Genesis 10–11

0:00 My first job in ministry, not my first job, but my first job in ministry, was as a youth minister in the town of Southbury, Connecticut. I was a junior in college when the Lord sort of gave me the assignment to go to ministry. It took me about a year to kind of figure that out. But once I did, I took a job as a youth minister. When I showed up for the first day on the job, the senior pastor of the church took me to what was to become my office, which was just a tiny little sort of cubicle in the larger complex of offices in the church. I actually think maybe they just cleaned out a custodial closet for me because there were no windows, there was no real light, nothing that would make one think, wow, I have arrived. This was the beginning of a journey, not the end of it. On the wall of that office, though, was a poster that I looked at over and over and over through the three years or so that I was a youth minister there, and it was a super interesting poster, just kind of visually,

1:00 but also in its meaning. The poster was actually a picture of a sculpture. That's what it was, and it was one of these, you know, supposed to be encouraging posters, right? It had, you know, one big word on it, and then a Bible verse at the bottom of it, but the picture of it was a sculpture, a statue, and what the statue was doing is it was the picture of a man that, clearly a man that was sort of reaching up into the sky, you know, like this, and he was made out of crystal. It was just a beautiful sort of crystal. There was light shining on it, and so it was flashing, and he was sort of reaching up into the sky, and from head to sort of mid-thigh or so, he was made out of crystal. But at the bottom of the statue, there was this nasty grayish black stone that was sort of reaching up the legs of the man and threatening, it looked to me like, to pull him down into its own muck and mire.

1:59 And the picture that I had in my mind, at least, until I looked a little bit more closely at the poster, was that this man, made out of crystal, beautiful and all integrity, this man was being pulled down into the muck and mire of the things of this earth. And that's what I thought the poster was about. Well, one day I decided to look a little bit more closely at it. And when I did, I noticed that at the bottom of the poster, there was a Bible verse that was printed out underneath it. And this is what the Bible verse was.

2:30 It was Romans 8.23. Not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. And I realized when I read that verse on the poster, I realized all of a sudden, oh, this guy that's made out of crystal is not being grabbed and sucked down into the muck and mire of this world. The guy is escaping the muck and mire of this world.

3:04 He's being pulled out of it. And I realized all of a sudden that this was not so much a warning as it was an encouragement. That one day we as Christians are going to escape all of this junk that we find ourselves mired in now. You know, in a lot of ways, it's funny. For all we've been talking about in the book of Genesis, it seems like again and again and again, that is the story. It's God taking a people, humanity, who are stuck in the muck and mire of this world in their sin and rebellion against him.

3:37 And then plucking them out of it. And he has to do it over and over and over again. So there's Adam and Eve, for instance, right, in chapters 1 through 3. Adam and Eve drop the entire human race into this muck and mire of sin and rebellion against God. And it looks like they're completely stuck. But then you get Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, where God says, I'm not going to leave you in this forever. I'm going to send another king who's going to crush the serpent, Adam, just like you ought to have in the first place. I'm going to pull you out of this.

4:10 By the time you get to chapter 6, you've got humanity stuck in it again. And what does God do? He picks one guy and quite literally pulls him up out of the muck and mire of the flood and out of sin and floats him on the ocean, Noah, until the ark finally comes to rest in the mountains of Ararat and humanity gets to start over. Well, today we're going to be looking at another sort of rescue mission that God makes, again, of the human race. See, the lesson is that sin is not a small problem.

4:42 It's a big problem. It's one that goes all the way to the core and all the way to the heart of who we are as human beings. And it's not just a matter of making a moral decision, turning over a new leaf, doing something new for a while. Sin is a radical problem that's going to require a radical solution. And even Genesis chapter 10 and 11 help to teach us that lesson. Take a Bible, if you will, and turn over to Genesis chapter 10 and 11. If you're using one of these red pew Bibles like this, you can find those either in the pew racks in front of you or maybe under the chairs if you're on the sides or up in the balcony.

5:19 And if you'll just turn over to page 7, you'll find there Genesis chapter 10. We're going to be looking at two whole chapters of Genesis, chapter 10 and then chapter 11. Now, just by the way, I know that that wasn't the plan. I know that the plan originally, and some of you, you know, will be kind of bothered by this, just like I was when I'd made the change. But the plan originally was to do chapter 10 today and chapter 11 next week. But I realized as I started looking at this and studying it, that, oh my goodness, you really can't do chapter 10 all by itself.

5:53 Because chapter 10 and 11 are really meant to be one thing. And hopefully through the sermon today, you'll see the structure of that one thing and how it operates in telling the story. But you really can't just do chapter 10. You've got to do 10 and 11. So what we're going to do is 10 and 11 today, and then next week we're actually going to look at the first three verses of Genesis chapter 12. So chapter 12, verses 1 to 3, God's promise to Abraham. And what that's going to function as, I hope, this is what I'm hoping, is that that'll be just a little morsel, a little nugget, a little appetizer for what's going to happen when we come back to Genesis next year, next fall.

6:33 and pick it up and look at Genesis chapter 12. So that's where we're headed. I'm actually, normally we would read all of chapter 10 and all of chapter 11. But if you look down through chapter 10, you're going to see very quickly why I'm going to show you the grace of sparing you a reading of that entire chapter. But I do want you to see the structure of chapters 10 and 11. So let's look at it together.

7:04 If you look down through chapter 10, you can just kind of let your eyes roll over it. It's another genealogy. We've looked at a couple of these already in the book of Genesis. This is another genealogy. And it's a sort of scattershot genealogy if you look at it. It's a list of names, a list of descendants. That's what's good. You're making your way through time with this person, father, this person, father, this person. But it's a little bit of a scattershot, right? So instead of just naming one person, like other genealogies in the Bible does, it'll name several different descendants.

7:34 And then it'll pick up this guy, and it'll name his descendants, and then go back up here and pick up another guy and name all of his descendants. It's a sort of shotgun blast of names of people who actually, if you look at it, become nations that you're going to meet throughout the story of the Old Testament. If you look at the end of chapter 11, starting in verse 10, You'll notice that you have another genealogy starting there, but it's different. It's not a scattershot generation or genealogy.

8:06 It's more of a laser firing, right? It's more like chapter 5 where you have one name fathering, one name fathering, one name fathering, one name. And the focus is extremely tight. There's not a single word that's wasted on this guy's brother or this guy's uncle or whatever it is. There's no narrative in it. It's just straight down the line, and it fires all the way from Shem, the son of Noah, down to Terah, who fathers the next great character in the Bible, Abram, who's going to be renamed Abraham, right?

8:39 So you've got scattershot genealogy in 10, laser-like genealogy at the end of 11, and in this, you know, from 27 to 32, you have a little bit of a story that's beginning the story of Abraham, right? And then right in the center of it, between those two genealogies, you have chapter 11, verses 1 through 9, which is the story of the Tower of Babel. So that's the structure. Genealogy at the beginning, that's more scattershot. Genealogy at the end, that has a more laser-like focus.

9:12 And then the end, a break in the two to tell the story of the Tower of Babel. That's the structure of it, and we're going to talk about all kinds of details in it. But I want you to see the structure of it and what it's doing. And I'm also going to give you the main idea that I hope will sort of unfold and become clearer as we make our way through this. Here's the main idea that these two chapters are trying to teach. We as human beings are unified. We as human beings are unified in our brokenness and rebellion against God.

9:46 We as human beings are unified in our brokenness and rebellion against God. And yet God gives grace. And yet God gives grace. That's the main idea. That's what this chapter, really like many other portions of the story of Genesis, is trying to teach you. We as human beings are unified in our brokenness and rebellion against God. And yet God gives grace. I want to go through this text in three parts, really looking at those three main parts of the text as it's broken up in its structure.

10:18 So first of all, looking at chapter 10, we're going to talk about the fact that we as human beings are one humanity. We are one humanity. Number two, looking at the story of the Tower of Babel, we are one humanity that is united in rebellion. One humanity that is united in rebellion. And then number three, looking at the rest of chapter 11, we are one humanity that is united in rebellion and in need of God's grace. My prayer as we look at this story, as we look at this text today, is that you'll see, maybe anew if you're a Christian, but maybe for the first time if you're not a Christian, just how much in need of God's grace you are and just how willing God is to give it to you.

11:03 That's my prayer this morning. So let's start looking at this text. Point number one, looking at chapter 10, we are one humanity, inescapably one humanity. That's the main message of what is called here in chapter 10, the table of nations. If you let your eyes kind of just wander over it, you'll see what it is. It's a table of names. It's a genealogy, but it sort of goes all over the place. The main divisions of it are that it's tracing out the sons or the descendants of the three sons of Noah.

11:38 You remember when Noah went into the ark, he was allowed to take himself, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. Those three sons, famously, are Shem, Ham, and Japheth. You can see that in verse 1. So chapter 10, verse 1. These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. And this chapter is going to trace out who those sons were. If you look at it, it goes in reverse order of the way those boys are named. So in verse 2, first you get the sons of Japheth.

12:10 In verse 6, then you get the sons of Ham. And then in 21, it turns to Shem. To Shem also, the father of all the children of Abel, the older brother of Japheth. Children were born to him, and then it traces it out. So that's the main sort of division of this table of nations. It's interesting for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons that it's so interesting and that people have noted throughout the centuries is that if you count the nations sort of correctly, if you count the names correctly, what you get are 70 names. Exactly 70 names of people who ultimately became nations.

12:46 That's one of the features of this thing. You've got, for example, names of individuals who became the father of an entire nation. That's a fairly common feature in the Bible. So, for example, when God renames Jacob the patriarch, he renames him to Israel. And then Israel, the name of that individual guy, becomes the name of the entire nation. So that's what you're seeing here in these 70 names. You're basically seeing 70 individuals who become the fathers of all the nations that you're going to see popping up throughout the story of the book of Genesis.

13:19 So you've got to keep that in mind when you read it. If you get confused between, wait, are these nations? Because I see some things like Hittites and Argishites and, you know, termites and all the rest. I see some things that seem really familiar to me from other parts of the Bible. But it seems like it's talking about them as individuals. Well, that's exactly right. It's exactly right. They started as individuals, named a certain thing, and then their descendants became the, you know, Gregites or whatever. You know, that's how the thing works. So it's 70 names. Why 70?

13:50 Well, you know from studying enough of the Bible that numbers are important. And so what you've got there is ten sevens, right? We know from, you know, even the story of creation that seven is a number of completion. And ten is also a number of completion. And so 70 names is to say seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, ten times, right? Or in other words, complete, complete, complete, complete. This is the totality.

14:22 This is the totality. This is the totality. That's what it's saying to you. Interestingly, also, those 70 names are usually broken into sections that are made up of threes or fours or sevens. Now, why is that significant? Well, all of those numbers are significant. Seven, we know, is the number of completeness. Three is also a number of completeness, famously because of the trinity of God, right? The totality of the universe is born up in the trinity of God.

14:57 One God in three persons. So that is completeness. Three is another number of completeness. What's four? The four winds, north, south, east, and west. Four is a number of creation. So what it's saying is it breaks these names up into these groups of three and four and seven. What it's telling you is that this is the whole family of the nations. Let me show you this in a couple of places. So look at verse 2 there. The sons of Japheth, count them.

15:29 Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshach, and Teras. Seven of them. Now probably that doesn't mean that Japheth had seven and only seven sons. That's not what it means. it's just grabbing seven of them that are particularly important and saying, this is the totality. It's a very stylized sort of genealogy. Look at verse 3. The sons of Gomer are Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togermah. That's a three. And then four, the sons of Javan, Elisha, Tarshish, Ketim, and Dodanim.

16:04 Right? Three, a number of completeness. Four, a number of creation. Put them together, and you've got seven grandsons of Japheth. It just happens over and over and over again. You get threes, fours, and sevens. And what you're supposed to take away from that is, okay, for one thing, this is obviously stylized. Like, not everybody in the world has three, four, or seven sons and grandsons. It's just, the world doesn't work like that. It's more complicated than that. But here, pretty much everybody's got three, four, or seven sons and grandsons. And you're supposed to realize, oh, it's stylized. It's making a point.

16:36 And then the next question that's supposed to come to your mind is, okay, well, what point is it making? Well, the numbers that it's using are numbers of completeness and completeness and creation. So what it's saying is that this table of nations is identifying the entire world. It's not just identifying a subsection of humanity. It's not just identifying a piece of humanity where there are other pieces in other places. That's not what's going on. Again and again and again through the numbers, Moses is telling you this is the whole thing.

17:09 It is the whole of humanity. Now, what's that supposed to do in your heart? Well, one thing that it's supposed to do in your heart is that it's supposed to make you realize that you as an individual person, you as an individual human being, are a part of the whole. You are one human being who in yourself as an individual is made in the image of God. But you are also part of a human race. That has been sunk into sin, not as individuals, but as a whole.

17:45 It goes back to what we talked about with Adam, right? When Adam ate that fruit, when he bit into that fruit and rebelled against God and said, God, I don't want your authority over me. He was not just acting for himself. He was acting as the representative of all of us. And so you as an individual are a part of a fallen human race. Yeah, you'll stand before God as an individual. And you'll give an account for your life to God as an individual. But you'll also give an account to God as part of a fallen human race.

18:23 And that's an important perspective for you to keep in mind. You, whatever your name is, whatever your history is, whatever your story is, You are hopelessly a part of this broken, fallen humanity. So when you see on the news or when you see on X or Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is that you look at for your news, and you see human beings perpetrating evil, you know what your response to that ought to be? Part of your response to that ought to be, yeah, to identify the evil and say, that's evil, right?

18:59 That's wrong. That oppression should not be happening. That war should not be happening. That aggression should not be happening. Those abortions should not be happening. That's evil. But another part of you ought to grieve because you ought to recognize that I am part of this. And as much as that group over there or that group over there might be sunk in sin, I'm part of them. I'm a human being right along with them, hopelessly a part of this broken, fallen humanity.

19:34 70 nations, complete, complete, complete. But you know what else is true of that? Those are 70 nations, the completeness of humanity, to whom God offers grace. do you remember in the gospels when jesus finally decides to let his disciples go out into the world and proclaim his him as king proclaim him as as messiah do you remember how many of his disciples he sends out to the nations of the world 70 one for each one of the nations of the complete totality of humanity Friends, it is a glorious gift of God that when Jesus sends out witnesses to his greatness and his salvation, he does not send 67 or 68 witnesses to the nations.

20:39 He sends 70. Because this invitation to come to Christ is open to every single nation in the world. Every single individual in the world. It's open arms. in an open hand, to come to the king and find salvation. You know, sometimes Christianity gets dinged, insulted, mocks, however you want to say it. Christianity sometimes gets dinged for being exclusive, for saying that it's only for a certain subset of humanity.

21:14 It's for a very narrow slice of people, but not for the vast majority of humanity. But what I want you to see, at least in part here, is that that's not true, not in the least. The offer of salvation is open to every single person who has ever lived on the face of the earth. Jesus has his arms wide open, even in the sending of 70 witnesses to 70 nations. You know, I've noticed over the last week or so that it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here.

21:48 Much to my chagrin, I always find that Christmas comes too early and outstays its welcome, at least as I'm concerned. as far as I'm concerned, because by the time Christmas actually gets here, I'm pretty sick of it by the time it gets here. I just, you know, the day itself is great, but when we're still celebrating Christmas into, you know, the first week of January or something like that, I'm just like, enough. It is enough Christmas. And so most of the time, I want to wait until like December, oh, 19th or so to start decorating for Christmas and celebrating Christmas. One of the things I do like about the Christmas season, though, and some of you have heard me say this before. One of the things I do like about it is free coffee day at Starbucks, which happens usually once a year. I think they've done it pretty much every year that I've been here, but basically the idea is that if you will go to a Starbucks here in Louisville on a particular day between the hours of whatever and whatever, they will give you a free cup of coffee, eight ounces, which would normally be $7.95, but on that particular day, it's free.

22:53 And people will line up around the block to get their free coffee. And you know what's kind of glorious about it, besides just the fact that you're getting something free? It's that that invitation to come and get free coffee is wide open. They don't discriminate against anybody. You can come and get a free cup of coffee if you're young, if you're old, if you're American, if you're not American. It doesn't matter. If you'll come to Starbucks and say, hey, can I get my free coffee, please?

23:28 They'll give it to you. They don't even keep a record. And if you have the patience, you can go through the line several different times and turn that, you know, 8-ounce coffee into a 24. You've got to have a lot of patience for that, though. Here's the thing, though. I have never, in all the years of observing free coffee day at Starbucks, I have never once noticed anybody accusing Starbucks of being exclusive because you can't go to Jimmy John's to get your coffee.

24:00 You know what I'm saying? You can't go to Jimmy John's or Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken and say, Hey, guess what, Jimmy John's? It's free coffee day at Starbucks. Give me my coffee. That's not how it works. The offer, for that matter, you can't stay at home and call Starbucks and say, hey, I'd like to have my coffee delivered to me on my terms. That's not how it works. The coffee is being offered by Starbucks. And so you have to go to Starbucks to get the free coffee. And nobody accuses them of being exclusive.

24:33 You can see a mile away, the parallel I'm drawing here, right? The offer of grace and salvation comes from Jesus. And you have to go to Jesus to get the grace. Christianity is not exclusive. Christianity is open and welcoming, 70 witnesses to 70 nations. But you got to go to the king to get the salvation. You got to go to Jesus to get his grace.

25:09 Let's look at it some more. We've already said in chapter 10 there that the genealogy goes through the sons of Noah, kind of in reverse order, Japheth, and then Ham, and then Shem. If you look at verse 5 there, there are certain little details that the text draws attention to here and there. So verse 5 is one of those. So after it lists out the sons and grandsons of Japheth, it says there in verse 5, From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans in their nations. If you spend a lot of time in the prophets, so for example, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, that word coastlands becomes very important, right?

25:45 Because the coastlands, at least as the prophets and the Israelites thought about it, were the places that were the most far away, right? They were on the edge of humanity. They're on the edge of the ocean. They're like almost tipping off into the waters of the ocean. They are so far away. And yet in the prophets, when the Messiah comes and God sets the world to rights, Even those people on the coastlands who are the farthest away get brought back into the center in Jerusalem. So even right here, before you even kind of know what's going on, you're being introduced in verse 5 to those who are most far away.

26:20 And the message is going to be that salvation comes even to them. Look also at verses 8 through 12. This is in the middle of the genealogy having to do with Ham. And in verse 8, you get this little narrative about a guy named Nimrod. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. Or it may just say, he began to be a mighty man on earth. The Hebrew is a little bit hard to translate there. Cush fathered Nimrod. He began to be a mighty man on earth.

26:52 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. And therefore it is said, like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Akkad, and Kalneh in the land of Shinar. And from that land, he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Kala, and Rezim between Nineveh and Kala. That is the great city. What's that doing there? And why do you get all this detail, as much as it is, about this guy Nimrod? Why is that there? Well, most importantly, what that's doing is giving you a little flash introduction to the idea of Babylon.

27:30 It's giving you just a little bit of history of the city of Babylon. You see that in verse 9? He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore, it said, like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel. Babel becomes Babylon in the story. It's giving you just a little bit of a flash of this guy who conquered the city of Babylon and began it as a great empire. Why is it mentioned that he's a hunter? Well, the answer is nobody exactly knows.

28:03 The fact is probably just that he was, in fact, a hunter. And so it gets mentioned that way. He was a famous man, a ruler of many, many cities, and he was known as one who hunts. There have been attempts throughout history to make that word hunter mean something else, like to make it mean tyrant or ruler or despot or something like that. But it doesn't work like that. Some people have even suggested that, well, maybe it's talking about the fact that he was a hunter not of animals but of people, right? He was a tyrant in that way. But none of that quite works. If you look through the Old Testament, the word that's used there is just a normal word for hunter.

28:36 It means someone who goes out and kills animals for food. That's what it means. That's interesting, isn't it? Because when it's describing the fact that Nimrod was a mighty hunter, it uses two times the phrase that he was a hunter before the Lord. A great skill that is done before the Lord. And there's no irony there. But the text doesn't give any side eye at all to the fact that Nimrod was a great hunter. It just appreciates that skill that he has and recognizes that he did that skill in the face of the Lord, before the eyes of the Lord.

29:16 Has God given you skill in any way? Maybe you're a skilled hunter. Maybe you're a skilled coder. Maybe you're a skilled attorney. I don't know, a skilled doctor. What do you do that you're skilled at? I have two things to say to you about that. Number one, if God has given you some skill and allowed you to use it, recognize that you do that work before the Lord. You do it for him, for his glory. It's like what Paul says to us in Ephesians and Colossians.

29:48 Everything that you do, do it for the glory of the Lord. Do it knowing that you're not doing it just for men or just for other people, but you're doing it before him and as unto him. That's the first thing I want you to see. The second thing I want you to see is that Nimrod's skill as a hunter, even though he did it before the Lord, did not keep him from falling into evil. His skill, even though he did it before the Lord, did not keep him from falling into evil.

30:21 He founded the city of Babylon, which becomes literally the symbol of evil in the world and rebellion against God throughout the whole rest of the story of the Bible. Friend, whatever skill God has given you, whatever work he's given you to do, do it as unto him. Do it before him, but do it with great humility. Knowing that with a whisper, with just a change in the direction of the wind, any skill you have could wind up being used for evil.

30:54 Pray that that wouldn't happen to you as it did to Nimrod. Look down now at verse 21. Shem there in 21 is the youngest son of, or the oldest son, sorry, of Noah. He's listed last because that's the way biblical genealogies work. You sort of dispense with, you know, the ones that are not going any further. And then at the very end of the genealogy, you grab the one that is going forward and you push it forward into the next stage.

31:26 So because the line of promise, because the line of the Messiah goes through Shem, even though he's the oldest, he's saved to the end. You get here in verse 21, 22, 23, you get a critical break in the progression of the story here. So first thing to note is that in 21, you've got this guy named Eber. Why is Eber singled out there? I mean, he shows up a couple of times more in the genealogy, but he doesn't do anything in particular, and yet he's singled out. He's the father of all the children of Eber. Why is that there? Well, it's probably, the only reason is probably because Eber is the name that ultimately became Hebrew, right?

32:02 And so the nation of Israel was known as the Hebrews, and so they looked back to their father Eber, right? And they saw him as a significant patriarch in their history, and so he's named here. Look at verse 25. To this guy Eber were born two sons. The name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided. And his brother's name was Joktan. Now, look what happens in verse 26. Joktan fathered Almodad, Shelef, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

32:38 Verse 30, the territory in which they lived extended from Mesha in the direction of Sefer to the hill country of the east. These are the sons of She... Well, wait, what happened to Peleg? There were two sons of Eber. 25. To Eber were born two sons. One was Peleg. The other one was Joktan. Jocton did all this stuff, and then 31 just brings it to an end with no further mention of Peleg. What happened? What happened? Well, that's the point that's going to get unfolded through the rest of chapter 11.

33:11 You can see the wrap-up of all that. Hold that in your mind. What happened to Peleg? That's a big question. But you can see the wrap-up in 32. These are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. What's the point? What's the point? The point with all the sevens and threes and fours and tens and all of it is that none of us escapes the catastrophe of humanity's rebellion against God. We are all wrapped up in it.

33:47 Friends, it's critical. It's critical for you to understand that you are a part of a fallen humanity to whom God offers grace. This is part of the reason, by the way, why God doesn't just save us as individuals and pluck us up to heaven. It's why he saves us as individuals, but then he puts us together in churches like this one. We fell together as human beings, and we are going to make our way to heaven together.

34:18 not just as individuals, but as a community of people who are believing in Christ. You need to understand that you're a part of a broken, fallen humanity, and you have been offered grace as part of a new nation that's centered on and united by Jesus Christ. Here's number two, just thinking more about the fact that we are united in rebellion against God. We're a single, fallen, broken humanity.

34:53 And chapter 11 teaches us that we are united in rebellion. So chapter 11 opens with this famous story of the Tower of Babel. And we're going to read that. That's going to be the one part of the text that we're going to read at some length. But before we read it, you've got to see kind of how the story of Babel fits into the larger story. Or else it's just going to seem sort of disjointed. It's going to seem like it's broken off from the rest of the story. Just a parenthesis. It's not really going to fit unless you see it. So think back to the bigger structure of chapters 10 and 11. Do you see how this Tower of Babel story is surrounded by two genealogies?

35:28 You see that, right? You've got the scattershot one in chapter 10, and then you've got this more laser-like one in chapter 11, verses 10, and on toward the end. So why is the story of the Tower of Babel in the middle of those two genealogies? Well, it has to do with the two sons of Eber, Joktan and Pelek. Remember the question, what happened to Pelek? Back in 1025, you had humanity breaking into two different lines, Joktan and Pelek.

36:00 Now, the rest of chapter 10 followed Joktan, and the story is telling you that this is his end. The line of Jokton ends at the story of the Tower of Babel. Let me show you the connection there. Look at that phrase in 11.2. The whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, it's really eastward. It's a funny word that can mean from the east to the east, eastward out of the east.

36:35 It can mean all kinds of things having to do with the east. But this is probably meaning more as they migrated to the east. So people are moving eastward. And look up at verse 30 when it's talking about the people of Joktan. The territory in which they lived extended from Mishan in the direction of Seafar to the hill country of the east. Joktan's people moved east. The people who built Babel moved east. That's the connection. Which is a fascinating little thing, right?

37:05 because all throughout the story of Genesis, I don't know if you've noticed it yet, but to move eastward is to move away from blessing. So when Adam and Eve are put out of the garden, they're put out to the east. When Cain goes to build a city that's going to find itself in rebellion against God, he moves to the east. And now the sons of Jokhton, who are going to find their end rebelling against God by trying to build a tower into the heavens, they have moved to the hill country of the east.

37:36 Well, let's read the story and see what happens. Chapter 11, verse 1. Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated eastward, probably, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth and the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built and the Lord said, behold, they are one people and they have all one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do and nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech so the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth and they left off building the city and therefore its name was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth

38:37 and from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. It's a fascinating story, right? Several different details here that are really important. Do you see all those words when the people are talking to themselves? How many different times they say come? Come, let us make bricks. Come, let us build a tower. Come, let us do this so that we won't be dispersed. You see how many times they say that? It's like two or three times in there that they say, come, come. That's supposed to give you a sense of just frenetic activity. Really not even thinking because literally the word is let's go.

39:10 And so throughout the story you have let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. They're in a hurry, right? It's just frenetic, undirected activity. Let's try this and let's try that and let's do this and let's make a name for ourselves, right? Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. The mention of the bricks there is another thing that gives you the sense that they're just in a hurry, right? And they're not even really thinking well because bricks famously were not suited to build high things. They just weren't strong enough. The weight of the tower itself, if you built them too high, it would crush these sort of fabricated bricks.

39:43 If you want to build something that's tall and big and heavy, you got to use stone. Bricks are fast, but they can't be used to build big things. And so it just gives you a sense of absurdity of what's going on here. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Get some weak building materials and let's use this stuff that's going to get crushed under its own weight to build a tower into the heavens. You're like, it's not going to work. It's just not going to work. And it's absurd right from the beginning. And yet, what drove them to want to do that?

40:14 What drove them into that frenzy of absurdity? Well, verse 4, come, let's go. Let's build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves. Let's make a name for ourselves. Friends, that is always, always a prime driver in human activity, isn't it?

40:49 Let me make a name for myself. And yet Ecclesiastes teaches us that no matter how hard you strive for that, no matter how hard you try to be remembered, life is a vapor. It's a wisp of smoke. And within just a few years, every single one of us and all of our accomplishments are going to be blown away.

41:25 You know the poem Ozymandias? You ever heard that? I love it. It's just a monument to humanity's wispiness. Here's what it says. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

42:02 You see, the image, it's a statue, a broken statue. And on the pedestal, the broken pedestal in which these trunkless legs stand and this face over in the dirt, on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. And then the poem goes on and says, Nothing else remains. Round the wreck, round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

42:51 Oh, friends, for all of our vain glory, for all of our self-glory, that's what awaits all of us. The lone and level sand stretching far away. You know, the next time it's mentioned that someone is going to have a name made for them. You know, the next time in the Bible that's said, well, it's Genesis chapter 12. Where God says very pointedly to Abraham, Abraham, you're not going to make a name for yourself like the people of the Tower of Babel tried and failed to do.

43:31 But I am going to make a name for you. Friend, in a lot of ways, that's the great question of humanity. That's the great question that we face as humans. Who's going to make your name? Who's going to make your name for you? Are you going to spend the years of this life, 70, 80 years, however long you've got, striving and struggling to make a name for yourself that is eventually just going to fall into the sands? Are you going to come to the Lord who made you and let him make a name for you?

44:12 I love that image in Revelation when Jesus says that for every individual who comes to him in faith, At the last day, he's going to give them a white stone that has a name written on it that's known only to the believer in Jesus. An intimate secret between you as a believer and Jesus is the name that he makes for you. And friends, don't you want to go that way? Don't you want God to make a name for you rather than you striving your whole life to make a name for yourself just to see it wiped away?

44:46 Which way are you going to go? Well, the people in Babel tried to make a name for themselves, and the result is, again, what we've called a couple of different times, talionic justice, lex talionis, the law of equals, right? That you basically get exactly what you deserve. That's what talionic justice is. The people in Babel get exactly what they deserve. So in verse 5, you get more of this, what we call anthropomorphic language. So anthropos is the Greek word for human. So certain human traits are sometimes in narrative, especially in Genesis, attributed to God.

45:21 So he comes down to look and see. That's speaking of God as if he's a man. So he comes down to see the tower which the children of man have built. And then look what he does. The Lord said, Behold, they're one people. They have all one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Is God threatened there? Is he feeling threatened there in verse 6? like, oh my goodness, they actually are going to build, if I don't stop them, they are going to build a tower up into heaven and they might kick me off my throne. Nothing will be impossible. No, the whole story is set up to show you the absurdity of it. This is God looking out for human beings again. It's akin to Jesus saying in the book of Luke, if they do these things when the wood is green, what are they going to do when the wood is dry? Like if they're able to do this in their frenetic activity, if this is where their hearts go, then what's going to happen as they mature and as they grow and as they spread across the face of the earth, their evil is just going to go lower and lower and lower and lower.

46:21 So let's stop it now. Just like the flood. It's God again holding back the worst effects of rebellion. Well, then he confuses the speech of the whole world there, scatters them across the face of the earth. It's the very thing they were working to prevent, right? They wanted to build a tower. They wanted to make a name for themselves, to stay together, unified. And the Talionic justice that they get is to be scattered over the world with all these different lives. It's a sad moment.

46:53 It's a sad moment in the history of humanity. And honestly, it's a result that we as human beings have been working against ever since. We as human beings have been constantly working against division, against disunity, against conflict, against warfare ever since this moment. Much of what we do as humans is work against that. But here's the great promise of the gospel. The great promise of the gospel is that ultimately all that division, all that disunity, all that conflict and warfare is ultimately going to be brought to an end.

47:26 The book of Revelation says that there will be people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation who are united before God's throne worshiping one King, Jesus. It started at Pentecost, right? when one gospel was proclaimed in many languages. Zephaniah tells us that at the end, at that time, God says, I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure single speech that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord.

48:07 Friends, does division and disunity in the world bother you? Does it break your heart to see human beings turned against each other? Do you know what the cure for that is? Do you know what the only cure for that is? It's the one gospel of Jesus Christ. It's people who are at odds across all kinds of dividing walls of hostility being brought together to worship and serve a single king. That's what will bring unity. That's what will bring an end to division.

48:41 Here's the third point, finally. We are a united humanity, single humanity, united in rebellion, and also in need of grace. Well, kind of surprisingly, after the story of Babel, starting in 1110, we go back to another genealogy that traces the descendants of Shem. We've already done that in chapter 10, right? At least half of it, Joktan, that ends in Babel. And now we get the other side of it. We ask the question, what happened to Peleg, right? What happened to this other son of Shem, son of Eber?

49:14 What happened to him? Well, this is where it ends. This is a different kind of genealogy if you look at it. It's not scattershot at all. You don't get multiple sons, multiple grandsons, multiple great grandsons. That's not how it works. This is a laser. It's tracing the line of the promise. It's tracing one right after the other, the line that's going to lead to Jesus. And it almost has this kind of impatience to it, right? Where in chapter 10, you can kind of look at these people, look at those people, look at those people. Oh, and here's a story about Nimrod.

49:46 No, this one has none of that. There's no wandering around. This is just a laser-like focus as fast as possible getting from Shem to Abraham. If you look at it, it's very similar to chapter 5, the genealogy there, which ran from Adam to Noah over 10 generations. This one runs from Noah's son Shem to Abraham, also over 10 generations. That's important. A couple of things to notice here if you look down through there. For one thing, just notice that there are shortening lifespans throughout this.

50:19 The lives are getting shorter just like God said they would back in chapter 9 or 6, sorry. Also, notice that in both chapter 5 and here, basically what's happening is that these genealogies are plotting an escape for humanity out of catastrophe. You see that? So in chapter 4 and 5, the way the genealogy in chapter 5 works is that you have Cain's line that's traced out, right? And it ends in catastrophe at the end of chapter 4.

50:51 But then you've got this escape route that's planned through Cain's brother Seth and it shoots out into the future and makes its way to Noah. It's a kind of escape pod shooting out from the ship that's self-destructing. Same thing here in chapter 11. You have the line of Jokton that ends in the catastrophe of Babel and then chapter 11 comes in and says, and yet there's an escape because the line of Peleg goes a different way. The line of Peleg goes toward redemption and the giving of the promises to Abraham.

51:25 You see the point here, right? Over and over again in this book, what we have seen is that there are, for human beings, two paths laid out over and over and over again. Two different paths. One path that leads to destruction and one path that leads to grace and salvation. The same exact thing happens when you are confronted with the claims of Jesus. You come to a fork in the road and you're either going to take the path of rejecting Jesus, Which is to say, I'm headed down the road to destruction. Or you're going to take the path of accepting, receiving, trusting Jesus.

51:59 Acknowledging him for who he is and trusting him to save you. And you're going to be on the path to redemption and salvation. Friends, a lot of you are at that point right now. You've been confronted with the claims of Jesus and now you're standing at a fork in the road. And the question is being put to you, which way are you going to go? You're going to go like those human beings that came from Jaxun who wound up in the destruction of Babel? Or are you going to go the way of the promise? Are you going to receive God's promises in Christ and be saved? There are a lot of you at that point right now.

52:35 And friend, my plea to you would be do not turn down the way of destruction. It's wide. It's straight. It's beautiful and it looks easy. And this way of redemption and salvation looks narrow and winding and hard. But go that way. Because that ends in glory. And this ends in destruction. Come to Jesus.

53:08 The whole thing ends with this little narrative in 27 to 32. We finally reach the next stage of the story, which will unfold starting in chapter 12 and focus on Abraham. This little narrative tells the story about how Terah, who was the father of Abram, who becomes Abraham, how he and his family all picked up their stuff from Ur of the Chaldeans. It's like the area of Babel is where it is. It's where they lived, Babylon. And they headed off back toward the west, actually. So back toward blessing. And they settled in a place called Haran.

53:40 Now, what's interesting about this is that when Abraham and his family leave Ur of the Chaldeans, which is Babylon, according to several other places in the Bible, Abraham had already received the call of God. He'd already received it. He didn't apparently tell anybody about it, that God had called him to make his way back west, but he'd already received it. It was there. In the midst of all the catastrophe, all the destruction, all the sin, And God whispered to Abraham, pick up your stuff and go west.

54:13 And Abraham did. It wasn't much. Not at this point. This is still very much in Abraham's heart. It doesn't come out until chapter 12, which we'll talk about a little bit next week. It's just a little flash of hope, a little flash of light. And that's how God works. Over and over again, that's how he works. In Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, it's just a flash of light. I'm going to send somebody else. When Jesus is born, it's just a little flash of light. He's born not in a palace, but in a stable.

54:45 It always starts that way. But ultimately, God's promise becomes a rushing river of hope and joy and salvation. Look, you may not think very much about this day right here and right now. You may not think very much even about me calling you to salvation in Jesus Christ. It may seem like a very small thing to you. Yeah, friend, you need to recognize that that's how God works you may have walked in here today thinking I'm just going to get through this service and then I'm going to go eat lunch and I'm going to watch football and this day will just sink into the sea and ocean of all the other days of my life I will forget it wouldn't it be glorious friend if this day if this day was the one 50 years from now you look back on and say that's the day God saved me I never expected it but that's the day God saved me God always, always starts small, but he ends gigantic.

55:47 Let's pray. Our Lord God, we praise you and we thank you for the fact that you are a God who, even though we as human beings have sunk ourselves as individuals and as a human race into the catastrophe of sin and the evil of rebellion against you, yet you always show grace. And even now, oh God, you offer us grace in your son, Jesus Christ. Father, we pray that all of us, all of us would know the goodness of coming to you and knowing your mercy and your salvation in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ.

56:25 We pray all of that in his name and always to his glory. Amen. Thank you.