Back to the Beginning No.15 The Tale of Two Cities

So let's read from this holy word. Let's turn to the scriptures as found in the book of Genesis in the 11th chapter. In the 10th, you're confronted with a genealogy that is a table, a list of the descendants of Noah.

You get these sort of family listings in the Old Testament. The fifth chapter gives you another illustration. There it's the family pedigree of Adam.

And here in the 10th chapter, the pedigree of Noah. There in the fifth chapter, there's greater concern with just identifying names of people, whereas in the 10th chapter, the three sons of Noah, they all had their descendants. And there is reference made to the geographical location into which they went.

If you tart up the number of people's groups, there are 70 in the 10th chapter. 70 is a very important number in Hebrew history. 70 leaders of Israel you'll discover mentioned in the Pentateuch.

70 people were used for the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. 70 was a complement of the Sanhedrin. Most remarkable how the number 70 comes time and time again in the Old Testament and in the New.

Well, when you move from this genealogical record in the 10th chapter into the 11th, you find that one of these people's groups is migrating. And this is what we're told by the narrator. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar.

Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the people. The tower that the men were building, the Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth and they start building the city. That is why it is called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.

From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. Now I want you to go to Isaiah in chapter 47. The reason for this is not obvious to start with but it will become obvious later on as I open the scriptures to you.

Isaiah 47, which speaks of the city of Babylon. Go sit down in the dust, virgin daughter of Babylon. Sit on the ground without a throne, daughter of the Babylonians.

No more will you be called tender or delicate. Take millstones and grind flour. Take off your veil, lift up your skirts, bare your legs and wade through the streams.

Your nakedness will be exposed and your shame uncovered. I will take vengeance, I will spare no one. Verse 12, there's irony here.

Keep on them with your magic spells and with your many sorceries which you have labored at since childhood. Perhaps you will succeed, perhaps you will cause terror. All the counsel you have received has only worn you out.

Let your astrologers come forward, those stargazers who made predictions month by month. Let them save you from what is coming upon you. Now go through to the book of Revelation and the 17th chapter.

We've got the NIV, the 17th chapter leads off with a title, The Woman on the Beast. And it refers to a female power that has authority in the whole of the Middle East. Verse four, the woman was dressed in purple and scarlet and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.

She held a golden cup in her hand filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead. Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth.

Chapter 18, after this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted, fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great.

She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.

Verse 17, the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore. Cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen, purple silk and scarlet cloth, every sort of citron wood and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cargoes of synonym and spice of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and carriages and bodies and souls of men. They will say the fruit you long for is gone from you.

All your riches and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered. The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn and cry out, whoa, whoa, oh, great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.

In one hour, such great wealth has been brought to ruin. Well, what a selection of readings for a sunny, though cold autumn morning. What we're doing, what we're about this occasion, my friends, is bringing to completion a series of addresses that I've brought to you from the, what might be called the primeval history of the Old Testament.

And by that term, I refer to the first 11 chapters and what is contained within them of this beginning of books. Charles Dickens, if memory serves me right, has, as one of his many volumes, a book that's entitled A Tale of Two Cities. There is a sense in which you could subtitle the Bible with that particular designation.

A Tale of Two Cities. More of that in a moment. In the 1960s, a number of freedom songs were birthed, especially in the United States of America, which gave I don't know how many thousand, 50,000 men as sacrificial victims in a war that, on reflection, should probably never have been fought in Vietnam.

And one of the songs said this, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn? Where have all the young men gone? Gone to graveyards, everyone. When will they ever learn? When will we ever learn? There's a philosopher, I believe a French philosopher, who said this, history teaches us that history teaches us nothing. In other words, the lessons of the past do not become a corrective for the behavior of the present.

One of the reasons why we've been looking at the beginning of the book of beginnings is because there in those 11 chapters encapsulated is the same sort of difficulty, dilemma, problem, tragedy that we're going through today and has dug the footsteps of the human story down its many, many centuries. You are brought in these verses, face to face with the creation of a city, and the name of that city is Babylon. Later on in the book of Genesis, and not too far hence, you will discover the significance of the city of Jerusalem.

Babylon, it actually means the gate of heaven. Jerusalem means the city of peace. And I want to say this to you, that either you are a member of the former or of the latter.

You can't be in both camps, and whether you recognize it or not, you are either a citizen of Babylon or you are a citizen of Jerusalem. Both of these cities geographically can be found on the earth today, but it's not so much the geographical location of Babylon and Jerusalem that is important in the Old Testament or in the New Testament. It is what they stand for.

Babylon stands for rebellion. Babylon stands for men reaching up. Babylon stands for the dethronement of God.

Babylon stands for declaring a unilateral independence from God. Jerusalem speaks of coming down. Jerusalem speaks of the peace of God.

Jerusalem speaks of God extending his hand of fellowship to you. The gates of Babylon could never get so high as to be able to allow people to enter through into company with God. The gates of Jerusalem, spiritually speaking, have been opened by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Savior, if of Zion's city, I through grace a member am. If that is your experience, as was the experience of the hymn writer who gave birth to that particular song, then you are blessed. So what I'm going to do this morning, and you can switch the overhead off now, what we're going to do this morning is to draw this contrast, as we come to the end of this, these primeval narratives in the early chapters of Genesis between Babylon and Jerusalem.

Maybe I've gone too quickly. Maybe you need a little bit more revision and a bit more context. Previously, we've looked at the opening chapter, the creation of the world.

We have seen something of the remarkable way in which God took great care in creating a theater on which man, in his image, could be placed, followed very quickly by woman. We saw the disgrace, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We saw the problems caused by the sons of men seeking the daughters of heaven.

We looked into the civilization prior to the flood and discovered that there was a cosmic smell that was foul in the nostrils of God that caused him to cleanse the world. And we watched as Noah Noah, almost a second Adam, leaves the security of the ark, the waters having abated, and for civilization along with animal life to continue. This was the point that we arrived at as we came to the end of the ninth chapter.

And here, as I've referred to in my preamble to the Bible reading this morning, in the 10th, you get an account of the descendants of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their offspring who had the command from God to move into the world, to populate it, to live their lives for his glory. Shem, one of Noah's sons, is the one from whom you trace the Jewish race. If you take the H out of Shem, you've got Sam, put Itik on it, and you've got a description of a racial group of people, the Semitic peoples.

And in these verses in the 10th chapter, you find how the descendants of Shem, as well as Japheth, as well as Ham, were spread around the world. Indeed, the word spread and scattered are pivotal to this 10th chapter. You see this great migration of people groups as they start to move off to the north and to the south and to the east.

And it's one of those people groups, though the actual chronology, how many years has elapsed between the flood and this account, it's not too easy to establish, but it's one of those people groups that commands our attention as you move into the 11th chapter, where highlighted for us is the development of the city of Babel or Babylon, which you will find in the previous chapter has been built by a man whose name was Nimrod. Verse eight, he becomes a password as a successful man in the area of military prowess, in the area of a charismatic personality. Nimrod is the sort of man who, given the chance, would establish his own government, will go against the purposes of God instead of the world being permeated by communities of people living here and there with their own governments.

Nimrod is the sort of man who will establish a central control, who will have all the clout, who will vie over against the purposes of God in this world for all power and all authority. There have been many Nimrods in history, and the world has not run out of the supply. So when you come to these verses which speak of the tower of Babel, you are actually finding yourself in what was the center of civilization and commerce and religion in the early centuries of world history.

You check the record in the Bible, and I have just given you a sample of readings, and you will discover that spiritism and astrology and the occult has as its headquarters this part of Mesopotamia. You've heard of ziggurats. You've heard of pagan temples.

God help you, some of you have read your own astrological charts during this last week. From where do these things come? This idea that the heavenly bodies created by God in Genesis 1 can become personalities and be reduced to the size of the zodiac controlling in a superstitious fashion the destinies of nations and of individuals. Where does it come from? And the answer is it comes from Babylon.

It comes from this center of the occult, and the spirit of Babylon is still with us today. This vying with the spirituality of God, this competitor with the revelation of the Lord. You see, when in the beginning you read in supplementary accounts in the Bible that Satan falls from heaven and makes his abode spiritually, uses his influence in the world, the scriptures are not joking.

He sets up a network, invisible but at times tangible, concentrating on particular individuals and particular cities and countries. And whenever biblical writers look back to Babel and to Babylon and to Nimrod, they see there the infestation of a world having been cleansed through the flood that Noah experienced, now returning, congealed and running like a cancerous saw with all the opposites and all the problems and all the attractions. What you have here are a group of men who replay Eden.

Come, let's make bricks. Let's build a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we might make a name for ourselves. It was not the crass stupidity of trying to build a tower beyond the planets themselves.

They were not so idiotic. The problem is this concept of building a name for ourselves. Implicit within this is the temptation dangled in front of Eve and by her in front of Adam.

Eat and be like him. Babylon, I say, stands for the enthronement of man and the dethronement of God. And that spirit, that temptation is still with us today.

Mess around with what God has done. Interfere with the genetic structure. Say to God, it was good when it left your hands, but let us get our hands on it and improve it.

And basically what you have is a reenactment of Eden, a reenactment of Babel. Babel, the gateway to heaven. That's what it means.

To enter into heaven and to cheat God by so doing, to establish your own invulnerable society. Man the measure of all things. I speak in contemporary language.

This is the language of secular philosophy. This is the language of secular politics. This is what you find in our media day by day.

This is what comes off in the hundreds of the presses that compose the books that we have available to us. It is the dethronement of God, the enhancement of man, man knowing better. Let's build a tower to the skies.

Let us take the future. It belongs to ourselves. The spirit of Babel.

My cat can't talk, but it doesn't stop our Joshua from making what he wants. No, the chimpanzees can't talk, at least. I think they can in a rudimentary fashion.

There's been some remarkable work done in Tanzania on the behavior patterns of chimpanzees. But whatever you're prepared to concede in terms of animal relationships, there is nothing that compares with the sort of communication that you and I have with one another. And at the beginning, the whole world had one language.

The whole world was able by lip to communicate. Why were men given the ability of speech? One lip, one set of words. That's the, I was trying to get from my notes the exact translation of the Hebrew of verse one.

God comes down in the cool of the day. What does he do? He talks to Adam. You see, however refined the singing of the birds may be, however wonderful is the whole of the created handiwork of God, he has blessed man in a unique way.

And the gift of speech is his in order that he can speak to God and respond to what God has to say. And in those primeval chapters in Genesis as they describe the world as it was, there is a common language. What language was it? Hebrew or will that be the language of heaven? If it is, I pray God it's not Chinese.

I mean, the number of characters. Can you imagine getting all those onto a computer and having to bash them all out? I mean, it's bad enough in English, isn't it? Maybe it was Hebrew. I mean, the words of the names of places in the first 10 chapters have got Hebrew connotations.

However, this is just fancy and every Welshman knows the language of heaven has got to be Welsh. And again, I'm in difficulty, quite frankly. Comrander just about is all that I know and can manage.

But here on this earth, these men who want to dethrone God use this means of communication in order to enhance their corporate abilities to put up a ziggurat, a temple, a gateway to the heavens. This will be the spectacle, the architectural feat of the ancient civilization. It has religious connotations because Nimrod knows as Hitler knew, you can only mobilize a people by giving them some sort of religious objective, even though it be a false one.

And these men and women with a unified language say, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches heaven. They want to go up. It's ironic.

In the fifth verse that you read in anthropomorphic language, that means language describing God as though he was human, which he's not, but how else can you describe certain activities of the Lord, but by employing anthropomorphic terminology, the Lord came down to see the city. Here is man wanting to go up. Here is the Lord coming down.

Here is man creating a city with the name, the gate of heaven. And here is God coming down to have a look at this puny little job and watching these felons. Here is Nimrod having put a council together for this great work of the construction of the ziggurat.

Here is God taking counsel himself and saying, if as one people, speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. And that's precisely what happens.

The ability to communicate is taken away. And what you find is that each racial grouping has its own language, its own phonetics, and so forth. They can understand one another within the grouping, but there is not an interlineal understanding.

You can imagine how problematic that is when the design of this place is so big and the whole enterprise is so extravagant. Here is God doing what? Here is God causing confusion to come into Babel. If you put the overhead on again, you'll see another translation of the word Babel.

You see, literally, it's got the idea of a gateway to the skies. But you can bring another Hebrew word alongside it, which is like Babel, but not quite Babel. And what that means is a mixture.

What that means is confusion. Here is God visiting this group of men and women, and by a miraculous stroke of the breaking up and the confusion of language, he causes them all to be mixed up at sixes and sevens. God's initial purpose for mankind was not a diversity of languages.

He wanted us to be able to understand one another. Zephaniah in chapter three will give you a glorious verse which speaks of the consummation of all things, when God will purify the language and give each one of us an ability to communicate, so the Chinese will be at one with the English, and the English with the French, and so on and so forth. Switch the overhead off, please.

God comes down and causes confusion. And Babylon, the city of the gate of heaven, of the gates of heaven, is the Babel. That's how God looked down upon that early community of people.

The Lord will have men in derision who vie with him. He will laugh them to scorn. The great of this earth are ridiculed by God.

So if you want further illustration from that in ancient history, go to Alexander the Great. He's mentioned in scripture, but not by name. He's mentioned by symbol and by type in the book of Daniel, and he is called a he-goat, a he-goat.

And the great city, and the great attempt at building this Sikurative, moving to the skies, when God comes down, he says, it's utter confusion, it's an utter Babel. Babel. And so you find these men doing, as a result of this miraculous shock that God has sent amongst them, like some sort of earthquake, you find them moving across the face of the earth, as God has said in the beginning, for the Lord will have his way amongst men.

Do not think that somehow or other you are exceptions. God has his way in the whirlwind. God has his way in the migration of the nations.

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

And then you come to what seems to be a tragic full stop in the Bible, in these opening primeval history chapters. I say it's tragic, or seemingly so, because you see, there is no grace here, at least if there is, it's only fleeting. Let me demonstrate what I mean.

Adam and Eve, they foul things up. The garden of Eden is no longer a garden of beauty because it is spoiled by their sinfulness. But as God responds to their sin, he clothes them in skins of an animal, and he sends them out east of Eden to live.

And he gives them a promise that one day the problems that have been caused in the garden will be undone by God moving into the world again. Sin, grace. Here is Cain, he's responsible for the first murder.

He murders his brother, Fratricide, a double degree of sin, if you please. And Cain is afraid. God, in his grace, punishes him, but protects him and puts a mark upon him.

Here is this anti, or this, yes, this antediluvian civilization before the flood. Here are men and women, again, rebelling against God. Here is what I call the cosmic stench.

God cleanses the world, but there's an ark and a family, and there are tokens of animal life, and no comes out of the ark after the water's subsided, and there is a rainbow in the sky. God makes a covenant of grace, heightened centuries later as Jesus comes into the world, God's own rainbow warrior, of that I referred, to that I referred last week. You see, there's sin and grace.

There is judgment and mercy, but going to this 11th chapter, where is the mercy? Here is the storm. Here is the judgment. Where is the hope? The fact of the matter is, my friend, that I'm not being trite by telling you that the 12th chapter follows the 11th chapter, and from the 12th chapter, you start moving into the history of the Jewish nation.

You are brought face-to-face with an individual. No longer does God deal so much with the whole spectrum of humanity. He now focuses Himself upon one of the descendants of Shem, whose grandfather is Nahor, whose father is Terah, the man Abraham, and you will, as you move from the 12th chapter into the 13th and the 14th and the 16th and so on, you will discover how God takes this one man and fashions this man and moves him from Mesopotamia into a land that He will give him, and Abraham becomes the father of a great multitude.

Through Abraham, the whole world will be blessed, but where did Abraham live? And I don't mean physically. He looked for a city whose maker and whose builder was God. Yes, Jebus will be taken by David from the fierce tribes, and Jebus will be named Jerusalem.

It will be the city of the great king. It will be the headquarters, if you like, of Judaism, as it has been regained during our own lifetimes. But don't you see, Abraham, in his understanding of the purposes of God transcends a mere attraction with a city.

He looks for a city whose maker and whose builder is God Himself. In other words, he wants a spirituality which is permeated by God. That is not to say that Abraham never got it wrong.

Thank God for the honesty of the Bible, but this was his preoccupation. Here is Babylon. Here is Jerusalem.

Here is man's attempt at creating the gates of heaven. Here is God revealing Himself to His servant and telling him to move in faith and to believe Him for the future as He's tried to believe Him for the past. And when you move on into the New Testament, it's this whole concept of Jerusalem and for what it stands which is heightened.

We are members of the Israel of God if we are Christian people. We have been blessed through the loins of Abraham because our Lord Jesus came from him. Our Lord Jesus was a Jew, but He died for the Jew and for the Gentile.

And those who have exercised faith in God as Abraham exercised faith in God are brought into the citizenship of Jerusalem. And the most important thing, therefore, the most important question I can put to you this morning is of what city are you a member? How do you become a member of Jerusalem? By confessing the royalty of its prince, our Lord Jesus Christ. Babylon seeks to get up to God and dethrone Him.

But John says, I saw a new Jerusalem, the holy city coming down from God as a bride adorned for her groom. Don't you see? There's a fundamental difference. Even the verbs are different.

Nimrod and his men try and get up, God comes down. Babylon tries to arrogate to itself something that no human constitution can ever possess. But the new Jerusalem comes down by the grace of God.

Savior, if of Zion's city, I by grace a member am. Are you there? Not in the town hall in Worthing. In the annals, in the legislature, amongst the archives of the city of Jerusalem spiritually understood, is your name there? Have you acknowledged its prince? Have you turned your back upon Babylon, the spiritism, the evil of this world? Have you said, as for me and as for my family, we are part of the new Jerusalem and are doing our best in this interim period to live in the hostility of this world as men and women who are bound for a better destination.

Cliff Richard over at Brighton on Friday said to 3,000 people, reflecting upon his conversion 30 years or so ago, I seem to be more and more an alien in this world. The hostility, the stench of Babylon, he feels it, especially in the world of showbiz. He says, I feel an alien.

Cliff was right. He is an alien. You and I are aliens.

Babylon is doomed. Babylon is ruined. The economics of this world will fall apart, but the prince of Jerusalem shall return and Jerusalem shall circumnavigate the globe and the earth shall return to the greatness and the grandeur that it had, even more so than on the occasion when God spoke and brought the world into being.

This, my beloved brother and sister, is the reason why I've taken you back to the beginnings for these 10 or 11 series of addresses. Let's sing about our citizenship, 173. You've listened well and I trust that God has given me some understanding and been able to convey something of the truths to you this morning of his holy and inspired word in this particular passage.

Just so that you can change your stance for a little, at least change your seating position for a while, just stand and sing the first two verses and sit on the third and we'll bring the bread and wine to you and our musicians will continue to play something appropriate as we move from the word of God to the table of the Lord to a recognition that the prince of Jerusalem died outside Jerusalem's walls in order to achieve our salvation. 173, enthusiastically sing one and two then sit down again for the third verse. ♪ For peace to be seen in the streets of living waters ♪ ♪ Survive life's torture in the city of Jerusalem ♪