As I’ve been preaching lately on the major stories and themes coming out of the early chapters of Genesis – the concepts which get universalized and carried throughout the rest of Scripture – I have arrived at Genesis 11 and the tower of Babel incident.<\/p>\n\n\n
There’s a lot going on here. My major challenge all along with this series is knowing how to narrow my focus.<\/p>\n\n\n
First, there’s the “Table of Nations” stuff in chapter 10 and – if I wanted to run down a rabbit hole – there’s the passage in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 laying out the fascinating possibility that Yahweh disinherits the nations after Babel and hands them off to lesser spiritual beings, turning His focus to creating a new nation which will be His people.<\/p>\n\n\n
Something I hadn’t noticed before: The people are motivated to build the tower so as to “make a name for ourselves”. This and the function of the tower itself – an attempt to connect with heaven in such a way as to bring God down to earth – moves God to action and He scrambles the languages.<\/p>\n\n\n
I think there’s a lot to chew on about the power of language and communication, but what struck me was the “making a name” part. They want to make a name for themselves specifically in hopes that will prevent them from being scattered – which would involve following God’s will!\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But then in Chapter 12, God zeroes in on Abraham – who is descended from Noah’s son, Shem, whose name means “name” – and promises Abraham to “bless him” and “to make his name great”. God doesn’t have an issue with somebody becoming well known – as long as He is in the driver’s seat and the notoriety is for the right reason.<\/p>\n\n\n
And God goes on to say WHY He plans to make Abraham’s name great: “so that you will be a blessing”! (Genesis 12:2)<\/p>\n\n\n
God plans to give notoriety to Abraham – greater notoriety than the builders of the tower could have dreamed of – but not for the sake of Abraham’s ego, but rather to bless the world!\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I’ve been preaching lately on the major stories and themes coming out of the early chapters of Genesis – the concepts which get universalized and carried throughout the rest of Scripture – I have arrived at Genesis 11 and the tower of Babel incident. There’s a lot going on here. My major challenge all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9586,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9585\/revisions\/9586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}