Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #3 of Genesis, chapter 11 and I will begin by reading Genesis 11:5-7:

And JEHOVAH came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And JEHOVAH said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

As we discussed in our last study, we can clearly see from these verses that God intentionally confounded the language of mankind to restrain or hold back their progress. They were one people and one language and they were involved in one building project and God said, “and now nothing will be restrained from them.” Nothing would be “held back” as far as mankind making rapid progress in their various pursuits.

As people of the world would look at this, they would not understand. What is wrong with progress? What is wrong with advancements? They would reason that with progress peoples’ lives get better. For example, as mankind made technological advancement, it often saved time. There are dishwashers and washing machines and dryers. Prior to that and for thousands of years, people had to take their clothes to a running stream and beat them upon a rock and hang them up to dry, but now it can all be done in the home, saving great amounts of time. Just look at all the improvements that technology has brought to the field of medicine, with medical centers and hospitals. It can save peoples’ lives. People that previously might have died are kept alive by technology and we could go on and on with all the wonderful things brought about by mankind’s advancements. It would make no sense to the people of the world that God would intentionally hold man back and hinder his progress.

People departed from one another and they spoke different languages (after the tower of Babel) and it just made things more difficult for people. If people had been allowed to speak one language and live on one land mass, progress would have been more rapid and we may have had an explosion in technology and the electronic medium two thousand years earlier instead of during the last couple hundred years. There would have been certain benefits and temporal blessings that would have taken place with the things that man discovered. By the way, man’s discoveries are all a result of the will of God, even in the secular world. God permitted man to discover these “secrets” of His creation, but God allowed it to happen according to His timetable and His program of “times and seasons.”

Someone might ask, “Why? What does it matter? God could still have His program of times and seasons, like a period for national Israel and Christ coming after 11,000 years of life’s history and the beginning of the church age in 33AD and the end of the church age and time of the Great Tribulation and the season of Latter Rain when God would save the great multitude and complete His salvation program.” Someone might argue that God could still have done all those things.

However, we have to keep in mind that along with man’s progress and advancements in technology that aided everyday life, there is a downside. Yes, it is a big help to have a car and we can drive 30 minutes to work. If we were still in the “horse and buggy” stage, it might take someone four hours to go that distance. Admittedly, there are many positive things that result from improvements and inventions. God held mankind back, however, and that is the only way we can understand what is being said in Genesis 11. It was the Lord’s purpose to delay or restrain mankind because He wanted it to be in accord with His timing and not the timing of the world. One big reason for this was because the Bible speaks of an “end of the world stage,” which began with the end of the church age for the apostate church. God speaks of a world where iniquity will abound. He speaks in Romans, chapter 1 of giving man up to the sin of homosexuality. He speaks of “perilous times” in 2Timothy, chapter 3 and He says in 2Timothy 3:2-4:

For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

When God’s elect people living at the time of the end of the world see Scriptures like Romans 1, 2Timothy 3 or Matthew 24 and the verses that refers to iniquity abounding and the apostasy of the churches, we can absolutely know that we are now living at the time of the end of the world. How are we able to know this with such great certainty? The reason is that we have the entire history of the world that we can look back on. We have the Biblical history that brings us to the 1st Century AD and we have the church age history and we also have secular history. Of course, the Biblical history is extremely accurate, but we can observe some things in secular history, even though we know that mankind tends to exaggerate and lie. And, yet, when we look at all the available history, we can conclude that in all history there has never been a time as wicked and evil as today and with such opposition to the commandments of God in the Scriptures. Over the last couple of decades, evil has multiplied and sin has abounded and history attests to that fact. Moreover, we do not find in any historical record – Biblical or secular – of the acceptance and promotion of homosexual marriage that has spread across the earth in just the last few years. God condemns homosexuality as sin and there is no recognition of homosexual marriage anywhere in the Bible, nor has there been recognition and acceptance of homosexual marriage in any civilization in recorded history. Yes, you can find evidence of homosexual activity, like in Sodom and Gomorrah, or in certain other locations around the world, but never to this degree and, therefore, we know that this is the time that Romans, chapter 1 refers to when God says that He will give man up to that behavior. It is a judgment of God.

The child of God is encouraged by this information. No, we are not encouraged by these sins, but we are encouraged by the fact that God is fulfilling His Word right before our eyes. We are encouraged and comforted to know that we have understood the Biblical timeline of history correctly. We have understood other indicators of the end stage of the world, like Israel becoming a nation again in 1948. We have understood the end of the church age and the terrible apostasy that overtook the churches. We are encouraged and comforted to know that we have already gone through the Great Tribulation and that we are living on the earth in the Day of Judgment that is currently taking place. We have understood these things correctly; we saw the “sign” in the Scriptures. The Scriptures are the only acceptable “sign.” God does not permit us to look for outward signs like looking into the sky for some kind of sign, but He does allow us to look into the Bible itself. And there we can read Romans, chapter 1 or we can read 2Timothy, chapter 3 where we learn that the world will become “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,” and we recognize our world and our present day. We see the “sign” in Matthew 24:12:

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

We see iniquity abounding and multiplying. There is no child of God that can read this and not immediately think, “Yes, that is happening now. I see it by God’s grace.” Also, the Bible says, “The love of many shall wax cold.” How is love defined in the Bible? Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” Are people keeping the commandments of God? No, they are not. Even basic morality that was written upon the hearts of men has been lost, like marriage being only between a man and a woman. Mankind is actively doing whatever they can NOT to keep God’s commandments, which shows forth a coldness of heart that indicates no love toward Christ. There is no obedience to the Word of God. That is also an evidence that has no comparison to any previous time in history. Any that argues, “The world was like this a century ago or five hundred years ago,” does not know what they are talking about and they are not being honest. It is more than obvious that now is the time that these verses are describing. God looked ahead and He moved these prophets of old to write of the conditions in our present time and He caused them to describe it perfectly in scriptures like we see in Romans, chapter 1 or in 2Timothy, chapter 3. We see the rebellion of man, like never before, and that is why God hindered the building project at the tower of Babel and it is why He went to such great lengths to divide the human race by the confounding of speech and by the dividing of the continents because God did not want this unified version of mankind to progress more rapidly.

God’s program of salvation was to be by faith, not by sight and the Bible says: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” God wanted His salvation program to be recorded in written form, not on video cameras. In our modern Christian world, some have the idea that we should make movies and films that show people “God,” but that is completely contrary to the Bible. God does not want to show Himself: “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.” He does not want to openly display His mighty power and His ability to part seas. He does not want to show mankind that He can cause the walls of Jericho to fall at once. He does not want to show “visual aids” of 185,000 Assyrians as dead corpses. God does not want the world of our time to see these things. That is why He arranged things the way He did. In times of low population, God recorded all these things and caused them to be written, but in the time of great population and in the time when the majority of God’s elect would be livng on the earth, God gets the glory through the Bible as He brings “the still small voice,” the written record of His power, that it all might be by faith and trust in God.

Of course, man does not naturally trust God – man wants to see a sign. He wants to see the “lightning bolt” or a physical demonstration. He wants to see God prove Himself and show His power and then they will believe, as they said to Jesus: “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” But that is not the way of God. God has not provided a video documentary of the life of Christ and He did not provide an audio version when He spoke throughout history, but He chose the written Word. He chose language, the language that can be traced back to the tower of Babel when the confusion of tongues made it necessary for man to write things down. That was one reason God did this, but, more than that, it was to hold man back from certain advancements and to keep man at bay when the Bible was being recorded. He kept man back from advancing in communication and transportation because these advancements tend to speed everything up. You can fly in a plane and get across the world in a few hours instead of a sea voyage that could take months. Now you can speak over the radio or internet and reach incredible numbers of people all over the earth. That speeds everything up because you do not have to write the communication in a letter. God did not want things sped up at that time, but God carefully allowed the world to develop at a slow and steady pace.

Also, when man is held back from improvements in communications and transportation, it also holds man back from sin, as it says in Genesis 11:6:

… and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

The wording is different, but this reminds us of Genesis 6:5:

And JEHOVAH saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

The world has progressed in the electronic medium and we have internet, television and all these other things available, but what else has “progressed” along with it? Sin and iniquity has abounded and now an individual in rebellion against God can broadcast his rebellion. A group of wicked people can develop a movie of their wickedness and sell it and distribute it all over the earth. The evil ideas of men in past generations were held in check to some extent due to the inability of people to widely disperse and share their evil thoughts. There could have been a wicked and evil man that lived in a village of five hundred people and he could impact those five hundred people and he could even write letters outside of his village, but that was the limit of his ability to broadcast his evil ideas. But that is not true today. Now a person can broadcast evil all over the earth – his evil thoughts about abortion, gay marriage, adultery, and so forth. He can spread his evil far and wide and contaminate others. That is what evil does. Unsaved man is especially prone to evil. He is like a receptor waiting to receive some evil thought into his evil heart.