God’s Heart for the Nations
August 8, 2021
Preached by Ben Bechtel
Scripture Reading
Genesis 11:1-9, 11:27-12:3
11:1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 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.4 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.” 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 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 will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth…
27 Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. 28 Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29 And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. 30 Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
31 Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.
12:1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
As people, we all have our own individual hobbies, interests, and passions. Have you ever stopped to wonder where those interests and desires come from? I’m sure there are many answers we could give to this question, but one prominent way in which we catch a love for something is seeing someone else love that thing first. For example, my love for the outdoors came from watching my wife love it first. As I saw her heart for hiking and kayaking and rock climbing my heart began to grow for those things too.
This week we are beginning a new sermon series entitled Joy to the World: God’s Heart for the Nations. Our hope in this sermon series is that precisely this dynamic would occur in our church body. We are going to open the Scriptures over the next five weeks to explore something that is near to God’s heart: the people of this world spread across the globe. As we gaze into the heart of God for the nations, I pray that our hearts would grow to love what God loves, and that our lives would resound with a desire to see others come to know Jesus.
We are going to begin this study near the beginning of the Bible in Genesis 11-12, where the love of God for the nations begins to spill off the pages of Scripture.
1. The Scattering of the Nations (11:1-9)
We cannot begin to rightly understand Genesis 11 unless we see it in the grand story of Genesis 1-11. The first 11 chapters of the Bible tell the story of God and humanity. God created all things good and in Genesis 1:26-28 we see that God created human beings as the crown of creation, people made in his very image. God gives his blessing to human beings and commissions them to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the world with more worshippers of him. Adam and Eve were to multiply and fill the earth, acting as king and queen under the ultimate authority of God. However, in Genesis 3, the couple takes matters into their own hands. They rebel against God, believing that they ought to have the right to rule their own lives on their own terms. As a result, they are exiled from God’s presence, and rather than being blessed in the presence of God they discover the curse of being exiled from him.
Genesis 3-11 is one big movement away from God. That is why in verse 2 it mentions that the people came from the east, or eastward. This signifies in the story that they were moving away from God’s presence. Sinful humanity is relentlessly running from their Lord. And this lot of humanity, all of whom spoke the same language, settle down and begin to build a city and a tower. Now, when we read the word tower, we ought not to think of the Empire State Building or some other skyscraper. Rather, we ought to picture an ancient temple. Their intention is clear in building this temple, they want to reach to the clouds. They want to make a name for themselves. To cast it in the language of the story of Adam and Eve, they wanted to become like God.
This temple tower was a monument to their own self-reliance, their own ability to govern reality on their own terms. It is the same tower we seek to add bricks to when we throw every ounce of time into our careers or seek to live by our children’s accomplishment. It is the same tower our society seeks to build when we pride ourselves in technological advances for the sake of progress or valuing financial gain at all costs. We are all Babylonians at heart.[1]
How does God respond to our prideful pursuits? Look at verses 5-6:
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 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 will now be impossible for them.
One way to look at this whole story, is to view it as a satire mocking the futility of our human achievements. “The Lord came down.” Our tower that was supposed to reach up to heaven and shout our own ability to live without God isn’t even big enough for God to see without coming down, without getting out his divine microscope. God looks at the tower and says, “that’s cute.” But in another sense, God comes down and sees the severity of the situation. There is nothing these humans can’t do if they put their collective mind to it. God isn’t threatened by this, but he is concerned for the destruction this would render to humanity.
So, God intervenes. You see, just like in Genesis 3 when God prevents Adam and Eve from eating of the tree of life after they had fallen into sin and condemning them to an eternally sinful state, God prevents these people from doing all they could set their mind to. Thus, he scatters them in judgment, yes, but also in mercy. He wants to preserve humanity from this fate, and so he intervenes in judgment.
Then the final proclamation upon this city resounds in verse 9. Babylon, according to the word’s etymology, meant gate of the gods, which is how the Babylonians understood their city. However, God here says that Babel or Babylon means confusion. All of our efforts to become like God, all of our human efforts to throw off God and rule our own lives, merely end in confusion and chaos.
This story is teaching us the truth about our human condition. Even if we all were to be united into one people, with a common language, and even if we did learn to coexist, our common objective would be to throw off God and rule autonomously, defining good and evil for ourselves. So, this section ends with humanity exiled and scattered from the garden, from life with God. This is where all human sin and idolatry, all of our attempts to define good and evil in order to make our name great, gets us. The question is where do we go from here? Are God’s purposes for humanity over? Is this the final word?
2. The Blessing to the Nations (11:27-12:3)
After the curse and exile of Babel, the Lord does speak again, and his word brings blessing (12:1-3):
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
God proclaims his blessing into the exile and confusion of the nations. From these many nations he chooses one man, a new representative like Adam, whom he will bless.
You may have thought it a little strange that we read the end of chapter 11 along with God’s calling of Abram before the sermon. Why all those names and places? Those names and places reveal something crucial about who Abram was and the nature of God’s blessing. From these verses we discover Abram’s father’s name is Terah. Terah likely means moon and both Ur and Haran were centers of lunar worship in the ancient world. This means that Abram comes from a family of idolators. Abram was not the cream of the crop, he was not called and blessed by God because of his devotion and upright character. Abram, although scattered from Babylon, himself had a Babylonian heart. Yet, God chose to meet him and call him out into fellowship with himself. God doesn’t call qualified people who have it all together; he qualifies those whom he calls.[2] He is a God of grace.
God makes these lofty promises to him which are staggering in their scope. Ultimately, the end of verse 2 reveals to us why God will bless Abram with a family and land. God will bless Abram so that others can be blessed in him. And who are these others who will be blessed in Abram? As verse 3 says, the families of the earth. In other words, the very people scattered by God at Babylon, through this one man, God wants to bring back into the sphere of his blessing. This should come as no surprise to us. This was his heart from the very beginning in Genesis 1, for humanity to live in relationship with him, be blessed, and spread out becoming a blessing to the world. God’s heart is that people trapped in the destructive devices of Babylon, people condemned to try to play god, people lost and scattered, would be brought back into the sphere of his blessing through Abram.
Just like Abram, we as the church of Jesus Christ are called to go and be a blessing. We are called into this plan of God to reach the nations with the gospel. We are called to share in the same heartbeat of God that the nations scattered across the earth would come out of the curse of Babylon into fellowship with God as members of the family of Abraham. This sounds wonderful! What a gracious God and what a grand plan! But what did this plan mean for Abram’s life? What did the call of God upon him to go and be a blessing to the nations actually entail for his everyday existence? And what does this mean for our lives? It required two things of him and two things of us: getting out of his comfort zone and faith in God even in the unknown.
a. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Would you look at verse 1 with me again?
1 Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.
Now, this should speak clearly to us in central PA, who on average live eight miles away from our mothers. What is God calling Abram out of? He is calling him out of his place of comfort. And in the Hebrew, that word “go” is actually two words, emphasizing Abram’s own agency in the matter. Essentially the text is saying, even if none of your family follows you, follow me. This sounds similar to Jesus’s radical calls to count the cost and follow him.
Church, the call of God for us to go is one that requires we leave behind our comfort. If we hear and respond to the gracious call of God it means that unlike the residents of Babylon, we cease trying to play God in our lives. Following Jesus means that anything Jesus wants from us, he can have. If God saves us by grace, if we don’t contribute anything to God’s choosing of us (like Abram didn’t) he can ask anything of us. Where might Jesus be calling you out of comfort into sacrificial service for his goal of seeing the nations blessed? Might you be called into full-time missionary service? Might you be called to give sacrificially, so that it hurts, to see the gospel spread? Might you be called to move not to another country but to another neighborhood to make Jesus known? Maybe for you today it’s that first step of obedience, to share the good news of Jesus with your neighbor which you have been putting off for a while or to give up a few minutes of your time and lead your family in prayer for the missionaries this church supports. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are not blessed in Christ to live comfortable, insulated lives. We are blessed to go.
b. Faith in God Even in the Unknown
Did you notice the lunacy of how some of these promises likely sounded to Abram? Look at verse 1. God says he will give Abram the land that he will show him. Abram doesn’t even know what this land looks like! He hasn’t even seen it with his own eyes. God, you seriously want me to drop everything and move to a land I haven’t even seen? Look at verse 2. How will God make of Abram a great nation when it says in 11:30 with great emphasis that his wife Sarai is barren, and they are past child-bearing years? Yet, Abram and Sarai follow the call and go. They had faith in what God promised even as they faced the impossibility of the task ahead.
Church, the same is true for us. The task ahead of us sometimes feels unachievable. How am I supposed to be able to share the gospel with my co-worker who has completely different political and social values than me? How am I supposed to talk to my non-Christian neighbor about Jesus when I am crippling afraid? How are we able to reach into foreign nations around the world or our post-Christian culture today with the gospel? In the face of all these unknowns, we have the same God as Abram, with the same heart to reach idolatrous Babylonians from every nation. And we can rest assured that his promises to bless the nations will not fail. We can have faith in the midst of the unknown of God’s call because we are called by the same faithful God of Abram.
You may hear all this talk about a sermon series on missions and just hear in it another guilt trip. But guilt is not enough to motivate us to get out of our comfort zones and have faith in God in the midst of the unknown as we are called into his plan to reach the nations. We must see God’s heart for the nations and let that become our heart as well. Where do we see the heart of God for the nations displayed most clearly? The cross. You see, God had such a heart to bless the nations, that he himself came down in the person of Jesus. As he went to the cross, Jesus gave up his own security and Jesus had faith in his Father for the sake that all nations might be blessed in him. The heart of God as revealed first in the promise to Abram and then in the person of Jesus is to bless the people of the world, even at the expense of his own life. Do you see his heart this morning? May we see that heart more clearly over the coming weeks and may that stir us up like Abram and like our lord Jesus to get uncomfortable for the sake of seeing the nations be blessed in Jesus.
[1] Kent Hughes sermon
[2] Keller sermon.
