Genesis. Lesson 6: The Tower of Babel

Transcription

1 As you read through this lesson, take the time to look up the highlighted scripture references in your Bible. This will increase your understanding and help you prove the material for yourself. In our last lesson we learned about the flood that God sent upon the earth and how He protected Noah and his family from it. At the time when Noah lived, the world was filled with wickedness. Almost no one was obeying God and everything that people did and everything they thought was evil. They were so incredibly wicked that God was sorry He had ever created human beings! So He decided to send a flood upon the earth that would end the lives of everyone. Everyone that is, except for Noah and his family! God saved Noah and his family because Noah wasn t wicked like everyone else. Noah was a righteous man, who obeyed God and had faith in Him. So God warned Noah about the coming flood and told him to build an ark to save himself and his family (Hebrews 11:7). God also sent animals of every kind to be saved, so they could repopulate the earth after the flood. Noah and his wife, their sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth) and their wives, and all of the animals spent a year in the ark while the earth was flooded. After God told them they could leave the ark, and they were standing on dry ground again, Noah made an offering to thank God for keeping them safe. Then God promised that He would never send a flood like that again and He put the rainbow in the sky as a sign of that promise. And the Bible tells us that every time there is a rainbow in the sky, God remembers His promise! He will NEVER send another flood so terrible that all life on earth is destroyed (Genesis 9:12-16). Life Goes On Noah and his family then began to rebuild their lives. The first thing they undoubtedly did was have a good look around! Then they had to find an appropriate place to set up their camp, unload all their belongings from the ark, put up their tents, mark out areas to plant crops, and set aside other areas to house the animals cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, etc that had stayed with them when they got off the ark. (The wild animals had all wandered away, of course.) While they were on the ark, Noah and his family had probably discussed how they were going to organise their lives after the flood. But this didn t mean they could now take things easy. Preparing food (with none of the modern conveniences we have today), growing crops, and looking after their livestock would have kept them busy from morning till night, day after day. So it s a good thing there were eight of them to share the load! 1

2 However they didn t stay eight for long. Some time after that, Shem, Ham and Japheth s wives all had babies. So pretty soon there were lots of children running around! The Bible tells us that Shem had five sons, Ham had four sons, and Japheth had seven sons. It doesn t tell us how many daughters they had, because it was usually just the names of the sons that were recorded in those days. But we do know that they must have had some girls too otherwise we wouldn t be here today! When the children grew up, they got married and had children, and when those children grew up, they got married and had children, so before long there were lots of people in the world again. The Bible tells us that ALL of the people on earth whether they are black or white or yellow or red or brown descended from Noah s three sons and their wives (Genesis 9:18-19). It s hard for us to understand how all of the different races that exist today could come from this one family, but God obviously engineered the potential for this within Adam and Eve s DNA and it was then passed down through the generations to bear fruit in Noah s offspring. One of the great things about the people who lived after the flood was that they all spoke the same language. So wherever they travelled they could understand each other! Wouldn t that be wonderful? Some of you may have travelled to countries where people speak a different language and you know how difficult it is to communicate with them. The people who lived after the flood didn t have that problem at least at first! But it wasn t long before something happened to change that. A City is Built Immediately after the flood, Noah and his family lived in the area around the ark. But as the extended family grew larger and larger they would have spread further and further away. Eventually his descendants decided to move completely away from the area. They took their families and livestock, and travelled from place to place until they reached a plain in the land of Shinar (known today as Iraq), where they decided to settle. One of the people who moved to Shinar was Noah s great grandson, Nimrod. His father was Cush, who was the son of Ham. Read what the Bible says about Nimrod in Genesis 10:8-14. Nimrod was a mighty or powerful man on the earth. He became famous because he was a great hunter. Everyone knew about him and they even had a saying about him: Like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. After a while, Nimrod decided to build his own kingdom, with cities that he ruled over. The first city in his kingdom was Babel. 2

3 Before Babel was built, most of Noah s descendants lived in tents because they lived nomadic lives, moving from place to place as they grazed their livestock. But once they settled in Shinar, and weren t going to move around anymore, they could live in permanent dwellings. So they decided to build a city. Read Genesis 11:3 to find out what they built their city out of. They made these bricks out of clay and then burned them in a fire until they were hard. Then they used bitumen as the mortar or cement to hold the bricks together. But they didn t just use these bricks to build houses. They also used them to build an enormous tower, which they planned to make so high that its top would reach into the heavens! 1 The Bible says that they built this tower to make a name for themselves, so they wouldn t be scattered over the face of the earth (Genesis 11:4). They thought the tower would make them famous that it would show people and perhaps even God Himself how GREAT they were! It s also possible that they wanted to use the tower as a kind of fortress to keep them safe from danger. Later on the Bible talks about other cities that were great and fortified up to the heavens, and towers that were used as places of protection and defence (see Deuteronomy 1:28; 9:1; Judges 9:50-53). A Change of Plan As they were building their city, someone very strong and powerful was watching from a distance. That someone was God, of course. And eventually He decided to take a closer look at what they were doing. The Bible says that He came down from heaven specifically to see the city and the colossal tower that they had built (Genesis 11:5-6). (As we continue these lessons, we will discover that God often interacted in the affairs of man in this way.) When God saw how unified the people were, and how well they were working together to build this amazingly high tower, He knew that they would soon be able to achieve ANYTHING they wanted. That might sound like a good thing, but it wasn t. You see, the people in Babel were not living God s way of life, and because of this they would probably end up doing something destructive, which is what people usually do when they are living their own way instead of God s way (Romans 3:10-18). The Bible tells us that the way man thinks and does things eventually leads to death (Proverbs 14:12) and perhaps it wouldn t have been long before the people at that time developed weapons of mass destruction, just as man has today. But God would not have wanted that to happen. As many of you probably know, the Bible tells us that the time is coming when Jesus Christ will return to stop mankind from completely destroying itself and this is all part 1 This means the sky not the heaven where God lives. 3

4 of God s great master plan. BUT, at the time of our story, Jesus hadn t come to this earth as a man yet, so perhaps God had to intervene to stop mankind from reaching this point prematurely. Whatever the reason, God knew it wasn t good for man to be so unified at that time, speaking the same language, and with the ability to do anything they wanted. So He stopped them in their tracks by confusing their language so they couldn t understand each other anymore. You can read about this in Genesis 11:7. Did you notice that God said, let US go down? That might seem strange unless you remember that, in the beginning, the Being that was God consisted of God AND the Word. That s why God refers to Himself as us in this verse. 2 He was not alone. This material was covered in Lessons 1 and 2, where we also learned that God is creating a family that He wants all of us to be a part of one day. 3 Families are important to God, so when He confused the language in Babel He confused the language between DIFFERENT families NOT the language WITHIN families. He did this by making one family speak one language, and another family speak a different language. So parents and children could still understand each other, and so could grandparents and grandchildren, and aunts and uncles and cousins! But they wouldn t have been able to understand some of their friends and neighbours, or the people they worked with. And because they could no longer communicate with each other, work on the city and the tower came to a complete stop. Eventually people began to move away from the city. There was no point in staying together if they couldn t talk to each other or understand each other! So families packed up their belongings and left. Some families went one way and other families went a different way and this is how people ended up living all over the earth (Genesis 11:8-9). No More Confusion Now, if you remember, the reason the people wanted to build that tower in the first place was because they wanted to be famous and they didn t want to be scattered all over the earth. Did they get what they wanted? Read Genesis 11:8-9 to find out. Well, in some ways they did, because most people today have heard of the Tower of Babel, so they are famous! But, on the other hand, they did end up being scattered all over the earth, which is just what they were trying to prevent! 2 See Genesis 1:26 where God uses the same language when He says, Let US make man in OUR image. 3 See, for example, 2 Corinthians 6:18; Ephesians 1:5; Hebrews 2:10-11 and 1 John 3:2. 4

5 Interestingly, the city they were building was called Babel because that s where God confused man s language and the word Babel means confusion! And of course there must have been a lot of confusion after God confused the language! Just imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and discover that you can t understand what all of your friends and neighbours are saying! That s what it was like for the people in Babel. And because of what happened there, we now live in a world where there are lots of different languages and it s difficult for people to understand each other. But it won t always be that way. The Bible hints that one day everybody in the world will speak the same language again. And then it won t matter which country people come from, everyone will be able to understand each other! This will happen after Jesus Christ returns to be King and sets up God s Kingdom on this earth. At that time, God will then give people a pure language so they can call on the name of the Lord and serve Him with one accord (Zephaniah 3:9). 4 This means that everyone will worship God the same way! And they will worship God the same way because Jesus will teach the whole world to obey God and His Laws, and people will be united as they live God s way of life. The world will then become a safe and joyful place as everyone learns to trust in God, the One who is described in the Bible as our high tower (Psalm 144:2, NKJ). Only He can keep us safe from harm and show us the way to real peace and happiness and He loves us more than we can possibly imagine! We ll learn more about just how MUCH He loves us in a future lesson. 5 4 There is a question about whether this scripture means there will be one language or whether it means that languages will be pure. I ve used it in the sense of one language because that s what most translations suggest. Also, the same Hebrew word is used for language in Isaiah 19:18, where in the context of the millennium it refers to one language the Egyptians will speak the language of Canaan. 5 Now would be a good time to read the first two Holy Day Lessons if you haven t already. They begin to touch on the greatness of God s love for us, and contain information about Jesus Christ and His sacrifice that will provide a framework for material that will be introduced in subsequent lessons. 5