Sermon Tone Analysis

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Cosmic Geography
The divine transgressions we looked at in the previous chapter had something in common.
They were both supernatural rebellions aimed at co-opting God’s plan for humanity and the restoration of his rule.
In this chapter we’ll look at another rebellion, one that originated with people.
This rebellion produced a predicament that we’re all still part of, and that predicament involves supernatural beings.
The titanic struggle for God’s restoration strategy took a turn for the worse that only the return of Jesus will finally resolve.
The Tower of Babel
The story of the Tower of Babel (Gen.
11:1–9) is simultaneously one of the best-known and least-understood accounts in the Bible.
Children learn about it in Sunday school as the time when God confused earth’s human languages.
After the flood, God repeated the command he’d given to Adam and Eve to cover the earth.
He was trying to kick-start the spread of his ruling influence through humanity.
Once again, it didn’t work.
People refused.
Rebellion in their hearts, they had a better idea, or so they thought.
They decided to build a tower to avoid being scattered (Gen.
11:4).
The logic seems odd.
Sure, an amazing tower would make them famous (Gen.
11:4), but how would that prevent scattering across the earth?
The answer lies in the tower.
Bible scholars and archaeologists know ancient Babylon and cities around it built towers called ziggurats.
The purpose of the ziggurats was to provide places where people could meet the gods.
They were part of temple zones.
Rather than make the world like Eden—to spread the knowledge and rule of God everywhere—the people wanted to bring God down at one spot.
That wasn’t God’s plan, and he wasn’t pleased.
Hence his statement—again to the members of his council—“Let us go down and mix up their language” (Gen.
11:7 gnt, emphasis added).
God did so, and humanity was separated and scattered.
The incident explains how the nations listed a chapter earlier in Genesis 10 came to be.
That’s the story most Christians know.
Now for the one they don’t.
The Gods and Their Nations
Genesis 11 isn’t the only passage that describes what happened at the Tower of Babel.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes it this way:
Some Bible translations have “sons of Israel” instead of “sons of God” in that first sentence.
But Israel didn’t exist at the time of the Tower of Babel.
God only called Abraham after Babel (Gen.
12).
“Sons of Israel” can’t be right.
“Sons of God” is the terminology found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest manuscripts of the Bible.
The ESV has it right.
The wording is important.
When God divided up the nations, they were divided among the sons of God.
God allotted the nations to members of his divine council.
This is the Bible’s explanation for why other nations came to worship other gods.
Until Babel, God wanted a relationship with all humanity.
But the rebellion at Babel changed that.
God decided to let members of his divine council govern the other nations.
God had judged humanity.
Even after the flood they would not resume the kingdom plan he had begun in Eden.
So God decided to create a new nation, his “portion” as Deuteronomy 32:9 says—Israel.
He did this, beginning with the call of Abraham, in Genesis 12, the very next chapter after the Tower of Babel story.
God’s allotment of the nations to other gods frames the entire Old Testament.
How?
The rest of the Old Testament is about the God of Israel and his people, the Israelites, in conflict with the gods of the other nations and the people who live in them.
That wasn’t God’s original intention.
Yes, what he did at Babel to the nations was a judgment, but God never intended that the nations would be forever forsaken.
When God made his covenant with Abraham, he made clear that “All the families on earth will be blessed” through Abraham and his offspring (Gen.
12:3 nlt).
God was planning to bring the nations back into his family at some point.
Paul knew all this.
In his sermon to the pagan philosophers in Athens he said:
Acts 17:26-27.
Through Moses, God had warned his own people not to worship “the host of heaven” (Deut.
4:19–20), a label found elsewhere for the members of the divine council (1 Kings 22:19).
Acts 17:26–27 makes it clear that God’s purpose was that somehow the nations would still seek after him.
But the gods who had been set over the nations interfered with this plan in two ways.
We saw earlier in Psalm 82:1 that God had assembled the gods of the council.
The full psalm tells us why.
The gods of the nations had ruled those nations unjustly—in ways that were contrary to the true God’s wishes and principles of justice.
God indicted them as soon as the meeting began: “How long will you hand down unjust decisions by favoring the wicked?”
(Ps.
82:2 nlt).
After hammering them for two more verses on their injustice, the Lord described how the gods had failed to help the nations walking in darkness find the way back to the true God: “But these oppressors know nothing; they are so ignorant!
They wander about in darkness, while the whole world is shaken to the core” (Ps.
82:5 nlt).
Sadly, the Israelites wound up worshipping the gods “not allotted to them” (Deut.
29:26; see also 32:17) instead of seeking the true God.
God’s reaction was swift and harsh (Ps.
82:6–7): “I say, ‘You are gods; you are all children of the Most High.
But you will die like mere mortals and fall like every other ruler’ ” (nlt).
The gods would lose their immortality (Ps.
82:7) and die like men.
We know from other passages that this judgment is something associated with the end times (Isa.
34:1–4).
At the end of Psalm 82, the writer hopes for the day when God will finally reclaim the nations as his inheritance.
As we’ll see later, he’ll get his wish in the New Testament.
The Deuteronomy 32 Worldview
Because of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, geography in the Bible is cosmic.
Ground is either holy, meaning dedicated to Yahweh, or it is the domain of another god.
This worldview is reflected in many places in the Bible.
For instance, in the Old Testament the book of Daniel refers to foreign nations being ruled by divine “princes” (Dan.
10:13, 20–21).
Another example: When David was running from King Saul, he was forced out of Israel into Philistine territory.
In 1 Samuel 26:19, David cried, “They have driven me out from the Lord’s land to a country where I can only worship foreign gods” (gnt).
David wasn’t switching gods.
He also wasn’t denying that God was present everywhere.
But Israel was holy ground, the place that belonged to the true God.
David was stuck in the domain of another god.
My favorite Old Testament story that makes this point is found in 2 Kings 5. Naaman was a captain in the Syrian army.
He was also a leper.
After he followed Elisha’s instructions to wash himself seven times in the Jordan River, he was miraculously healed of leprosy.
Naaman told Elisha, “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel” (5:15).
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