Tells us that we’re all going to experience the discipline of God. It’s a sure sign that we’re God’s children because God disciplines us as his children. He his beloved people. He disciplines us. It says to share his holiness with us. God wants to do something deeper in our lives. Never feels great. It’s always painful afterwards. Hebrews 12 says for those who’ve been trained by God’s discipline. Our purposes have been thwarted, but it produces in our lives a harvest of peace and righteousness. You know, last Sunday afternoon, 23-year-old American tennis player Ben Shelton, he lost in the final of the US Open, and he stood to receive his uh second place trophy. And you could see the real deep disappointment on his face. He went to the microphone and he said, “First and most importantly, I want to thank God.” He says, “My successes are a gift. The failures are a gift.” Wow, that’s a mature perspective for times when our dreams and our plans get thwarted by God. It seems like a punishment. At the center, it’s a gift. And that’s how things turned out at Babel. The scattering of people all over the earth spread a beautiful layer of different colors and physical characteristics and races and cultures all over the place. Beginning of Genesis 10, we’re given the table of nations that branched out from the three sons of Noah. From that information, we make out kind of a general geographic distribution of the people after Babel. Babel sent the descendants of Japheth to the north. Those nations that are listed under Japheth in Genesis 10, they’re nations that Israel won’t have a whole lot to do with for the rest of the Bible. Indo-European people, mostly to the north. Those of us who have any kind of European heritage would have emerged from that line. And the nations that emerged from Ham, this is the son who dishonored Noah and was cursed by his father. The nations listed under him, they’re like a rogues gallery of future enemies of of Israel, Egypt, and Canaan, Assyria, Babylon, Sodom, Gomorrah. Eventually, Assyria would take 10 of the tribes of Israel into exile. They’d never be heard from again. and later Babylon would take the remaining Israelites and hold them captive for 70 years before allowing them to return to the land God had given them. The third son, Shem, he’s the line from which Israel would emerge. Line of Abraham and David and Jesus. Genesis 10 23 mentions a fellow named Eber. And a few chapters later in Genesis 14, it’s going to refer to Abraham as Abram the Hebrew. And it’s from that man Eber’s name that the term Hebrew would arise. So you as you look at that map, you see how all those lines Japheth and Ham and Shem, they kind of converge around the promised land, around the land God gave his people. That was the home base by which God planned to bless all the nations on earth. And the gift that uh felt like punishment at Babel, allowed for middle brown people, which is the color of most people in our world, to spread and develop and cluster and intermar according to language groups and gives us this beautiful range from the lightest of Scandinavians to the darkest of Africans and the compact stature of the Japanese to the really tall Somalians. All of them blessed with their own languages, their own cultural development. any of the so-called racial characteristics that people think are major differences. Things like skin color and eye shape, you know, they account for 0.012% of human biological variation. So, what we call racial characteristics, they’re bafflingly trivial. The only reason we even notice them is that we’ve been culturally conditioned to see them. You know, about 45 years ago, I was thinking of asking this cute Jamaican girl to marry me. And I I spent an afternoon with uh with golfing with my pastor up at Rundle Park. I had a question I wanted to ask him. You know, mixed marriages were far less common then than they are today. And I asked him what he thought it would be like for kids growing up in a racially mixed home. What what’s that do to kids? Would it put an overwhelming burden on them? Would they be insecure and unsure of themselves? They face life looking differently than the people around them. His answer to me, I think, was a good and a wise one. He said, “Confidence and a secure identity. They come from upbringing, not color. Many kids grow up in single race homes, but they’re insecure. They’re not very confident. Other children grow up very differently from the kids around them. They’re secure in their identity. They move forward in life with some optimism and confidence. The difference really is how the parents love and work with their kids to help them develop that kind of secure identity. Well, his answer to me seems obvious now. What a good-looking bunch of kids. His answer seems obvious now is a real question I was wrestling with decades ago. My my kids, they’ve all faced challenges along the way in terms of who they are. They’ve all faced racism of a micro variety or some very macro. They’ve had to do a little more work to sort out their identities. What a beautiful thing it is though for us just to be able to relax and enjoy the diversity that God has spread over all his earth. A diversity that really has its roots in the ancient city of Babel. And just briefly before we move on, uh the scattered nations are on a planet. They’re not just difference in appearance and language and culture. They’re also highly diverse spiritually. Some seem very spiritually dark, some of the nations on earth, and some very spiritually receptive. Certainly not not all Christian missionaries have the same experience. The gospel acceptance in a warm nation like Nigeria very different from the gospel resistance in a nation like Japan. You know, at Knox, we’ve supported a Japanese missionary couple for many, many years. It’s one of the toughest fields on earth, maybe the toughest field on earth for the uh for the gospel to gain traction. And how do we account for that? How do we account for all those differences in how the gospel impacts people? We have some hints throughout the Old Testament. Just going to spend a minute on this, but Deuteronomy 32:8 and9 seems to point back to Babel when it says, “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob or Israel, his allotted heritage.” The suggestion made by numerous scholars including guy named Michael Heiser is that the Lord assigned to some of his underlings, those sons of God, administration over various nations. He chose Israel for himself to be his heritage. And some of those administrators didn’t seem to do a very good job of it. In Psalm 82, which we’ve looked at a few times in our study of of of Genesis, we read, “God Elohim, the great, the only almighty God, has taken his place in the divine counsel. And in the midst of the gods, the little little gods, the underlings, he holds judgment.” And why is God holding judgment among these beings? Well, if some of those supernatural beings have become corrupt, they have to be held to account. And the psalm continues with God addressing the council. I said you are gods. You are all sons of the most high, but you will die like mere men. You will fall like every other ruler. Rise up, oh God. Judge the earth, for all the nations are your inheritance. Now, Ephesians 6 tells us that we put on the armor of God because our battle is not against flesh and blood. against powers and principalities and corrupt demonic rulers who are exercising ungodly discipline and or or ungodly influence on earth. And it makes sort of sense of the of some things we read in the book of Daniel where the angel Michael he’s tasked with protecting God’s people Israel. He had to do battle with the prince of Persia and ominous mention is made of the prince of Greece who is to come. Nations in our world have very different spiritual characteristics. And without going any further down that rabbit hole, we shouldn’t rule out supernatural influences over various people groups. Battling principalities and putting on the whole armor of God. That’s part of our calling of what it means to go out and make disciples of all nations. So, we’ve looked at the the problem of Babel and and people who refused to separate from one another and fill the earth. They only wanted to make a name for themselves. We’ve seen God’s gracious gift disguised as punishment. The gift of diversity, the gift of language, gift of nations. Mentioned the tree of life uh in the new Jerusalem whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. What does that healing of the nations look like? You know, in our world today, a kind of rebabilization is occurring. a a reformation of Babel where diversity is being diminished and uniformity is being enforced. In a recent book entitled How to Kill a Language, author Sophia Smith Gayler details the the tragic ramifications of languages that are being lost. She notes that the linguistic wealth of our world is fast disappearing and that in the next hundred years, half the world’s current 7,000 languages will die. Linguists are unanimous. She writes that languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. The UN assembly president has said that one indigenous language disappears every two weeks. A very conservative estimate places the number of all the languages that have ever existed in the world at about 31,000. A more probably realistic middle-of the road estimate puts that figure at about 140,000. She says, ‘In the 22nd century, we’ll be fortunate if we still have 4,000 languages with us. And she speaks of of the heartbreak of a lost language. Uh, leaving one behind is not just some intellectual exercise. A language is the way your parents spoke to you. It’s every memory of your childhood. It roots you to your ethnic identity and values, informing all our life choices. She writes, “Groundbreaking research in Canada from the 1990s and 2000s revealed that communities where indigenous peoples could in the majority hold a conversation in their Aboriginal language experienced low to zero youth suicide rates. In communities where fewer than half could speak their language, suicide rates were six times higher.” That’s a shock, isn’t it? It isn’t surprising really because a language is health. That’s part of the way it it continues. It’s it’s its continuity. And those of us whose first language is English, we’re like the linguistic winners in the world. You know, in access to the internet alone, 49% of the world’s top 10 million websites are in English. Meaning the rest of the world with all their languages, they have to scramble to build content to share the other half of the information and the research and the news and the entertainment and the artificial intelligence and all the stuff on the internet that we take for granted. By quite a large margin, Mandarin has the highest number of native speakers of any language in the world. And some of you speak Mandarin here. Uh, and that’s your heart language. Now, English is the most spoken. And the reason for that is that so many people in the world have had to learn English as a second language. Think what it would be like for the rest of us to leave English behind and learn Mandarin if we wanted a higher education or a better job. If we wanted to go on the internet or enjoy the entertainment of a concert or a movie or a streaming series. Laying down our language would be very humbling for us to have to struggle with vocabulary and verb tenses and gender endings and to not feel very confident in expressing our ideas and our feelings be laying down an enormous part of our identity and our cultural heritage. Many in the world seem forced to do that. For us to be the linguistic winners in the world, others must lose. And Gayler writes that more than half of the world today really just speaks 23 languages of the 7,000 known languages. Most of those 23 languages have become dominant just because of colonial histories and exploitation and various traditions. She says French didn’t accidentally become the official language in 20 countries. It was done through colonization. I think there’s an ominous drum beatat to reestablishing Babel, to migrating toward a single common language. We don’t necessarily get stronger. We become more vulnerable to the very same problems that God protected Babel from. So, how are the nations healed? By the leaves of that tree, the the verse familiar to us, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. You think on the cross Jesus was being scattered. His blood was dripping to the ground and bits of his flogged flesh were blowing off into the wind. And though Jesus was disintegrating, he stayed in place. He received the punishment for all of our disobedience so that his perfect obedience could be transferred to our account. He was scattered so that all the other nations could be reathered. That’s what happened at Pentecost. Jesus doesn’t gather by reducing diversity. He embraces diversity to bring the nations to himself. At Pentecost, Acts chapter 2, through the miracle of the Holy Spirit, people, it says, heard the wonders of God being declared in their own heart languages. And even though many of them would have spoken, maybe all of them would have spoken a second common language of Greek or Aramaic, God tenderly reached out to them in the words of their most intimate heart connection. Just a few hours later, or maybe not even that, Peter spoke a gospel message to them in the language they held in common, maybe Greek or Aramaic. But before that, God was declaring his love of diversity, his passion for people of all nations, just as they are. In John’s great revelation uh 7:9 he says after this I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb. And at the end of the Bible in Revelation chapter 21, we’re given another picture of that beautiful diversity in our salvation destiny. Says, “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty and the Lamb. City has no need of sun or moon to shine on it. For the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. So, we thank God that he thwarted the purposes of the people at Babel. Thank God that he continues to thwart from time to time our own plans and purposes. Thank God that his spirit gives us the resources to dismantle all of our own racial instincts and inclinations. And thank God that he continues to save and make his own people from every tribe and every tongue and every nation. There are some things we can pray about here. And this is just a moment for you to take uh your time with God personally. And something you might want to pray about in the next couple moments is you might want to thank God for any thwarted plans in your life that you suspect may really be his gift to you. Praise God that his armor is sufficient for us to battle even powers and principalities and very dark places. And maybe pray for one nation or people group that’s on your heart for God to open their eyes and turn them to him. Just take a few moments of prayer and then I’ll close us off.