Called by - to Call on - the LORD
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The Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel
Spread out over the Earth
Spread out over the Earth
So let’s look at what happened. In the beginning God created everything and the first people he created was Adam and Eve. After he created Adam and Eve he told them to multiply and spread out over the earth.
28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”
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Later after both humans and creatures had become desperately wicked God decided to start over with just Noah and his family. After He judged the whole world by a flood he told Noah and his sons to multiply and spread out over the earth.
1 God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
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And again in verse seven:
7 But you, be fruitful and multiply; spread out over the earth and multiply on it.”
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After this we read how Noah sinned against God just like Adam showing us that none of us can live perfectly and therefore we all need someone to save us. In the next chapter we are given Noah’s lineage which also served to explain how all of these different nations on earth started. And the last verse of the chapter tells us that Noah’s descendants, which became nations, were spreading out like God had told them to:
32 These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their family records, in their nations. The nations on earth spread out from these after the flood.
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And that is how we are introduced to what happened in a valley in Shinar. Let’s pick up the story there: “The nations on earth spread out from these after the flood.”
1 The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. 2 As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let us make oven-fired bricks.” (They used brick for stone and asphalt for mortar.) 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered throughout the earth.”
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You see, their whole purpose for building this tower with it top in the heavens was to make a name for themselves and stay there in one place. Their goal was to “not” spread throughout the earth. They wanted to stay and multiply there and become a larger more powerful nation than all the other nations on earth who were going to keep on spreading themselves thin. No, the group that settled in the Shinar valley said not us. You can keep spreading out over the earth if you want but not us. No, we are going to stay here and band together, and become strong and powerful, and no one will rival us, we will build a tower for the whole world to see and talk about and the top will be in the heavens and everyone will talk about us and fear us, our name will be the greatest name on earth.
As you can imagine the problem with this is that it was the exact opposite of what God had told them to do, and the exact opposite of what God had planned. The beauty is that God always tells us what He wants and He gives us the choice to go along with Him or rebel against Him, but no matter what we choose, what He has declared is what will happen.
8 So from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 Therefore it is called Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth.
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So That They Might Seek God
So That They Might Seek God
Ok, so that’s the “What.” We know what happened. But what about the “Why?” Why was God so determined that people spread out across the whole earth and form so many different nations? The answer is so that they would seek and find God. You say, what are you talking about? God was right there with them. Wouldn’t it make more sense that if they stayed right there where God was that it would be easier for them to find Him? Let me tell you, God is just as much in Yatesville as he was in Shinar. Your physical distance from the Middle East has no effect on your distance from God. God is right where you are, even if you are on the International Space Station.
Acts 17:26-27 says this:
26 From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. 27 He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
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You see, God in His omniscience knows far better than of us how to run the universe and what will happen as a result of every scenario. He knew that if people stayed where they were and just built bigger and more powerful cities what the outcome would have been. And He also knew if they were forced to spread out over the entire earth what the outcome was going to be. He knew what would have happened if they would have been allowed to stay in that valley and build that tower, and grow their city, and make a name for “themselves” what the outcome for humanity would have been. God even said in verse 6:
6 The Lord said, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
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So I’ll be the first to admit, if Go would not have confused their languages and forced them to spread across the earth then yes, I believe that there would have been cell phones and planes in Jesus’ day, but that’s the whole point. God has always known how the future is going to unfold before He created anything, and He has created the world, and people, and has been constantly intervening in the world in such a way that people all over the world would seek Him in hopes that they would reach out and find him, staying close to each one of them so that when they reached out to Him, like someone who is drowning reaching up for someone to save them, He would be right there and grab ahold of their hand and pull them up to safety, to be with Himself forever. I believe with all my heart, that even though the majority of the people throughout history will ultimately reject God, He has ordered the world in such a way that the most people will realize their need for Him and will reach out to Him to save them.
So what about Abraham?
The Call of Abram
The Call of Abram
A Nation in Relationship with God
A Nation in Relationship with God
God promised that He would turn Abram into a great nation through whom all the nations on earth would be blessed.
1 The Lord said to Abram:
Go out from your land,
your relatives,
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.
2 I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,
and all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.
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We see that all of those nations that God wanted, that He told Noah’s descendents to spread out and form, He wanted them to be blessed through the relationship He was forming with Abram. The nation that would come through Abram, and ultimately the Messiah that would come through Abram, would show the whole world how to be saved. The prophet Isaiah reiterated this:
6 he says,
“It is not enough for you to be my servant
raising up the tribes of Jacob
and restoring the protected ones of Israel.
I will also make you a light for the nations,
to be my salvation to the ends of the earth.”
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On the website Jews for Jesus there is an article titled “A Light to the Nations” Dr. Arthur Glasser, said that in Isaiah chapter 49, God tells the Servant, who is the Messiah, the embodiment of Israel, that
“...to confine his activities to returning the exiles to the land is too small a thing’ (verse 6a). There is a larger task: ‘I will also make You a light to the nations, so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth’ (verse 6b).”
He went on to say:
“Jesus called into being a band of Jewish disciples who submitted to His lordship and instruction. He gave them the task of proclaiming the “good news of the Kingdom of God” to every tribe, tongue and nation. He commissioned them by bestowing a foretaste of His new covenant with Israel predicted in Jeremiah 31:31- 34. He gave them the Holy Spirit to transform their lives and wrote His Law on their hearts. He particularly empowered them for worldwide witness (Acts 1:8). And they obeyed Him to such a degree that the world has never been the same since! Those first thousands of Jewish believers in Jesus became Messiah’s “light to the Gentiles.” They spearheaded a movement of mission into the Middle East and India, North Africa, the Mediterranean world and Europe, and its outgoing momentum remains to this day.”
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From the very beginning God told Abram that all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. The purpose of the nation of Israel was always, and still is, to point all the nations to God, to show them how to be saved and to be reconciled to God. But we are not talking about the nation of Israel by physical lineage. To be born as a descendent of Israel does not mean you are a true Israelite. Paul makes this very clear in Rom 9.
We Are the True Israel
We Are the True Israel
6 Now it is not as though the word of God has failed, because not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.
8 That is, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but the children of the promise are considered to be the offspring.
9 If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. 11 For the Scripture says, Everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame, 12 since there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him. 13 For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
14 How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? 15 And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. 16 But not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed our message? 17 So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.
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We are the continuation of the chosen people that God has called to himself to point all the nations on earth to Him.
We are surrounded by people who will seek God if they are presented with the true gospel and are shown what a real relationship with God looks like
God has placed you here and now as part of His omniscient plan to reach the world.
You say I’m just one person in Yatesville, I can’t reach China or Iran. Two things. One - yes you can, through the internet and through giving to the cooperative program to send Missionaries all over the world, and Two — there are people in China and Iran who know that people in the remotest parts of America need to be saved and they are saying to themselves, I’m just one person in China and I’m just one person in Iran, I can never reach the men and women in Yatesville, and God is saying to us all, I have a plan for that. I have already placed and sent someone there. If you would reach the people I’ve sent you to and if they will reach the people I’ve sent them to, the whole world can be reached. And God has a plan for places that doesn’t have anyone that knows Him and they are called missionaries, there may be some here that God calls to foreign nations and remote villages to take the message of salvation, and we can help fund them because God has placed a burning in their souls that they can’t shake and that they can’t ignore for the lost souls around the world that God is calling to Himself. And God has a plan for the people in your town and that’s you, and He has placed a burning in your soul to reach them.
We are part of the greatest story the world has ever known, and God has devoted a whole chapter in His story to each one of us. He is the author of this amazing story and He has written every page before a single day took place.
16 Your eyes saw me when I was formless;
all my days were written in your book and planned
before a single one of them began.
All of your days are written in God’s book. When your life is over and we are all standing around God and He reads His grand narrative, when He comes to your chapter, what will be written? What story will we all hear? Will it be a story like Job, full of suffering but never cursing God, just eagerly looking forward to see Him face to face? Will it be a story like Enoch and Noah, that you turned from sinning against God and walked with Him every day? Will it be a story like Abraham, who stepped out in faith and left his old life behind to start a new life with God, wanting a relationship with God more than anything else and anyone else in this world? What will your story be like? And if you’re not happy with what has been written up to this point, then I ask you this. What do you want the rest of your story to look like? Remember the story of the two criminals that were crucified with Jesus?
39 Then one of the criminals hanging there began to yell insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
40 But the other answered, rebuking him: “Don’t you even fear God, since you are undergoing the same punishment? 41 We are punished justly, because we’re getting back what we deserve for the things we did, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
43 And he said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
It’s never too late to write a new ending to your story, as long as you are alive. Jesus stood to His feet at Stephen’s stoning. I may not ever do anything to make God stand to his feet but I at the very least want to give God something to smile about while He is writing my chapter. Don’t you?